this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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There is a somewhat obvious seeming out to this that a religious person could take I think: what if they were to simply look at the start to it and say "Evil doesnt exist, everything we think is evil actually isnt for -insert some reason here that presumably whatever god they follow understands but humans cant/dont-" It wouldnt work for truly dualistic religions since having an evil deity as well as a good one requires evil obviously, and it does make "good" a fair bit less meaningful, but still. Granted, Im not sure if any actually do this.
That'd work if for instance there wasn't the ten commandments and a ton of "this is evil don't do it" in any holy book out there.
It'd need some serious mental gymnastics to consider, say, raping babies not evil, though.
As for dualistic religions, they fail either the "can god prevent evil" or the "does god want to prevent evil" checks, therefore their gods either aren't omnipotent or are themselves evil.
Devil's advocate:
If you stipulate that "life" (afterlife, reincarnation, any continuance of existence) is eternal, then it's easy to posit that the evils we see and experience, no matter how heinous, are ultimately trivial.
In the experience of a newborn baby, being born is being crushed out of the comfortable place they have always known into the cold air and bewildering new sensations of the world outside. It's the worst thing they have ever experienced, and from their perspective it would be fair to say that they have experienced something completely heinous and inexcusable.
The same with the first bump on the head, skinned knee, or simple disappointment. These are terrible experiences that a child could righteously argue are proof that no loving God exists, else why would he allow them?
Thirty years on, such minor trivialities are easily forgotten.
In 50,000, a billion, a trillion years of varied experience, what we call the worst evil might seem equally trivial. Not even in the face of greater evils seem since, but just in the scope of all that one has seen and done, and with the certain knowledge that life ultimately continues.
It's called [Philosophical/Religious/Metaphisical/Leibnizian] Optimism, was seriously argued by Leibniz, and was the satirical subject of Voltaire's Candide, and definitely persists as a lay Christian belief.