Ope, it's a PoE-related discussion, I had to stop by at least for a little bit.
I have several questions:
1. Should God have created a world without suffering? If so, why? If not, why not?
2. How could God have created humans with physical bodies without engendering suffering?
3. How could God have created a material world without engendering suffering?
4. If God prevented suffering should God prevent all suffering or just some suffering?
5. If God prevented some suffering should God allow some people to suffer more than other people?
Thanks, Trailblazer.
1) If God is omnipotent and omniscient, then God
could create a world without physical suffering. Whether or not God
should do that depends on the values of the person doing the assessment. If a person values preventing and alleviating suffering, if they value human dignity and life, then yes; they would find that God
should have done so. Likewise, this applies to God itself: if God values preventing and alleviating suffering, dignity and life, and so on; then God themself would believe they
should have prevented physical suffering.
2) As the creator of how physics work, God could have created a universe in which physics always prevents instances of physical suffering. There are many ways to do this, but an easily cognizable version is a universe with
conditional physics; like lines of code.
That code would effectively read something like this: "If knife is cutting potato, allow. If knife is cutting living skin, disallow (set inertia to 0)." This concept can be extrapolated to prevent literally any kind of physical suffering such that physical suffering is simply not possible to occur; and that is within an omnipotent/omniscient being's power to do.
3) The answer is the same as the answer for (2). God could create physics itself in such a way that doesn't allow physical suffering to occur. God would not even have to personally intervene at all once setting this up.
4) This depends on whether God values beings with free will. If so, there are some forms of suffering God could not prevent, such as unrequited love, broken friendships, that sort of thing. God could not prevent a person from lying to their friend, and their friend being angry about that once they discover it. But God could prevent anybody from developing cancer, or being struck by lightning, or being shot or stabbed.
Physical suffering is entirely preventable without removing free will.
5) This is a question about justice, I think. I do not subscribe to retributive theory of justice (that people should be made to feel pain of some kind just because they inflicted it on others).
However some valid forms of justice (by this I mean ones I agree with) are rehabilitative justice for instance, or justice that prevents more harm from being done to society. So for instance if someone is put into a prison cell to keep them from hurting other people, this isn't strictly retributive: the purpose is to protect other people and to (hopefully, if possible) rehabilitate the person; not to cause them harm for its own sake as retribution.
So that being said, it is possible that some rehabilitation might be less comfortable than others in proportion to how serious the crime or offense was. The point isn't to
hurt the person justice is being done upon, but for instance it probably takes a lot more to rehabilitate a perpetual lifetime liar than it would someone that told a little white lie that one time.