True, but given the uncertainty around the whole thing, if we don’t have an omnimax god then the exact extent and type of their abilities would likely be considerably debated upon. A non-omnimax god very much more leaves open to countless justifications for specific acts being not the same as similar ones, or particular powers being avaliable in some cases but not in others. It’s considerably simpler when it comes to an omnimax god; the whole issue of “Could they do that?” is avoided, for the most part.
Why wait? He has the power to enable us to see the bigger picture without all that bother. A metaphorical snap of the fingers, and presto, success of perspective. God doesn’t need to wait.
If it’s “not limited in any way”, it’s randomness and sociopathy.
First, the instant one person harms or interferes another that argument is invalidated. If “free will” ( whatever that is ) is so overwhelmingly important then it’s just as bad for another person to violate it as it is for God to.
Second, that has no relevance to suffering caused by nature at all.
Third, we are badly designed, physically and mentally; something that IS NOT our fault. Something that if we are God’s creations is HIS fault. If we make bad or unethical judgements because of our human flaws and limitations, those are God’s fault for building those flaws and limitations into us.
The God you describe is not benevolent, but uncaring at best. If our suffering is meaningless to God, then he is not even remotely benevolent to us.
And frankly, anyone who thinks in terms of that “bigger picture” is likely to be tossed into prison when they attack someone. Why would any non-sociopath want to become like the God you describe ?
I am not saying suffering is fundamental to personhood. Quite the opposite. I am saying that there is no such thing as suffering. That shit just happens and that it is an unavoidable consequence of living in a physical world. Leaves shade each other, pianos fall on people.
As you said yourself earlier, suffering is a mental state.
Ok, but whose needs? You plant your garden while I wax my car. You then want rain to make it grow while I don’t want it to ruin my work. Who will a god please?
Could you have rain to water the plants and let the kids splash in poodles without hurricanes and mud to mess the car of a sunday driver?
Just as pain is an extension of touch, natural disasters are an extension of a natural world. Touch goes from caress to hammer on the testicles. Rain goes from rainbow making drizzles to devastating flash floods.
And even caresses and rainbow making drizzles are undesirable to some. This is my main point against a classically benevolent god. That we all want different things so it is impossible for a god to cater to us all.
A true omnimax god wouldn’t need to metaphorically snap his fingers to fix something. Fixing stuff is for imperfect people who try and err. The original creation should have been perfect from the beginning. But yes, I see what you are saying.
No one has ever satisfactorily explained to me why free will requires the ability or the inclination to perform great evil. Presumably, since God is supposed to be all-good, he is not inclined to choose evil (and perhaps not even capable of choosing evil). Yet presumably God is still free. So the theist must concede that free will doesn’t require that one ever desires to do evil (or else concede that God is unfree).
Well, give me omnipotence and I’ll see if I can design a world that has one without the other. Theists must (and usually fail to) take seriously what omnipotence means: God can do anything that is logically consistent. If a world with physical laws that produce puddles but no hurricanes is logically consistent, then it is within the scope of an omniscient being to produce such a world. (Or if not puddles, then something else pleasure-producing for children.)
Yes?
But that world is in the first place a creation of a god (assuming we’re saying it is). By the same logic, we don’t have hurricanes daily, constant rain and flooding, tsunamis hitting every coast on a weekly basis. Earth could most certainly have been made to be a lot more unpleasant and disaster-full than we experience it; why can’t it be better?
Now, this is a good point; what some people consider suffering, other’s don’t. I quite like even a heavy rain as far as weather goes, but i’m in the minority there. When the god’s taking people’s desires into account, whose does it pick? Assuming personal preferences are a result of life and not creation (which seems fair to me), actually selecting what we do and don’t like would be a significant infringment of free will. Logically it seems the god should choose to do whatever results in the least suffering (can you tell i’m a utilitarian? ;)), which means in some cases that yes, suffering is an unfortunate necessity - i’d have to go without my enjoyment of heavy rain.
However, the problem with this argument is that I tend to think it’s a very, very small minority who enjoy the suffering associated with natural disasters. When the god in question has to decide between helping those who dislike an earthquake under their feet, and those who enjoy it, I really have to think there’s going to be more in that former group. It can’t cater to us all, so it should counter to the most, and I don’t think under that that natural disasters are acceptable.
True.
I mean omnipotent, not omniscient. It’s the middle of the day, and I’m caffeinated. I have no excuse.
Suffering is relative.
A small child suffers greatly after some playground trauma or another but to us it’s nothing. A high school girl suffers the worst experience she can imagine due to unavoidable high school drama but to an adult it’s irrelavant and will pass.
That all of life is suffering is a given, that a benevolent God tolerating suffering is an oxymoron is not. To me asking why God allows pain and suffering is akin to asking why a mother sends her son to the sand box knowing there could be someone there to bully him or asking why a father sends his daughter to high school knowing there may be other vicious little girls waiting to crush her emotionally.
