If my “thesis” was trying to prove the existence of God, or that God isn’t evil, then what you’ve written here might be relevant. So save this dialogue for someone who comes along to argue as such.
acts like someone who was trying to argue the opposite
This is somewhat fun, but shouldn’t charades be played over in MPSIMS or The Game Room?
This is either extremely disingenuous or pathologically inflexible thinking. There’s nothing inconsistent with believing that god does not exist, and also asking how you reconcile your belief in god with human suffering.
This question derives from theists’ own assertions about God. You say God is all powerful, all good and all knowing. If all these things are true, then evil and suffering cannot logically exist, because nothing can happen that is not the will of God, and an omnibenevolent God cannot will evil and suffering. That means even if there is a God, he’s either unwilling to stop evil, unable to stop it or ignorant of it. There is no logical way in which God can possess all three of those '“omni” qualities and still allow evil. You have not come close to addressing this problem with your OWN conception of God, or really even shown that you fully comprehend what the POE is.
So what is your thesis? Restate it in one sentence for those of us that are slow on the uptake.
What is your thesis, Straggler?
Perhaps if you state it clearly, it’ll help the discussion stay on point.
Omnipotent can mean several things, and does not necessarily imply the ability to do anything that can be expressed in words. The meaning of a word cannot always be gleaned from its components. For example, Odin was called “All-Father,” but that does not mean he was considered the genetic ancestor of humans, dwarfs, elves, or giants.
Look up proof by contradiction some time. Atheists have a strong enough case that we don’t have to just yell “no God” as an argument. The POE argument goes like this:
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Assume a tri-omni god.
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We can derive from this that this god will create a world with minimal (not no) suffering.
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We examine our world, and see that there is not minimal suffering - not even close. We can easily imagine a world with free will and less suffering than there is today.
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Therefore, the omnibenevolent god does not exist.
I can see a person who gets this, and is somehow convinced that a monster god exists. I’m fine with that. However if this person tries to get others to worship or pray to this monster god, he’s a monster too. The only reasonable response is that in del Rey’s “For I’m a Jealous People.”
And Jesus saying God is his father did not literally mean that. Omnipotence commonly means the ability to do any logically possible thing, not to create a taco too big to eat.
There is a lot of ground between ‘God does not exist’ and ‘God is a monster’.
The problem of evil is only a problem for one very narrowly defined kind of God which, incidentally, is why I am trying to understand how the idea of a omni* God came about. It doesn’t seem to be a very credible kind of God and doesn’t seem to be supported by the bible (DtG’s excellent cites notwithstanding).
Quite so. And, as I note, other meanings of omnipotent and almighty exist.
God this, God that.
My OP swipe was at the non-sensical arguments made by atheists when they produce illogical examples of suffering when they’re clearly searching for its most extreme cases, when arguing against God.
Your post failed to address this entirely.
For the sake of an argument, you either assume God exists, or you don’t. Not “I’ll assume he’s true when making my argument, then deny his existence when you make yours”. THAT is disingenuous arguing.
It makes no sense to point to the suffering in this world to argue against “God”.
And why is that?
It does, for certain values of “God”.
The existence of suffering isn’t proof that no form of God exists. But it is proof that an omniscient, omnipotent, omni-benevolent God doesn’t exist.
Because when atheists cite earthly examples of suffering while arguing some fact or point against God, they’re clearly thinking as hard as they can to come up with the worst kinds of suffering they can conjure.
If the argument rests on a pre-supposition that God exists, earthly examples of suffering are nowhere near the top of the scale.
It’s impossible for both suffering and an omnimax god to exist simultaneously, and we know, without a doubt, that suffering exists. Even in your own ridiculous argument that suffering after death is even worse than suffering in life, suffering STILL EXISTS. You aren’t making it go away by pointing to something worse. The existence of ANY evil refutes the existence of an omnimax God.
I’ll make it simple. Answer these four questions.
- Is God all powerful?
- Is God all knowing?
- Is God all good?
- Does evil exist?
If the answer to 4 is yes, then the answer to at least one of the first three has to be no.
POE is certainly a problem for an omni* God but I don’t think it is quite a proof. It doesn’t address the 'God works in mysterious ways" defence for example.
But if the sufferings of Hell far exceed the sufferings of Earth, that only makes the Problem of Evil *worse *for theists.
If the fact of earthly suffering is inconsistent with the omnimax God hypothosis, the existence of Hell is even more inconsistent with it!