Even if you are correct that starvation and disease are both solvable now, so what? Are the thousands of years of human history before now irrelevant? More people have died than are alive today.
The world doesn’t just hurt when we “fall”, it hurts many people all the time, for no reason. People are born without limbs, people are struck by lightning, people are born depressed and suicidal. Our minds are built to suffer, evolved to use the pain of existence to encourage us to reproduce. If god could subject us to worse, how does that let you call what we have now good?
You do raise a very good point here. Even if people in the past had all acted in the most perfect possible way, millions would have died of old age in any case during that time. If God (unpack: omnipotent, omniscient being) exists, therefore, then this must have been a design feature of the universe; or at least, one that He is unwilling to stop.
It’s at this point that the question of whether an afterlife exists enters the debate. What death means, for the person who dies, changes pretty dramatically between the universe where an afterlife exists and the universe where an afterlife doesn’t exist; and an omniscient being has access to this datum, and can plan according to it.
It is always possible, of course, that an omniscient, omnipotent being might not be good. I doubt the extreme of evil (life is too pleasant for me to believe that that is true), but there is certainly the possibility of indifference to consider.
Even if you are correct that starvation and disease are both solvable now, so what? Are the thousands of years of human history before now irrelevant? More people have died than are alive today.
The world doesn’t just hurt when we “fall”, it hurts many people all the time, for no reason. People are born without limbs, people are struck by lightning, people are born depressed and suicidal. Our minds are built to suffer, evolved to use the pain of existence to encourage us to reproduce. If god could subject us to worse, how does that let you call what we have now good?
You do raise a very good point here. Even if people in the past had all acted in the most perfect possible way, millions would have died of old age in any case during that time. If God (unpack: omnipotent, omniscient being) exists, therefore, then this must have been a design feature of the universe; or at least, one that He is unwilling to stop.
It’s at this point that the question of whether an afterlife exists enters the debate. What death means, for the person who dies, changes pretty dramatically between the universe where an afterlife exists and the universe where an afterlife doesn’t exist; and an omniscient being has access to this datum, and can plan according to it.
It is always possible, of course, that an omniscient, omnipotent being might not be good. I doubt the extreme of evil (life is too pleasant for me to believe that that is true), but there is certainly the possibility of indifference to consider.