I think number (2) gives Him an awful lot of leeway. Suppose His plan is to conquer evil over time, and you simply got here too early to observe its conclusion. Don’t you have to invoke some sort of temporal reasoning even to talk about a plan? Doesn’t a plan imply the unfolding of events over time? I don’t know what useful comment one could make about a plan that may well, for all we know, take billions of years. There’s too much epistemic baggage for me.
I agree that *it could *give some leeway - although I’m not entirely sure how. I’m not entirely sure how your example gets around the problem. God is still responsible for evil, I just can’t see the conclusion.
AFAIK, yes. I don’t think concepts of god being outside of time are necessarily coherent though. I also think that if you posit that god created the universe, then you are necessarily talking about an entity that exists in time, since creation implies events unfolding over time.
I don’t think my commentary is aimed at interpreting that plan, per say. What I’m trying to highlight is that one cannot escape that plan; ie, if we were created to fulfill a plan by an omniscient entity (which we cannot escape due to it’s omnipotence) then that entity is responsible for what we do.
Some of us have absolutely no problem picturing The Fifth Dimension. 
Am I the only one who knows that the OP’er is stealing an old George Carlin routine word for word? On “Class Clown”, he did a routine called “Heavy Mysteries” and in it he says in his brash “student in Catholic School Voice” ,
Credit where credit is due.
Cartooniverse
If you’re actually interested in this subject, you should read the Bible, cover to cover - you’ll find that many atheists have. In the West we grow up with a children’s Bible background, where all the rough spots, contradictions, and violence have been censored or smoothed out.
Granted chunks of the Bible are extremely boring. But I found it quite profitable to sit down with my kids when they were old enough and go through Genesis, line by line, and coach them in finding the logical flaws, contradictions, and just plain absurdity in it. It worked quite well in encouraging both critical thinking and atheism.
When I was in grad school, based on a challenge on another message board, I read and took notes on the whole thing. It drove me from leaning towards atheism to full atheism. So, I recommend reading the Bible.
Ah, but if you were compelled to believe it, you wouldn’t have free will. 
Heh, good point.
I don’t know of any biblical passage, church doctrine, theologian, or denomination that holds that God is necessarily capable of doing logically impossible things. You can define omnipotence that way if you want, but that isn’t the way it has typically been used. If you do define it that way, it is false to claim that most conceptions of God include omnipotence as an attribute.
Like I said, any argument with a word beginning “omni-” usually has little or nothing to do with either the biblical or the modern religious concept of God.
I still think the problem is epistemic in nature. We just don’t know enough about the plan, and that’s assuming there is one. Maybe the plan is to give complete freedom. Imagine, for example, an Austrian economist taking over the Federal Reserve. His plan for the economy might well be to interfere as little as possible.
I agree. In fact, impossible things aren’t even things.
I’m not sure I follow you - I’m **not saying **god is capable of doing logically impossible things. The point I made was that the various omni’s contradicted one another and that omnipotence doesn’t seem feasible, since there seem to be at least one thing that god cannot do;
god can do somethings IFF god cannot do some other things.
I’m afraid I don’t see why you think I’m defining it that way.
If this is true then what do you think has to do with the concept of god?
I agree to an extent I suppose - however wouldn’t this train of reason also negate the thought that god is a good entity?
Although, come to think of it, I don’t know how I would reconcile the thought of an omniscient creator god with one that doesn’t have a plan. It’s an interesting notion though.
What do you mean by freedom? When I hear that I think libertarian style free will, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If you mean another sort, then our behavior is determined by our environment and upbringing.
Erm…Heh…I’d like to imagine what you mean, but I really have no idea what an Austrian economist would do to the Federal Reserve…
I agree with this.
If you’re a fact guy, then you’d probably choose the first position I mentioned: that omnipotence, to the extent that it exists or is a property possessed by anything, does not include the ability to do the logically impossible.
