However, if one ascribes to the idea that “God works in mysterious ways” it logically follows the the desires of God are unknowable and therefore should have no influence on human affairs.
Because that’s not a defense. Asserting that God has any reason at all, mysterious or otherwise, amounts to a statement that God needs a reason. It is impossible for Omnigod to need a “way” to do anything. Whatever his goal is can be effortlessly and instantly accomplished without suffering. No mysterious purpose can justify EOG, because no purpose can logically be necessary.
It’s just shorthand for “why are you ignoring the contraditions in your religion?”
Well, because your god goesn’t exist (or at least we have no reason to assume it/He does), discussing its nature is indeed pointless. However, some religious persons try to use their beliefs to influence law, politics and science. At that point, calling out the irrationality of their beliefs is fair game because whether or not their god can inflict suffering (or stand back and watch as suffering occurs in the situation He created), they certainly can if left unchecked.
This argument is a complete failure. The claim that they’re just looking at the downside is irrelevant if they are right. If somebody argues that the federal bailout is a bad idea because it’ll run up the deficit, I can’t declare the argument void because they’re looking at the bad parts!
Since earthly life is the only thing we know we have, I think it is indeed at the top of the scale. If we were sure about anything else, the whole topic would be settled.
I realize that it’s common among those who advocate for a particular god to think that repetition of an idea makes it true, but it doesn’t. Merely repeating your mantra that no one would choose x over y doesn’t make it so. Of course, you can then modify your stance to the no true Scotsman fallacy if you wish, but your point doesn’t somehow gain power by doing so.
Anyway, to iterate: such a concept doesn’t argue against a god; merely it argues against your god. We are all atheists about, well, every other religion out there. True atheists only take it one god further. You disbelieve in thousands of gods man has created throughout time immemorial. What suddenly imbues your god with a greater part of existence than all the other gods you yourself don’t believe in? In short, nothing objectively does; only your belief in it him/it/they is different. This is woefully inadequate.
Emotionally blackmailing people to accept him else be punished for all time irrespective of the pain and suffering we deal with in the here and now doesn’t counsel one to accept your god. It’s a remarkable coincidence that the Abrahamic god isn’t powerful enough, righteous enough, wise enough, cogent enough to write a book that all of his subjects must agree upon. If he’s oh so powerful, why is it that he has spawned three religions, all of whom are at war with the other two? It doesn’t add up.
Earthly examples of suffering may not be at the top of the suffering scale, but so what? They’re certainly sufficient to disprove an omnimax God.
I’m also completely lost why you’re arguing that even greater suffering than we see here is some kind of defense. Greater suffering would just make the disproof stronger.
In a discussion about the Easter Bunny, to discuss what his properties are, one needn’t assume that he exists, just what his nature would be like if he existed. I think you are stuck in some kind of Aristotelian logic, remaining forever ignorant of Boolean logic.
Sure. I was just showing in a simple form the proof no omnibenevolent god exists. I can also prove that God cannot be both omnipotent and omniscient in any reasonable senses of those words. That doesn’t rule out most gods in our past. As I pointed out above, there is Biblical evidence both for and against a tri-omni god. It seems pretty clear that the roots of our god were in a standard tribal god who was just very powerful and immortal. God has accreted so many new features that he became self contradictory - kind of like feature creep in software.
Ah, so now we throw brainwashing in with the other evils of God.
From your own OP, and the bolding is even yours. And you’ve been handwaving “Earthly suffering” away as unimportant all through this thread. Which realistically means you are handwaving away all suffering.
The relevance is that it devalues your whole Pascal’s Wager. Your entire argument assumes that God is honest and will reward your grovelling and suffering instead of torturing you anyway. Monsters aren’t trustworthy. Trusting that a sadistic egomaniac will reward us for being tortured is extremely foolish.
What happened ? I must have missed that one ( and Google give back nothing ).
That’s hogwash. I can come up with far worse ways of suffering than what we have here on Earth. But so what? That there’s some worse kind of suffering available, doesn’t somehow make anyone’s actual suffering seem any better. Phew, thank god they only drove nails under my fingernails. It hurts so much the less knowing they could have slowly, methodically starting lopping off bits of me from feet moving upwards. Now that would have been horrible. But it was only nails in my fingers, so it’s way cool now.
That there exists something more extreme in measure doesn’t somehow make an already extreme something suddenly moderate. Maybe it makes the something moderate by comparison, but not at all in an absolute sense.
When we cite Earthly examples, we do so only because they exist. They’re real. The same isn’t the case for hell or god’s ire and all that nonsense. Moreover, it’s completely fine to accept the premises of someone’s argument to argue against it. Otherwise, we have a round of assertion - counter-assertion. That isn’t a debate; that’s a bitchfest.
