If God exists, then there is no unnecessary suffering.
There is unnecessary suffering.
Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

You can’t establish the minor based on what Christians believe, because they don’t believe this world is some sort of Disneyland designed for our happiness and enjoyment. They believe there’s a purpose to this world as we find it and a purpose for the suffering we encounter in it, and they reject any attempts by the atheist who claims he knows better than God as to what is necessary and what is unnecessary. Looked at from the believer’s perspective all you’re claiming is that even if God were to exist, you the atheist can actually judge God as if you can somehow know what he’s doing, why he’s doing it along with what you think he should or shouldn’t prevent or allow.

So it’s not that I don’t understand what’s going on with the argument; it’s that I reject the atheist's attempt to pretend he’s deriving the existence of unnecessary suffering based solely off of what Christians believe, and hence, it’s the Christian whose beliefs are contradictory. I mean, do you really think Christians believe there is unnecessary suffering and that the argument from evil is really effective?

Anyway, what I find bizarre is the implication in your argument that you think that if God really, really, really exists that you are actually capable of rendering any sort of judgment whatsoever about him. Personally, I just find that nonsensical and without any merit whatsoever. So the way I see it, it's not the Christian begging the question, but the atheist, since I don’t see how you can assert that there is unnecessary suffering without first assuming God doesn’t exist. For once you assume God actually exists, your only retort is to say that you know more than God, which again, I just reject out of hand.

I'm not trying to establish the minor premise based on what Christians believe. I've said this a half dozen times and in as many ways and every time you ignore it and go back to talking about the misinterpretation of the argument that you have here. I don't know what else I can do.

Here you mean your perspective (many theists don't avoid the problem of evil by redefining the terms like you are), and your perspective is just wrong. I am not claiming that if God were to exist that I the atheist can actually judge God. I am claiming that the problem of evil makes it more likely that God doesn't exist.

Let me quote myself:

Now, please explain how I can make that assertion if I am pretending to do what you describe above?

Once again, the argument from evil is not trying to show that God is evil, but that God doesn't exist. Let me end here with this passage from Hume, which I think states my position well:

It makes it more unlikely to you because you don’t hold the same worldview as the theist.

Imagine waking up from a dream where you experienced and witnessed suffering. Now even though you experienced and witnessed suffering, that suffering is not real in an absolute sense because it’s contingent upon you being in a dream state. That’s not unlike the theist worldview in which this temporal state in which all the suffering you cite is contingent upon a state of temporal existence. And just as how you wake up from a dream and realize that all the suffering experienced while in that state wasn’t real, theists have a similar conception of what occurs after temporal existence ceases for them. To the theist, that eternal state of the afterlife is what is real, not this temporal existence. So in a loose ontological sense, saying evils are experienced in temporal existence is like saying evils are experienced in a dream state… in terms of the theist’s worldview, anyway.

If that works for you, cool. I’m not willing to debate this issue in a framework where the theist worldview is eliminated from the onset.

Don't you mean, "...in terms of my worldview, anyway"? I've never heard this idea before.

But clearly the existence of an O3 God IS NOT being "eliminated" in that passage! It's only not being taken as an indubitable premise.

In general, do you think it's possible to be uncertain about the existence of an O3 God? Your posts suggest that you interpret everyone as either taking God's existence or non-existence as a sort of first-principles axiom.

Which atheist do you think is attempting to pretend that?

I don't think the existence of evil renders theism inconsistent. (I was a theist with no good answer to the problem of evil for several years).
Some do, some don't. It is effective.

You never heard of heaven?

Well, O3 is a philosophical concept that we can’t really define in the sense of knowing what is or what is not all-powerful, since we have no idea whatsoever what’s involved in creating a world. So I guess it’s uncertain in that respect.

I think our minds assent to one or the other:

• Nihilism is the belief that life has no intrinsic meaning or value.
• Anti-nihilism is the belief that life has intrinsic meaning and value.

Naturally I've heard of heaven, but not an analogy of the form...

Dreams : Waking Life :: Waking Life : Heaven

In fact this analogy seems to seriously erode the notions of moral agency which I have found to be popular with theists.

Ok, but my point was that nowhere in the Hume passage is the existence of an O3 god "eliminated from the onset." Rather, the passage argues that nothing about the world leads us to believe in such a thing. (Although we may always assert consistency of any world with the existence of an O3 deity. We do this by simply saying: "Well, O3 gets you less in the way of equality and non-suffering than you'd expect.")

And you consider atheism to be functionally equivalent to nihilism and anti-nihilism to be functionally equivalent to theism?

I'm not really sure what you mean by "real in an absolute sense" here. I would actually say that if you suffer in a dream, especially if you were conscious in that dream, that the suffering was real. Suffering refers to a mental state, and our dreaming mental states are still real (unlike the objects about which we dream). Thus, we could be experiencing real pain and suffering as part of our dream-state. So, just by the terms of your analogy, I would reject your claim that our suffering is not real.

Second, I don't think it follows from theism in any strong sense that our temporal existence is not real, certainly not the Abrahamic religions. Our actions in the temporal world, whether for good or ill matter to God. If they were not real, they would seem to be irrelevant. The sense of mission, of changing the world, that is characteristic of Islam and Christianity seems pretty clearly to recognize the significance of what happens in the temporal world.

Third, claiming that the suffering experienced by a parent whose child has died, or by a woman raped and beaten by her partner, or by a prisoner tortured by his captor is not significant because it is not in some sense "ontologically real" would make me extremely uncomfortable. I would not be willing to trivialize the reality of their suffering in the way you seem to be.

Beams and motes duffe. You are the person who refuses to consider the problem of evil without first assuming that God exists. I am, as I have stated numerous times, making no presumption about the existence of God at all. It's true that this means that I am not assuming that God does exist (as you are), but my not assuming that God exists doesn't mean that I am assuming that God doesn't exist (as you keep claiming). This was the point that the Hume passage was supposed to illustrate, that I am not antecendently assuming that God exists or doesn't exist.

I didn’t mean to imply that I’d never consider such a claim. I just meant I’m not interested in debating that issue itt since my entire argument is centered on conceptions of God. Anyway, I think you guys are reading more into this than I’m actually arguing. The gist of my argument is:

1. This world is consistent with an all-good God.
2. An all-good God would not create a world in which suffering that does not lead to a greater good is possible.

(A) has been accepted and I think (B) is true by definition. So if you want to strike up an evidential argument from evil that’s fine, but it’s irrelevant to what I’m arguing itt.

Okay, well, if all you mean to be doing is pointing out the implications of theism, fine. This might be relevant to showing that the logical problem of evil fails, but I think it is fairly widely agreed that that argument fails already and I don't think anyone has asserted it in argument with you (notice for instance how both All-in Flynn and I argue that it fails in this thread with Mike Technique). It would have been nice if you had acknowledged somewhere earlier that you weren't trying to show that the problem of evil wasn't a problem for the theism.

Anyway, if you want to talk about implications, I don't think that (B) is true by definition. For instance, I think that various theodocies, such as Van Inwagen's Global Properties Approach, show how unnecessary evil is compatible with the existence of a perfect God.

Not an interesting statement at all.

God come to the earth precisely to suffer and to show Christians the Way. Wrongdoing involves suffering. Christianity fully acknowledges that fact and makes no attempt to sweep it under the rug.

I think that's something that sets Christianity apart from most other religions.

newsflash, god is a human invention. People try to prove to other people he/she/it exists as a test to see if they will fall for it.

Don't waste ur precious time thinking about life trolls