The third position I mentioned is specifically in response to the stated “God as an author” theory/analogy, wherein you posit that to God, this universe is like a book he is writing/has written. The universe has a known beginning, which is consistent with a book; also science begs off claiming to know what (if anything) existed/exists before/outside of our universe, so in theory such an entity could exist, outside our ability to detect (much like the characters of a book are unaware of the author unless he does a Jesuslike self-insertion of himself as a character in the book).
(In answer to your question: “Well then, where is he?”, the answer would be: “Outside the story” aka “Outside the universe”.)
The book analogy handily explains the odd notion of God being ‘outside of time’; the author and readers of a book are ‘outside’ of the book’s time, and are able to skim back and forth amongst the pages unaffected by the book’s chronological progression. This explains foreknowledge as well.
The way the book analogy comes into play in the unliftable rock scenario is that, if you were writing a book, you could write: “God therefore created a rock that could not be lifted by anything, and then proceeded to lift it; in spite of his having lifted it, the rock remained unliftable, and had never been lifted, even though it had been lifted by God. For an encore, he made 2+2=3 without redefining any of the symbols therein, and then proceeded to simultaneously exist and not exist, just for the fun of it.” In writing this, you’ve made your story a place where the impossible can happen, and incidentally made our current rules of logic inapplicable to events in the story. However, there’s nothing stopping you from doing it. You can type that (heck, I just did); the gods of logic won’t come down and smite you for it.
However it should be noted that if God writes such a thing, then God hasn’t really lifted an unliftable rock. His representation of himself in the story has, but he has not. In his reality, such an act would be impossible, unless it itself is a reality where logic holds no sway and anything can happen, impossible or not.
So anyway, if the book analogy is real, then God would have the power to do logically impossible things in our universe. He accomplishes this by having the universe be a place where logic, (truth, reality, etc) is not reliable. For myself, I wouldn’t derive any confidence from assuming that level of uncertainty into my beliefs about reality, but that doesn’t mean that such a thing is unbelievable. You thus can have the reasoned opinion that God is capable of lifting unliftable rocks; you have merely sacrificed your confidence in the value of reasoned thought in this reality to gain such a belief.
Not in my opinion. I don’t think ignorance on our part should constitute evil on God’s part. Maybe part of the plan is that we should be ignorant of the plan, and for all we know, that’s a good thing. Like I said, the problem is epistemic in nature, and the only way to solve it is to become knowledgable about the plan.
That at least frames the problem differently, making it metaphysical rather than epistemic. With this take, it isn’t necessary to know what the plan is, but only whether there could be (or must be) a plan. So since you seem to side with there needing to be a plan, let’s just assume there is one. Now the metaphysical problem is solved, and we’re back to the epistemic problem.
I define freedom as the absence of coercion. Metaphysically, it means that God forces no moral consequence upon our choices.
Austrian economists are of the classical liberal school. Ludwig von Mises. FA Hayek. Milton Friedman (to a great extent). They hold that an economic praxis occurs when each of two agents, exercising volitional freedom, decides that what the other has to offer is worth more than (not equal to) what he himself has to offer. If they both belief this, they make an exchange. (If they both believed their items to be of exactly equal value, they’d hold on to what they have.) Austrian economists place no confidence in macro-economics or central planning. Hayek, in fact, won his Nobel prize for proving that socialism fails on account of central planning — specifically, it is impossible in a socialist system to set prices knowledgably.
ETA: To flesh that out, an Austrian economist in charge of the Fed would likely enact a plan to interfere as little as possible.
My apologies, I wasn’t clear with my objection - I didn’t mean to imply that because we didn’t know god that would make him evil. What I’m trying to say is that if god is unknowable then we can’t say that he is either good or evil.
My objection doesn’t really ride on knowing god’s plan though - although I will credit your rebuttal in that if god doesn’t have a plan (or somehow has an incomplete plan - I’m not sure how that would work, mind you), then the thought that god is responsible for evil doesn’t hold the weight I initially assigned it.
Granted I still think that an argument could still be made - but I’d need to know a little bit more about the definition of ‘god’. On the other hand, I think that by going this route (ie, god = unknowable) starts to go down the route of incoherence.
