Omni-awkward: The Trouble with Perfection

In this episode, we're hanging out with our old pal Epicurus. He's the guy who realized a few thousand years ago that you can't really have an all-powerful, all-loving god AND a world where mosquitos  can kill you, and pediatric cancer exists. It's the Epicurean Paradox, and it's the ultimate glitch in the matrix for traditional faith.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Thank you. I'm pretty excited. Today we're going to be discussing one of the cornerstones of deconstruction. I think it's arguably the most logical question anybody can ask about God, about what makes up God, about who God is. However, it opens up so many cans that alone this is enough logical doubt for some folks to just walk away. And it's called the Epicurean paradox. And that sounds fancy and boring. I promise it's not. It's much more often referred to as the problem of evil, but I like the Epicurean paradox because it makes us sound intelligent. I think when trying to understand an organization, say you're looking to find a local nonprofit that you would like to support. You're going to research that nonprofit, you're going to get a better understanding of them, and you're likely going to start with their mission statement. Most businesses have them. I would imagine almost everyone does. But that got me thinking, let's look up the mission statement of the church. Now, obviously, I've mentioned in the past that the religion I was raised with was Catholicism. And Catholicism kind of makes this one a little tricky, the mission statement. However, just to stay in line with Catholicism, that's what I'm going to stick with. But I have noticed that many denominations have mission statements, like official mission statements. The Catholic Church doesn't, again, have an official mission statement. What they'll do is they'll refer you, if you ask, they'll refer you to either the Apostles or the Nicene Creed, both of which are pretty lengthy prayers in the Catholic Church. And it is just a I believe this, I believe this, I believe this, start to finish. And I'm not going to read them. Frankly, I don't necessarily think that a four-minute prayer is in line with where we're aimed as a podcast anyway. But feel free to look that one up. Either the Apostles or the Nicene Creed. I did find that many local parishes have mission statements on their website. However, they are extremely generic. However, they are extremely generic. Much like as I've found most of the customer-facing, we'll call it, aspects of the church, they they tend to be. The point in this is to bring to the surface that perhaps religion has come so far that it's lost sight of what it originally was. Now think about it, there seemed to be such a rush to get this religion plan rolled up to the masses that it seems like maybe the creators of it moved on to some of these small details before they really solidified the big one. The big one, of course, being God. That's what we're supposed to model ourselves after. And if we're called to do that, then shouldn't we know a little more about what we are modeling our lives after? So I'm taking some time today to cover the problem of evil. So I think one of the first steps in determining if a leader is going to be in line with what you believe, then you need to understand that leader. And today we're going to do it, we're going to attempt to do it using only the information that they provide. And by they I mean the church or the Bible or so I think that this is going to show that there are more than a few cracks. I know for myself it certainly did when I when I initially started asking and and really fueling this question. It it showed me an awful lot of cracks. But we'll see how it goes for you guys. So Pew Research Center is a very popular research center. They are a private company that is basically paid to take surveys, uh, collect data. So Pew Research Center found that 75% of all Christian denominations believe in what I'm going to refer to today as an all three God. Uh Omni-triad, multiple ways to refer to it. I'll call it the all three. Okay. So we've got all knowing, all good, and all powerful. So that's what we're going to talk through. And I don't know if I set the table properly or not. Um again, again, I'm nerding out. I really am excited about this. We've we've taken our time slowly walking through a lot of those whys and the what nows surrounding deconstruction or deconversion. Now that we've kind of laid some of those out, and of course we'll pop back and forth in and out of those as podcasts continue. Uh, but by and large, the the framework is there. So now that those have been addressed, we get to look at the the meat and potatoes of it. We have the best understanding I think we can about why we're experiencing and feeling what we are. But now we get to go into the the facts side of it. Uh and and that's why it's so exciting to me. So to speak to the all three, the three identities of God, the three things that God is, and these are absolutes, these are capital A absolutes. One, God is all knowing. So this is God having total and perfect knowledge of everything, and it implies that God knows the past and the present, so every event that has ever happened, as well as every event that is currently happening. And I mean every event. So think about that. That is you listening to me right now. That is me taking the time to ramble in a microphone. Everything simultaneously, God is aware of. So that is past and present. And we don't stop there, of course, future. God is aware of all things that will occur. When and how they will occur. My favorite one, and I feel like this is just doubling down so much that it's kind of sus, the counterfactual aspect of being all knowing. So God knows what would have happened under different circumstances. This is sometimes referred to as middle knowledge. Um so yeah, past and present, every