“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” Epicurus
Why does God seem to take pleasure in causing pain? He hardens the heart of the pharaoh, so he can continue to cast plague after plague on the Egyptians. He tells the Jews of the Promised Land, and allows that entire generation to die in the desert. He tells them not to steal or lie, then points them at the Canaanites and says, “see those guys? kill them and steal their land!” And that’s just a few chapters. Lets not even get into how he created evil and allowed it into the world in the first place.
I’m not asking if God is real. For the sake of argument I will assume he is. I’m simply asking how can he be considered a benevolent creator. How can a God that calls himself the embodiment of love condemn a three year old child in Africa to die of AIDS and literally burn for eternity because she didn’t happen to hear his name? Please, someone, make a case for a God.
As far as Christians go I think you can find your answer in the old testament book of Job. When Job questions God he answers “You primitive screw-head, the reasoning behind my actions are beyond your comprehension.” Okay that’s not an exact quote, but it’s pretty close. Everything has a purpose we just can’t understand everything.
I’m actually an atheist but I really like the book of Job.
But in practical terms, that means that if God isn’t evil he might as well be evil. If he acts evil, does the sorts of things that you’d expect from an evil being, does it really matter what his motives are?
And at any rate, at best standard-version-God can only qualify as amoral, not good; as is often pointed out in these discussions, being omnipotent means that any suffering he inflicts is by definition unnecessary.
You have posited a God that is omnipotent and omniscient and wrote the Bible and conforms to human reason and human logic. So yeah, eternal punishment for not bowing down and worshiping him/her/it is evil. If that is your understanding of everything in the universe and outside of it that you do not fully understand, the conclusion is inescapable.
I might as a defense of God say that we don’t understand everything. Particles should not be able to exist and not exist before observed, yet they do. And those are the smallest and most insignificant things. We should not be able to love and hate at the same time, yet we do. God does not play with the world as you and I might imagine. Think of God as the love we have for each other and the desire to care for each other. Start there and understand that love will work through you for as long as you let it. If it were possible to enact and be perfect love and caring for each other that is the closest you will come to perceiving the presence of the divine.
Belief doesn’t mean the bad things required by physical law and biology will not continue to happen, however your reaction to those things will be required to become caring for others, rather than something less constructive.
Certainly philosophers have discussed such things at length. I remember in my Ethics class in college the professor asked one day “Is it [whatever] good because it’s good? Or is it good because God says it’s good?”
As I said earlier, I’m an atheist. If I were to look at this through the lens of Christian theology I’d have to come to the conclusion that I’m just not qualified to judge God’s actions. In Job, God gets pissed at those who insisted that Job must have pissed God off to be afflicted with so much suffering. Of course in a philosophy class I can’t just abandon all reason and to be honest I really can’t come up with a good defense of the Judeo-Christian God. If I were writing a Dungeons and Dragons campaign I’d probably have to make God of the Old Testament a Lawful Evil deity.
Actually, throughout most of the Old Testament, Job and Ecclesiastes notwithstanding, God’s kind of easy to understand and keep happy. If you’re Jewish, do what God tells you and follow Jewish laws, especially the “not worshiping other gods” thing, and don’t be mean to the poor, because God hates it when people are mean to the poor, almost as much as the worshiping other gods thing (although he doesn’t hate ANYTHING as much as the worshiping other gods thing). If you’re not Jewish, don’t mess with the Jews. Admittedly, if you’re a Canaanite in the book of Joshua, you’re probably screwed (even though the Hivites managed to survive), but other than that, you’re generally pretty well set. Job screws it up with the whole “God is beyond human understanding and sometimes bad things happen to good people”, and Ecclesiastes with “there’s no purpose to life and everything’s random, so just try to be happy and live your life well”.
Obviously, there are various rationalizations offered up by the church for God’s benevolence. If you don’t buy into those, the question is academic.
