Several of the above discussions seem to revolve around what is “good” and who is “more worthy” to receive God’s help.

It is like trying to define “hell.” My hell could be sitting through a long, boring testimony meeting listening to Sister So and So talk about what her kids are up to and how she is suffering. To another attendee, it might have been the most enlightening meeting he has ever experienced.

By most of your standards, I am not the worthiest of persons, but when I pray and have faith God helps me.

Is that fair that he should help a sinner like myself and not cure my mother-in-law’s cancer??

My mother-in-law has been fighting a terrible cancer for about 8 years. She grew up on healthy food and never smoked, but now the cancer moved into her lungs. She has had chemo several times and 4 surgeries.

Maybe she secretly blamed God? She told me that she has “too much to live for and will keep having treatments and surgeries until I have no organs left to take out and/or die.” She has suffered.

My husband and I have NOT sat around analyzing whether or not she is worthy of God’s help or “what she possibly could have done in this life and the pre-existence to ‘deserve’ this test?” We are just grateful for the days that she feels better.

Then, by God’s grace, by chance or who knows for sure, she was selected to receive an experimental drug, and it is prolonging her life and shrinking her tumors. Did the doctors at the Huntsman Cancer Institute pray about who was the worthiest to receive the drug?

Or was it by chance that she received the actual drug and not the placebo?

I think you are struggling with understanding because your are humanizing God and “judging” him on when it is proper and just to use his power of intervention to fight evil. Using “human” definitions to understand God may not be the answer. He is not Spiderman.

Going with the natural flow of things makes life much easier. The Tao Te Ching (one of the most influential books in history) describes “opposition’ best (no offense to the Book of Mormon intended). There are English translations at the library — just my opinion.

Jesus alluded to it when he observed that there were many Jewish lepers but God chose to heal a Syrian, Naaman. Having healed Naaman, it is inconceivable that any Jew who died of leprosy would not have prayed his or her heart out to God for a cure. Or died with God\’s name on his or her lips.

This is an example of the Great Parsimony. Heal one man and get everyone\’s attention. God is a monopolist who controls the market on spiritual experience on this planet. He is maximizing his return by controlling this market. His return is appropriately not just the saved but those who are going to become like him.

Monopolists operate at the point of maximum pain. In economic terms, they are extracting the maximum profit from the society in which they operate. In spiritual matters, God gives just enough spiritual experience to maximize his return, which is, to keep everyone focused on spiritual matters to the maximum degree. More or less would diminish the focus and lessen spiritual investment.

This is the point of maximum pain. Ask the agonized Jews dying of leprosy or modern day Mormons dying of cancer pleading for a cure.

It has nothing to do with what God can or can not do. The value of one more individual raised to spiritual enlightenment and community with God is so important that it is worth the pain apparent powerlessness of God to prevent evil. Apparently God needs us to learn the lessons that only this earth can provide, which are unteachable in the eternities.

God does not need to be very powerful to appear infinitely powerful to us. (His main powerlessness is due to his inability to force individual behavior.) His \”finiteness\” is merely due to the operation of the Great Parsimony, his need to maximize his return.

If you do not like this comparison of God to a monopolist, just consider all of Jesus\’ economic parables. He saw God as the unjust judge, also. Hmmm.

Finally, we might consider that the experience of this life is not individual. In the final summation we will become the sum of all of the experiences of this life. We will experience all of the pain and joy of existence in the last analysis. Just as Jesus was able to take upon himself the sins of the world, we will be asked to do the same. Likewise the joys. So, there is not one life full of joy and pleasure and another pain, in the end we will all share equally, this is our life. It can not really be otherwise in the celestial kingdom.

In mortaility we must endure trials, even evil, sometimes. God knows when it is better to intervene than not to intervene based on factors we could not easiliy discern. For example, how an individual will respond to divine intervention. I\’ve been told that God only intervenes just enough so that our reaction is still our choice. In the case of Laman and Lemuel, even sending an angel didn\’t \”make\” them choose good in the long run. But that level of intervention has more to do with who is involved than the actual actions taking place.

At the very least, if we are agreed that there are evil people who commit evil acts, as well as random events in nature that cause human suffering, we don’t need to blame God for these facts. The God that we feel must logically take responsibility for these facts is a construct of human thought, one whose axiomatic perfection is actually its greatest flaw, since that absoluteness is a simplified case that makes it easier for human beings to reach logical conclusions about what such a God can or must do.

