A few years ago I was convinced that the thing that went wrong with Christianity in the First Century was when the Christian theologians took the neo-Platonic conception of God, then, in an effort to do the philosophers one better, they came up the idea of creatio ex nihlo. Because of this people are able to ask this this series of predicates.
1) God is Good.
2) God created the world the way it is by fiat (creatio ex nihlo).
3) There is suffering in the world.
4) Therefore God must want suffering and is not worthy of worship.
5) God cannot stop suffering and is not worthy of worship.
The supposed fact that God made everything by an act of will has some logical paradoxes that many people are unwilling to live with. If I were not LDS I'm afraid that I would agree with this line of thinking. Luckily I'm not.
The LDS do not have arrive at this conclusion because we say that God did not create everything, in the idea that God did not create matter or intelligences. Also, we believe that God in a moral being and is capable of making choices, including wrong choices.
Of course when there are problems when the LDS say that there are co-eternal intelligences that Heavenly Father did not create. They think that is blasphemous and when we then say that he didn't create matter but simply organized it their heads seem to explode. I understand their concerns, but it make much more sense to me to worship a logical God than an irrational one. I wonder what the philosophers would make of the LDS God. So far as I know only the LDS think about our conception of God and we, or the LDS, philosophers don't seem to have a problem with it, but I guess that I don't really know what's been said or written about it. However, some of the thoughts that philosophers have talked about sound very familiar. I'm starting to think that I'd like to study this stuff more in depth instead of just listening to the lectures, although listening to the lectures is fun.
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