From what we can tell of the real world, there isn’t good an evil, there’s just competition for scarce resources among greedy animals, and of course the natural disasters that come from living on top of a changing planet. One could say that by trying to pass down laws that (theoretically) mitigate the worst side effects of competition that He was doing his best for us. Of course, most of His laws were rubbish so far as actually producing any particularly positive effect beyond our natural instincts, and just as often created greater negative. We came up with better rules for economy, government, and personal relationships ourselves.
And of course, by creating a planet with scarce resources, earthquakes, typhoons, etc. He did certainly lead to the death of trillions of creatures through history. Death itself, if you count it as an evil, is of course also unnecessary for a benevolent deity. If you want to test whether or not your creations will live just lives, having them all die after 80 years and have to re-learn everything that they’ve been able to experience is a rather bizarre system. What the purpose of creating life would be in the first place is similarly unclear. If they’re test subjects, that’s not really benevolent–and you should be changing the rules that you had down a bit more often than once every few millenia. If they’re children who you want to raise and nurture, why do you need countless generations of them?
The best I can say about God is that if He exists, He isn’t good or evil, He just happens to look a darned lot like unguided, natural processes.
Sometimes I think the point of the Adam & Eve story is that, given a choice, humanity will choose a world with evil and pain and conflict over one without. And what God does is allow us to make that choice.
Adam and Eve had no idea what they were doing and once they realized what had happened, God was like, “Nyah! You don’t get to come back!”, and kicked them out of Paradise.
While I like the idea of your idea, it simply doesn’t match up with the text.
What pushes god into the evil category for me is that he gets upset at his creation so he decides to flood the world and destroy everything excepty for a few lucky people and one pair of every animal.
When I think of Noah and his ark, I see the bodies of men, women, children and animals floating in the water. Surely 1 or 2 were decent and didn’t deserve death.
No; if there were a Judeo-Christian type god (sole, omniscient, omnipotent creator of the universe, has rules about right & wrong) we could not reasonably describe him as evil.
Two reasons. First is the obvious problem of perspective and limited knowledge. Even if we were justifiably confident in our standards of good & evil behavior, we simply don’t have the information needed to judge such a creature. For all intents and purposes, we would be completely ignorant of the context in which god’s actions take place. It’s a timeless, universe-encompassing entity, and we’re hanging out on a single rock (out of trillions) for a few dozen years. For one of us to say that god is evil would be akin to a two-dimensional square saying that a sphere is ugly, even though the square can see only an infinitely small slice of the whole.
More fundamentally, however, if there was a god we could *not *justify confidence in our moral standards where they differed with his. Atheists generally hold that god is a detestable character, which is all well and good given the assumption that he’s also a fictional one. If he’s real, however, than we have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the universe, and there would be no reasons (other than pride or spite) to leave our moral standards unaltered in the face of this new information.
If it’s a given that god is real, then there’s no reasonable course of action besides substituting his moral judgement (to whatever extent it is discoverable) for ours. Either the good exists independent of god, or it is a function of his decree that it is so. In the latter case, then obviously whatever god claims to be righteous must be so. If the good exists independent of god, on the other hand, then his information and his thought are infinitely better than ours, and to hold that I am right and god is wrong is just silly. The only pretext for disagreeing with god would be to hold that he is trying to trick you, which is both completely speculative and completely unlikely (being god, would he not have succeeded?).
It’s fine for two laymen alone in a room to argue about the theory of relativity, but if Einstein walked in only a fool could hold on to a contrary opinion. That situation barely hints at the level of our necessary ignorance in the face of god’s judgment.
Except that in the story of Job, we get to peek behind the curtain and see what God’s purpose was, that was behind Job’s misery. And it wasn’t something noble, it was basically God and Satan having a beer and making a wager. What the hell is the purpose behind that? To keep God entertained? To make sure he keeps his status as besting his buddies?
That’s something that makes the Old Testament really hard to believe (as if it weren’t hard enough already) - God saves the Jews, even parting the sea for them but drowning their oppressors, and as soon as he turns his back for two seconds, they’re making idols to other Gods, so he smites them hard, and next thing you know, they’re doing it again, over and over.
I was having a beer with God last night and asked him about this thread. He got really angry, “Fuck me, you smite a few people; send a plague upon someone and next thing you know you are the fucking celestial Ted Bundy.”
