What? A red herring is a distraction from an argument, in this case an argument no one has made. Instead, one of the arguments in the thread is that God INVENTED famine, pestilence, war, death and whatnot. Your argument is an analogy that makes no sense in this context.
But thanks for the definition clarification of “Red Herring”, I was using the term literally, then I remembered the allusion of fish to Christianity is with mackerel not herring.
The Bible’s God, judging by the things He is recorded as having done and said, certainly is psychotically evil. There is no other name for a being who created Hell.
That has nothing to do, however, with any philosopher’s God, posited independently of any tradition of religious revelation.
The flood story( like many stories in the Bible) are exaggerations of the facts. Yes, there were floods, and there were cities that were destroyed by nature, so people were probably taught that it was God being angry about something. It helped to keep them in line. Just like Pat Robertson does today, to try to keep his followers in line as if he knows it all!
“God” is an idea that only exists due to the “tradition of religious revelation” in the first place. There’s no way it could be “wholly independent” - it’s not like there’s any evidence for gods of any kind.
And how many people believe in the kind of “philosopher’s God” you are talking about, anyway? I mean, really believe, and not only bring him up in religious discussions to defend God from an accusation like being evil or logically inconsistent, then forget about him otherwise?
Plato and Aristotle and Spinoza did. The only living example I can think of (but not, I am sure, the only example now living) is the famous skeptic Martin Gardner, a self-identified “philosophical theist” who considers in depth the questions of God’s existence, free will, the efficacy of prayer, and the problem of evil in his book The WHYs of a Philosophical Scrivener.
People can go through the motions of pretending to look, but that doesn’t mean that evidence for gods actually exists.
Notably, those are all individuals; the vast, vast majority of believers don’t believe in anything like Gardner’s generic God. Which even he admits is an irrational thing to believe in, with no evidence for it; I’ve read The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener. He believes in it ( or says he does ), because he wants to believe in it.
