The definitions make no sense. Love is an emotion; how does it “facilitate goodness” ? All goodness ? How can existence “compel the existence of a facilitator”; how can it “compel” anything, given that existence is a passive quality ?
I don’t follow you here, mostly because I don’t think there is any meaningfully delimited concept of what a “metaphysical thing.” Start simpler: once you admit beings into the picture who can do, from the perspective of the human being’s experiencing it, anything, then all certainty breaks down.
Obviously, you agree that empirical observation is based on some pretty basic axioms. Without them, it would be impossible to have any sort of empirical certainty at all. We generally don’t think that these axioms are proven but regard them almost with the attitude of well, if they are false, then we can’t really know anything anyway, so we might as well stop arguing over whether they are true and just see what we can do IF they are true.
We’re in a similar situation with our trust and perception of the motives of other beings, though of course you are quite welcome to hold empiricism as only ONE of the many ways of knowing these things. What I 'm saying is that if you introduce the element of a being powerful enough to make you believe anything at a whim totally undetectable to youself, a being who is entirely outside of anything you’ve experienced, then you’re basically just as screwed from the perspective of trust as you are from the perspective of experiential knowledge if you kick out enough of the basic axioms of empirical observation.
To put it more simply, we all jokingly discount the “brain in a jar” hypothesis not because we can disprove it, but because we can’t. Admitting it would basically undermine anything and everything we percieve. Having a God of such extreme power running around is pretty much like starting off from first premises saying that we are, in fact, brain-in-a-jars in a very real sense.
Because if Satan is powerful enough, then he is indistinguishable BY YOU from God. You could ALREADY care very much what Satan thinks: because what you think is God is, in fact, Satan.
God already seems demonstrably unwilling to consistently expose deception in our own word. Countless people have lived and died entirely believing complete falsehoods, sometimes perpetrated by their fellow men, sometimes believing in, perhaps false Gods. As I said, if God could be shown to consistently act to prevent any and all deceptions: thus rendering them impossible outside of God’s own handiwork, then at least we could have some assurance that spiritual experiences were authentically God-inspired (maybe: unfortunately for all we’d know this too could be a deeper deception). But I don’t think we’ve so far seen any evidence of that protection being consistent on the small scale, and so it’s not clear why we should expect it on the large scale either. Are God’s motives for not exposing deception good ones? Bad ones? I don’t know. And since God is beyond my comprehension, I don’t see how I can know.
I don’t understand what you are saying. Why has irony not compelled the existence of an agent to facilitate it?
Where did I make that assumption? The point was that human malevolence become indistinguishable from God’s benevolence. A human being can convince you that one is the other.
My whole point is not about arguing that God is good or bad, but that God’s very nature prevents us from discerning it. The mere poetntial existence of ultra-powerful being is another wrinkle in that problem because it further destabilizes our ability to judge motives.
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Why the presumption that God treats human beings as puppets?[/quoet]
God doesn’t have to, though the possibility that God does is the direct price you pay for having such a being that is beyond human comprehension. Dig a rabbit-hole for yourself, and you can fall down it.
Who said they were? But how could yuo ever be sure, to any level of certainty that they were if they could just as easily make you think they were regardless?
I think you’re jumping off the trolley tracks just to avoid the trolley here. I didn’t say anything about those conclusions. What I said was that the ability of other others beings to have total control over the finite amount of power needed to completely manipulate human thoughts renders us unable to distinguish God’s actions from those of any other powerful being. Hence, when you encuonter something you believe to be authentically a transmission from God, it could just as easily be a manipulation by another being. And you’dhave no way of telling the difference.
I don’t know about God there may or may not be. All I know is the exorbitant claims made by theologians. Even if God has discernable parts, that we are unable to see the whole of his nature prevents us from ever being able to judge him even in the limited way we judge other people (who at least we have experience with seeing tons of examples of their behaviors from start to finish in their lives)
They’d like to have the cake and eat it to: go crazy with touting their God, without any admission of the can of worms their extremes opens up. If God is outside the universe’s laws, beyond time, as incomprehensible to human beings as the many incomprehensible things far beyond our ability (our brains can barely concieve of multiple levels of computation at once: God must be capable of near infinite capacity) then yes, there is no plausible way to judge his motives.
Your cat is a creature of habit. Your cat, and most cats, are lucky in that, by and large, so are you and most owners of cats. A bit higher and more complex in their appreciation than the cat are your friends and family. They’ve learned to trust you from experience that’s a little deeper than the cat: indeed, you’ve learned to trust and judge and concieve of yourself much in the same way. While they can’t convieve of every synapse in your brain or soul or whatever you posit determines your decisions, they have a rough idea of how yuo think and react and expect, what your values are, that you really care about them, and so forth. Of course, even in the human scale, this sort of trust could be wildly, absurdly misplaced or have been earned by deception. The only thing that makes us find it unlikely is that in most human beings it is unlikely: they are clumsy, mercurial, and often have empathy and guilt.
