ringo writes:
Poor helpless god.
There seems to be an implicit, unstated assumption behind this (and most) discussions of "the problem of evil": that God's highest priority is to reduce our human suffering. Thus if God does NOT reduce human suffering, He is either evil or impotent.
But what if God's highest priority is something else? Something on a longer and grander scale, like vanquishing ALL evil at the end of time? What if His priority for us, now, is not to reduce suffering, but to effect personal growth? Perhaps suffering is needed for our personal growth, just as we know that physical pain is a helpful warning to protect us from physical harm?
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." — Albert Einstein
I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives us a lot of factual information, puts all of our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously. — Erwin Schroedinger