If God is omni benevolent and all-powerful, why is there evil and suffering?

If God is omnipotent (all-powerful, able to do anything), omni- benevolent (all loving) and omniscient (all knowing).

The problem is this: our world contains vast amounts of suffering, much of which seems either
entirely unnecessary or unnecessarily severe. Although some of this is the result of evil human action, and thus may be seen as an inevitable consequence of human free will, much is not. Plagues floods and famines and is not all the result of human action. Even the idea that human free will explains the existence of much suffering is hard to accept, since God, if all-powerful, could He not have limited our capacity to harm others?
So why is there all this suffering? If God cannot prevent it, it would seem he is not all-powerful. If God does not want to stop it, it would seem he is not all loving. If God does not know about it, he cannot be all knowing.

Is God constrained by his goodness?

If God is omnipotent (all-powerful, able to do anything), omni- benevolent (all loving) and a perfectly free agent (Sovereign).
God could choose whatever he wants. Nothing could stop this because God is omnipotent. Nevertheless, if God is also all-loving. It seems that such a God could never choose to do something, which is unloving. It is not that God just chooses not to do such things, rather that God's nature as omni- benevolent constrains what he can do. In other words, God does not have the freedom and/or the power to do something unloving, an if this is the case he can not be Sovereign

One possible response is that God is not necessarily omni- benevolent, but, in fact, since he never chooses to do something, which is unloving. However, if this is true, then how omni- benevolence can be a necessary characteristic of a God. Perhaps God can do literally anything. (Sovereign)

God the sustainer?

Is God the sustainer of all that is? This means that if God ceased to exist so would everything else.

It hard to model God on our universe. The laws of physics do not seem to require that the universe have anything outside of itself to continue to exist. Therefore, they can't quite see what kind of evidence it would be possible to point to in order to come to the belief that God is required for the universe to continue.
When they have previously confronted this problem, it has been suggested that a lawgiver or law-enforcer is required in order to sustain the laws of physics. But, this response seems to rest on a misunderstanding of the nature of physical laws. Laws in the legal sense do require lawgivers and law-enforcers. Nevertheless, physical laws are simply descriptions of the nature of reality. Therefore, the idea that a lawgiver is needed to sustain the rules of physics seems to confuse the legal and scientific senses of laws.

The personal God

It is hard to understand how, God, one can have a personal relationship with him.
Personal relationships appear to depend on a number of things. Sufficient similarity between the persons in the relationship is one. Another is that both are persons or are, at least, person-like as some higher primates, for example appear to be. The problem is that in our universe there seem to be no genuine personal relationships between things of great difference. God is vastly different from human beings.

People can have feelings for things, which are similar to those, they have towards people. Affection or love for places or objects, for example, is common. However, this is not the same as having a personal relationship with them. In a similar way, people have relationships with animals, maybe a cat. Nevertheless, this does not seem to be the same as a personal relationship, because of the great difference in the way the person relates to the animal and the way the animal relates to the person. Perhaps this is the kind of relationship envisaged with God

Can God do the illogical?

What does one mean when they God is able to do anything?
In the model, Can God to make 2 + 2 = 5? (Where all the terms hold their common meanings). He could not do so and the model broke down. It seems that no being can ever do what is logically impossible. It is not just beyond the wit of humanity to make 2 + 2 = 5, such a thing is a contradiction in terms.

So to understand that an all-powerful that God can do anything is illogical. Before accepting this, however, you should understand that by accepting the limits of logical possibility on God, one must leave open the possibility that, if some characteristics attributed to God turn out to entail logical contradictions, It means, in effect, accepting that rationality is a constraint on God The bible says nothing is impossible with God. Could God destroy himself or could God make a rock too heavy for him to lift as examples?

Why did God create our universe?

If God is omnipotent (all-powerful, able to do anything), omni_ benevolent (all loving), omniscient (all knowing) and the creator of all that exists we run into a problem.
When your God created the universe, being all-knowing, he must have known about all the suffering there would be in this world. Yet God still created it, as it is. He did not create a more benign version of the universe, or simply choose not to create the universe. Why is this?
It could be that God did not know about all the suffering, which would occur. Nevertheless, that would make God not all knowing. It could be that God does not mind all the suffering, but that would make him less than all loving. It could be that God could not have created a more benign world than this one. However, that would seem to make God less than all-powerful. The only way we can resolve this problem is to conclude that God can only do what is possible and that this really is the best of all possible worlds. 

God exists eternally.

God exists through all space and time. However, according to our best physics, space and time exist only within the confines of a universe. This would seem to constrain God's existence to within a universe.

God exists "outside" "TIME AND SPACE IN THE EVER CHANGING MOMENTS OF NOW"

By Alan
 

Without pain, there could be no pain-dependent virtues.
(1) Without danger, there would be no courage,
(2) Without prolonged frustration and disappointment, there would be no patience.
(3) Without want, there would be no generosity.
(4) Without suffering, there would be no compassion.
The Christian God creates our world as a crucilble of laerning, as school for moral and spiritual development.  The quality of our moral order and its love would be inferior, if we were incapable of developing courage, patience, generosity, and compassion.  