All of this is thrown out the window once we start to move to beings much outside of human experience. You needn’t even get anywhere close to the philosophically extreme heights of God to imagine ultra-powerful beings for whom all the rather simple and finite tools of trust and judgement available to us to be completely inadequate. The God you propose is so far off the scale of our tiny experience that an analougy from your cat to you isn’t even remotely plausbile as a model of you to God. The entire evolutionary history of cats that attuned them to feeding patterns is less than an instant to any decently souped up God.
99% of them.
Most theologians believe that God (if they believe in a singular God) is omnipotent.
If God is omnipotent, he can do anything.
Can God do metaphysically impossible things? Yes. He’s omnipotent. That’s the point. We do not even have to imagine such a scenario - we may merely outline it. Could God kill all of us with a thought? Yep. He’s omnipotent. Could God turn us all into jam? Yup, omnipotent. Could God make it so we’d always been jam? Yup, omnipotent. Could God make it so we’d always been jam, and yet the entire history of the world proceeded exactly the same (except for our jam-ness)? Yup, omnipotent. To venture into the realms of things we do not understand, could God hatch a small egg? Yup, omnipotent. Can God do metaphysically impossible things? Yup. He’s omnipotent!
It doesn’t matter that we can’t define a metaphysical thing beyond it being metaphysical - God can do it, according to most theologians, because he’s omnipotent.
I post now not to proselytize, but only to point out why problems concerning religious language and knowledge have plagued philosophers and theologians for centuries.
Traditional theology tackles the problem of defining God by saying all we can truly know about God is what he is not (negative theology). From the Summa:
By “metaphysical thing”, Liberal means ideas related to the fundamental tenets of reality that have a universality of time and space; for example, the nature of existence. A metaphysical impossibility, then, would be something like “existing and not existing for all time and space”; there is no theologian I’m aware of who would say that God can do this.
More subtly, Aquinas also rules out five other characteristics for God: composition, imperfection, finitude, change, and multiplicity, arguing that these conflict with the metaphysical foundations of existence. The timelessness and universality of metaphysics is the key to this argument; it is incorrect to compare God with the properties of (or, to some extent,reasoning based on) tangible objects as these are imperfect manifestations of general metaphysical principles.
A summary answer (again from Aquinas) is that since things are considered to be good according to their commpleteness/perfection for a purpose (e.g. a good hammer is one that doesn’t need to be changed for the purpose of driving nails, while a bad hammer will need some alteration, and hence is incomplete or imperfect), and God is perfect for all purposes, the God is good. We cannot properly judge this “good” because our examples all involve tangible items, which as stated above we cannot compare to God.
Again, I’m not making this glib statement to convince you, only to point out that the argument is based on metaphysics. Personally I find it a formidable one to cogently atack, but I can’t say I’m convinced either…
On preview I note that Revenant Threshold argues the opposite opinion. Many will read this as yet another example of how poorly reasoned theology can be; more’s the pity:-)
No, that’s not the point, and that’s not what omnipotence means. Only a quack would suggest that God can make a contradiction true — e.g., a married bachelor. That’s not power; that’s absurdity.
Uh…Omnipotency means omnipotency. To suggest that there is something God cannot do, absurdity or not, is to place limitations on him - and if he has limitations, he’s not omnipotent. I think what you’re getting at here is that he chooses not to do these things - God can do anything, but he chooses to do only some things.
If a God cannot make a contradiction come true, he is bound by a limitation, and is thus not omnipotent.
No. What I’m getting at is that for metaphysical impossibilities, there is no do to do. It is not a matter of ability, but of possibility. For there to be a do, there must be possibility in at least one world. See this link for a discussion of modals:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-modal/
No, it is not a limitation. It is an empty set. There’s nothing there — not a limitation, not even a potential.
I believe I see what you’re saying - that an omnipotent being cannot do “some things” because there are no “some things” for it to do. Is that right? (Sorry to dumb it down - I need it at around that level or I won’t understand it).
Ok. If i’ve understood you correctly, I think I get where you’re coming from. I was just set off by your example of the “married bachelor” which an omnipotent being could indeed create.
Ack. Apologies for the poor coding.
But the OP is asking us if it is wise to assume God is benevolent, not whether any of us has defined Him thusly. But since you have, it’s reasonable to assume you think it is wise to do so. Why is it wise to define God as the facilitator of goodness?
