I agree that, without knowing what sort of god we’re talking about, the answers are meaningless.
But I do want to address one issue that you, and many other people, have brought up, that being this:
This highlights why the “What sort of God?” question is critical, because I could imagine a god who allows evil to exist in this world, because it is an essential feature to some other, ultimately greater good, that we simply cannot see or understand in our current state.
I’m reminded of a bit from Robert Heinlein’s book “Job: A Comedy of Justice”, in which one god-like being takes the protagonist in to see another, even more god-like being. He analogizes it to a human taking a pet to the vet’s office. I’m sure my cat thinks I’m being evil when I take him to see The Guy Who Sticks Needles In Me For No Damn Reason, but that’s because the cat doesn’t understand things like disease, or vaccinations, or surgery.
Perhaps all the suffering of Earth is needed for some purpose we can’t understand. I don’t know if I’d want such a god to exist, but I might not hate it either.
Of course, that’s unlike pretty much all of Christianity, so even if such a god existed, the Bible thumpers would still be annoying and wrong, but there you go.
I don’t buy it. Some of it, as a necessary consequence of dealing with human beings capable of moral agency? Okay. But all of it? No. That it is not ALL necessary, even if (and that’s if) there is a greater good for some of it means that, at the very least this world is not compatible with an omnibenevolent, omnipotent god.
You have stumbled onto the best of all possible worlds theory. It fails if just one baby killed in a tsunami didn’t have to die, if the survival of that one baby wouldn’t make the world better.
BTW, if you weren’t aware, the claim that we use just a small part of our brain is wrong. We use almost all our brain. Brains take lots of energy - wasting it would be evolutionarily disadvantageous.
I’m not sure I see your point here. This is the “ineffable” part of “the ineffable plan”, as most theists would describe it. The point I’m making is, yes, this might seem like insurmountable problem to us puny humans, but to someone with greater ability to see and understand, a “god” if you will, the apparent contradiction would vanish. Not only are we too stupid to see the solution, we’re too stupid to even see the correct problem.
Yes, I know that. There was something else going on, but they were clearly dumbing it down for us.
I saw a clip of a creationist minister say that if the Bible told him that 2 + 2 = 5, he’d believe it. That’s kind of what’s going on here.
There is also a dual, the worst of all possible worlds theory. Say that the world was created by an evil god to be as bad as possible, and that every event in it contributes to its evil. Anything, no matter how good it seems, actually makes things worse.
Just as unfalsifiable as the best of all possible worlds theory, isn’t it?
Just to be clear, the “insurmountable problem” in question is “coming up with some sort of explanation that explains how the world as it currently is is literally the best possible world ever, when even a child can think of ways to improve it.”
Such an explanation would also how to explain how the past is exactly as good as the present is, because otherwise why did the God not instantly transform the past into the present?
*“What the hell are you getting so upset about?’ he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrive amusement. ‘I thought you didn’t believe in God.’
I don’t,’ she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. ‘But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him to be.’
Yossarian laughed and turned her arms loose. ‘Let’s have a little more religious freedom between us,’ he proposed obligingly. 'You don’t believe in the God you want to, and I won’t believe in the God I want to . Is that a deal?” *
Problems with that argument include that if the plan is “ineffable”, then you can’t at the same time argue that you know that it’s a well-meaning plan, and that for an omnipotent god there’s by definition no need for such a plan at all. They can just do it.
I do not care one way or the other about “if gods there be.” I often ask the rah-rah’s I talk to “How is acknowledging a “god” going to help me?” So far, I’ve yet to get a logical answer.
Well yes, but once you’re discussing gods, you pretty much have to accept the fact that things are unfalsifiable, otherwise we can’t have any kind of discussion. It’s a “don’t fight the hypothetical” situation.
But I’m not arguing that I “know” this is true. I’m just pointing out that this proposed interpretation solves “The Problem of Evil” that seems to worry so many people. They insist that the existence of evil disproves almost any kind of benevolent god you can imagine, and I’m pointing out that I (and at least the people who made the movie I linked to) am quite capable of imagining a god that solves the problem of evil quite easily. That doesn’t mean I believe it exists, it just means I don’t accept their argument as the slam-dunk they think it is.