But why is suffering apparently so unfairly distributed?  God honors our free will, including our freedom to abuse it and thereby create "unfair" suffering.  Of course, this does not account for natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes.  In this respect, the Bible implies that God wants not only free will, but also a universe that is independent of His micro-management and runs according to its own laws and the chaos that these laws cause.  Thus Ecclesiastes teaches: "All are victims of time and chance (9:11)."  And Proverbs speaks of Wisdom personified as if "she" were Mother Nature.  In this role, Wisdom is paradoxically both an extension of God and independent of God's micro-management.  Wisdom celebrates her creative role in these words:

"I was beside the Master Craftsman, delighting Him day after day, ever AT PLAY in His presence, AT PLAY everywhere on His Earth (Proverbs 8:30-31),"

This poetic view of creation as Mother Nature's [= Wisdom's] "play" allows for the apparent randomness and dead ends of the evolution of life with all its increasing complexity.  It also allows for our role as mini-creators "in God's image" tasked with the responsibility of shaping our world and its moral order in a way that prevents the forces of chaos from destroying the quality of human life.  In this way, an enticing mystery raises its beautiful head--the elusive relationship between the latent creative powers of the human mind and the prospect for channeling divine power and grace to meet human need.

Consider the alternative that pain might instead have been fairly distributed on Earth.  In that case, there would be no incentive to choose evil because of the resulting negative consequences.  But the quality of a moral order depends on our incentives to make evil choices, incentives which we are free to resist in the name of love, justice, or the desire to please God.  Conversely, there need be no immediate physical reward for loving choices other than the enhancement of the quality of our consciousness.  Also, if pain were fairly distributed, this would strongly confirm the existence of a moral and just God.  As a result, we would tend to worship and serve God more out of a sense of duty and fear than out of a sense of faith and love embarking on a voyage of self-discovery in the darkness of limited understanding.  

Don

Hi Alan-
In a general answer, might I suggest a look at the chain of causality. In the beginning there was nothing. In fact, if you go more than about 19E9 light years in any direction you leave the defined universe and wind up in more nothing.

Then there was something. I like the St Thomas Aquinas term, the "Uncaused Cause" happened (I usually call it thermodnamics) and everything began at once. Continuing from then we have everyone. So each of us is a manifestation of God's creativity, and to that extent, and especially since we came from the one beginning, we are all fragments of the God-stuff out of which everything is made. Hence, you are God. (There are better ways to realize this, of course.)

So now, when you ask why God did something, look in a mirror and ask why you did it, because that's what brought it into your world. And equally, as you forgive and repair, you can ascribe that to God as well - fixing things so that the problems don't recur.

From that perspective, I suggest that "God did this" in order to find out how it feels to be you, and how God-as-you would cope with the problems of the world, and the various influences that surround it.

The value of this realization is that we can now act from a positivistic basis as we do therapy, soul retrievals and so on. It sort of trades off old ignorance for new understanding, but brings responsibility in place of innocence.

dave

Hi Alan. Although some of this may sound familiar, I will answer this first one with what sounds right to me based on all I have heard or thought of. Still not sure on the rest but this is a start.

Sometimes suffering is necessary for us to grow as human beings and to learn from. Time and time again, the hand that we are dealt in life may not be the best, but it everything was a smooth ride, we wouldn't grow, mature or learn much. Hence the known saying, "growing pains," growth is most often unpleasant but it is a necessary part of living and becoming more. Also, the Great Creator made us as we are and while that may be the case, we are not all controlled like puppets and to some extent our fate is in our own hands. It's not always as simple as "if I drop something it will fall." We could drop the item but we could also act quickly and pick it up before it hits the ground but in such a case one would have to act fast enough. Time and time again mankind has been its own worst enemy. Sometimes people are dealt a bad hand at life, others are born with a brain chemical imbalance that ends up consuming them. I wouldn't go as far as to say any soul is evil. I think we all have the capability to do both good and evil in our lives and everyone does both. No one is purely good or bad. There are urges within us to do both in given situations and in the end its all about how weak we are when these urges hit us. When we are aware that in the long run we are best off helping our fellow man and embracing a universal love for all mankind we know intellectually that we should listen to urges to do good and not bad but we might not always be strong enough to resist the urge compelling us to do something that is not so good. Inner strength plays a key role in assisting us in resisting those urges. We have all done things we are not proud of. The key is that every bit of energy inertia we put out has the possibility to cause something and even the smallest thing could make a huge difference. You could do a tiny favor for a man who you did not know was so depressed he was contemplating suicide and your small act of kindness was just enough for the man to decide to stay alive. You never know. In the end this is something that we all need to realize is that we're not perfect and that inevitable suffering can happen, but that we should do everything within our power to minimize that suffering and make a positive difference whenever possible. Hope this is helpful.
Peace,
David

Greetings,

Are sometimes your questions rhetorical, Alan, to be instructive?
Because once one has accepted, even experienced as you have, that God is supreme,
there is no need to ask the rest, right? Our puny human chips of light off the God-source
are just not up to truly comprehending the Wholiness of The Source.

So I'm thinking that maybe you wrote this to get us to admit that faith in 'God' (whatever we believe God to be)
is the answer.

Is that the answer? 

Bets

Alan,

This seems like a more complex version of saying that if God has the ultimate power to do anything why can't God make a rock so big He Himself can't lift it?  If I start from a set of assumptions about God, and demonstrate a resulting logical impossibility, am I really saying something true about the nature of God?  Or am I just demonstrating that erroneous assumptions about the nature of what God is will lead, logically, to a demonstration that something about those assumptions is in error?

So, can God make a rock so big He can't lift it, thereby demonstrating that He is ultimately powerful?  A friend once answered this question by saying, Yes, of course God can do that, if God is the rock.  So there we have it according to my friend, logical proof that God can be a rock.   

Bruce