Yes, that’s exactly right. And I don’t think you’ve dumbed down; you just clarified it a bit.
A bachelor is unmarried by definition. “Unmarried bachelor” is a tautology. “Married bachelor” is a contradiction, and is metaphysically impossible, assuming we do not change the definitions of the words.
Yes. Similarly, God having created a universe in which pi is irrational cannot himself express pi as a ratio. (We have no idea whether there could be a universe in which pi would be rational.) On the other hand, God can express pi to any degree of accuracy required, cause a universe to appear out of nothingness, cause a virgin to become pregnant with a male child without the agency of a sperm, and cause the dead to become alive again. There is no inherent absurdity in any of these… it’s just that they’re all very, very hard. The question is not whether God is or is not omnipotent, but of whether the definition of omnipotence we are using is nonsensical.
Because for me, at least, it helps to make logical sense of morality, of the purpose of God’s and our existence, as well as answer the OP’s question.
Here is an informal tableau:
Let goodness be that aesthetic which edifies. Let God be that agent which faciliates goodness. Let love be those acts which are Godly (i.e., which facilitate goodness). Let sin be those acts which are un-Godly (i.e., which obstruct goodness). Let the universe be a probability distribution.
Those definitions allow us to formulate premises about the nature of morality, and of the natural versus the supernatural. Consider how goodness is defined, for example. From that definition, there arises the premise that goodness compels the existence of an agent for its facilitation. After all, that’s what edification means. Were it to be stagnant, it would not be edifying. Therefore, it is constantly seeking its own improvement. That would reasonably include its own amplification.
From the definition of God, there arises the premise that goodness is the aesthetic most valued by God, and a corollary that morality is not about ethics, but about aesthetics. That is, Godliness is not achieved by obeying a set of rules, but by holding dear a particular treasure.
From the defintion of love, there arises the premise that love is the essence of God; it is what God does. He facilitates goodness. If we then are given the premise that man is created in the likeness of God, we may draw our first inference: namely, that man is a free moral agent — free to value whatever he wishes.
From the definition of sin, there arises the premise that malevolence is un-Godly. Given the premise that trusting reason is wise, we may conclude that it is indeed wise to assume that God is benevolent.
(The above answers the OP.)
From the definition of the universe, there arises the premise that man is a dual creature. He is at once a supernatural being (a free moral agent) and a natural being (a subset of distributions; i.e. subatomic particles). Given the premise that the universe has at least the *appearance * of reality, we may conclude that the latter serves as a context for the former. The purpose of life then (physical life) is to pursue within the context of the universe that which we value most.
Finally, we may conclude, given the inferences drawn, that being one with God means valuing the same aesthetic that He values: goodness.
Many other inferences may be drawn, of course. Consider the question, for example, of whether homosexuality is a sin. The answer, given the premises above, is that like anything else homosexuality can be Godly or un-Godly depending upon whether the exercise of it is to facilitate or obstruct goodness. If two men are edified by a homosexual relationship, then their relationship is Godly.
Those are all assumptions, not definitions. They don’t answer the OP. They don’t even hang together with each other. And how is the universe a “probability distribution” ? If it’s a reference to quantum mechanics, that’s only true ( if it is true at all ) on the scale of the very small.
They do nothing of the sort; they are assertions with no evidence.
Goodness is an abstract concept; it compels nothing. It can’t compel anything.
Your definition of God, your definition of morality. Also, morality is about ethics; aesthetics are only about appearances, not behavior.
Love is not “goodness”; it’s an emotion. It can be good or bad.
We are not made “in the likeness of God”; that concept has never made sense except for the idea thatGod looks human. We cannot be made in the likeness of a vastly superior being any more than a bacterium can be made in our image. We also have never been able to prove ( or really even define properly ) free will.
You still haven’t shown anything of the sort.
Not even close.
Like I said, we can’t prove free will, we can’t define it properly, nor ( if it exists ) can anyone show it to be “supernatural”. Also, quantum effects don’t matter much on our scale.
At last, something we agree on.
Except we still haven’t proven a God exists, or that it is good even if it does.
I need to digest that awhile before resonding, but thanks for taking the time to clarify. I want to see what the consequences are if we change some of those definitions or assumptions, and if there is any wisdom in your scenario that doesn’t exist in other scenarios.
Indeed, though I’m not sure how we got on this topic: it seems like a red herring. However, I should note that anyone with total control over your mind can certainly make you think tha a contradiction has been proven true, or not realize that some claim is a contradiction. In fact, that’s what optical illusions are essentially doing to your visual perception: making you think that an impossible structure is real in 3dimensions.
