Missed edit, should be “omniscient.”
I find that argument tiresome and weak. God is so far above us that we are less than ants are to us. If humans had created ants and given them the ability to think on some basic level, then it is up to us to be able to communicate with them on their level. If an ant can understand that I don’t want it to get into my sugar bowl and does anyway then an appropriate punishment would need to be used to show displeasure. I sure wouldn’t wipe out ever creature in my back yard save 1 personal favorite and tell them to go on from there.
God created humans to be intelligent to be able to think and to communicate. It is up to God to speak to us on our level so we understand, not hold us to such a high standard that we can’t comprehend it much less live up to it, then get when we fail.
God didn’t accidentally kill a few clusters of people they way I might run over an ant hill with my lawmower. He purposefully and willfully exterminated every living thing on Earth. The failure was on God’s part for being unable to adequately express himself to his people or deal with them when they erred.
That’s impossible. Once more; with an omnipotent God it is impossible for suffering, or anything else to be necessary. If God wants it to happen, it happens.
To be honest, I really don’t understand why the existence is such a hang up for so many people. In my view it is only really non-sensical in certain narrowly defined contexts. If God created us without free will, then I could understand an argument that he is evil; in fact, I would say that he has to be evil in that context. However, most Christians believe that we were created with free will, so I think that makes the existence of evil much more interesting.
So let us consider what free will is that, in order for it to exist we must have options and we must be able to choose between those options. Thus, because sin is anything that is not God’s will, evil has to exist or we would have no options from which to choose, making any consideration for the existence of free will meaningless. Similarly, given anything but an infinitesimal chance of choosing evil, over the entire course of human history, evil choices would have had to have occurred. So, really, it’s a matter humanity of being automatons or allowing evil to exist.
In fact, that’s really the whole point as I see it. Of course an all-powerful being can create automatons that would love him and do what he says, but that seems like an exercise in futility, doesn’t it? Isn’t it a lot more meaningful if someone has the choice not to do something, but does it anyway?
Similarly, I don’t get why the idea that some things that God does are beyond us is necessarily a cop out. If we were able to understand everything that God does, then either we too are perfect, which we clearly are not, or he isn’t, which violates an assumed property. Now, that’s not to say that it’s a valid defense for things.
I think also that a God that would create us as beings with free will and has directly instructed us to question things, that he would want for us to have a large degree of understanding. I think in most important areas we either can understand his motivations OR we can come to understand them at some point in the future. A good example of this sort of thing is like when parents appeal to the “because I said so” defense of their parenting. Will a 3 year old kid necessarily understand why having a dozen cookies right before bed is a bad idea? Will a 5 year old understand why their parent doesn’t want them to see a movie with lots of violence or sex in it? Of course the kid gets angry and thinks the parent is being unfair or just being mean, but when the kid gets older more sense can be made of why those restrictions were put in place.
As much as you might say that the old testament makes God look angry and wrathful, it just as much makes the Jews look like the petulent child who get’s told that he’s not allowed to have cookies and then, as soon as his parent leaves the room, sticks his hand right back in the cookie jar, just to yell and scream when he’s punished for it. That is, that to say that the God of the old testament is necessarily fundamentally different from that of the new testament is to make a questionable assumption that the perspective has remained constant. Just in the last hundred years have millenia old practices like of sexual and racial inequality really begun to be addressed, yet so many people will write a pass for our founding fathers as a product of their era where slavery and women as property was acceptable, but not consider that so much of what we’ve got in scripture are from thousands of years before from people far less like us than them.
I agree that the ant analogy isn’t very good in the way that it was given. God didn’t kill people by accident or by oversight. But you’re really sort of making the point here. We, as humans, kill ants because we lack the ability to communicate to them that them getting in the sugar is bad or that we need to dig up the land to build a house or whatever. But that’s exactly what makes our relationship with God different. God has given us rules and has given us commandments, most of which make sense to us, but not all of them.
If we could communicate to an ant not to get in the sugar, and if they thence didn’t do it, we would have no reason to kill them to keep them out. I can even imagine they might argue that it’s a good and tasty food, even how cruel it is of us to put the sugar there so accessible to them and then not allow them access to it under penalty of death, when really that has nothing at all to do with why we have the sugar there at all.
So, a better analogy would be to have those ants continue to go into the sugar, even if we were able to communicate to them that we would kill them if they did. Or communicate to an ant that, being told he might be stepped on if he was running across the middle of the sidewalk and decided to do it anyway.
