---In [email protected], <jr_esq@...> wrote : Nonetheless, most Christian theologians believe that God cannot perform evil. He knows that it exists, but he allows others to actually perform the evil deed.
Theologians are noted for sloppy thinking. If they believe god cannot perform evil, that is just a pretence to knowing something they do not know. If they did know, they could show us how that could be. Of course the first thing they would have to show and demonstrate is that there is a god. A first cause is responsible for everything that follows from it, unless of course that first cause is not omniscient, like the Greek gods, but the Western theologians probably would not buy into the view that god is fallible and dim, or that it is not fully in control of the world, that other forces it did not create also exist. The world would seem to exist, but how that came about is a bit fuzzy as there is vast disagreement as to solutions to that question. In my pre-teen and teen years, the argument from evil was the very thing that made be drop religion (which did not have a good grip on me even then). I thought the people trying to con me into believing in a god that created everything and was omniscient were insane; the basic forms of reasoning simply escaped them. As you said to Turq, it's the reasoning that counts, and you have counted yourself out. To come to the belief you seem to espouse, you have to run logic through hoops and several rounds of emotional self-deception to try to get the concept of an omniscient first cause to not be responsible for all that follows from it. You either have god creating evil, or you have a lacklustre first cause that does not pass muster for a god, like a mob boss that sends his henchmen to do his dirty work. Isaiah hit the nail on the head. You really have to look at how different versions of the bible try to fudge that passage by translation or by adding lots of footnotes 'explaining' it. What I quoted was a literal translation. This problem was first expressed by Epicurus (341–270 BCE): Is god willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god? (This is a modernised version of the argument, he really used the term 'the gods'. The idea of that pesky Yahweh psychopath had not yet diffused to Europe. There were other Greek conceptions however, such as Parmenides' 'the one'.) As to the original question whether god can lie we do have a lot of experience with those who claim to be representatives of god certainly tend to lie a lot.