single detail. The future, every single detail, and to double down the counterfactual, not only what will happen, but what would have if you chose something he didn't know you would choose, even though he knows you know what? It's it's fine. I should just be reading right now. We're gonna circle back around. I'm I'm gonna try to hold the sarcasm at bay here for a little bit. So that is all knowing. The counterfactual, what would have happened under different circumstances, and the internal. God also knows every thought, intention, and secret of your heart. Um that sounded so fucking creepy, and I did not mean it to sound my goodness. Uh let's let's do it again and try to minimize the the creepiness. And finally, the internal. God knows every thought, intention, and secret of your heart. Just as creepy, but I think we're just gonna have to accept that that one's creepy, and we'll move on. Uh the second of the big three, all powerful. So this refers, as it sounds, to having unlimited power. In theological realms, this is usually defined as the ability to do anything that is logically possible, and and again, we could I mean we could spend all day just attacking each word logically possible, logic uh relatively anecdotal word, right? What's logical for some is not logical for others, and vice versa. Um the church openly accepts the fact that God has given us countless miracles, and one of the things that makes something miraculous is if it is logically impossible. That's one of the things that makes it miraculous. However, they're stopping short of that and saying that being all powerful really only gives God the ability to do things that are logically possible. It doesn't make sense to me. It does not mean, however, that God can do things that are self-contradictory. To me, this almost sounds like a limits. God, of course, is limitless. Um God can't create a square circle. This also implies that no external force can frustrate God's ultimate will or purpose. So the obvious and all-powerful would of course be that God would have the ability to prevent any and all evil from happening. And since you know that evil exists, there's the problem with evil. And we're only on number two. And had we gone down that same vein with them, we would have landed on it then too. So number three, all good. This means that God is perfectly good, possessing a will that is always aligned with moral perfection and love. Moral perfection and love, not decimating entire populations with floods, not sacrificing firstborns, not any of that, because that's not morally perfect, nor is it a sign of love. But this means that God is perfectly good. In this context, God is seen as the very standard of goodness. So the attribute is often the centerpiece of the problem of evil. So I'm going to read you the definition that I found of the problem of evil. So this is the philosophical question of how a God who is all-knowing knows about suffering, all powerful could stop it, and all good would want to stop it, yet still allows evil to exist. So that is the Epicurean paradox. That is the problem of evil. Now, if we've given ourselves permission to ask that question, right, how can, if all these three things are true, then how can these things also be true? That's a very fair question. It's an extremely logical question, and it's a question that takes some brass balls to ask outside of your own head. I've asked it multiple times in my upbringing. It never went well once I was basically just told that we don't ask that question, and if we have that question, it's because our faith is not strong enough. That was the mild of the two reactions to me asking that. The second time I asked it was in an apologetics class, my senior year high school, and I was asked to stay after class to speak with the to speak with the teacher, and I was told that certain things on the heart should be sat with longer before being vocalized. And that now that I hear that out loud, that almost sounds like a quote from a politician, right? You threw words out there, and that's about what you accomplished. So, like I said, it takes brass balls to ask this question outside of your own head. We look at our support network, we look at our circle before deconstruction, and it's not a coincidence that a very common thread, of course, is religion. And these tend to be our closest friends, oftentimes family, um, and even almost more importantly, are the friends. Families don't necessarily get to elect us and their involvement in us, but our friends do. Um, just like we get to we get to pick who who we befriend. Sometimes it's even scarier to ask the friend. If your friend has similar opinions, then you risk alienating yourself from a friend just by asking that question we're not supposed to ask. So I'll ask it for you to start with. How can this be possible? And then we get to kind of chew on it and think about it. However, because we are questioning this, it is only fair that a rebuttal be allowed. And and this is where it gets kind of fun. The Catholic Church took a swing at these questions. Obviously, this isn't something that they could have just ignored. So asking those three questions requires no faith. There are plenty of people who have never believed in the God that would hear these three things and would have questions, logical questions. So asking those three questions requires no faith. Even though we're pretending, or maybe some of us aren't, that God is real, these questions may still feel wrong to ask. Case in point, there's still an old voice in me that's telling me it's wrong to ask these questions. And those are those are old echoes, but they're still there. But this is called the logical structure, and this is how we approach these three questions logically, and to me it tracks that as a believer in God, the questions that feel so wrong to ask are the logical ones. And here are your logical structure