Ah, but you get a practice book. However, the practice book is full of self contradictions and obvious lies, and says at least two answers to each multiple choice question are the right ones even when the test book says there is only one.
Look, just because it says you shouldn’t pray in public, and yet Christians are always pushing for public prayer in school, uh, …, um, I’m sure there’s a point to all this.
Creation is neither benevolent nor malevolent. It produces and evolves life. If your life form finds a successful niche in Creation, you’re in; otherwise, you’re out. There have been several major extinction events on this planet, but Creation handled them quite well. The “good” and the “bad” of human existence is our decision, not Creation’s. Imagine if we put all the time, money, and energy that we’ve used to dominate and destroy one another into improving the human condition. How “good” would “God” seem then?
One way that a god might be both omnipotent and benevolent is if he’s not all knowing. Omnipotent just means he is capable of doing anything, but he may not actually know which specific thing to do. Perhaps he’s just a scientist in a lab trying to figure out the best ways to create life. Compare it to a human scientist trying to find out the best way to raise healthy and happy mice. Although the scientist is not actually omnipotent, the scientist has an almost endless array of manipulations that can be applied to the mice. The best ones aren’t necessarily implicitly evident. The scientist may try a variety of foods, environments, chemicals, population sizes, etc. to best understand which conditions produce the happiest mice. Unfortunately, some mice will be part of experiments which end up having poor results, but that’s just part of the process. In the end after numerous experiments the scientist will know the best techniques to use to raise happy mice. Along that line of thinking, our universe may be just one of many universe experiments run by god, each created with different conditions and different manipulations so that he can learn which are the best conditions for happy life. We just happen to be in the universe with bad stuff like cancer, school shootings, drunk drivers, opiate addictions, and social media. Hopefully our suffering is giving god some good data about what not to do and future universes will be better off.
Unfortunately, the majority of Christians are not willing to give up any one of the three attributes of their god: All Seeing, All Knowing and All Powerful.
Omnipotence includes omniscience.
Yeah, I remember when humans decided to cause that earthquake, or that hurricane! We really shouldn’t do that. And, remember when humans decided to invent brain cancer for children? Man, what were we thinking?? Oh, man, and we really shouldn’t have infected so many mosquitos with malaria! Talk about biting ourselves in the ass!
Man, it’s all Bruce’s fault! Makes total sense! Plus, he’s Canadian, so Blame Canada!
My hypothesis is that it’s God versus a fallen demiurge who is holding the entire universe hostage. All but the rarest overt intervention by God would trigger the annihilation of the universe and everyone in it. God’s plan is to recruit as many agents among humanity as he can to intervene covertly in the blind, deaf amoral physical universe. Eventually the universe will come to an end, those who joined God’s side will be reborn in a new uncorrupted universe while the fallen angels and impenitent humans go in the delete file.
Omnipotence and omniscience are mutually contradictory. If God knows the future it must include his actions - since they affect the non-godly universe. If he is omniscient, he knows what he is going to do at time t. Which means that at time t -1 he can’t change his mind. Likewise, if he is totally free to do anything at time t, then he can’t know what he will do at time t - n.
And don’t tell me that he chooses not to do something he doesn’t foresee. It’s not what he does, it is what he is able to do.
An omniscient god is an automaton, locked into his program of actions seen at time t - infinity.
It’s not a problem if there are two gods, one omniscient and one omnipotent. But which is greater? And if God is the greatest, then neither is god.
If there is the god of the Bible, he is the fallen demiurge. In other words, Satan won and is sitting in the celestial White House. Who has Satan killed? God killed billions and keeps on killing. Why would Satan torment those who are sent to hell? They are his buddies, after all. No, an evil deity sets things up so that all who don’t kiss his ass enough get tortured.
Makes a lot more sense than the Bible.
Creation is nature, it is not a benevolent old man who is supposed to babysit us and keep us from burning our hands on a stove. Life is born, ages, and dies. Disease and natural disasters are part of nature, too. Hey, “Pathogenic Lives Matter”, at least in the natural order of things. I am saying that maybe, just maybe, we could do a lot better job of minimizing the negative aspects of nature if we put all our energy into improving the human condition as opposed to making it worse.
This seems to be completely off-topic for this thread. Are you saying that God is benevolent or omnipotent, or both, or neither? Are you saying God doesn’t exist, and we’re all part of Creation, whatever that is when it’s capitalized? Are you redefining God as the indifferent workings of nature and the universe?
Agreed. We’ll just let this go for another day.
+1 or like or heart or whatever.
Doesn’t this assume that God is subject to time?
I think it’s possible to get out of that one by positing a God who’s outside time: who sees/knows all of time at once, as a human can look and see multiple things within a given space at once.
That would certainly fit with the ‘beyond human understanding’ theory. But it would also mean that God’s designing and intending all the consequences of everything – from a human point of view, simultaneously. Among other problems, I don’t see how that provides humans with free will.
Not only did God write the entire script, but the show has already been performed.
Responding to this, because I think it is relevant, in that God can be a benevolent experimenter, and the horrible things that happen are necessary to get data to improve the future.
Except performing lethal experiments on sentient beings without their consent is not “benevolent” in my opinion.
No argument here.