Larry Sanger

So the three horrors, as I call them, are pain, death, and wickedness, essentially.

And the problem is...

We have reason to think, at least according to the earlier chapters in my draft, we have reason to think that the creator of the universe is purely good.

And yet, how is it possible that the creator of the universe would be purely good if the

The universe contains evil, death, and pain.

So how would he allow those things to exist?

So there's...

My response is actually complex, and it actually takes a while to get into.

A large part of it, although I will say that there's nothing surprising about it to anybody who has studied the philosophy of religion, the problem of evil in general.

So, for example, I talk a lot about free will.

I say that unless man were created with free will, then he would be essentially a robot designed.

One thing that we know from earlier arguments in philosophical theology is that God, he guides each person.

level of the scaffolding of nature to higher orders of complexity.

And being an intelligent or what appears to be something like intelligent being, then he would have reason to make something like himself,

as being the most perfect, because why would he do anything less?

That's the idea.

So it makes sense that God would create beings that can reason things through in the way that he perhaps does.

At least, whether or not God actually reasons, that might not be how his mind works.

Nevertheless, the idea is that in the same way that God creates things and has a rationally ordered mind that is free, we might be similar.

And I have to make—again, it's very long.