>Define Satan as "the scariest thing that can be conceived"
>Satan would be scarier if he was evil and liked to torture mortals for his pleasure
>Satan would be scarier if he did all this from the shadows and kept his existence ambiguous to us
>Satan would be scarier if he was all-powerful, because that means we will never be able to defeat him
>Satan would be scarier if he was omnipresent, because that way we would never be truly safe from him
>Satan would be scarier if he existed
>Satan must exist
Kek
>inb4 god is not evil and LUUUURVES you unconditionally!!
>just face the hardships he lays before you like a good goy because... because he loves you okay!?
Satan is not scary, but he wants the worst for humans. He is an enemy to humans because God loves humans.
Wrong nagger
"god loves humans" is not the same as "god wants the best for humans."
Wouldn't you want the best for someone you love?
I don't presume that god will follow my lead.
We all have an understanding of right and wrong, or good and evil. If God is the greatest being (in which case he must be the best in every aspect), it follows that he is also the most good.
But is the good of a god useful to mortals?
If God created everything, he must have the capacity for everything, at a minimum we know he's capable of both the greatest and most miniscule of tasks, the most good and the most evil. To be God means to be everything, or at least, to be capable of everything. It doesn't follow that God would necessarily be the most "good" in the moralistic sense, only that be be capable of it. He can, of course, also be capable of the most evil, afterall he created it no?
Augustine would argue that evil does not actually exist, but evil is simply the absence of good, just like shadow is the absence of light. A shadow is not a thing that actually exists on its own, but it is defined by the absence or lack of light.
Interesting idea, yet the shadow still "is". One might argue that the shadow doesn't really "exist" by itself, but that dark that we call the "shadow" does in fact appear in reality regardless of the mechanism. All things that appear within reality must, naturally, be made by God. Now, evil in the context of human action can be explained away by the concept of free will, but evil in the context of natural disaster, disease, hunger, entropy and so on and so forth can only possibly exist by design, much like how a game developer might code in a particular mechanic, or a director of a film coordinates a particular scene, God must have made these things Himself.
Now one could argue this is for some sort of reason, but nonetheless these things exist, and would typically be considered evil. One could then go ahead and say "Anything God does is good", but that's a cop-out, denying the essence of what the words "good" and "evil" really mean to most people in the first place. Thus, God must not only be capable of evil, but practices it intentionally.
I think you are right that God created the capacity for their to be evil. In the book of Job, whether you interpret it literally or metaphorically, Satan asks God for permission to afflict Job, and God gives the green light.
You bring up two kinds of evil, moral and natural. You are also correct that moral evil arises from free will. The disasters and such are known as natural evil, and philosophers have suggested various reasons throughout the years for their existence. One explanation is the butterfly affect. I won't get into it here but I think you would find it interesting to look up some explanations for why "natural evil" is permitted.
Abusive parents often times love their children, it doesn't mean they want the best for, or much less actually give, the best for their children.
>Define Glerpglorp, The Goblin Who Hates Ontological Arguments as "the being most effective at killing people who use ontological arguments"
>Glerpglorp would be more effective if he existed
>Glerpglorp must be sodomizing OP with a schoolbus right now
Good, now go one step further.
Satan would be scarier if he showed up at OP’s house and butt fucked him
>define op as a homosexual
>op would be a homosexual if he sucks cock
>op is a homosexual
this logic is not logic
not saying that he doesn't exist
satan was already defeated
Ok, but is scariness some a priori form that needs to be embodied?
all of this but
>inciting and praying to God ends the tribulation