questions. One, is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he's not all powerful. Is he able to prevent all evil but not willing? Then he is malevolent, or at least not all good. Is he both able to prevent evil and willing to prevent evil? Well, if yes, then why does evil exist? So here are a few examples that challenge the the all three, the omni god. Countless out there. I like to keep the examples pretty simple. If this isn't necessarily a a step that you've taken, um then let's keep these as as simple as possible because there's so much more information pinging around in your heads. Innocent suffering. There are a lot of quotes out there about this. Um childhood cancer is always one of the more popular ones that comes up. This challenges God as all good. So I've pulled some numbers, done research. Seven children will die today in the United States from cancer. That's the United States. That's just the United States. The Bible explains that all human suffering is due to original sin. But what being, if we're still screening this God, if this is the person we want to align with, what being would support the suffering of innocent children? Now a common rebuttal to that is that at no point would anybody suggest that God is supporting the suffering of innocent children. So let's eliminate the word supporting and let's substitute it with allowing. Doesn't change the question much. What being would allow the suffering of innocent children? And the second part of that is if they could prevent it, and that brings us full circle back into this logical structure that just keeps spinning. So these are young people who have done nothing that would support a consequential, I'm putting that in parentheses. They have done nothing that would support a consequential form of cancer. Certain things, a higher risk, smoking, alcohol abuse. We know that there's an increased risk of cancer due to this behavior, so that is what I would mean by consequential. But they did none of those things. Their crime was being born. We've addressed original sin in a previous episode. I had thought about holding off on original sin until this episode. I just felt that it was more appropriate to discuss it earlier. Um and we can certainly swing back through because it's definitely going to come up today. But being born was their crime. Seven children today will die in the US from cancer. That's challenging the all good. Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he's not all powerful. Next on the list Natural disasters. Earthquakes. I live in a part of the country where our natural disaster to fear are tornadoes. Uh different coasts, obviously earthquakes, you've got wildfires. Don't need to walk you all through this. We all know what natural disasters are. So challenging the all good. So natural disasters like tsunamis, earthquakes, wildfires, they do not judge, they destroy indiscriminately, often, if not always, affecting people who have done nothing to deserve this. So this event would suggest a lack of intervention to prevent immense suffering, which any good God absolutely would if they were able to. While taking a science-based approach to this, I will tell you that for myself, I never believed that natural disasters were caused by God, or that they were punishment for our behavior. That was never something that I that I bought into. Or even that they were an allowed evil. I even as a as a little guess there was something in me that that just kinda knew that boy some of these never-ending convenient answers for every question asked about faith, this seems a little seems a little odd. Something just didn't quite sit right. We know that the planet purges itself. We know that the planet reacts to human intervention, and that the planet reacts to time. However, if there's say an isolated society on an island, we love this example, it's kind of the ageless one. So we've got this isolated society on an island that is killed by volcanic eruption. You might not argue that this is in the same category as childhood cancer, because in a lot of aspects it isn't, but you may see this as an example of how an all-loving God could have intervened. So again, an all-loving, good God could have intervened, we would all argue that they should have. And frankly, they they would have. Or perhaps God didn't know the volcano was gonna erupt. And if that's the case, then it can't be all knowing. The next one is gonna be difficult for me to stay this episode's course because it can go down a very long rabbit hole. I'm not going to let it though. Human inflicted atrocities. By this we're typically talking murder and rape. So the ability that humans possess to inflict extreme suffering on others, such as murder, genocide, sexual violence, it kind of begs the question why an all good God allows such evil to occur. So this example is really one that highlights how none of these three attributes to God could possibly be true if murder or rape happened. We'll be back to this one in just a few minutes when we get to some of the common defenses. Uh the rebuttal provided by the church is certainly going to circles back around to this. I do apologize. I lost track of the time, and it is school drop-off time, so I apologize if you're hearing the bus in the background. Again, it is a pretty rural town, so there's a very fair chance that it's a high school kid in a lifted pickup with the exhaust. And uh, so anyway, like I was saying, we'll be back to this one once we get to the common defenses. And another one that really challenges, and it's the last example that I'm going to use, um, are diseases. So malaria. The it malaria's a really big one globally. So I think it's uh it's a really kind of easy one to do here. So in 2024, malaria killed 610,000 people globally. 