I’m back. So you ask some very interesting questions. Let me take a stab at them.
1. Wouldn't a more appropriate title for the website be: "Why has 'God' allowed amputees - period?"
Actually, no. You will certainly see a great deal of discussion on this forum about how or why a supposedly good god would allow the extreme suffering that a huge percentage of humanity is subjected to. While amputees certainly suffer, I if I were to question the playing field that your god offers those who are supposedly taking his test to see if we are worthy of spending the afterlife with him, I would point to children born to malnourished mothers surviving in war zones before pointing to amputees. But yes, it is an uneven playing field. And if there were a god, one might question why he or she (or they) would allow such wide discrepancies.
But the title of this forum actually addresses a different set of questions. Christians believe in an omnipotent god. And Christians pray to their omnipotent god, asking for favors or support or relief from suffering. Christians believe that god listens to these prayers, and sometimes answers them, and sometimes, for mysterious reasons, doesn’t answer them. Christians pray for cures to cancer, for winning lottery tickets, for winning touchdowns. When a cancer patient goes into remission, or a scratch off ticket provides a surprise $50, or when little Johnny’s touchdown brings wild cheers from fans of his team, Christians can thank god for answering their prayers.
But even true believers KNOW that there are some things that are not going to happen.
Christians probably don’t pray to god to ask him to regrow amputated limbs. If god is omnipotent, he could certainly re-grow a limb as easily as he could put cancer into remission. But cancers sometimes go into remission, regardless of prayers. Hindus and Buddhists and atheists with cancer sometimes go into remission. But amputated limbs don’t grow back. Not for Christians or Muslims or Jews or Wiccans or Sikhs or anybody. And so, on a certain level, even true believers understand that the only prayers that are really worth engaging in, are prayers for events that might happen even in the absence of prayer.
You are a believer. I assume you believe in the power of prayer. If you had a loved one who was recovering from cancer surgery, would you pray that the doctors were successful in removing all of the cancer? If a loved one had a leg amputated, would you pray for the leg to grow back? Why or why not?
2. Is the question: WWGHA a restatement of the classical problem of evil?
I think it is important to point out that the concept of good vs evil is really unique to the world’s monotheistic religions. Other belief systems tend to recognize shades of grey, or context, or even consider good and evil to be subjective concepts.
3. I have seen various responses to the classical problem of evil invoke the "incommensurable goodness of knowing God" (not that I know how to convincingly unpack this concept). Often, when someone loses some part of their body there are standardized compensation tables in the insurance industry for doling out monetary compensation. These kinds of payments always seem empty, in a way, no matter how much money is involved so my final question is: Is it theoretically possible for some "good" to exist that would outweigh the suffering of say, a Canadian soldier who has just returned home from Afghanistan to live the rest of his life with replacement legs?
Are you asking if sometimes good things happen after bad things have happened? Well, yeah. My grandfather was a laborer, (coal miner, then steel worker) whose leg was crushed (though not amputated) in an industrial accident. After more than a year out of work, the union trained him to be a draftsman, and he spent the rest of his professional life using the skills that he would not have learned if he had not had an accident. So my real, personal story seems to support your premise.
But what about the kids who are born malnourished, in war zones, abandoned or orphaned and left to sleep on the streets and dig through garbage and steal to survive, and then die young? What if the kid, as a teen or young adult, did really evil things, that he would never have done if he had been born into an environment in which safety and nutrition and access to an education were a given? Did you god give this kid a fair chance? And if the kid broke god’s laws, would god be justified in condemning this kid to ETERNAL DAMNATION? And, of the millions of people who have lived under these sorts of circumstances, do you think you could, in each case, identify some “good” to outweigh all of the suffering?
