A theologian tries to explain the Aurora theater shootings:
The capacity to choose God and goodness came with the commensurate ability to choose evil. Is it loving to force his creation to follow his order, or to teach it and leave the creature to choose? It would seem that God came to the same conclusion that America’s founders did many millennia later: compulsory virtue is no virtue at all.
So all that death and misery are the cost of a lesson for Holmes?
Jerry Coyne sneers from a slightly different direction:
And really, does suffering make us into “good people”? Where’s the evidence for that? Yes, some people may say that going through a tragedy has made them better, but which parent would say he’s glad his child died of cancer because it made the parent a “better person”? That is monstrous. Are we all better because God allowed the Holocaust? What a horrible thing to think! Only a theologian or ardent believer could accept such nonsense.
No, there’s no solution to the problem of natural evil.
The problem of evil is, rightly, the problem of wishful thinking.
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God exists.
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God is all knowing.
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God is all powerful.
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God loves us, so …
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Why is there evil in the world?
The ‘problem’ of evil arises from the claims [1..4] made about God. Take away any single one of those claims, and the question “Why is there evil in the world?” never arises.
Is there any reason, any evidence, to justify a single one of those claims? No. There is not. The insoluble conundrum arises wholly out of wishful thinking.
