I’ve thrown this out before in venues less conducive to debate, so I’d like to hear opinions of this:
If an omnimax (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) deity had created us, we would be born with knowledge of its existence, and what it wants from us.
This does not affect free will, because:
Even people who are 100 percent sure of their religion (I think the majority of people who have ever lived) still commit sins
The deity could still give us free will, or it wouldn’t be omnipotent
It would not use humans as prophets to get its message out, since clearly that channel of communication results in contradictory messages, and cannot be distinguished from messages that are not from the deity but only from the prophet (lies and insanity).
From this reasoning, I conclude that either we were not created by a deity at all, or we were created by one that is not omnimax.
Presuppositionalists basically believe this. They would argue that atheists are ‘suppressing the truth’. They appeal to Paul, who wrote something to the effect that all men know the truth of God. Bahnsen/Van Til also were heavily influenced by this sort of thinking.
WLC would argue against your argument by saying that God wants free beings to come to him and that your argument would not guarantee more free beings to come to him - or something like that. I’m not particularly convinced by his line of reasoning.
I think Plantinga would probably say that there could be some reason for God’s not revealing himself and that it would be up to you to disprove it - something like that, since his argument against the argument from evil is essentially that God could have some purpose for the evil that leads to a greater good.
I’m not seeing an argument. I’m seeing some statements, but not a reasoned, logical argument.
Maybe God wants to send out confusing signals. It’s like when you watch the same movie over and over again even though you know how everything is going to play out.
There’s a lot of possible explanations, but I think the simplest is the assumption that creation is complete. A lot of people, especially theists, have a sense that creation was some event that was performed and done with some time ago or that we’ve more or less reached a point where we’re more or less complete. One thing we do know is that if God exists he created the universe and life here on Earth through processes that are continuous. There may have been a point at which the time and the universe began, but that’s no more a single moment of creation than the first note in a symphony or the first frame in a film is the creation of those works of art.
Another thing we know is that while these timelines seem very long relative to our own lives, really, we’re no where near the end. And so judging the ability of the creator off of an incomplete work doesn’t make sense. It’s probably a fair criticism of something like Young Earth Creationism which does suppose that we’re complete, but I don’t think it works against an omnimax god in general.
If an omnimax (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) deity had created us, then She/He/It would certainly have the ability to create us with or without any knowledge She/He/It so deems.
I’m an atheist, but I still don’t think this argument holds much water. If an omnimax god wanted to create a world that could run without his constant intervention, then the biology of that world would have to be able to function well on its own. Human brains are already big enough to make childbirth unusually difficult (by mammalian standards), and that’s even with all human infants essentially being born premature. (They’re unable to walk, for example). Packing even more hardware into a human brain might just not be practical.
Besides, we already have very highly active agency-detection software running in our brains, generating a lot of false positives; we tend to think that random noises, movements etc., are caused by other animals or people, until we’ve ascertained otherwise. That’s halfway to a built-in belief in gods anyway. (Why is there thunder? Why, because there’s a person making all that racket).
Short version: It’s hard enough to shove a working brain (encased in a head) out a birth canal already, and hyperactive agency-detection both confers survival benefits and creates a predisposition to belief in gods. Why would an omnimax god bother tinkering further?
Of course if he was omnibenevolent he wouldn’t play “hide the truth” games to trick his creation into displeasing him, especially if praising him is one of his primary requirements for an end reward state.
So if the intent was a omnibenevolent god who demands worship the knowledge of her/him/it would be innate. (in my world view of what is good)
This is not an argument it is just question begging.
You could just as easily use it to argue that RevTime is a robot. If RevTim were a person he would have written a better OP. He did not write a better OP so therefore he is a robot. QED
The argument presupposes that you know exactly how an omnimax God would behave. How did you acquire this knowledge? and why is it not given to everyone else?
That doesn’t sound even slightly omnibenevolent. Sounds more like a mafia boss. “Youse wanna play it dat way, ok. Here’s da deal. You gotta believes in me, or it’s Infinite Punishment, an’ I mean Infinite. An’ I ain’ gonna give you squat about if I exists or not. Kapeesh?”
The OP sounds like the mirror image of one of the “proving god exists from first principles” arguments in Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, and IMHO equally unconvincing because it’s based on shaky assumptions.
