If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good, whence evil?If God wills to prevent evil, but he cannot, then he is not omnipotent
If he can prevent evil, but does not, then he is not good.
In either case, he is not God. - David Hume
What a perfectly logical statement.
Which is devoid of any meaning, any nuance, and is simply assembled to break your mind.
The biggest problem with logical arguments is that we tend to just overlook the assumptions made therein.
And, after accepting the assumptions, then if we are sure the proponent can make do logic, then of course, they have won.
What is really bad about our current schooling system, and the media, is they have trained us to accept certain assumptions that have never been looked at. Further, they don't even teach us to look at the assumptions. And if you want to get in trouble with the teacher, bring up any of those assumptions. (because the teacher hasn't been taught about those assumptions or why they even exist, and they get really mad when kids go outside of their knowledge area)
We are taught to lose before we ever begin.
We are trained to dig ourselves a hole that we can never get out of.
The logic of David Hume above is fraught with assumptions.
The biggest assumption he makes is that we are frail humans who are separate from God.
Just like science, separating physics from metaphysics.
And having that choice affect every observation of every experiment from then on. Every piece of science has to assume God doesn't exist. This is why we have atheism and scientism.
It appears that we are not frail humans, but quite powerful beings learning from our experiences. And we learn from our experiences. And our experiences are based in duality and the presence or absence of light. We cannot experience abundance without their also being lack.
And every highly spiritual person, every Buddha, has stated we are a part of (piece of) God, not separate.
Hume assumes that evil is wholly separate, and can be removed.
And that it is a good thing to remove "evil".
Would you remove the end bosses in a video game?
So many people die. They are often needlessly hard. Isn't all of those game characters being needlessly hurt? Isn't that evil?
Any real game player will emphatically say, "NO, do not remove the end bosses, they are what make the game challenging". And challenging is what makes it fun.
Any Face jumper or other extreme sport participant would be really disappointed if the possibility of death was removed.
Thus, what some would call evil, may be the entire reason we have chosen to incarnate into this world.
It may be that if God chose to remove "evil", life here on earth would by horrifically boring. So, would God be causing more evil to remove what Hume states as evil?
Hume uses "cannot" as a synonym of "unable to". But there are more nuances here that really need to be explored.
What if God has given humans free will. And with that free will they chose to bring evil into this world.
Soooo, God could remove the evil, but in the same breath, he would be removing free will.
Hume also uses "cannot" in a way that makes God out to the bad guy if he doesn't do it.
So, now that God has chosen free will over removing evil, than God is bad... evil?
No human has ever been able to define "good", so, it is quite difficult to completely define "bad"
So, could we accurately know if God was removing evil or not?
Again Hume has made an assumption that doesn't hold water.
We, humanity, really need to start looking for the assumptions that we don't even know we have.
Many of these make our lives hard without any benefit. Like "we have to pay taxes or there won't be any roads" "Govern-cement is a necessary evil"
And many of these stop us from ever reaching our goals. "Rich people are evil" - meaning, you will never be rich, in fact, you may never get out of poverty.
Assumptions are made in all the fields of science. Many of these have stopped us from exploring reality. We just can't see it, because we have assumed that the truth cannot exist. Such as "We are the most advanced species of man to live on this planet" (linear progression of the species, when obviously this isn't true)
Now is the time for us to start looking at our assumptions.