philosophy

My Philosophy of Religion class is driving me nuts.

Correction. My Philosophy of Religion professor is driving me nuts. He's all about presenting arguments to us and then letting us either accept or reject them, with reasoning for why we accept or reject them. That's fine. That makes sense. That's a good way of sharing different ideas without forcing any ideas down anyone's throat.

However, some of his arguments are, in my opinion, insane. And therefore he's driving me nuts. We're talking about evil right now. We've already established that God exists. My teacher believes that God exists. He also believes that God is an infinite being, that's He's omnipotent(he can do all that is possible for a God to do, ie, can't make something that's nonsense, like a square circle, but can do all possible things) and omniscient. We've also established that we as humans are finite beings. We are limited. My teacher also believes that God is smarter than we are as humans.

So, onto evil. We've agreed that there's evil in the world because God gives us free will, and therefore, humans will do evil things sometimes. And sometimes some evil may be necessary for the greater good. But my teacher has an issue with "pointless evil". To explain pointless evil, he uses the hypothetical situation of a fawn being injured in a forest fire and not dying right away, but suffering for a few days and die. My teacher thinks God should just give the deer a heart attack and not make it suffer, because he doesn't understand the good that comes of that. Another example is a person suffering of an illness for many years. My teacher doens't understand why they can't suffer for 10 years instead of 20.

Okay, so I, along with other students, say, what's to say that God isn't already reducing the amount of evil to the smallest amount possible while still striving for the greater good? And my teacher says, "That's insulting my intelligence! I can look around and see all this pointless evil! It's insulting my intelligence to say that it's happening for a reason!"

Well, excuuuuuuse me. Sorry, but I'm insulting your intelligence by mentioning that you might not be able to see it because you're not as smart as God? A point which you've already agreed to? Well, aren't you a humble man.