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Comment by truculent | Hacker News Reader

Not sure this is the slam dunk you suggest. Isn’t this just the free will defence with extra steps? Or, perhaps, Swinburne’s argument that natural evil is a force for maturation and spiritual development.

The basic conception of the argument (“Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”) still seems valid if a God has created a karmic system.

So I don’t think this is an issue uniquely facing Western perspectives.

Personally, I don’t find the free will defence particularly convincing, either. Do we really have free will? Is free will truly necessary for education/moral goodness? And if so, is god truly capable of evil?

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1) not defending anything, just explaining what I know. 2) never heard of Swinburne. Natural evil is force for maturation and ALSO to uphold the principle of justice among all living beings. 3) No evil can harm a living being if he has not already bad stock of karma with him. And also God does not interfere with anyone's free will. If we are living with others then some laws will have to be followed.

Now you will ask that how did evil actually generate because in beginning there was no bad karma. The thing is that even the intention of harming someone and attempts can generate bad karma. Our mindset towardds others must be good.

4) Nah, in eastern philosophy even beginners know this, yeah but in east also very less people actually know about themselves!

5) Yes we have free will. If given two paths with one path we know as thousand times better than other path, Still by our free will we can choose the bad one. 6) Free will is necessary for love i.e. relationship with ourselves and God. Love is morality harming any sentinent being is not. 6) God is capable of evil but he/she(whatever) does not do it.

> The basic conception of the argument (“Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”) still seems valid if a God has created a karmic system.

The difference, as I understand it, is that the free-will argument requires the existence of a creator who is either impotent, malevolent or evil (or some combination of all three).

A karmic-based system requires no creator to exist.

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