As for the “They can just do it” argument, again, maybe they have what they consider to be a valid reason to let us do it ourselves. Just because they can do it that way doesn’t mean they have to. Also, while they might be considered omnipotent in the reality we see, there’s no reason to suppose that omnipotence exists in whatever “higher plane” they might be operating in. It’s like video games. Just because I can make a character fly in a game doesn’t mean I can just jump out a window in real life.
Not at all. The proposition that there are no gods can easily be falsified by a god showing up and doing god things. We’ve had several threads on this. Sure you might not be 100% sure there is a god, even then, but you would be sure to the level that there is a Paris.
Are unicorns scarce because unicorns are very sneaky beasts who can hide in your garage, or because there aren’t any? Same thing.
As I said, you are just repeating the best of all possible worlds argument - evil that god apparently does isn’t really evil, since it all works out best in the end. Which is begging the question, since the only way you can demonstrate that God does what is best is by assuming that all God’s actions are for the best since he is omnibenevolent. As I said - and which you didn’t really respond to - is that this can’t be correct since you can “prove” that god is omnimalevolent using the same argument.
With the assumption that my preference isn’t actually creating The Almighty in the image I most prefer, I voted no.
Given the way the world is today, the way it appears to have evolved over time, the way the universe seems to be constructed, the state of religion on the Earth, whatever God could possibly exist under those conditions is of no use to me.
If they are omnipotent there by definition can be no other reason than their own desires. For an omnipotent, omniscient creator god - the one people normally talk about - all evil happens for the sole reason they want it to happen; every last rape, murder and case of cancer happens solely because they planned for it to happen. There is no such thing as necessary evil or necessary anything else for an omnipotent.
And it doesn’t solve the Problem of Evil because God being all powerful is one of the basic premises that make it a problem in the first place. “I can’t” is a perfectly justifiable reason for not doing something after all. The POE only applies to an omnipotent and omniscient god.
The only possible way to “solve” the problem of evil is to either weaken the attributes of the diety so it no longer qualifies as tri-omni, or to change the definition of one or more of the “omnis” so that it varies from that of the people employing the PoE.
For the god to think there is a “valid” reason to let us take centuries killing and enslaving each other rather than intervening is to say that the god isn’t benevolent by the usual definitions, because we’d expect a benevolent human to intervene in such circumstances. By definition a god that stands idly by has to be prioritizing something else higher than benevolence to earthly humans. This makes the diety non-tri-omni --and also makes me highly doubtful that it gives the tiniest crap about earthly humans as anything other than test subjects or objects of amusement.
And whether or not the god is omnipotent in its own sphere has literally no bearing on their omnipotence on earth. I’m a mere mortal on earth, but despite that I’m omnipotent from the perspective of the stories I write. My earthly impotence has no impact there.
Based upon the vengeful and hate filled psychopaths that are presented as gods in various religious dogma, I’m very sure I would not want a god to exist.
I’ve gotta say, I’ve never come across this particular counter to the “best possible world” dargument, but I like it. And it makes sense. Because how do we know that every step humanity seems to take towards flourishing, to achieving more happiness for more people as it really has been in spite of all the doom and gloom, isn’t really just a prelude to a fall? God only knows, and he’s been known to smite mankind just for kicks in the past.
Random aside, there actually was a branch of early Christianity, one of the gnostic cults, that called themselves the Cainites because they identified the god of the Old Testament as an evil NFBSK, an entity that was in fact a god and did in fact create the material world we are cursed to live in, but was not the supreme, spiritual god (who would have of course recognized that Abel was being a dick and totally got what was coming to him for trying to show up good, honest, hardworking Cain). They believed that Jesus was associated with the supreme god and party of the mystery about him, the mystery the Gnostics sought to understand, was what would help them to cast off the corruption of the material world and achieve a sort of spiritual victory over the evil creator god.
I am an atheist who has no preference, which is not one of the poll answers though ‘I am not an atheist’ *is *for some reason.
Would I like someone to blame all this evil on? Only if I could make them stop.
I got the omnimalevolent argument from book by a philosopher with detailed refutations of theistic arguments. Borrowed it from the library - I have no memory of the author or title.
I looked up omnimalevolent in Google to see if I had coined the word. I hadn’t. Alas.
Worse than that, a god who is omnibenevolent by nature cannot be omnipotent, since he has lost the power to do true evil. A non-omnibenevolent god would definitely be more powerful than an omnibeneovent one, so the omnibenevolent god would not be a god by the theists’ own definition.
