I understand what you’re saying wuntext. Tragedies and calamities happen and we wonder, “Where is God in all this? Why does he allow bad things to happen?” It’s probably the oldest and most common questions in the history of civilization. And I’m not going to say here that there’s any simple answers to these.
I am not saying either that there is always some higher purpose for everything, including tragedies.
But, what I am saying is that it’s not so simple to say, bad (evil) things happen, therefore god does not exist. My argument is “Has God done anything about the evil that is in the world?” If God has not, then it’s clear that he’s powerless or does not care.
For children in the Philippines that are going through pain, I have not done a single thing to help them. And it shows that I don’t care about them and/or I don’t have the ability to help them.
But for my own children, I have over the course of their lives helped them through bad/evil times. This shows that I care about them and I have the ability to help them. But have I prevented every bad thing from happening to them? If I stood over them all the time and had access to unlimited resources, would I prevent all bad things from happening? Even in that case probably not.
Another example. On this forum, I have practically unlimited power. I can edit anyone’s post to make it say anything I want. I can create users and make posts under their names. I can delete anything said that is contrary to what I believe in. I can even edit peoples’ posts when they make bbcode errors or misspell words. But, do I do any of these things? Almost never. Why not since I am a god here? Don’t I care that people don’t know how to use spell correctly? Why don’t I just go ahead and fix all the spelling errors?
If I did any of these things, though my motive might be right (correct spelling), it would violate peoples’ free will. So, if a post does need to be changed, it’s the practice here to ask the original poster to modify it, instead of jumping in and modifying it.
Also, it would not be a good forum if I exercised my “omnipotence” all the time. And I doubt many people would sign up if I did that.
So, even though I have absolute power here, I don’t exercise it all the time. But how would anyone know I do have absolute power? If I would demonstrate just once my powers, then it’d point to me having absolute power. But if I could not even demonstrate it once, then it’d be highly suspect that I have such powers.
https://debatingchristianity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=64774#p64774