No, it wouldn’t. If the “zero” is set high enough, then there will be nothing unpleasant to be felt as suffering. Or, you can simply make them incapable of suffering at all; they would feel negative stimuli, but treat it merely as data, and not suffer from it.
No, it doesn’t. You are improving your own experience of it at the expense of others. My idea of comfort could include freshly killed whale blubber in a sauce of only perfect tomatoes. And screw the whales, those who protect them, the people that will go hungry while hectares of land are wasted growing my perfect tomatoes and the people who slave harvesting them. Screw the whole world with the jet fumes to bring those fresh to me. That is not a better world. It is just a better life for me at the cost of great suffering for everybody else.
Evolution is not a mean to an end. It is just the natural state of things. Atoms bounce around. That makes things change and evolve. And there is no end state you reach and stop. It keeps going. Even on a computer simulation with no underlying physics to restrain them, our own actions change the world and drive evolution.
No. I am not calling it benevolent. I openly admitted that I didn’t need this god to be benevolent and said I was ok with you calling it the devil. I just want this god to be plausible. It he is a jerk of a god, or impersonal, or unlikable, or not worthy of worship, then that’s what it is. I am not looking for a god to worship or sell to others. I am just exploring the plausibility of there being an idea of god that made sense to a logical mind.
Your definition of benevolence, though, is as far from the norm as the one you are wrongfully ascribing to me. You want a god that caters to immediate whims against all logic. A god that when I want rain for my garden and you want sun for your car wax gives both even if that doesn’t make any sense.
Dude. Whale meat doesn’t need to come from whales. God can poof meat into existence. Which destroys your point here.
Again, you are grossly underestimating the options available to an omnipotent God.
Evolution is not required. My game of Simcity doesn’t evolve, and if there is no shortage, there will not be genetic selection, because there will be no selection pressure of any kind. It won’t be evolution, it’ll just be multiplication. (Assuming God elected to make us reproduce at all.)
God can make it rain on the garden and not the car. You could have your own little cloud that just followed you around, if necessary.
Again, I don’t think you’re really grasping what “omnipotent” does to this issue.
Well, that’s the whole point of the idea of souls in many religions, I guess. By somehow making life trascend the natural, all the mortal suffering is turned into a “game” or learning experience, or whathaveyou.
Which is fine, by the way. It is an idea that I can buy. It is just beyond the scope of the current going of this discussion (and very much in the line of my own OP, way back when). I do agree that a “soul” that shares some of god’s divinity and can at some point see beyond the sphere of the natural and its mortal existence would make nothing of any level of mortal suffering.
This, I believe is also what many religions propose. That by reaching heaven or nirvana or whatever higher state, you are recompensed by your suffering. This leaves many other questions, of course: Is this suffering necessary to reach that higher state or reward? If it is rendered pointless by the reward, then why bother? If it is important to reach it (and you can fail to reach that state, at all or in a more timely manner) then it is real suffering and we just pushed the wrinkle.
I might. Never understimate the ability of mortals to underestimate gods. I do think that it is also possible to overerstimate them, though. I think logic might be constant and universal and that god should be logical. This should prevent a god from allowing two mututally exclusive outcomes come to pass at the same time, for example.
Oh, please. It’s far better than the state of nature we started out with. For us, at least; and as for nature, not being gods we can’t do everything.
In OUR universe, the real universe that has no god. In our universe life had to build itself, which means evolution. In an artificial universe there is no such requirement.
Only if the simulation is set up that way.
Your god isn’t even close to plausible. It makes little logical sense, has no evidence for it’s existence, ignores various physical laws, and isn’t required to explain anything. It is convieniently contradictory; its omni, omni, omni all the time until it comes time to explain why it hasn’t done something, then it’s less capable than we are.
It doesn’t even have a reason to create a universe; if it’s so impossibly omniscient than it gains nothing by doing so. It already contains a complete and perfect duplicate of the universe in it’s own mind, and always has in its eternal and uncreated existence.
What happens when I want to be a piss off and want it to rain in your car? Or even without ill intentions, what happens when I want my little cloud following me and you and I want to go to the movies in your car? What happens when we want to play ping-pong and flip a coin to see who goes first?
ETA: Not to mention that the little cloud would violate all laws of physic. Could there be laws of physics that allowed for it? I don’t know.
So you are talking about an unmitigated Nirvana. What if I want to suffer? I will either get it and then there is suffering or not get it and then I suffer because I cannot suffer (except that, oh wait)
You won’t; first because a properly designed being wouldn’t ever want such a thing. And second because you’d have no idea that suffering existed. Do you, right now want to yeegorth ?
Now now, let’s try to refocus on what matters. Of course it has no evidence and is not required to explain anything. That was a given from the get go. I would want my god to be entirely supernatural so there is no grasping it from here. Don’t fight the hypotethical.
It is not ignoring ANY physical laws. Quite the opposite, I am asking it to be completely subject to physical law and to never ever cheat and break them.
I am not sure where you see the contradictions. It is not that it is less capable than we are. It is just that it won’t cheat on its own rules. And I am not saying it is omni omni omni. I have carefullt set limits on its omniance restricting it to be logical and coherent.
As for its reasons to do anything. They are well out of the realm of this discussion. Maybe there is no creation and our reality is just the mind of god. It wouldn’t matter. It still is as it is.