Define God.
In any case, many atheists point to suffering to show that there is no God worthy of our worship. But it is very hard to argue against a god when your definition of him is so amorphous.
God: n. See also: ad hoc.
Are you suggesting I have to agree with a particular position to argue against it?
I may not believe in god, but I believe that others do. What should logically prohibit me from asking them questions about their belief?
Given that omnibenevolence results in a minimum of pain and suffering, if this is contradicted by the world then it doesn’t matter what ways and reasons God is using. He still isn’t omnibenevolent. We can easily show many incremental cases where suffering is not minimized, after all.
Actually, I think he’s unfamiliar with reductio ad absurdum. He hasn’t grasped that you can disprove something by first assuming it exists and then showing a logical contradiction. He seems to be thinking that with that first step, assuming it exists, that this somehow invalidates the argument.
Hey straggler, here’s a tangent. You can easily prove that there are an infinite number of prime numbers, first by assuming that there are a finite number of them, then doing some operations with the largest prime (if there are finitely many, there has to be a largest one), and getting to a logical contradiction, showing that your premise is false. This has stood for millenia as absolute proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers.
Do you accept this as proof?
I think he’s largely unaware of how logic works in any instance. But he seems to, as I implied, have a root misunderstanding of logical necessity. For instance, he’s arguing in the way that people did from the time of Aristotle to Boole, in that we can only apply logic to extant things. With Boolean logic, we had a more formalized way to speak logically about imaginary things. So, in Aristotelian logic, we couldn’t argue about a Unicorn because they aren’t real. In Boolean logic, we can still argue logically about it because of what it must be like if it existed in the first case.
While imaginary, we can certainly agree about what qualities would be essential: horse-like, having a horn in the center of its head, some kind of magical abilities. These are things that it would necessarily require. If we meet some animal that has some of those qualities, but not others, we can then use that set of criteria to rule out it being a unicorn in the first instance.
He misses this point altogether.
I’m not quite sure I agree that your argument is an actual proof of infinite numbers, but it’s a good way to give yourself plausible belief such is the case. It’s like using a drawing to prove something. Drawings don’t prove mathematical things, but they do give a plausible reason to believe such is the case. The actual proofs have to be more rigorous. I digress though, for this conversation, it’s probably sufficient.
An odd post, considering you yourself have only responded to my post through responding to Kobal2.
CurtC did give a (vastly simplified) version of the proof, for any given prime number, it is always possible to generate at least one larger prime, which is another way of saying that the number of primes is infinite. I’ll stretch it out a little.
Imagine that the only primes you know are 2, 3, 5, 7. You believe that 7is the largest prime number. This can be disproved by multiplying the numbers I listed, and and then adding one. In this case, you get (2357)+1, which is 211. The existence of that number proves that 7 cannot be the largest prime, because it cannot be divisible by 2, 3, 5, or 7. Thus 211 is either prime or the product of two (or more) primes larger than other than 2, 3, 5, & 7. This can be repeated no matter how many primes you are working with.
ETA: (This is not a mechanism for finding all possible primes, by the way. Anybody who knows how to do this, please forward that to me so that I may steal the method and [del]become the world’s master cryptographer[/del] win a Nobel.)
Paradise could be achieved. God need not act any more forcefully than our government, and you’d hardly call the existent of government to be an unforgivable attack on free will. Like previous posters have said, god could have created the world with enlightened souls already deep in the learned truth and morality he is trying to inefficiently teach us through life. That he doesnt speaks to a severe flaw in how god is commonly understood
And besides, I think if given the choice, most people would choose god cleaning up this mess than let suffering continue on
What you’re talking about is a method of exhaustion, which in this case can’t be a proof. Though someone might be able to now always find a larger prime doesn’t mean that such will always be the case. There might be some stopping point. There might not be. But using this method of exhaustion is inadequate because such a method requires that you actually account for all possible numbers. If there is an infinite number of them, then you can never do so. But suppose that there isn’t an infinite number of them; rather, just a really, really, really big number of them. The number might be so large that no one can count that high within his lifetime. In any event, the inability of someone to do something isn’t a valid argument that it can’t be done.
This is why in mathematics we require rigorous proofs. Of course, there is an infinity of numbers out there, and some of the ones near infinity are prime. But we don’t know this because we’ve counted all the way up there.
There isn’t a Nobel Prize in mathematics. That would be the Fields Medal. However, the proof exists and is easily found. Euclid actually wrote a proof out for this some 2,300 years ago.