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Comment by oefnak | Hacker News Reader

Okay, if the creator is good, why is there misery?

Good without evil is positive without negative, left without right, up without down, hot without cold. And like all those other pairs, good and evil are relative, as are happiness and misery.

It's for this reason that absolute avoidance of "sin" is misguided, even assuming we could reliably identify it. We were always meant to eat from the Tree of Knowledge; it was there for a reason, and the alternative would've been a rather stagnant and meaningless existence - certainly devoid of suffering, but also of joy.

> Good without evil is positive without negative, left without right, up without down, hot without cold. And like all those other pairs, good and evil are relative, as are happiness and misery.

This resonates with what I've read about the gnostic understanding of the creation. The demiurge (the God of this world) created this world to have a ratio of 2/3 light and 1/3 darkness. Suffering and conflict is produced to create tension and perpetuate the system.

http://www.trickedbythelight.com/tbtl/nde-transcript.html

Here's one perspective to consider.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference...

To me that seems like an incomplete explanation that ignores the hard part of the problem it’s trying to satisfy.

It’s easy to explain the suffering that can happen during one’s life as part of a wider experience which ultimately ends up being good, when the examples are adults with a range of experience and agency over their situation.

It’s less easy to explain why a good god has created an existence where a young child who doesn’t yet have agency over their existence contracts and dies of smallpox. Or is brutally raped and murdered. Or…

What’s the point of that exactly?

I think overall the challenge of the problem of evil for LDS is different from that of the Christian tradition. Christians believe there is just one God who created the physical universe, and created the life within it (either directly or by setting up laws that would lead to the inevitable outcome of life), and in a very real sense foreordained all that suffering and pain knowing that it would come.

The LDS church, on the other hand, teaches that "As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be". I'm not familiar enough with LDS teaching, but if their god was once like us, then that means that this god did not create life, given that this god was a living thing before having the power to create life (and is this the same for that god's god? And the god of that god? And so on?). That suggests to me that this god is not the creator of physical reality (contrary to what Christians think), and not the original creator of life, and therefore is not as obviously responsible for a physical reality full of suffering as is God for Christians. The LDS god did not set up the original rules, and so can't be as responsible for them. That being said, the god of the LDS does seem to be very powerful, so that would give rise to some forms of the problem of evil.

These are just some poorly informed thoughts, and there's a lot I don't know about the LDS church.

When I was a believer, I always thought the best answer to this is that suffering is brief & temporary when considered against eternal paradise.

Looking deeper, suffering is also necessary to allow for the gift of immortality to be a choice, and to be 'fair'-- those who cannot resist the desire to cause misery for others must be given the chance to demonstrate for everyone else why they should not be granted immortality. If God just snuffed them out at the first sign of trouble everyone would start to wonder if God was really being just. [Oh, I also didn't believe in eternal hell, just a final judgment where the 'bad guys' are all destroyed so the rest of us can actually start enjoying life without any more misery.]

You will find thousands of other quite different responses to this question because it is the most common question asked about God.

I don't really believe any of that stuff any more, but the beliefs I described brought me comfort for a long time in a dark place and I still think they make more sense than any other irrational, unprovable belief system I've looked into.

Ha, you like to ask the hard ones, and I have to head out right now :) Short version: for every view of the world, there's things it explains well, and things that are a challenge for it. Some theistic views I think as a whole do a great job of providing a solid worldview. However, problems of evil -- why is there natural evil, moral evil, misery, etc -- these are one of the areas that are probably the biggest challenge for theists that believe in a good God. Needless to say, there's a massive amount of words written about this topic. The short answer is: there is no logical problem of evil -- one where this kind of thing is logically incompatible with the existence of God. i.e., there's no proof that shows that a good God cannot have a reason for allowing evil/suffering/misery/etc. But it still presents an emotional challenge, and it does seem like they're an uncomfortable pair, even if not logically incompatible.

I have my own views on how to explain this, but it would take a fair bit to explain.

OK, here's my amateur take. Most misery is man-made. On the personal scale: envy, unrequited love etc. Also on the macro scale: wars, global warming etc. Perhaps if you create entities with free will they will unavoidably though ignorance or malice do some evil to a lesser to greater extent and therefore cause misery.

Bereavement is unavoidable but many religions promise an afterlife.

Child bone cancer and like are difficult to explain away. Perhaps we would have a cure for cancer if we didn't spend so much effort developing weapons and better advertising algorithms, but that is besides the point. I have heard Muslims believe that Allah will not inflict suffering on someone beyond what they can handle.

God, if they exists, could have created world we everyone were in a state of continually bliss, but what would be a point of that?

> God, if they exists, could have created world we everyone were in a state of continually bliss, but what would be a point of that?

What would be the point of not doing that?

It's not really about individual suffering -- god could have created a universe in which suffering did not exist as a possibility or a concept. But it does so exist. Therefore God either intended it to be so, and condones or accepts or requires suffering, or God has limits that mean it had no choice but to create the universe this way, or there is no God.

Yes, if God exists, is the creator, is all powerful, is good, is sane, then suffering must be of ultimate benefit, or an unavoidable consequence of for example free will. That said lot of suffering is man made.

> I have heard Muslims believe that Allah will not inflict suffering on someone beyond what they can handle.

I find this a particularly inhumane way of thinking. Try saying that to someone suffering "oh, you can handle it", it's beyond cruel, yikes. Makes it sound like it's some type of blessing, like the little 3-yr old is meant to die of bone cancer because of some greater God's plan. I don't know, it's just sounds so wrong to me to think like that. Even life on earth is some sort of school for the afterlife, I don't think there is a lesson to be learned by dying of cancer as a young child.

> God, if they exists, could have created world we everyone were in a state of continually bliss, but what would be a point of that?

Yes please, isn't that what heaven is supposed to be?

>> God if they exists, could have created world we everyone were in a state of continually bliss, but what would be a point of that?

> please, isn't that what heaven is supposed to be?

No, I doubt it would be like that, not like what a junkie experiences when they inject heroin in a vein. There would be some sort of meaning to it.

> Perhaps if you create entities with free will they will unavoidably though ignorance or malice do some evil to a lesser to greater extent and therefore cause misery.

Well, to be sure, you have to nudge a bit and create such circumstances to make sure there will be misery and wars. For starters start several opposing religious factions, all willing to do god's bidding and do horrible things in his name. Don't discourage it, leave your words in ancient manuscripts open to interpretation.

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