Why do we allow each other to suffer? Do we sometimes make judgement calls about what levels of unpleasantness we regard as “Inconvenient” and what others merit the title of “Suffering”? There are universal pains that are unavoidable; my parents died, everyone’s parents are going to die eventually, there is sickness, there is heart break, there are atrocities that humans commit to one another that are unspeakable. Why do we allow this? Are we truly unable to stop it ourselves? Certainly an omnipotent God has the power to stop it, why doesn’t He?
In short, why should He? If suffering occurs on a physical level then what will any of it matter when the physical form falls away? If suffering occurs on a spiritual level then how can we quantify it without first quantifying spirituality? And, even if we could somehow identify true spiritual suffering and not just a deep physical suffering, as physical creatures confined to this level of reality what makes us think we would be qualified to do anything about it? At that point how do we know God*** isn’t ***doing something about it and we are simply unaware because we only know the reality of our physical world?
That’s just my thought on it anyway.
Just because it’s a mental state doesn’t mean that it isn’t real.
Both.
Again, yes. A reasonably powerful, much less omnipotent God could give us each our own subjective paradise.
You are also trivializing the whole issue by comparing trivial irritations to the kind of mind wrecking agony that some people go through. You are ALSO ignoring the fact that, for example, a doctor can relieve an awful lot of suffering, without any silly agonizing over how he’s violating people’s free will. You are basically arguing for the superiority of humans over God.
Then eliminate or control the natural world; something a god should be able to do. Make it impossible for anyone to harm another.
Again, that’s trivializing the issue. If I stood by and watched a child burn to death, with a fire extinguisher at hand, would you accept my claim that I was respecting the child’s free will to burn ? Or would you think I was a monster ? That’s the kind of monster you are calling God. You are solving the “Problem of Evil” by defining God AS evil, or at least a sociopath. Which works from a logical perspective, but begs the question of why you don’t just label it the Devil instead.
But this is an argument against the very existence of suffering-based evil. If we accept it, it also means that we have no reason not to commit evil ourselves - if suffering occurs on a physical level, then we’re perfectly free to go about causing suffering. If we aren’t qualified to understand the problem, then we aren’t qualified to understand the problem across the board, and no kind of attempt at any moral position is valid. And the argument that God might be doing something about it “behind the scenes” also allows for an excuse for any evil we might elect to commit - God might well be solving all the problems we create.
You’ve basically managed to explain away not only reasons for God to do good but for everyone to do good.
You are confusing suffering being relative, with people not caring because it isn’t happening to them.
Garbage; that life is suffering is NOT a given, and you also are trivializing the issue. Would you think it so trivial if the father raped his little girl, crushed her kneecaps, and then peeled her skin off ? People, not to mention animals undergo suffering as bad or worse than that due to natural problems like genetic defects. Which, if you think God made us means that God is doing that to us, torturing his children.
And a god could easily make a world without suffering.
Because suffering is suffering regardless of any nonsense about the “physical form falling away”. And I’m sure that a soul driven to madness by the torment it suffered in life will find ***good care ***at the hands of the very god that stood by and let it be driven mad. :rolleyes:
Assuming you are right about God’s attitude, what makes you think that any afterlife would be anything other than an endless Hell at his hands ? Why would he suddenly develop compassion ?
What makes you think that "spiritual suffering is any deeper, or even a different thing than physical suffering ? And we know that God isn’t doing anything just by looking around.
It’s not ‘nothing’ or ‘irrelevant’ if it’s your kid and you love them. If your kid gets beaten up on the playground or treated like shit by a boyfriend or duplicitious friend, then it makes you mad, and you grieve for your kid. To say that it is ‘nothing’ or ‘irrelevant’ to God when someone dies in pain is to say that God doesn’t love us.
It is fundamentally unsound to draw analogies between the decisions made by a parent, who faces a world not of his or her own making, and the decisions made by God who gets to decide what the world is going to be like in the first place. The parent doesn’t get to decide whether there are bullies on the playground, or asshole boyfriends at his daughter’s school. If it were up to him, there wouldn’t be, but there are, so the parent either locks the child up forever (not feasible) or risks the child in the world. God isn’t faced with that dilemma: God can make the world any way that is logically consistent and consistent with God’s benevolence. So God can, if he chooses, make the world without dangers and evils, and make human psychology so that we don’t need dangers and evils to learn any important lessons (or whatever your particular soul-building theodicy might be). Again, atheists are asking you to take seriously (a) God’s absolute, complete, and unabridged omnipotence; and (b) God’s ultimate control over the very structure and physical laws governing the world. If you do that, these pat answers to the POE are made a lot less plausible.
This would be true if suffering was desirable (and in many ways this is true to those for whom suffering is desirable) however you are standing on the assumption that a physical being is going to want suffering simply because there is no reason not to want it.
This is a fallacy, to assume that someone does want something simply because there is no reason not to want it.