Actually I think we are ahead of the game a bit - perhaps it would be better if we fleshed out some of the terms that are being used to describe god.
What do you make of the following definitions:
Omnipotent: Able to do anything logically possible.
Omniscient: All knowing.
Omnibenevolent: All good.
Omnipresent: everywhere
Atemporal: Eternal, outside of time.
Spiritual: Not consisting of the physical.
Creator: The cause for existence and or the universe.
I’m probably missing a few and although I think I’m being basic and charitable with these definitions, I’m not entirely convinced I am. On a personal note, I don’t think they all make sense, are possible, or can exist without contradicting each other (ie, I think some, not all, of the omni’s fall into this category).
Perhaps I’m wrong, but the reason why I think there should be a plan is because it doesn’t make sense to me for an all knowing creator god to just accidently spawn a universe (keep in mind I’m suppressing my objections to these terms). I realize that my incredulity isn’t enough to necessitate a plan.
So if my incredulity is on point then there was a specific purpose for the universe. God would have to create it for a specific reason and since god would know everything, that leads me to believe that god would know how each and every environmental/behavioral cue would cause a reaction in our will (I realize that I’m dismissing libertarian notions of free will here - which could be a problem). In other words, it’s like setting up dominos - an omniscient creator set up the picture he wanted to and then flicked the initial domino.
Being omnipotent, nothing could stray outside of god’s plan (not that I see that as an option anyway).
And how do you believe people arrive at their choices? I ask because it seems to me that we arrive at our choices due to our upbringing, genes, etc - ie, that causal forces determine our choices.
I think I can follow this, however plugging in the attributes mentioned earlier about god, it makes it a little difficult. This seems to make more sense with the ‘non-plan’ god, but I’m not entirely sure how the non-plan god reconciles with omniscience and the other attributes of god. That’s not to say that such a god doesn’t exist.
Right, however such an AE wouldn’t have started the system nor would such an AE know the outcome - both of which I’m assuming. Which could, in fairness, be the problem.
My problem is that without the omni-assumptions (and the assumptions as to what the omni’s mean) the definition starts to exhibit the problem of critical specificity; ‘god’ starts to lose more and more meaning. IMO god starts to exhibit the ‘McNose’ problem - which you might be familiar with, but I’m not sure everyone else is, so I’ll quote Francois Tremblay’s book, The Handbook of Atheistic Apologetics (who I believe is quoting someone else, but I don’t have access to the person he’s quoting):
Not common, but pretty damn old,
CMC fnord!
No female god is moving any rocks, rearranging the universe’s furniture is a job you trick the hubby into doing!
Electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength between 493 and 539 nm. 
And CMC brings up a very fascinating point: post-Exilic Judaism and Christianity (and from what I’ve been able to gather Islam as well) were (evidently) subtly but pervasively influenced by the dualism of Mazdaism (much preferred for the name of the religion over Zoroastrianism, for the same reason that Islam is preferred over Mohammedanism). The picture drawn by kanicbird, of a universe in which Satan is a rebel against God and tempter of mankind to evil contrary to His will, is a variant on Ahura Mazda/Ormazd vs. Angra Mainyu/Ahriman, revised and rewritten.
In reviewing how the classic monotheisms have interacted with the Problem of Evil, that influence really needs to be kept in mind.
Leaving aside the theistic/atheistic debate what you’ve actually postulated appears to be a coherent question (actual words grammatically and apparently logically arranged ) based on a coherent subject but is in fact a meaningless group of words .
Others have used the statement "At this moment I am lieing " as a so called philisophical teaser.
If your question was posed as "If god is all powerful and he created a stone elephant pyjamas reflex generator banana harpsichord ? it would be more obvious.
A DaDaist painter did the same thing visually with a painting of ,I believe a pipe (could have been a fish)entitled "this is not a pipe " which was true it merely looked like a pipe .
FWIW you’re thinking of Rene Magritte (who’s classified as a surrealist rather than a dadaist).
My apologies I stand corrected 