The Problem of Evil, A quick retelling
The Problem of Evil is a simple but devastating knockdown argument against the existence of God as conceptualized in the Abrahamic religions.
Let’s begin with some rhetoric.
Imagine yourself with the power of omnipotence, you like the God of the Bible can part the Red Sea, cause a plague of lotus to devastate a city, or create a whole new world in a duration of your choosing. Now with this power would you leave the world unchanged? Is there anything about the state of affairs of the world that you find unsatisfying?
I would imagine yes.
Even if you are just a slightly good human there will be evils in our world that you would want to correct. Perhaps the fact that there are infants being born without limbs anger you, or the thought that millions of people suffer daily from painful and deadly diseases that you find to be meaningless. Great, you now have the power to change that, in a blink of an eye you can make all this evil disappear.
Now I introduce to you the Abrahamic God. Half of the population believes in this God or a relevant form of it, who they describe with great zealously as all-powerful, all-knowing, and most importantly all-good.
I see a contradiction.
Here is the argument:
If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
Evil exists.
If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.
Therefore, God doesn’t exist. 1
If God exists in the way described in the Abrahamic scriptures then he IS omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect there is no workaround. Evil also exists and not just the evil that the Theists ascribe to be the result of our free will, but natural evil that exists independent of our actions. How can we marry the metaphysical idea that the Abrahamic God exists with the empirical fact that there is evil in the world?
I do not think you can,
hence the nonexistence of the Abrahamic God.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/#ChoBetIncForEviFor