On suffering

I kept following the discussion on the InterGalactic Summit (IGS). It has turned about the everlasting question of evil. Is God himself evil because there is so much suffering in the world? One can turn this around and equally ask: if God is truly evil and hateful, why is there so much good in the world? This is also part of a discussion I have with one of LUMEN's own. I record in these logs part of this discussion, perhaps for future use: 

"It is easy for people in the IGS to depict God as a clockmaker, bent over some intricate machine with cogwheels and springs. These people stand behind God and tell him, “I would put that piece here”. In such a narrow and mechanistic vision of the act creation, where moreover we think we know it all, it is natural to be angry if the universe does not live up to our vision of how it should be, if it does not deliver what we think we are entitled to. But creation and reality are not mechanistic, deterministic, following the laws of cause and effect. Heck, even at the deepest level of our understanding of physics, the world is not deterministic, and a cause can have many different effects. To me, creation can be corrupted by the acts of the creatures living in it – if it weren’t then the world would be a soulless, dead place. To prevent us, God would have to take away our soul – in stead He freely became vulnerable to allow us to exist."