One possible problem with this is number (2):
Would the
Christian God avoid evil if He could? There's not a lot of evidence for that in the
Bible.
JHVH is a wrathful and petulant SOB most of the time in the
Old Testament, and then he went and got his kid nailed to a tree just to prove a point.
I'm not sure that (6) proves much; the standard response is that
God's benevolence is inscrutable, because He's
God for God's sake. "
Don't pay it no mind, that's just his way", so to speak. The question you have to ask is, "
is evil bad?" I mean, absolutely and fundamentally bad, bad that it exists at all, not just that it's bad for you or me to do it. "
God's Plan" and all that. I don't think we've established that the existence of evil
is inconsistent with divine benevolence. Is it anti-benevolent to swat one's kids when it's appropriate? For all we know (or
can know), God's concept of
tough love may well include atrocities like
the Holocaust,
the Tutsi genocide, and
Hootie and the Blowfish. He's in a position to take a very long view of things; according to
Christian theology, the soul will exist for a long, long time after the body dies.
Life is a blip.
Ultimately, we're discussing the properties of an entity when those properties cannot be fully known. What use then is
logic? I think it would be fairer to condense those seven steps into one: "It's a crock".
The whole thing just slithers loose whenever you try to grab it. That which is by definition insusceptible to logic may as well be viewed with a jaundiced eye, if only for lack of anything better to view it with. Either that, or get down with
Kierkegaard and start leapin'.
I was gonna reply to this with
some dumbass crack about
the problem with evil being that
the hours are irregular, but dammit it turned out to be something interesting.
You can't win 'em all.