Or, 'if the world is bad, why is God real'? The answer to both is "I don't have an answer".

Which of these is most satisfactory?

God - present / world - bad
God - absent / world - bad
God - present / world -good
God - absent / world - good

Which one is likely to lead to the most satisfactory conclusion? What have you got to lose in choosing to think that the world is good? Isn't thinking that God is good and present preferable to thinking that god is either bad or absent?

You want evidence that god is present, good, bad, or absent? Ardent believers don't get that sort of proof -- why should you or I get it?

Go for the good.

If God is real, why is the world bad? — csalisbury

Because you are taking a human-centric view, and God is the God of all living things. If you get ill, you think it's "bad", but if you were the germ(s) thriving within your fevered body...? God cares for all things, not only you and your ape-brothers. :wink:

Because it's only in the darkest of times that the grandeur of the hobbit spirit is revealed.

If God is real, why is the world bad? — csalisbury

I love the world. I think it's beautiful and wonderful.

I hope you'll believe I'm completely sincere, because I am.

:up:

It's absurd to think that just because something is bad that therefore God doesn't exist. Not any different if a person slashed a painting with a box cutter that the painter doesn't exist. Or if a house burned down, then the architect doesn't exist.

A better question would be "Why does evil exist if a good God exists?" Then you must define what good is and what is good, and also what is evil.
Why does evil exist? One could say that it was because God is good, and that good consists of giving humanity a degree of free will.

Another question is if God doesn't exist, why does evil exist? Then there wouldn't be much to say what is right or wrong. One would need some sort of a god, even if it was an impersonal force. It would be impossible to say that mass murder is wrong because all we would have is our own selves. If one declared it was wrong, then he or she would have just declared him or herself to be superior to other humans, which again would be a type of a god. Thus, evil cannot exist unless a god exists.

If God is real, why is the world bad? — csalisbury

It isn't 'bad'. There are bad things in it, and good things. Lots of both. Infact the world looks rather like the bizarre and chaotic mixture of good and bad which you might expect if God didn't exist..

Well, the whole Job story was trying to address that question.
I won't shake pom poms for the claim of victory that is made there.
But it is hard to surpass the rejections of the not helpful responses to the problem.

The world, in all the multiplicity of its parts and forms, is the manifestation, the objectivity, of the one will to live. Existence itself, and the kind of existence, both as a collective whole and in every part, proceeds from the will alone. The will is free, the will is almighty. The will appears in everything, just as it determines itself in itself and outside time. The world is only the mirror of this willing; and all finitude, all suffering, all miseries, which it contains, belong to the expression of that which the will wills, are as they are because the will so wills. Accordingly with perfect right every being supports existence in general, and also the existence of its species and its peculiar individuality, entirely as it is and in circumstances as they are, in a world such as it is, swayed by chance and error, transient, ephemeral, and constantly suffering; and in all that it experiences, or indeed can experience, it always gets its due. For the will belongs to it; and as the will is, so is the world. Only this world itself can bear the responsibility of its own existence and nature—no other; for by what means could another have assumed it? Do we desire to know what men, morally considered, are worth as a whole and in general, we have only to consider their fate as a whole and in general. This is want, wretchedness, affliction, misery, and death. Eternal justice reigns; if they were not, as a whole, worthless, their fate, as a whole, would not be so sad. In this sense we may say, the world itself is the judgment of the world. If we could lay all the misery of the world in one scale of the balance, and all the guilt of the world in the other, the needle would certainly point to the centre.

It's kind of funny if you take out the definite article, so he's just talking resentfully about a guy named Will, who is Hegel.