There is a German superstition that a knife must not be left lying with the edge pointing upward because God and the angels might injure themselves with it. If the physical Universe had been created by God, it would follow that there was time when the quantity of matter was less than it is now, when it was in fact zero.  However, physics proves or presupposed that the quantity of matter has always been the same. Since most ordinary people include the creator of the material Universe in their concept of God, and since they mean by “creation” a temporal act of making something out of nothing, the appeal to the eternity of the matter is effective as a popular argument for atheism. Among the traditional atheistic arguments, some point to imperfection or defect in the Universe and argue that the defect is incompatible with the existence of God insofar as God is defined as a perfect being. Among the imperfections or alleged imperfections emphasis has frequently been placed on the enormous waste in nature, especially in matters of reproduction, and on the trial-and-error method of evolution.  

 Nothing could be more unworthy of a supreme intelligence than this inability to construct an organism at once, without making several tentative efforts, undoing today what was so carefully done yesterday, and repeating for centuries the same tentative and the same correction in the same succession. And in the end, if this entire process of repetition is man, it has been questioned whether it was worth all the pain and tribulations that precede it. If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in it, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final results of my efforts. It has also been suggested by several writers, and not all facetiously, that if there were a God, then surely he would have provided human beings with clearer evidence of his own existence. If an omniscient and omnipotent God did not take care that his intentions should be understood by his creatures, could he be a God of goodness? Would he not, rather, be a cruel god if, being himself in possession of the truth, he could calmly contemplate mankind, in a state of miserable torment, worrying its mind as to what was truth? 

 If God exists, then, he could have so convinced all men and women of the fact of his existence that doubt, disagreement, or disbelief would be impossible.  We are told that with God all things are possible. If so, it was possible for him to create a World in which the vast mass of suffering that is morally pointless—the pain and misery of animals, the cancer and blindness of little children, the humiliations of senility and insanity—were avoided. These are apparently inflictions of the Creator himself. If you admit that, you deny his goodness; if you say he could not have done otherwise, you deny that with him all things are possible. The Design Argument cannot succeed in establishing a maker of the Universe who is both omnipotent and perfectly good. It argues from the nature of the World to the nature of its cause, and since the World is a mixture of good and evil, it cannot be established in this way that its creator is perfectly good. If the theory that the Universe is the work if an all-powerful and all-good being were true, then the Universe would not exhibit certain features; experience shows that it does exhibit these features, and hence the theory is false.  

The argument from evil has no logical force against belief in a finite God. The evil in the World is perfectly compatible with the existence of a God who is lacking either omnipotence or perfect goodness, or both. In fact, there is no obvious incompatibility between the existence of the metaphysical God and evil in the World, since it is not claimed for the metaphysical God either that he is all-powerful or that he is perfectly hood in the ordinary senses of these words. In the light of the injustice and suffering we find in the World, the moral character of God cannot be represented after the model of the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving. God is good in the very same sense in which human beings are sometimes good. The ultimate reality is good and just in the sense or one of the senses in which we use these terms when we praise good and just human beings. It might be more reasonable to consider that evil is of a privative rather than a positive character. Because evil is real and positive, it is the consequence of man’s abuse of his gift of free will and that a Universe without evil and without free will would be one worse than with both.  

The existence of evil does not seem to be of considerable value in showing that this argument does not by itself justify rejection of belief in an infinite anthropomorphic God. It has been argued that although the existence of evil cannot be reconciled with the existence of an infinite anthropomorphic God, this is not too serious a problem in view of the powerful affirmative evidence for this position. We do not abandon a well-supported theory just because we meet with some counterevidence. The fact that divine science, like natural science, brings us face to face with apparently insoluble contradictions. The moral for our discussion is that an atheist cannot afford to neglect the arguments for the existence of God. Unless one can demolish them, the arguments from evil will not by itself establish the atheist’s case. If one has faith, proofs and reasoning are not needed; if one lacks faith, they are of no avail.  

A person who has faith is not shaken by absence of evidence or by counterevidence; a person who has no faith will never become a true believe even if one is intellectually convinced by the argument of rationalistic theology. We that fight the living World must have the Universal for succor of the truth in it. Cast forth the soul in prayer, you meet the effluence of the outer truth, you join with the creative elements giving breath to you. The idea of God transcends both mysticism and the person-to-person encounter. The nature of man and a World with dependable sequences (or causal laws), evil of certain kinds is unavoidable and, furthermore, that (though they do not, of course claim to be able to prove this) in the next life there will be appropriate reward and compensations. Some admit that their faith would be logically weakened, perhaps fatally so, if it could be shown that there is no afterlife or that in the afterlife injustice and misery, far from vanishing, will be even more oppressive than in the present life, or that the evils which, given the nature of man and a World of dependable consequences, they thought to be unavoidable, could in fact have been prevented by an omnipotent Creator.  

The Winchester Mystery House

  Haunted by a ghost warning her of deaths about to come, and ghost haunting her dreams night after night, Mrs. Winchester builds one of the most bizarre mansions in the World. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/