Is God cruel and sadistic?

There's a lot of suffering in the world. People die in horrifying ways--geting burned alive, being tortured, etc. This has been going on for a long as there's been people. And that's not to mention animal suffering. If there's an all powerful God, and he lets this kind of thing happen, you'd think God must be cruel and sadistic to allow it. He's even worse if he causes it. So I want to answer that objection to God today.

Without God either telling us why he does stuff or us being able to read his mind, the best we can do is speculate, and to speculate, we have to consider all the possibilities.

One possibility is, as we said, that God is cruel and sadistic. Another possibility is that he has some hidden purpose in suffering that we don't know about. Another possibility is that he has certain goals that come with unwanted corollaries, and he does a cost/benefit analysis. If we thought about it long enough, we could probably come up with all kinds of possibilities.

But what this means is that we can't say for sure that God is cruel or sadistic. To say that, we would have to be able to rule out every other possibility, and we are just not in a position to do that. We lack the mental equipment to make those kinds of judgements about an all knowing God.

There are ways of arguing that God is good, though. One way is to recognize, first of all, that there's such a thing as good and bad, and they aren't merely a matter of personal preference. Some things really are tragedies, and some thing really are great.

But nothing matters unless it matters to somebody. So if it matters whether people suffer or not, then it must matter to somebody. It might matter to you but not to me, or vice versa, but obviously it wouldn't matter in any objective sense if it came down to you or me. So if it matters in an objective sense, then it must matter to a transcendent being, like God.

The God of classical theism is a sufficient ground for right, wrong, good, evil, virtue, vice, etc., because he is the ultimate ground of all being. Everything else exists because of him, and reality revolves around him.

So basically, if there is a real objective distinction between good and bad, then there must be something resembling the God of classic theism.

If the distinction between good and bad is grounded in God, then God would have to be perfectly good. The reason is because of the very nature of good and bad and what they mean. Good is what "ought to be" and bad is what "ought to be avoided." If this distinction is grounded in God, it would mean that God only prefers the good and never prefers the bad. That would make God perfect good by definition.

So we can form this argument:

1. If God is perfectly good, then whatever he does, he has a morally justifiable reason for doing it.
2. God created a world containing a lot of suffering.
3. Therefore, if God is perfect good, then God has a morally justifiable reason for creating a world containing a lot of suffering.
4. God is perfectly good.
5. Therefore, God has a morally justifiable reason for creating a world containing a lot of suffering.

We came to this conclusion through deductive reasoning, so if the premises are true, then the conclusion must also be true. That means we can deduce that God has a morally justifiable reason for creating a world containing a lot of suffering without even knowing what that reason is.

So, it's similar to how you might react if somebody you really trusted did something questionable that appeared, on its surface, to be a betrayal. Since it goes so much against their usual character, you would probably give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they had some good motive in doing it, or some hidden purpose in doing it, that you just didn't know about. You wouldn't jump to the conclusion that they were cruel and sadistic.

For more on this subject, see "Covid-19 and the problem of evil."