If I call my mom and chat with her for the pleasure of chatting, that’s like worship, right?
If I call to ask her a favor (“Hey, I’ll be flying out of Raleigh on the 15th, can I stay at your house the night before?”), that’s like petitioning, right?
Thing is, if my mom were omniscient, I wouldn’t need to ask her. She would already know what she could do for me and would have already made her decision.
And if she were omnipotent, I’d expect a loving mom to grant my favor, even if it were bigger (“Hey, Momnipotence [which word I’m totally trademarking so BACK OFF], I’m flying out of Raleigh on the fifteenth to go to a work conference, but could you instead just invent a world where boring work conferences are unnecessary? Also I want a pony”). Certainly if I were asking for something in her house to stop killing me (“Mom your pet dog is chewing my leg off please get it to stop!”) I’d expect Momnipotence to grant my request.
And if she were Momnibenevolent, I’d expect whatever plans she was setting in place to be really good for me. She sure as shit better not be giving me cancer, so any phone call to ask her to NOT give me cancer, or to cure the cancer I contracted in her house, would also be unthinkable.
Also, Momnibenevolence never penalizes me for not calling more often.
This gets to why theodicy–the question of evil–isn’t the best argument against God, but it’s a very persuasive argument against an omnimax god.
An omnipotent omnibenevolent God won’t create a world with ebola in it. An omnimax god won’t let infants die from malaria.
If, however, there’s some super double secret reason why Omnimax God needs an infant to die of malaria, it’s gonna be because of some ultra-fancy twelfth-dimensional plan that I can’t possibly understand.
So why would my ignorant prayer change the results?
If the plan is that subject to interference by self-serving mortals, then the God were talking about is a narcissistic partisan and is as far from omnibenevolent as you can get.
kanicbird proposes a non-omniscient deity who needs us to report in. That’s…novel, and kind of terrifying–God runs the universe like Lucille Ball runs a candy factory–but it solves the problem.
Another solution is that God has a personality like Donald Trump, or like Nyarolathotep the Crawling Chaos.
But the omnimax God? I can’t square that idea with the idea of a God who responds to petitions.
No, that’s like chatting. It could be like worship in a sense if you had to give up something of value just to talk to her (your time, that game or movie you really wanted to watch, etc), even if you didn’t want to talk to her; but because you knew that talking to her is a positive good, you did it anyway.
Of course that’s true. But because you are a good and considerate son, you’re not going to presume on your mother’s foreknowledge or hospitality, and you’re not going to barge into her house unannounced. To do so would be using her for your own benefit.
Why would you assume that a world without “boring work conferences” would be a better place? Since God’s will is perfect, we have to presume that the world he created is the best possible one.
So you want a pony, who cares? How does having a pony make you a more virtuous and fulfilled human being? How does it bring you closer to salvation? Maybe having a pony would be bad for your soul.
Maybe having to live the rest of your life with a bum leg will give you more opportunity for growth in virtue and selflessness and lead you to salvation.
It seems to me that you “expect” a lot of things. Why do you assume that cancer would not be good for you?
What would happen if you stopped calling Momnibenevolence? She would surely not punish you, but you would naturally drift apart in your relationship.
I don’t have trouble believing that a world in which God listened to and sometimes granted our petitions was somehow better for us—more benevolent—than a world in which that was not the case.
Things get complicated if I try to work out the details of how, exactly, that would “work,” and to reconcile it with my experience of how the world we live in actually does work.
Well sort of, sort of not. We are part of God Him/Her/Itself, so if we know it God knows it. If we feel moved to pray that message goes forth in the ‘Body’ of god, so God does know all, and we are part of that.
Why God did this, because Love never fails, God’s plan is perfect.
Is it scary, YES to many it’s as scary as Hell, It runs contrary to everything we have been taught, but it works and ultimately is the way (we are to become children of God, as that is what we are).
And scriptures point to a God that does not know everything, Jesus many times didn’t know things (of this world, and heavenly things), but the OT big G God didn’t even when God said that he didn’t order people to do something, nor did it come to mind (about people burning their infant children).
Happily my father died quickly and painlessly. I’m sure his soul, if he had one (none of us do) would be just fine.
The thought that being tortured by a disease like cancer is good for the soul is just so much like religion. Kind of like the abusive parent whipping a kid and telling him it’s for his own good.