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One resolution to the problem of evil is that God is not good. The evil God challenge thought experiment explores whether an evil God is as likely to exist as a good God. Dystheism is the belief that God is not wholly good. Maltheism is the belief in an evil god. Peter Forrest has stated:
Epicurus was not an atheist, although he rejected the idea of a god concerned with human affairs; followers of Epicureanism denied the idea that there was no god. While the conception of a supreme, happy and blessed god was the most popular during his time, Epicurus rejected such a notion, as he considered it too heavy a burden for a god to have to worry about all the problems in the world.
That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or ...
For some thinkers, the existence of evil and hell could mean that God is not perfectly good and powerful or that there is no God at all. [62] Theodicy tries to address this dilemma by reconciling an all-knowing, all-powerful, and omnibenevolent God with the existence of evil and suffering, outlining the possibility that God and evil can coexist.
…it is possible that one thing in relation to another may be evil, and at the same time within the limits of its proper being it may not be evil. Then it is proved that there is no evil in existence; all that God created He created good. This evil is nothingness; so death is the absence of life. When man no longer receives life, he dies.
According to this tradition, "evil, though real, is not a 'thing', but rather a direction away from the goodness of the One"; [11] evil is the absence of good, and accordingly, it is technically wrong to say that God created evil, properly speaking. Rather, he created a world which was imperfectly good.
The first saying God, being above good and evil, produces impartially the effects to which we call good and evil. The second saying there’s an equal and independent power that produces evil. Lewis says that he doesn’t think the doctrine of the Fall answers whether it was better for God to create or not to create.
There is, therefore, no ontological source of evil, corresponding to the greater good, which is God; [28] evil being not real but rational—i.e. it exists not as an objective fact, but as a subjective conception; things are evil not in themselves, but because of their relation to other items or persons. All realities are in themselves ...