The real God who has revealed himself to prophets, and through Christ, is not such a simplified entity whose actions we can venture to predict in every case by logical deduction. He is not an automaton who is not affected by emotions or our own suffering, and he is not in position to alter us, who are the most significant source of evil, because the evil we commit on each other is not random but purposeful and therefore far more thorough.

Henry Eyring, a chemist and not a philosopher, argued that the existence of evil and injustice in this life is all the more reason to believe that there is more to reality than just this miserable earth. The same yearning for balance, completeness, beauty and symmetries that guided him and other scientists in seeking to understand the universe led Eyring to believe that the reality of existence needs to include places and times in which balance and justice can be restored.

Thus, the spirit world, where we live between death and resurrection, ensures justice by giving every human being a full opportunity to hear and consider accepting the gospel of Christ and salvation through him. The assurance that every person who commits evil will have “a bright recollection of all our guilt” and have at least a thousand years of contemplating that guilt is an assurance of justice. The resurrection of all, especially of children whose lives were cut short by evil acts or disasters, rectifies the injustice of death and suffering. The availability of eternal family bonds with those we love best balances the scales against separation and loss.

Now the response of most people, not only atheists but many traditional Christians, to these teachings is “It is too good to be true.” They would rather see suffering unmitigated than believe that God has addressed it through a “prophet in the age of railroads”. So they reject these teachings and live without them. They have their reward. They can be proud of their rugged individualism, or of their desire to have unresolvable mysteries.

But there are plenty of us who think that the beauty, symmetry and justice in these teachings makes them more likely to be true. And it opens us to accept what we believe is confirming intelligence from the real God, that the goodness that overwhelms evil is in fact true, and that with God’s help, we can be part of that goodness.

I of course disagree with Clark.

Just to be clear, the position I outlined wasn’t my own. It’s one I actually disagree with quite strongly on both philosophical and social grounds.

I see your comments the same way, so probably we’re talking past each other. Maybe some other time.

I also suggest that while the logical problem is dissolved by finitism, it is important to state the evidential problem in such a way that its essential premises can be disclosed. Once that it done, we can focus on the what the real issue is — viz., whether we have good reason to believe that there are in fact evils that are inconsistent with the kind of world we believe God might create given constraints necessary to accomplish the kinds of purposes we believe God may have for us. The problem then boils down to what God’s purposes in allowing the kinds of evil that we experience could be given what God must allow to achieve his overall purposes. However, it quickly becomes clear that we are not in an epistemic position to make such judgments with much confidence. Thus, in the end we end up with faith acknowledging our puny epistemic ability to make all-things-considered judgments about why God might allow what he has sheer power to eliminate, but perhaps not ability to eliminate without defeating his overall purposes for us in this sphere of existence.

Thus, the evidential problem is simply seen from a different perspective by a finitist (hate that term) who believes that God faces constraints in what he must allow to achieve purposes such as our exaltation and immortality and eternal life. I also believe that the pre-mortal life where we could have had vastly different experiences and had all kinds of time to consent and make covenants with one another, changes the landscape drastically. For example, it seems to me to be morally impermissible for God to use another person’s suffering to benefit me; but if that other person consented to be a means by which I would be given an opportunity to learn certain lessons, then it seems to me to be permissible. What kind of evils must God allow to leave room for us to freely choose loving relationships or remain free to reject love?

I also believe that limiting God’s foreknowledge is important in theodicy. I of course disagree with Clark. The fact that God doesn’t know the complete future or have middle knowledge means that God must wait to see what we actually choose before he formulates his next step to fulfill his plan. That entails that what will work to challenge me to grow must be left to my decision at times.

“Yes, JWL does mention something about that, but the elephant in the room is the belief that God knows what is going to happen to each of us before it happens. Since he is both all powerful and all knowing he is derelict in not preventing it in general and unjust in not being even handed in the way he chooses to intervene.”

I disagree. I don’t think God does know what we are going to choose at the most fundamental level.

In fact, I’d submit that it is logically impossible for even a perfect and omnipotent being to know the outcome of a truly free choice.

Do we have agency or not?

If we do, I’d submit that God does not know the result of that agency.

He is waiting to be surprised by us.