I think you are slipping to habit from your discussions from theists. Remember I call myself an atheist and I am just trying to explore if the idea of a god that met my requirements is logically plausible, even if that meant it would be a shit of a god. Please don’t fall back to your idea of a Judeo-Christian God or whatever model is in your mind, and remember that I am not shooting for a likable god.
I think we already established my idea of a god to be an uncaring god. So the question now is, is an uncaring god logically plausible? and as an aside from our discussion so far, I have the tentative solution of suffering existing because even if that makes him uncaring, a logical god could not avoid it as long as there are many individuals free to want conflicting things.
Don’t mind if I do. Do you have chocolate?
Well, there’s a big difference between a game and a learning experience. In a game, humans really suffer, but God (and any souls that are involved) just doesn’t give a crap about the suffering of humans; they’re neutral or amused by the trials of them, the way that we are neutral or amused by the suffering of characters in movies. Many of the things we watch with excitement would be horrible if they happened to real people.
Learning experiences, on the other hand, are worthless if they do not in fact effect the real entity in question. So, for a soul to learn something, the soul would have to suffer - which an omnipotent God would never allow to happen if he gave a crap about souls. Instead of that, he would just implant the knowledge directly and painlessly or create us with the knowledge pre-installed.
So the ‘learning experience’ explanations floated by religions doesn’t pass muster. And I know of no mainline religion who claims that life is a game and that we are suffering for the amusement of the heavens - not since the greeks and romans, anyway.
Meaning that the souls, and God, care nothing about us mere mortals. We are but bugs for them to pull the arms and legs off of while laughing maniacally I have no problem with this theory…but could not classify such a God as benevolent from a human perspective.
I can answer all those questions, presuming an omnipotent god. They are, respectively, “obviously not”, “it was pointless regardless of the reward”, and “If you can fail to reach that state it’s because God is malicious - and all suffering is real. The only question is whether God gives a crap about the entity who is suffering needlessly”.
Who here is proposing a mutually exclusive outcome? Absent those, it is impossible to overestimate an omnipotent god.
An omnipotent God can give you the experience of being rained on, or of it raining on others, while sparing them the experience of undesired rain. realith need not be consistently objective, after all.
Alternatively, God could have just not made you into a malicious dude with the desire to be a piss-off. If he manages not to be one, then you don’t need to be one. Similarly God could have created everyone to be mature enough not to be bothered in the slightest by going second.
The laws of physics are irrelevent to an omnipotent God.
Omniscience breaks physical laws.
You have indeed referred to it as an omnimax god. And you’ve placed little if any limit on it’s omniscience that I recall.
Considering that this thread is about the “Problem of Evil” that’s hardly true. And you’ve been talking quite a lot about why God would or would not do things a particular way.
No god is logically plausible. It’s a fundamentally foolish idea with no basis but myth.
And you started out referring to the god you wanted to postulate as benevolent. And the very “P.O.E.” this thread refers to only exists if you postulate a benevolent god ( benevolent in the normal sense, not your inverted one ). And your OP was full not of claims that God didn’t care, but of reasons why he shouldn’t.
Frankly, your definition of god’s abilities , morality and goals seem to shift as the argument for his “plausibility” demands it.
And as pointed out again and again, that’s simply not true.
Just out of curiosity and without wanting to hijack my own thread. Does anyone object to the idea of the world as it is under an omnipotent and omniscient god that is not benevolent but instead either careless or actively assholish?
The reason I ask is because that could really narrow the discussion a bit.
And yes, of course that would still be an unfalsifiable and unnecessary god. I just want to know if there is an objection to that idea.
(pardon me for not quoting, but quoting without the ability to select text is a real chore)
DT, how would omniscience violate physical laws? Considering that I specified that omniscience meant knowing all that there is to be known.
As someone said earlier, it doesn’t narrow the discussion, it kills it entirely. If god is not benevolent, by definition there is no Problem of Evil.
begbert, I don’t think you can have the experience of being rained on without being actually rained on and suffering if that is not what you wanted. I am having a weird sense of deja vu about this, we might have gone over this before.
How can you know what it is like losing a finger without the pain of the cut and the handicap of not having that finger thereafter? the want of drinking a beer you cannot because you are on antibiotics?
If you have ever had any form of accident, you know that no matter how many times you have read about it and seen it in video, it is not the same as having it happen to you. Even if you did, remembering it now is not the same as having felt it then.
Right off the top of my head, it violates the Uncertainty Principle, the observer effect, causality, and the speed of light.
Indeed, it is just that discussion has drifted from Evil to suffering, which I assume to be different things. There can be suffering without Evil, I think. At least without evil on the creation side of things. You could still argue that there must be Evil on the god side for there to be suffering on the creation side (to which I might agree after some discussion which would be mostly an agreement on the meaning of terms)
Ok, this could be good material for a future discussion, if you are game. I can see the Uncertainty Principle under some conditions that I have wanted to discuss for a while and haven’t had the chance. The others I am not seeing. Don’t mind if I dogear this page.
For your kid? Playing with a friend I can see competition, but losing to my kids sometimes gave me pleasure in that they were smart enough to play well.
You can be wired to want to win without suffering if you don’t. That’s like the Jamaican bobsled team. I doubt they suffered from not winning the gold medal, but instead were happy at their success in competing.
Striving to do your best might make you disappointed if you fail, but that’s a lot different. If you are playing a new video game you are going to die a lot while you get the hang of it, but I think that makes most people strive to master it, and doesn’t cause anything like suffering. We have that striving wired in, and eliminating suffering won’t make it go away.