The argument on goodness, I don’t think it answers the OP at all, since the premises are so arbitrary. If God is good in a way that YOU understand good then it is wise to assume that he is good because we wouldn’t want to contradict our own claims. That’s not much reassurance at all. Good and aethetics and so forth could just as easily be particularly provincial concepts relevant mostly only to the limited interests and fragile concerns of human beings and of little consequence to God.
I agree; the premises are arbitrary and somewhat personal. Following Aristotle (and Aquinas), it may be better to define “good” metaphysically.
Goodness is often defined in terms of suitability for a purpose: A person can be a good dancer if he produces actions suitable for the art of dancing. Notice that we are not defining what “suitability” is–this is a judgment call particular to each individual. Furthermore, we can see that goodness lies on a scale, as we often say one dancer/baker/writer is better than another, and those that are good at something universally strive to be better at it. Again, we may disagree as to whether our judgement of who’s better is correct, but one can still admit that (1) goodness comes in degrees, and (2) those who believe they can become better at an action feel the urge toward improvement (although they may be limited in this improvement by other factors, the most obvious being a finite lifespan:-)).
Understanding the “good” in this way allows us (to some extent) to get a handle on a more abstract application of goodness: We don’t necessarily need to define what “a good human being” is in order to talk about goodness as it applies to humanity. Furthermore, as we get more metaphysical–as we move away from particular cases to generalities which seek to embrace the whole of existence–the limitations to improvement mentioned above begin to melt away. This is because limitations are necessarily imposed by factors outside of the item/circumstance to be improved.
The question then of whether or not God is benevolent reduces to “Is God suitable for the actions associated with God?” By “actions” here I don’t mean acts of God as commonly understood, but the actual essence of God; it must apply to His essence because God is infinite and therefore unlimited, and so any definition of his goodness applies to him in totality. Furthermore, God is perfect (i.e. not in need of something), and is considered (in one way or another) to have caused the entire universe to exist. Whether or not you believe in God, most I think would agree that the common understanding of God includes these characteristics.
By the understanding of “goodness” above, all things strive to be better, and the impulse for this (like the impulse for all things) naturally comes from their cause, i.e. the creator God. And, since He is perfect, God cannot improve; He must be the highest good, and therefore must be perfectly benevolent.
Why, then, does God allow evil in the world? As we’ve seen above, thinking He is essentially malevolent is not an option. One solution may be that He is not omnipotent/omniscient; there are problems with this approach, but this post is long enough I think. The standard answer is that we are limited in seeing the ultimate goodness in all things, even those (e.g. the death of a child) we see as irredeemably evil. That is not a very comforting answer for a believer (but then again, atheism doesn’t claim to be comforting either, just factual), and it’s an answer I doubt I’ll ever accept completely. Still, I trust in God’s benevolence, and hopefully have demonstrated (at least logically if not comfortably) why this is a wise thing to do if one believes in God. At least the existentialist in me is satisfied 
He could be perfectly evil. The existence of good in the world could be a sham, designed to make it worse when the good are all thrown into hell, and the evil all sent to heaven.
More seriously, I don’t think the concept of “perfect” really applies to a being, even a superior one. Perfection is for simple things with rigid definitions, like equations and spheres.
No, an evil thing is still evil even if the result is a greater good.
No, they are definitions — specifically, copulas. Let x = 1 defines x as 1. See, for example, oh I don’t know, any mathematics or logics textbook.
What you mean by “hang together” is anybody’s guess.
Except that the macro world may be said to be an emergence of quantum probabilities. See this explanation:
http://www.chaos.org.uk/~eddy/physics/universe.html
Actually, assertions with no evidence are called “premises”.
I did not define goodness as an abstract concept; I defined it as that aesthetic which edifies. If you wish to use your own definitions, then get out of my argument, or else use mine.
Yes, of course. It was I speaking. At least now you concede that they are indeed definitions.
I did not say that love is goodness, and in fact, the term even as ordinarilly used has quite many definitions.
We are made in His likeness in the sense that we are spiritual beings.
You are mistaken.
If you mean to say that my answer does not satisfy you personally, then that is what you ought to say. But to declare that I have not answered the question when I did so absolutely directly and in excruciating detail is an exercise in intellectual dishonesty.
I don’t know who your “we” is, but count me out.
Disconcerting, to be sure. 
You seem to be in a world all your own. Perhaps it is best if I leave you undisturbed.
Please explain which premises you found to be arbitrary. Unless you meant the copulas, in which case I can only say that every definition is arbitrary. That’s what definitions are for: to orient us together in a mutual understanding of one another.