If God created us so that by virtue of how we are made, we never cause suffering then we are determined by external prior causes and not undetermined in the libertarian sense, therefore we would not have free-will in the libertarian sense in such a world. We would be prevented from doing evil by external prior causes, even though we ourselves wanted to do it. Imagine a world wherein any of the sins mentioned in the bible is impossible for men to commit because right before they are about to, a mechanism God built into them prevents them from doing so. Imagine men going to a bar with the intent of getting totally wasted and talking to any and every woman they come across with the intent of having sex with them in a hotel and right before they turn the first beer up, their arm locks and they are unable to raise the beer to their mouth. Imagine a world wherein the man wants to lay with another man and before they do, they freeze like statues.
This is essentially what you are suggesting God should have done. That He should have created us so that we never really are actually able to do what we want to do.
You don't seem to understanding. I'm not talking about a god stopping people from doing something. It's not determinism. I'm talking about people having the ability to choose something without the inclination to choose something. It's actually similar to how we live our lives
now, with the exception that those people who
would choose an option that causes suffering would instead act like those who would
not choose that option. So unless you're suggesting that people who, for example, would never choose to molest a child even given the opportunity
don't have free will, then it's demonstrably true that an omnipotent god could have created all of us, rather than most of us, without the desire to molest a child and still maintain free will.
I agree. It is logically possible for God to create free moral agents with libertarian free will who never choose to do evil and always choose the good. This is logically possible, but not necessarily feasible or metaphysically possible.
The fact that we already have people who would never, under any circumstances, molest a child means that if a god had only created a population of clones of this
existent person, that specific suffering would be eliminated. This demonstrates that it's metaphysically possible to, at the very least, eliminate this particular suffering. Which would be enough in itself to eliminate the term "omnibenevolent" from the description of any god.
Not if God possesses middle knowledge, which I happen to find arguably the case. Nevertheless, such a matter is moot to the point I was making. When I used the word "saw", I used it to convey that God being omniscient can survey all possible worlds including those that are both logically possible and metaphysically possible to actualize.
If it's logically possible for a god to create a person who
never causes suffering, it's logically not necessary to look into the future to see if that person (who
never causes suffering)
has caused suffering. Now, if you're suggesting that this god can't know for sure if the person it has created has the properties it thinks it has without looking into the future, then that god isn't omnipotent. An omnipotent god could create things with set properties.
If human beings have libertarian free will, then while P1 is logically possible in that the concept of such a world entails affirming no logical contradiction, such a world may not be metaphysically possible to actualize because whether or not it is actualizable is dependent upon what free moral agents would do in the absence of any external prior causes affecting their choices.
I've already shown how it's
actually feasible to create a population where one source of suffering is eliminated. And once again, that is enough
in and of itself to eliminate the idea that any god could be called omnibenevolent, unless you think that allowing child molestation is something a good and loving god would do.
The bolded portion is your argument for the implicit assumption that God's omnibenevolence necessitates He would do what you have claimed He would do. In order to show that it is not logically possible for God to have morally sufficient reasons for creating the world the way it is, you have to do more than just say, "this is true by definition".
I obviously
do not have to do more than that. Like I've said over and over, arguments are constructed using terms that have definitions. You can disagree with the definition of the terms if you'd like, but at some point you start to sound like the person who says they love their wife while physically abusing them. Yes, "love" doesn't have any sort of
objective definition, but by stretching the definition past the point at which the majority would agree with you, you show the weakness in your position.
All you have done is take me on a walk around the block. You have taken me right back to where you started. You are arguing in a circle. While that may be enough for you and for one who shares your view, you have not demonstrated that it is logically impossible that God has a morally sufficient reason for creating the world the way He did.
You've shown that you still don't understand the argument, and are just relying on referencing outside sources in the hopes that what you're writing applies to the argument.
If God's sole aim in creating was to create a comfortable home for His human "pets" that never had to endure, persevere, overcome, exercise compassion and cultivate virtues such as patience, kindness, trustworthiness, steadfastness, and others, then He could have done that, but one can reasonably argue that such a world has significantly overriding deficiencies than this one.
This "best of all possible worlds" slant has also seemed ridiculous to me. There's nothing about suffering that is attractive given the alternative. We use the rhetoric you're using right now to try and make ourselves feel better about living in this universe. Try and tell a child that's been molested that the experience was part of a plan to make them stronger by their "enduring" the suffering they felt.
I'll tell them that a good and loving god wouldn't have let that happen in the first place.