Why does God allow evil?
Bertrand Russell comments below.
"The world, we are told, was created by a God who is both omnibenevolent (all-loving) and omnipotent (all-powerful). Before He created the world He foresaw all the pain and misery that it would contain; He is therefore responsible for all of it. It is useless to argue that the pain in the world is due to sin. In the first place, this is not true; it is not sin that causes rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt. But even if it were true, it would make no difference.
If I were going to beget a child knowing that the child was going to be a homicidal maniac, I should be responsible for his crimes. If God knew in advance the sins of which man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for all the consequences of those sins when He decided to create man. The usual Christian argument is that the suffering in the world is a purification for sin and is therefore a good thing.
This argument is, of course, only a rationalization of sadism; but in any case it is a very poor argument.
Bertrand Russell, Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization? (1930)
Russell worked with his mentor, another famous mathematician and philosopher AN Whitehead, on a well-known work in mathematics as part of his fame. In this argument, Russell shows that he is clearly no biologist, evolutionary or otherwise. Is "pain" from "sin" due mostly to rivers?
Do children randomly develop into homicidal maniacs? Should parents automatically "responsible for a child who grows into an adult homicidal maniac"? Serial killers like the German Jurgen Bartsch, and the infamous Adolf Hitler, suffered abuse. In some tyrannical contexts, cross culturally that I´m thinking of, leaders executed the unfaithful and their whole families. One was an orphan raised in chaotic times. Yet, we have psychological and legal contexts to address specific issues of legal culpability for specific crimes and who committed them. 
Faulty premises, faulty conclusions. Russell, however, was on a roll. Russell then presents the "Christian" argument about the suffering in the world as purification for sin, and therefore good. That isn´t the Christian position that motivated George Fox and the Quaker Friends to stop bowing to aristocrats in the 1600s, treat women as worthwhile human beings, protest unjust criminal sentences, and in a hundred years, agitate for the end of slavery.
What do you think?
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