75% of those people were under the age of five. Malaria is only spread a handful of ways almost exclusively by mosquito bites, though it can also be transferred through blood transfusion, organ transplant, needle sharing, and it can also be passed from a pregnant mother to the fetus. But 75% of them being under the age of five and the vast majority from mosquitoes. And this would challenge an all-loving God for allowing this to happen to something that he created out of love. And of course the all-powerful God, as he could stop it, like right now. That mosquito could just go away. Frankly, it's not the mosquito's fault. The delivery method is the saliva from the mosquito, this all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, and all-good God could just prohibit that mosquito from ever making the saliva again. What I'm saying is a, remember, I'm not a scientist because those ideas were kind of dumb, but there are countless ways, countless examples that we could think of that anybody could think of, somebody religious or somebody secular could think of that would result in malaria not killing six hundred and ten thousand people globally, seventy-five percent of them being under the age of five. We could tear apart the math. I did give you the seven deaths from childhood cancer number. We could break that down to daily numbers. But I'm but I'm not going to. The numbers are high enough that I think everybody can appreciate that. So these are just a few examples of human suffering that any, all three, your omni god, could prevent or at least stop, or at very least intervene. Again, these are these are the people created in his image out of love to praise and honor him, and they're dying in ways that they don't need to, and he's not doing anything. So now we get to bring in the common counterarguments. Again, and that's and that's only fair. So there are three commonly used counterarguments for these examples, or examples similar to the ones that I've given. Theologians have developed vindications of God to answer this paradox. Ultimately, I guess what that would mean is that the powers that be saw these very logical questions starting to come from their followers. They had to come up with something. They wanted to get out ahead of it. So here's what we came up with The Vindications of God as an answer to the paradox. I did a lot of looking into these, trying to find something more robust than what I found. Um frankly, it's this is this really isn't much, if you ask me, but it's actually about all they have. So the one that we've all heard before, the free will defense. And now this argues that for humans to truly have free will, the possibility of choosing evil must exist. A world with free will and some suffering is viewed as better than a world of programmed but good robots. So this obviously begs the question that I asked in episode one, a question that I personally asked, and a question that I still personally ask in looking back over events that have happened to me, and I feel what about my free will? What about the free will of the victim? If the person abusing the child has a choice to do it or not do it, that is that person exercising their free will, regardless of what they choose. Free will, they're exercising and they have the right to pick either. The victim no free will, doesn't get to pick one or the other, doesn't get to pick anything. So there's no free will to the victim if the aggressor is only doing what we would perceive as evil because they have free will. And it's better to have that collateral damage than to have a planet full of robots. However, when I look back to how I was taught what heaven is, heaven is just scores of souls that get to get to spend eternity praising God. To me, I'm kinda getting good roboty vibes from that. With this victim's free will question. So I j I just shared that really common question that I have. What what about my free will? You know what when when I go back to that, but what about my free will? I j I just feel so alienated. Looking back on it, I remember just feeling on this island completely unsupported. That's very common for sexual abuse victims, that's very common for for victims of of of anything, frankly. But when I look back on my case, the only people that I had my arsenal, right, my circle, like I've previously mentioned as friends, were Catholic practicing, and of the mindset, now this is where it gets really kind of crazy, they were of the mindset, as I was at one point as well, that their very salvation is on the line when a friend comes to them with something like this. So if my friend believes me, then they're not entirely trusting in God's plan or at least entertaining the idea that a priest could have done this. Did they just believe that God could not possibly be responsible for this or have played any role in it and that Nick is lying or the victim is lying? So some suffering is viewed as better than good robots. If there was one sexual abuse victim in the year 2027 globally, and that one person is what the church would say that's some suffering, but that's all of the suffering, and now we can all be good. That one person going through that and not feeling supported and feeling like they're the problem, feeling like they're at fault, to me that's too much suffering. If that suffering is being used to justify the existence of something that is illogical, then I don't accept that collateral damage. It doesn't need to happen. I remember that I actually had someone in my really close circle when I brought up the sexual abuse, they referred me he referred me to his spiritual advisor, who of course was a priest. To anybody who's not familiar with what a spiritual advisor is, think of your financial advisor. Think of a dietitian. That's basically what this is, a personal banker. This is a person who, of course, is an expert on all things God and devotion and eternity. So you need to saddle up with the spiritual advisor, Nick. So he suggested that maybe the reason a spiritual advisor would help would be for the same reason