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From: sher@rochester.UUCP (David Sher)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Omnipotence, justice and suffering: a very long question.
Message-ID: <10567@rochester.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 14-Jul-85 03:13:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: rocheste.10567
Posted: Sun Jul 14 03:13:08 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 17-Jul-85 04:47:13 EDT
References: <1034@phs.UUCP>
Reply-To: sher@rochester.UUCP (David Sher)
Organization: U. of Rochester, CS Dept.
Lines: 37
Keywords: omnipotence omniscience theology

In article <1034@phs.UUCP> paul@phs.UUCP (Paul C. Dolber) writes:
 ...
>
>    4. "The fourth spurious solution, which is one of the prime glories
>       of Christian theology, claims in effect that suffering is a
>       necessary adjunct of free will.... The following questions must
>       be pressed.  First, if God knew that man would abuse his free
>       will and that this would entail cancer and Auschwitz, why then
>       did he give man free will?  Second... is there really any
>       connection at all between ever so much suffering and free will?"
>
 ...
>If "suffering is somehow logically necessary," then how could God
>create a heaven with no suffering, but not an earth with no suffering;
>why not create just heaven and no earth at all?  "Would the blessed in
>heaven be unable to appreciate their bliss if they could not observe the
>torments of the damned?"  Royce argued that "`Your sufferings are God's
 ...
>Regards, Paul Dolber (...{decvax!mcnc or !decvax}!duke!phs!paul).

From a strictly logical point of view this argument seems to require more 
assumptions than you have made.  The existence of heaven is not 
necessarily true.  (I come from a Jewish tradition where the above
argument was made but the existence of heaven was not believed, let
me state that this tradition does not correspond to the Orthodox position
or possibly any of the standard positions.)  Without assuming the
existence of any perfect place in particular heaven is this argument still
spurious?  It would seem difficult to prove the world non-optimal without
a complete better world model and even then the evaluation procedure
can be attacked.
Of course from a standard Christian viewpoint the existence of heaven
is axiomatic but also all sorts of wierd things are axiomatic from
a standard Christian viewpoint (oops prejudices showing!).

-David Sher 
sher@rochester
seismo!rochester!sher