We seem to be in the process of becoming self aware of this, many of us are still too young - minds have not formed yet to realize this.
I disagree with this somewhat. It is technically true because religion has nothing to do with God (the Omnimax God in your OP), but it is false for a Omnimax God. If you are God’s child then everything you do is God’s responsibility - and God can not sin, if the act of God’s child is ‘bad’ or ‘sinful’ God MUST, in order to be Omnimax make it good, righteous, basically taking the responsibility in full for the child’s actions, thereby removing the ‘sin’ from the child, by making it not a sin by a greater plan and design.
He does
God desired to use His children and to grow them to be gods of their own, so it is necessary that the children get to act as the voice of God, they must learn and learn to use their god powers, prophecy is just one of them. More to the point is that the children of God must realize who they are, they all have god powers, so they are there to form a more complete message, to help each other and not depend on a person who seems to be a ‘high priest’ so to speak.
IF this God, as supposed, is still restricted to logical laws of reality – if he can’t make a four-sided triangle or alter the past or create a “false truth” or whatever – then there is an interesting information-theory argument that it cannot reveal itself to any free-willed observers.
The reasoning is this (it follows from something Martin Gardner wrote in a “Mathematical Games” column): by interacting with mankind, God not only must know – must “model” – everything every human is ever going to do, but, in addition, God most know or model everything he himself is ever going to do.
His prophecies and revelations bind himself. He has to have total information on his own future state – including total information on the information on his future state and on the information on that information, etc. It requires him to have a perfect model of his own mind, including that model.
This quickly spirals to absurdity.
The easiest solution is for God to remain “outside” of the realm of interest. He can interfere in it – hit Sodom with lightning, whatever – but he can’t interact with it, because this causes changes in him, himself, which, being omniscient, he would have to know already. Too complex.
Actually Roman’s especially lays this out, but the rest of scripture supports it if you’re making reference to theist belief systems that everyone does have general revelation. Basically it’s completely impossible to look at the created order and not see the evidence of God. Actually even now a champion for atheism Steven Hawking used to constantly talk about this reality in higher level scientific study. It’s only recently to give one example he’s gone on the hating the idea of a higher power crusade. Now if you are referring to special revelation, that’s entirely another thing all together… which scripture states God decides upon whom to provide special revelation.
No; he was lying to placate his first wife, who was religious. And there’s no evidence of God whatsoever; just various baseless and contradictory assertion by believers.
I’m not sure if this is a whoosh, but we’re talking about an omnimax god imbuing all humans with particular knowledge. There’s no reason why that would entail additional hardware; it’s not like a newborn baby’s brain starts out “full” of knowledge.
And the stuff about childbirth…omnimax god could just make women more able to birth larger babies (you have to wonder why he didn’t already do this…).
I too am an atheist, and actually it was a similar train of thought as the OP that made me initially reject religion (rejecting theism came later).
ISTM that omnimax god might choose to reveal himself to us, or might choose to hide himself. What doesn’t make sense is why he would want to reveal himself in an incredibly ineffective way, such that most of us encounter a message that sounds just like a man-made myth/legend.
This idea only makes sense if we make certain assumptions about the motivations of an omnimax God, that we presume that he wants us all to know exactly right now. That he presumably has that ability doesn’t necessarily mean that he would have to do it. It’s sort of like the child of a wealthy man believing that because his dad has the ability to provide for him and “obviously” loving him means he will provide him with what he “needs”, that it’s contradictory that that same man would insist he get an education and work to earn a living. We see creation has occurred through long processes and so, if God exists, he used those processes, why would his obvious method of creation be suddenly different in revealing himself to us?
I don’t really see why man-made myth is really contradictory either. We know George Washington lived, we have a pretty good idea of his historical life and beliefs, and yet we still have some mythology surrounding him, like the cherry tree and "I cannot tell a lie and the quarter across the Potomac. Of course we know that those are simply myths, but I also don’t think it’s beyond reason that those same sorts of stories to a more primitive man easily could have gotten mixed in and we might then believe some things he really did do were also myths. But my point is, even with that mythology, none of it really detracts from knowing who he was. There’s a lot of mythology surrounding the nature of God and a lot of it is man-made, but I don’t think it really says anything one way or the other about God.