it helped him. I just needed guidance from someone that could help me kind of balance some of these feelings, the feelings of victimhood, the feelings of confusion, the feelings of abandonment and pain. This was one of my best friends, and his suggestion to that was to go meet with a priest and ask if they'd be my spiritual advisor, so that I would no longer be having these doubts, because that was the problem that I was having these doubts. Another common counter argument is soulmaking. This one is outrageous. This suggests that evil and suffering are necessary for human growth. They are necessary for human growth and the development of virtues like courage and empathy and patience. So one thing that the Catholics believe in is purgatory. So for anybody who's not familiar, we've got heaven and hell. Uh heaven good, hell bad, right? Purgatory. Purgatory's neither, I guess the way it was the way it was taught to me was that the people who die, who are not going to hell, can't enter heaven until they're pure, because only purity is allowed in heaven. So even the most amazing human is going to die, and they're going to go to purgatory. And here's where it gets great, because of course we've talked about fear being such a motivator. I was taught in high school that purgatory from a pain and suffering standpoint is no different than hell. But what purgatory has that hell doesn't is hope. The hope that it will be over and that you'll get to join God in paradise after your suffering, which is equal to hell, once that's over, and that needs to happen so that you can be purified to get into heaven. The word purification is commonly used. You could also substitute words like punished. You lived a life in God's eyes virtuous enough to get to heaven, to join him for eternity praising him, but we're not done with the suffering yet. You're gonna have to spend some time cooking here before you move on. I was often told when I was dealing with something negative, be it of the physical ailment or just something inconvenient. I remember being told that just jokingly, huh? Chin up, because this is probably just time off of purgatory, like we've got some old school, like 2,000-year-old ticket or coupon system where somebody is keeping track of Nick pain to purification ratio. Um, it seems like a really difficult metric to track, and if that metric can be tracked on every human, that truly does show a lot of power from God. And so why stop there and why not just kill the mosquito or prevent cancer? I don't know. Again, we're we're bringing logic into something that really is science fiction. The soul making defense, again, visuals. I'm I'm really big on visuals. So to me, the the first visual that popped to mind was Sid from Toy Story. I don't know if anybody remembers that. I've been on this kick lately where I'm watching like all of the old Disney and Pixar movies. Ironically enough, I've not gotten to Toy Story yet, but anyway, Sid popped into mind. So if you don't know who Sid is, let's just picture that kid, the one with a magnifying glass on the sidewalk in the summer with a sun and ants. And to me, if you make something out of love in your image, which by the way, we've been over this, is perfect. Remember, God is perfect, created out of love in his image, and then watch it suffer? Like seriously, what the fuck is that? So you're gonna make something. Think any fucking think think of a cake. Let's honestly, as just dumb as we possibly can. You make a cake, and it's not perfect, because it's a fucking cake, and you're not perfect, and you can't make things that are perfect, just like I can't. But we can pour our love into it. You know, there's always that joke, you know, the the the secret ingredient is love, right? That's what grandma put in it, and turns out more often than not it was brandy. But anyway, you can make a cake with love. And then when you're done with that cake, what are you gonna do? Just gonna throw it in the trash. Cake isn't a person, so a cake can't suffer, but ultimately what you're doing is you're creating something because you love, whether you love it or you love the person you're creating it for. A little side tangent there. If that was the reason God created humanity, then that's even more narcissistic than than I could have ever imagined. But you make something because you love it, and then you watch it suffer. When in theory, remember, you could stop that suffering, but you don't. So remember, I'm kind of framing this like a like a screening process. You're looking for that nonprofit organization. So we're still filtering all of our God questions and understanding through these questions as well as using our own God given logic. See what I did there? So if God made us out of love in his perfect image and then just sits back and watches us suffer, we don't even need to ask the why. Let's just ask the simplest question. If this is true, do you want to be devoted to somebody like that? I mean, honestly, we could we could sit here and talk about how God is real or God isn't real. My personal belief, of course, as an atheist is that this is this is all bogus. But say I was a theist. I didn't necessarily support the Christian God or believe in the Christian God, but I still believed that there was a God. And if these are some of the answers coming up when I was questioning that, even as somebody who didn't believe in them, I I I can't imagine wanting to to be like that. I can't imagine wanting to even play by those rules or or even being interested in where membership to this club ends. And the final counterargument is limited perspective. So this suggests that humans, being finite, cannot understand the big picture because God is so far superior to us that we can't possibly understand. Even if the answer was there, which it is, by the way. It's just never being given to us because we couldn't understand it anyway. So somebody, I don't