Really now, looking at the rules that God has given us, most of them make a lot of sense (murder is bad, stealing is bad, lying is bad, etc.), and there are even some that didn’t make a lot of sense then but do make sense now (like not eating pork). I would, however, say that is a double standard to argue that saying we don’t understand everything about God is a mark against him, yet there are so many other things we don’t, and may in fact never, fully understand but accept in plenty of other areas.
If we were omnipotent, like God, we could move each and every ant out of the way. We do things that might be acts of evil by omission because we are finite beings. God is not limited in this way. Being omnipotent, he can accomplish his aims without directly inflicting pain on us.
When people want us to worship God, they claim he is all-powerful. When people want to explain what actually goes on down here, it turns out he’s a pussy. Make up your mind, please.
No; an omnipotent could create beings that would faultlessly choose good of their own free choice. And, again there’s the problem of the real world; we are NOT creatures that are made to be good but choose evil anyway. We are creatures with a mess of nasty impulses and desires that we have to struggle to control.
If I’d known Adam personally and heard his story about the shaft-o-rama God inflicted on all of humanity just because he ate a stinking fruit that God had as good as handed him, I’d turn evil on principle.
You’re not too familiar with the Problem of Evil, are you?
Omnipotence is directly, unavoidably, contradictory with the idea that evil is justified by anything at all, and God’s claimed ineffability and superiority is completely irrelevent. Axiomatically, there are only three possible reasons to cause or allow evil to occur:
- the evil is necessary to allow God to achieve some other, ‘higher’ goal.
- the evil is fun for God, or otherwise satisfies him in some way. (fFor example, his temper.)
- God doesn’t care anything about us at all (this only justifies allowing, not causing evil.)
For an omnipotent god, case 1 cannot be happening, by definition - if god has to kill babies to achieve his ends, then god lacks the power to achieve his end without killing babies and thus isn’t omnipotent. This leaves only evil and apathetic gods, axiomatically.
Of course, the obvious thing to do is cede full omnipotence, and claim “near” omnipotence - God has reasons for the things he does (which aside from his own whims is impossible for a fully omnipotent god) but is still really powerful, and loves us and crap. The problem with this is, it raises the question of what his goals are, and why those goals require the types of evil we see. Seriously - babies dying of terminal illness. Why? Are dead babies like box tops that he can trade in for a nifty toy? Who is he selling the dead babies to to get his reward? Why does killing babies, specifically, aid him in achieving his end in the most optimal way, as opposed to some other nicer method?
Our supposed ignorace is irrelevent to this - you’re just not going to find a system where god has to go all Katrina on New Orleans to achieve his end, that doesn’t involve him becoming indifferent or evil. I mean, what are you positing, that God is in thrall to a higher diety that extracts payments in the blood of innocents? Cause that’s what it would take - demoting God from the one who decides the rules, since whoever did decide the rules is clearly at best indifferent to human pain.
We can judge God too - his own power and inability to make a mistake eliminates the possibility that he’s unhappy about the suffering he causes and allows. Nothing that happens is not his will - directly. You get crushed in an avalanche? It must be because he likes you being crushed in an avalanche, or at best doesn’t care one whit one way or another.
If he’s omnipotent, he cannot be correct - you have logically proved he’s lying.
Or we can be charitable. The people writing the *books *are lying (or talking out of their butts) and God himself no more explains things to people than we do to the ants we fry with the magnifying glass.
For an omnipotent God, your suffering must be its own virtue. Unless you think he can trade your pain to Pain god that rules over him, in exchange for a nifty toy?
Even with free will, God could have built us so that we couldn’t become mass murderers. Even with our free will today, most people just couldn’t do that. If no person could do it, I don’t think we’d be any less free.
But forget that. God kills us directly through natural disasters as well as indirectly through free will for murderers. Why couldn’t God build a somewhat more stable planet? Exactly what divine purpose was served by the tsunami or the Haitian earthquake?
You really think we are too stupid to at least partially understand the why? Then God could have made us a bit smarter. God could also come back and do a rev on the rules, most of which are pretty bloody irrelevant today. I’d have been a pretty bad parent if I expected my 18 year old kids to obey the rules I gave them at 5.
The Founding Fathers were not infallible. If God hated slavery, he could have said so. If God hated inequality, he could have said so. One thing I think we can say about God is that he wouldn’t give a crap about how annoying it would be to treat women like people and not property. Religious morals seem to follow, not lead, the growth of secular ethics.
If not eating pork made sense, and was inspired, why did the early Christians dump the rule as soon as they needed to to help recruit the Romans? That was supposedly inspired also, and it is not like they were cleaner then.
If there’s something that faultlessly chooses x, whatever x is, than it doesn’t have a free choice. It’s programmed to choose x.
