Signals of Mind

Atheist Argument

Version 2


“If God is truly all-knowing and all-good, why would He create people capable of such evil? History is filled with tyrants, child predators, psychopaths, and mass murderers like Hitler. Either God deliberately created these people knowing the devastation they’d cause, or He is powerless to stop them. In either case, the existence of so much human evil seems incompatible with an all-good, all-powerful God. If God wanted to create free beings, couldn’t He at least calibrate us toward kindness rather than cruelty? There are far too many bad, immoral and sometimes frankly evil people for there to be God that knows what he's doing."

ScrappyMarcus wrote: Sat Aug 23, 2025 12:42 am Atheist Argument

Version 2


“If God is truly all-knowing and all-good, why would He create people capable of such evil? History is filled with tyrants, child predators, psychopaths, and mass murderers like Hitler. Either God deliberately created these people knowing the devastation they’d cause, or He is powerless to stop them. In either case, the existence of so much human evil seems incompatible with an all-good, all-powerful God. If God wanted to create free beings, couldn’t He at least calibrate us toward kindness rather than cruelty? There are far too many bad, immoral and sometimes frankly evil people for there to be God that knows what he's doing."

Even if you only want to lessen the amount of Evil in the universe by a little you would end up completely eliminating free will. There is no other way around it ... any attempt to have less evil or suffering ends up eliminating all free will due to "The Veiled Elimination Spiral". If you eliminate the worst evil, let's say tortuing a living being to death then it will never have existed. No one would know that it ever existed in the first place. But the argument that surely God could at least remove the worst evil would still remain. And so you would have to eliminate what is now the most evil and so on and so on until there is no evil. But at some point anything that is even slightly bad would be considered evil because that would be the only thing you could call evil at that point. The ability for one person to disagree with another would be something some people would think is bad. You would end up eliminating free will. And then I have to ask what would be the point of any of this?