I’ve always quite liked Scott Alexander’s answer to the problem of evil. It is absolutely useless as a defense of Abrahamic beliefs in the real world, but is relatively satisfying to an atheist wondering how that question might theoretically be answered by a true god.
In case you’re not familiar, the basic idea is that God did create a perfectly good universe full of a near-infinite number of consciousnesses experiencing total bliss at all times—then decided that he wanted more net good to exist, so he made a universe which was almost exactly the same as the first but with one incredibly minor detail changed—making it just slightly less than maximally perfect. So on and so on, because to create an identical universe is not really to create one at all. After some absurd number of universes, we arrive at ours (this explanation requires that you believe that our universe has more net happiness than suffering, which is admittedly just taken on faith). Ours is definitely closer to balanced between perfectly good and perfectly evil than not, but it still is more good and thus worth creating.
He also implies that people who experience more suffering than happiness in their individual lives might be p-zombies, but I find that to be incredibly weird and have always left it out of explanations to people who might possibly feel that they have had a bad life.
I’ve always quite liked Scott Alexander’s answer to the problem of evil. It is absolutely useless as a defense of Abrahamic beliefs in the real world, but is relatively satisfying to an atheist wondering how that question might theoretically be answered by a true god.
In case you’re not familiar, the basic idea is that God did create a perfectly good universe full of a near-infinite number of consciousnesses experiencing total bliss at all times—then decided that he wanted more net good to exist, so he made a universe which was almost exactly the same as the first but with one incredibly minor detail changed—making it just slightly less than maximally perfect. So on and so on, because to create an identical universe is not really to create one at all. After some absurd number of universes, we arrive at ours (this explanation requires that you believe that our universe has more net happiness than suffering, which is admittedly just taken on faith). Ours is definitely closer to balanced between perfectly good and perfectly evil than not, but it still is more good and thus worth creating.
He also implies that people who experience more suffering than happiness in their individual lives might be p-zombies, but I find that to be incredibly weird and have always left it out of explanations to people who might possibly feel that they have had a bad life.