I can only fully understand my suffering; you can only fully understand your suffering. There may be a common ground wherein we may empathize with each other but we can only fully understand our own feelings. I think reason plays out that rational people don’t go about intentionally causing suffering simply because they have no desire for others to cause suffering within themselves. I’m not going to hurt someone because I don’t want them to hurt me back.
This does stand on the assumption of retribution being human nature and perhaps it is, but there is also no reason to believe retribution, if it is human nature, is not ambivalent. If I do bad things to others, others may do bad things to me; if I do good things to others, others may do good things to me. It may be that I do good things and some others do bad things to me but my goal is to let my integrity overshadow my basal need for retribution. Why should I let even my enemy suffer?
Der Trihs & Sophistry and Illusion -
I wasn’t saying that the suffering is irrelivant because it’s not happening to you, I’m saying that with maturity and experience one realizes that the world ending pains of the past are not necessarily the same in the present. My analogy of development from the playground to the locker room and into adulthood presumes one person passing through these stages, not one person as viewed by a different person. Does your first heart break feel as devistating today as it did back then?
There are people who commit evil by causing others to suffer but are these people the rule or the exception?
How do we know that the point of view of God watching babies getting raped is not the same as the point of view of a parent watching his child being teased on the playground? Is the rational answer to teach the child how to cope with the teasing, how to not let the words hurt, how to defend themselves physically to prevent their and their enemy’s physical suffering if the situation arises? Or is the rational answer to smash the bully’s head in with a bat?
Would the rational answer for God be to teach us coping skills, through experience and wisdom? Or is the the rational answer for God to smite the baby rapist?
We can only understand ourselves, we can only change ourselves. Even if we smash the bully’s face with a bat there is no guarantee that he won’t be back in two weeks doing the same thing.
Therefore suffering is relative to the observer and only relavent to the afflicted.
ETA: My extreme analogy is just to make a point, I also acknowlege the need to protect and defend those who cannot protect and defend themselves. Perhaps a baby rapist was a little too extreme as I don’t expect a baby to run away or fight off an attacker, but the gist of my point is the same no matter what the atrocity.
The rational answer is for God not to create baby rapists (or hurricanes or smallpox or…) in the first place.
As I argued above, you cannot compare (a) a parent, making decisions about what to do in a world not of his or her making and (b) God, making decisions about what kind of world to make in the first place. The parent has to deal with the bully and the disease, because they exist, and the parent can’t change that. God has the power not to create them in the first place. Even if the suffering of humans is fairly minor to God, if it serves no good purpose (or if the purpose could be served without causing suffering) then the suffering is *by definition *gratuitous.
I’m afraid i’m having a bit of trouble understanding what you mean here. I’m not saying that suffering is desirable. I think you mean that I am saying that *to cause suffering *is desirable, but i’m not entirely sure.
If that’s the case, I think that there are some people for whom causing suffering is desirable, yes. From some people who actually enjoy it just in general to at the other end all of us - we’re pretty much guaranteed to want someone to suffer at some point in our lives. However, the desire to cause suffering in and of itself is not the biggest problem, but rather the desire for things where suffering is a side-effect. Take slavery - a person owning slaves may not do so specifically or solely because they enjoy the suffering of their slaves, but because it means they don’t have to pay workers or provide them with benefits of any kind. A thief may steal not out of a desire to cause suffering in person stolen from, but out of a desire to own the stolen object.
But generally when people cause suffering for others it is because it also provides a benefit for them, causing less suffering for themselves. Steal some money, and you no longer have to suffer from a lack of cash flow. It’s simply trading one form of possible lack of suffering for another.
And why should God let anyone suffer?
The rational answer would be to *first *stop the bullying. And if I were an omnipotent parent, that would be trivial.
By owning slaves one would benefit from low cost labor (there is still some upkeep to the slaves) so there would be a benefit driving the initiave, but after thinking the whole thing out and looking at the end result, one persons benefit comes at the cost of another person’s suffering. As I do not have the right to spend another person’s suffering or to cause it indirectly by my actions to benefit then I would not have the right to own a slave.
The same could be said about theivery, if my benefit comes at the expense of another’s suffering then my choice is not to benefit or not, it is do I cause another to suffer or not. If I choose not to cause another person to suffer then I must find a different way to receive the desired benefit.
The end result of my thought is, what may be suffering to us may well be looked upon as whining and crying about a tempest in a teapot to God. That doesn’t mean God doesn’t care, and it doesn’t mean our suffering isn’t real, it simply means that whatever the suffering we feel is, it will pass.
The simple end point of this line of reasoning is this;
Either human suffering is important, or effecting, or intense, or whatever word is most appropriate to mark a situation that should be avoided, should not be created, in which case we, and an omnimax god, are morally obliged to avoid it;
Or it is not important, does not need to be avoided, does not matter whether it is created or not, in which case an omnimax god, and we, have no moral obligations to avoid it.
It is that simple. You cannot at the same time claim that suffering doesn’t matter, and that it does. That a deciding being need take suffering into account in moral terms, and that another need not. If a god doesn’t need to care about it, we don’t. If we do, then so does he.