He told me that he was just doing his job. In fact he said, “just following the universe’s order.”
It’s painfully obvious that the god of the old testament is a human construct. I mean, he’s so impotent, he can’t even control his anger at the petty actions of his creations. He’s like a big baby with an erector set that pounds his fist and throws his creation across the room when it doesn’t do exactly what he wanted it to.
I think it’s hilarious to postulate that this creature made us and set us up to regard much of what he does is evil even though he’s full of love. Saying “we just don’t understand god” is the cheesiest excuse one could possibly consider. If the whole idea of this kind of god doesn’t scream “fiction!!” I don’t know what does.
I believe parts of this has been revealed to me by the Holy Spirit:
IMHO everything, including bad things, comes from God (Job 2:10). Satan did not create bad things, as Satan can’t create anything in himself. God puts us through a “refining fire” (Is 48:10), God has gone through everything He has put us through (there is a verse about in the NT, and I believe in Is also,this though I can’t find it right now). IMHO then God Himself is self refining and we are part of that plan.
God could have created the world/universe(s), in a way that we (man) continuously bear the sins of God and and including His sons*. This would create a world where we are subject to what we see with Zeus and living in fear of his lightning strike.
God’s sons as seen in Gen 6:2, Job 1:6, 2:1, sons directly begotten, not born of woman IMHO, as they IMHO were around before Eve was taken out of Adam and are the ‘Us’ in Gen 3:21, possibly and IMHO archangels), they would be aspects of God, very powerful, but incomplete in themselves, and suffer things like Lucifer’s pride.
But the Father instead planned it out that we, man, will be conformed into Jesus (fully man, fully God), with the spirit of God living in man, born and fully appreciative of and totally helplessly put in the womb and hands of the creation of God called woman. Eventually learning His ways despite the influence of His rebellious sons interfering, to learn His way of Love, and to share in the inheritance of Jesus, which is the universe, far beyond what we see in StarTrek. Being born helpless and totally dependent, as a infant, of the created being called woman would be distasteful, to say the least, for a powerful Zeus like god.
So the Father could have created things where His sons played while causing world after world to fall into suffering, but instead He created a world where His son’s will eventually ‘go away’ (much like Halkens radiation causes a black hole to evaporate, children will cause the sons of God to do the same as the have children with the daughters of men), as those children turn to Jesus, and the men become glorified God’s son equal to Jesus, actually it is Jesus in them, and women become the bride of Christ, fully empowered as the 2 become 1, and given unconditional Love, with the Father providing all there needs.
IMHO that child who died of AIDs is not finished with their refining and will be later refined in another body, though perhaps that child is finished and with God in the Kingdom.
According to the Biblical account, God was “upset” in the sense of “very sad,” not in the sense of “pissed off.”
If that’s what you’re using for evidence, you’d have an easier time making a case that God was incompetent, or limited in power, than that God was evil, or limited in benevolence.
There was one decent who didn’t deserve death. His name was Noah. Presumably, if there had been others, they would have gotten ark tickets, too. (And there’s at least some evidence that if there had been, say, 10 decent who didn’t deserve death, God wouldn’t have sent the flood at all.)
There are things actually in the Bible that are problematic enough. But it doesn’t seem fair to judge the Biblical God by what you read into the Bible, or by what you guess really happened contrary to what it actually says in the text.
IMHO The flood was a act of mercy. At that time God let man have his way for 10 generations Adam to Noah, and things went very bad. Wickedness is something that man can not undo on his own, and causes great oppression, similar to what we see in very poor countries, but to a much greater degree, where the people at the bottom, due to the structure of society, can never escape, nor do people above them in status have any reason to help those below them.
It’s God showing man (as most men lived close to 1000 years back then, so each man could see the deterioration) just how bad it is if men were allowed their own way.
The flood reset things, and changed a few rules, such as man’s life limit is 120 years, and God will only hold people responsible for bearing the sins of their fathers to the 3 and 4th generation, instead of possibly 10.