Originally posted by FabianFnas
Who can anyone say that the intelligent designer, or the creator is loving and caring? This supernatural being is right on evil.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-03-uv-aids-cancer-cells-blood.html
Why has god created cancer? Even innocent children get cancer. Lethal cancer. Why?
Is this a regrettable flaw in his creation or is the intelligent d ...[text shortened]... igner not so intelligent after all?
What is the usual christian explanation of this evilness?
PT1 Comfort for Those Who Suffer
OVER the centuries, the question of why God allows suffering has challenged many philosophers and theologians. Some have asserted that since God is all-powerful, he must ultimately be responsible for suffering. The writer of The Clementine Homilies, an apocryphal second-century work, claimed that God rules the world with both hands. With his “left hand,” the Devil, he causes suffering and affliction, and with his “right hand,” Jesus, he saves and blesses.
Others, unable to accept that God could permit suffering even if he does not cause it, have chosen to deny that suffering exists. “Evil is but an illusion, and it has no real basis,” wrote Mary Baker Eddy. “If sin, sickness, and death were understood as nothingness, they would disappear.”—Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures.
In the wake of the tragic events of history, especially from the first world war until our day, many have reached the conclusion that God is simply unable to prevent suffering. “The Holocaust has, I think, dismissed any easy use of omnipotence as an attribute appropriate to God,” wrote Jewish scholar David Wolf Silverman. “If God is to be intelligible in some manner,” he added, “then His goodness must be compatible with the existence of evil, and this is only if He is not all-powerful.”
However, claims that God is somehow an accomplice to suffering, that he is unable to prevent it, or that suffering is a mere figment of our imagination offer scant comfort to those who suffer. And more important, such beliefs are utterly at odds with the just, dynamic, and caring God who is revealed in the pages of the Bible. (Job 34:10, 12; Jeremiah 32:17; 1 John 4:8)
What, then, does the Bible say about the reason why suffering has been permitted?