https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil
Again, not making a criticism, just an observation that I find oft unanswered
Dispassionately, though, the broader problem begs the question. If humanity is jut a product of time and chance, then evil is as much an illusion as any gods are.
But, that being said, some theists see evil as the absence of good. Murder, natural disasters, etc. all result when God leaves the world to its own devices.
To some degree a "good" answer to this question is very reliant on emotional and aesthetic components, so it's extremely fair to call it a hard question to answer.
Or, in the case of some older religions, they just accept that the gods are spiteful and cruel.
For God to be beyond good and evil, someone (probably God) has to have the authority to decide that. This is analogous to the concept of standing in the legal code. So even to say that God is beyond evil, you'd have to admit that there's some ultimate judge out there somewhere. And therefore something that defines what doesn't count as evil.
Basically, yes. In the Book of Job, God's justification for visiting such cruelty onto an admittedly righteous man who didn't deserve it (to win a bet with Satan, no less) was, in essence, "Because I'm God, and you're not." God doesn't have to play by human rules, humans have to play by God's rules.
In many old religions, divine beings had no problem killing any mortal they pleased - and the strongest gods tended to be the most petty and violent of the lot. They were manifestations of the wanton and arbitrary power of the natural world. The Old Testament God seems to be cast from the same mold - murder is a sin, but if He commands you to kill your firstborn, you'd better not hesitate.
It's not a satisfactory philosophical answer for modern times but it is an answer. The modern version of this seems to be "God works in mysterious ways," but it's a reformulation of the same argument - God is essentially alien, and not a moral being as humans understand morality.
As for the God of the Bible, I don't understand your point. It seems fair to say that people might not understand the whole picture and that it's not fair to judge God with limited wisdom and perspective. This attitude was Job's sin, not merely being weaker than God.
Are you claiming specific charges against the God of the Bible? Based on whose measure of morality?
As a Christian, my own answer (in short) is that true "good" requires that people can choose to either do good or evil. The only alternative is a pretty clockwork. This requires accepting a broader definition of "good" for you to accept that God is both good and accepts this tradeoff, but it's not a contradiction. It's just an emotionally significant consequence of believing God exists.
This doesn't really address the problem. If god is omnipotent and created the universe, he could have made things so that evil is simply physically impossible, with no contradiction of free will, in the same way that I am physically unable to flap my arms and fly to the moon, and yet I still have free will. The fact that he didn't means he's either not omnipotent or not omnibenevolent (a contradiction for those who ascribe both properties to god). The onus would have to be on the theist to show how "no-evil" somehow logically contradicts free will; and it must be a truly logical contradiction if it is to be any constraint on omnipotence.
I mean, you must be able to imagine how your reasoning sounds to people who don't already believe in god, right?
If you have a belief about how reality works, normally you would expect that belief to pay some dividend in terms of what you can expect to happen in this situation, or that. Otherwise you're just believing a thing for no reason at all. So you can call this anticipation of a certain result "evidence", and to have it not materialize is, in fact, a solid reason to suspect the truth of what you believe.
I completely understand that my reasoning sounds rediculous from a scientific point of view. However, God is not finite, therefore you will never find or prove God using the scientific method, a method for gaining meaning from finite things.
As the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard expressed, it comes down to a leap of faith. Are you willing to believe something that you yet cannot see?
Tdlr it makes me happy
But, since you bring it up, I'm pretty sure I'm getting basically most of what you mention already, in one form or another, and probably some other stuff that believing in God would diminish. No thanks.
And yet, when a new explanation is available that conflicts with faith, faith does not give way to it. That's simply wrong.
Anyway, I'll try to do better. Basically, in a universe in which "evil" is physically impossible, you may have "free will" in some sense to choose which good, but you cannot choose whether to do good, because all possible choices are "good". It's specifically freedom to choose good or evil that's the key ingredient in "good" being a meaningful concept, or at least it's consistent to so assume. You're back to the pretty clockwork.
I don't know if it's possible to construct a bulletproof argument here. Shaky foundations are an occupational hazard of metaphysics, for both sides. Saying "well, he's God so he should be able to figure it out" works just as well as "he's God and couldn't do it, ergo it's inconsistent". The best we can do is show our positions are consistent under some set of assumptions.
This doesn't really follow. We are creative so we could come up with infinite amounts of nonsense questions that are really logical paradoxes and not real objections. Why can't God create something so heavy that he can't move it? The question of why a loving God allows evil is in that same category if you believe: - love requires free will - free will requires choices - meaningful choices require evil to be an available choice
There are probably other formulations of how love requires the option of rejection and how evil follows from there. But the point is that they turn the contradiction between omnipotence and omnibenevolence into a paradox in the same category as "could God grow a mustache so great that he himself could not shave it?"
It stands to reason, then that the job of the objectors is to show that it's possible to love meaningfully without free will, really. And if you don't believe in objective morality, it's hard to argue what love is and isn't.
Or do I misunderstand and you care to elaborate?
Well, fair enough. If someone who doesn't believe in evils asks and a theist provides the Augustinian answer (evil is the absence of good), then we should all be enlightened, appreciate each other, and move on. But much more often, the people asking do believe in some sort of evil (rape warfare, slavery, child abuse, genocide, etc.) and don't realize the premise of the question is flawed. Again, it may be for reasons of aesthetics and emotion, but it's hard to make the case that there is nothing objectively evil. It's at least as dissatisfying as claiming that God exists and allows the same evils to happen.
The thought processes around this question typically boil down to what matters more: morality or observation. There are some who assume objective good and evil are irrefutable and can fairly cleanly proceed to thinking that something is behind all that. And there are people who assume that physical matter is the only way to prove the existence of things, and so all immaterial things (good, evil, God) are illusions unless we can use matter to somehow measure them.
This is a frequent misconception though. See the Euthyphro dilemma for a rebuttal. TLDR: are things right/wrong because god says so, or does God say so because they are right/wrong. The former implies a completely arbitrary morality. The later implies that morality is independent from God.
Something I find insightful is he argues that, like cold is an absence of heat, evil is simply an absence of good (God, grace, ect.)
If God decides to let individuals or populations live with the consequences of their choices, is He creating evil? Or is He letting things run their course? Giving unbelieving people a taste of the godless universe they prefer?
Anyway, at some point we're having a semantic argument about what definitions of words mean. And the objection about God and evil becomes more banal than controversial.
Religions are ancient cults that were successful in capturing a significant portion of the world's population in a time of scientific ignorance. It's as silly as believing in Zeus. Actually the Greeks knew that Zeus isn't benevolent, so that's less silly.
To be honest, I don't feel like either side answers the question very well
A conclusion I consider "false", which is my usual argument against atheism ("if the conclusion is ridiculous, then the premise is false" aka modus tollens)
I do not believe in a omnipotent God, who lives without restriction and can act arbitrarily. I do believe in one that does His best to help His children become like Him.
I think that principle is necessary to believe in order to arrive at a palatable solution to that question/problem. Any more than that and I'd probably qualify as "preaching".
I do think it's a possibility that people never consider though.