know, somebody's got some some locked safe somewhere that has some stuff written down on it, I guess. The limited perspective argument also suggests that we cannot understand the big picture as it relates to the ultimate good that comes from suffering. When posed with the question why does your God allow suffering? They proceeded to say we'd explain it, but you couldn't get it anyway. And good is coming from it, but you couldn't understand that anyway either. We just believe it. It's a matter of faith. This ran me right back into my childhood's religious formation classes, and it was the when what I at the time interpreted as bad questions, I now look back and say, well, holy shit, these were really logical. And looking back at the age that I was when I was asking some of these, to me that only bolsters my thought that it is not natural to believe this. So I would ask these questions and I would be told, like, you can't possibly understand. And it didn't even have to go further from there. The implication to me was that Nick, you can't possibly understand because you're dumb. You're not good enough, you're not smart enough, or you're not worth enough to know the answer to any of this. Just trust God, and you'll be fine as long as you follow all the rules. Again, and this is just glossing over the second part of that. Is this even a God you want to follow? So a thought that I really like to discuss is a counter to the argument that all suffering is because of human nature. So remember, that was one of the side effects of eating the forbidden fruit in the garden. With that came original sin. And another one of the ramifications of eating the forbidden fruit was that there was gonna be suffering because of it. So the implication then is that before the apple, there was no suffering, no greed, envy, lust, dishonesty. This is perfect for all who exist. But suffering came about because they ate the fruit, and that is a side effect of original sin. However, not all of his creation. Let's talk about our animals. This is kind of where we're gonna split away from the believing mind, because to even really discuss this, we just we have to lean on logic and not faith. So we know that the creation story has a ton of timeline holes in it, if not holes, at least reasons, legitimate reasons for people to say, well, wait, wait, what? But we do through science have proof that the earth is much older than the timeline of the Bible. This does kind of start flirting with the creationist Christians, and and that's that's not where we're going. But that one aspect of creationism was very present in my childhood. And I'm not talking Capital C church, I'm talking the brand of Catholicism that I was raised in. The earth was as old as the Bible, and this was fact, this was Gregorian calendar, fact. Again, liking to throw little searches in here and there, being curious, asking questions. So the the oldest human fossil was found in Morocco, and it is 300,000 years old, allegedly, because that doesn't line up with with our story. That's why I said we kind of have to split away and and lean on logic here. Human remains, 300,000 years old. Now the oldest animal fossil, and that and I mean mammal, I'm not talking single-celled organism, I'm not talking plant life, I am talking animal. It's basically what we would call a field mouse or a shrew. It's got a much longer name. But basically that's it, just a little field mouse or a shrew. They found its fossil, and it was 225 million years old. So using that science, animals clearly suffered for over 220 million years before original sin. But of course, the Bible would have us believe that man predates animals by give or take a week, seven-day creation. And we know that one of those seven was a day of rest. I had intended to hop onto another topic, but like I said, the problem of evil is a fun one to think about. And I'm talking like quiet car ride, just pinging around my head, thinking about it. And it's not a gut check, it's not me saying, gosh, am I really doing the right thing by believing what I'm believing now? It it isn't that. It's that we can't shut the logical voice off in our head. We can suppress it, and we can suppress it by insulating it with religion, with faith, with self-deprecation, with we don't have to know the answer for that, or the classic it's not for us to know. Love that one. I think this is all I'm going to do for this episode, and it's one that I really hope you can go back and listen to again. Or who knows, maybe in my in my rambling here I I made enough of a point that a seed was planted, even it's just one little thing. I encourage you, you know, I went through the different examples, uh malaria and child suffering. Think of examples in your own life and and just run them through that filter and and bring an ounce of logic into it. That that's really all it's gonna take. Earlier I said that asking this question is so extremely difficult. And you've asked it. We've all asked it, we're we're discussing it now. And this is one, and if my wife were being honest, she would roll her eyes. If she's listening right now, she likely is rolling her eyes. I could fill an entire day just talking about the problem of evil, because to me, I'd said earlier that this one question is enough just by itself, that a lot of people, based solely on logic and the lack of logical answers to these questions, that was enough for them to just walk away. I I really hope that you enjoyed our talk about the Epicurean paradox. Send me an email, let me know what's going on, ask any questions you want, or even give me topics that that maybe you'd like me to talk about. Uh hopefully it's one that I don't necessarily know how. Of a lot about because I love researching, I love looking up answers to things that I don't know. With that, thank you so much for joining me. I really look forward to you catching the next episode. And until then, stay curious.