No; an omnipotent being could arrange it so that every being that makes a free choice, makes the right one; that’s a direct consequence of omnipotence. If the creator of the universe is both omnipotent and omniscient as is typically claimed, then literally everything in the universe was planned beforehand. And the distinction between free choice ( such as it is ) and programming vanishes.
Isn’t that the square circle argument, though? Again, if the being is programmed to always make the right choice, it can’t be a free choice. And if everything in the universe is planned beforehand, there can be no free choice.
Only if you equate “free” with “random”.
Well, I sort of do. A choice is free if there’s agency; if there’s a non-0 possibility an alternate choice will occur. I don’t have free will in regards to my heart beating, but I do in regards to getting a can of soda, because it’s not possible for me to stop my heart from beating but it is possible for me to not get a can of soda.
Is there a non-zero probability of you not deciding to go get a soda once you have already done so? It was the balance of your desire for a soda with the inconvenience involved in getting one (plus probably many other factors) that dictated the result. I think that it is more the case that prior to the choice being made, incomplete information makes it difficult to predict the outcome.
Heck, doesn’t the problem go beyond that? I mean, if God created the universe, he didn’t just fill a big vacuum with floating rocks and spawn sundry life forms. He had to invent it in the first place; he has to be directly responsible for designing the basic foundations of existence. It’s because of his design that “2 + 2” doesn’t equal “purple.”
If “good” and “evil” exist, it would stand to reason that he had to have created the very concepts from the ground up. If he’s God, he should have been able to design a universe not where evil just didn’t happen, but where it never existed in the first place; where the very fundamental concept would be so impossibly eldritch as to be literally unthinkable by anything short of a god.
So, why would evil exist? Well, he could want it to exist for some reason, in which it becomes a sin of omission at best, or a sign of outright malevolence or even insanity. Or it was an unforeseen consequence of his universe design, or even an accident, which brings into question his competence as a creator.
So I guess, in short, God might not necessarily be evil himself…he might just be stupid. Or crazy.
I don’t know. I did terrible in philosophy in college. But it seems like if you can reduce my choices to strictly mechanistic formulas…desire for a soda minus inconvenience of getting a soda, plus factors A, B, and C, then I don’t have free will. I have to make the choices that the formula calls for.
If it was just a matter of giving us free will, this “God” could give us the ability to take our own lives if we so choose.
But we have the the ability to kill others, which takes away their free will. What would be lost by not having this capability?
No idea. But I don’t think the God of the bible (as opposed to the God created by Jews and Christians later on) is actually omnipotent or omnicient. He’s certainly powerful and knows a lot, but I think that the way he works in the bible is that he makes rules and then just expects that people will follow them, and says, “If you people follow my rules, I’ll help you. If you don’t, I’ll let bad stuff happen to you until you do.”
No One can say they know anything about God. What is taught, believed or written is of human origin, some believe the humans who use the belief in God to give him attributes of both Good and Evil,(at least in the way they translate the Bible, and other so called holy books, books written by humans for humans). No one can say anything about God except what they were taught, read, or want to believe. It is an individule choice of who or what to believe. There are many different ways to describe the word God. The many, many religions back this up. Even people in the same religion have different views. Some see God to be loving and kind, others like to believe that God uses evil to teach a lesson and many way out ideas.
begbert, your problem is at the top, where you’re defining evil as that which is not preferable to humans – fine if god is imaginary, but if he’s real then certain human preferences may lack moral significance.
Also consider that happiness, sadness, and tragedy are relative states. Eliminate the hurricanes and dead babies, and run of the mill death becomes evil; remove that and it’s hang nails and traffic jams; get rid of those and bad hair days are full blown personal tragedies. By your logic, if there was a god the only way he could not be “evil” was if life for all vaguely sentient beings was nothing but an infinitely increasing and accelerating series of pleasures (or, perhaps, if we were unable to have either positive or negative emotions). Fine for us, perhaps, but it could theoretically be sub-optimal by standards other than what we’d want for ourselves.
If god were to appear and say that the universe (or even humanity) was better off (morally, aesthetically, however) for the existence of occasional ignorance, randomness (either apparent or actual), misery, and capricious death, we’d have no basis for contradicting him. He can see the whole of existence (including whatever supernatural realms may exist in this scenario), and we can see virtually none of it.
Ok, the analogy was poorly considered in that it was confusing in this way, but the point was to look at it from the ant’s perspective, not ours. They can’t judge us because they have no conception of what our motives might be, nor even of what it might mean for a human to have one motive instead of another; they do not comprehend in even the smallest part the universe in which our decisions are made.