Suffering and God

Matt, do you believe that God is all-knowing, all-loving and all-powerful?

If so, why do you believe that? What is your best evidence? Do you have any evidence?

Originally Posted by matt52490

Suffering and evil seem to the big reasons, or at least the biggest moral reasons for why people abject to belief in God. What would be the strongest argument against God based off of the suffering and evil?

Matt, first could you clear up your question a bit. You say "the biggest moral reasons....", morals across the world differ according to culture, philosophies and or religions. Evil, or the existence of evil is not really a subject of morality. Believers in god or gods do not hold the only set of morals. I have a set of rules, of behavioural conduct, that is not christian or hindu, but it allows me to live a peaceful, as green as possible life, being useful, non damaging (or as little as possible). All with no belief in god or gods.

Suffering and evil, in respect to the existence of god or gods is really just logic. The article that Penguin suggested and linked to is great.

I think the world is just cold and sometimes cruel place. S**T happens, earthquakes due to tectonic shifts, volcanoes because there are weak spots in the earths crust, illness due to biological competition and weakness. Even human activities can be attributed to something natural or enviromental or cultural. Crime is sometimes survival, or a damaged mind, or competion gone wrong.
Does evil exist, not to my knowledge. Yes there is suffering, lots of it, from natural disasters, to man made disasters (from war to rape and murder). The man made ones are culture clashes, religious clashes, survival, sick minds, or plain amorality.

So, for your question:

There is constant intense suffering around the world which an omnipotent, omniscient god could have stopped.

An omniscient god would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could'nt because something worse would happen.

So, there is no omnipotent, omniscient, completely good beings, or god or gods.

Well the usual answer for suffering is that it is caused by human sin. The argument goes that if everyone obey god there would be no suffering. Sadly this is easily disproved by what we know about the world from science - from diseases to volcanoes. Of cousre we can split some of this up - Natural Evil being things like whirlwinds, earthquakes and so on which are obviously not 'caused' by human sin. Sin could be said to be responsible for things like AIDS and so on but these division are quite arbitrary.

Like most other things, we often need to check up on the thoughts of the Greek philosophers as they often had a handle on life. Here is what Epicurius had to say.

Epicurus [341–270 B.C.] Greek philosopher:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

Note Epicurius is not saying that there is not a god but merely whether the term means anything. Of course, one could apply Epicurius' tests to all the gods we have heard of and we would find none of them deserve the title. Nonetheless it is quite a useful point of discussion with those who want to indoctrinate.