There’s no design involved at all. The people God creates can still have total free will. It’s not a question of limiting them, it’s just about using his omniscience. Let’s change the chronology for a second. We know that Hitler was evil. The fact that we know that has no effct at all on his free will. God knew it before Hitler was born. the fact that God knew that before Hitler was born has no effect on his free will. God could have chosen to to let Hitler be born. No free will is compromised and much suffering is avoided.
I’ve seen this called the “argument from depravity.” Humans can’t possibly choose good because they’re born evil. Well, that’s a particular religious belief I don’t subscribe to at all, for one. It completely invalidates the idea that free will exiats at all for another (If it’s impossible for people to always choose good then they aren’t really free) and it places an annecessarily high standard for another. The choices for who is created need not be limited to people who ONLY choose good at every turn, but to those who will NOT choose to inflict great suffering on others.
Anyway, if it’s possible for even one person to always choose good (and if that’s not possible then free will doesn’t exist) then it’s possible for an infinite number of people to do it and for God to create only those people.
I can agree this is not a valid reason to not believe in God, but I see it as something that could drive one to not believe in God, perhaps where they first begin to question their faith. This is particularly likely if the people that are hurting you are the same people introducing you to God.
Learn that God is at best uncaring. Besides; if God made/controls the universe, every bad thing that happens is his fault. If I shoot someone, I can’t say “But Your Honor, I wasn’t actually holding the bullet when it killed that guy; it was the bullet’s fault !”
Garbage. People die horribly and learn nothing. Children are born and live short, pain filled lives; they learn nothing but pain. No “greater purpose” can justify this; and God’s opinion doesn’t count. He isn’t the one doing the suffering.
Our “purpose” is whatever we choose it to be. I’m sure most would choose not suffering horribly as one of those purposes.
Like I said, we choose our own purpose; no God or gods has the right to torture us into being his tools.
Another argument for the evil of religion; it feeds on the weakest.
Your arguement also assumes that being religious is inherently good; so much so that it justifies any amount of evil. That’s an idea I find sickening. The God you describe is an evil God; one who should be killed, not followed.
Well, they are wrong. In other words, prove it -actual evidence of God would be spammed out 24 hours a day over the media. Not to mention, when did philosophy prove anything real ?
Eternal life, but only for grovellers ( anyone else would hate him and reject him, once they found out why they had suffered ) ? That’s not much of a purpose; not to mention he could just give eternal life right now and stop with the sick games.
Can’t you see how fundamentally incoherent what you are saying is?
Let’s say that Mother Teresa has free will and is a good person ™. A strech, I know, but bear with me. Either there is something intrinsically good about her that makes her this way, or their isn’t. If there isn’t, then there’s no point in holding her to account for her actions. If there is, then why not create people who have this intrinsic quality in the first place?
The problem comes when you talk about “choose.” What the hell are you talking about? What is going on when someone chooses one thing or another, good over evil? I think even just asking that question pretty much blows your particular theological cushion fort to pieces. Think about it.
Does God have free will? God is supposedly always good. Is God a robot?
That does not address the question at hand, though. The question isn’t whether God can create people who sometimes do good, or even those like Mother Teresa who frequently do good. DtC’s claim is that God should have created human beings with free will who will ONLY choose to do what is good. I see no evidence that such people exist, or that they can exist.
Indeed, I maintain that–even if this were possible–that would, for all practical purposes, be the same as creating individuals who are *designed * to only do good. It would be like creating trillions of mountains with the intent of picking out one that bears the shape of Mount Rushmore. Did you “design” it to have that shape? Not in the sense of having specifically crafted it into that shape, but for all practical purposes, it amounts to a deliberate design.
The question isn’t whether *any * being can be good and have free will. An omnibenevolent God would certainly be an example of such. The question is whether a *human * being–one that is not omnibenevolent–can have free will and never fail to choose the right thing. Again, I see no reason to accept that claim, and billions of examples that suggest otherwise.
The problem with that is that if that is true then God is a tyrant who feels that the end justifies the means. None of the evil dictators we think of considered themselves evil, they just thought the end justified the means. Hitler murdered and tortured millions because he wanted a perfect unified Germany. Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao wanted societies of equality where there was no exploitation. God is no different in that regards if he feels that horror is acceptable if it leads to a greater good. None of the evil dictators in human history did what they did in the hopes of making society worse.
I would venture that 99.9% of humans do not feel that the end justifies the means if they were forced to actually face the consequences of their actions and see what their actions did to other people. Either the means aren’t worth the level of suffering necessary to get there or other methods of getting there should be looked at. God is either evil, lazy or inept if this is the case.
Another problem with the suffering question is why is suffering so intense? Assume that the maximum amount of suffering and pain a person could experience was only 1/4th as intense as it is now so that even if you did end up in a concentration camp or watch your kids get sexually assaulted the pain wouldn’t be much worse than a mild social rebuke and it wouldn’t be somethign that followed you for the rest of your life. Doing that would still allow people to maintain the integrity of their social, personal and biological beings (which is all suffering does, it maintains the integrity of our beings by preventing certain behaviors) without severe pain.
Another problem is that free will doesn’t exist with suffering or to a lesser degree happiness. You mostly cannot go do something that will cause you great suffering. People the world over are addicted to one thing or another and cannot control their behavior. For some people suffering is so intense that they take their own lives. The idea of free will is the opposite of intense suffering as suffering robs people of free will. Conscience drives us not to hurt others and our own suffering and the suffering of those we care about drives us not to act certain ways or try to prevent certain things from happening to us.
I find it very interesting that it’s not uncommon to hear people on this forum say that free will is a myth. It really is for another discussion but I do not understand why you would care about anything then. If we are a)robots just responding to input or what I would think you would consider more likely b) just randomly responding then why even bother to care once you know that knowledge? We do not make any choices then. Obviously you don’t know for sure but still.
My viewpoint might be slightly different than Christianity’s viewpoint, but who is to say that all people will not eventually see God? I consider us all to be evil so God creating only “good” people does not even make sense. With choice none of us are “good”. Not that it’s my personal opinion, but yet another possible explanation could be reincarnation until you finally see God. These are just two reasons off the top of my head that go against your proposed theory.
As far as people having moral obligations. First off, it is incredibly apparent that we do not have an obligation to do anything. We have a choice to do nothing. A “moral obligation” is just something we made up and while it always should be followed, it apparently is not. (On an extreme side note, how can we have an obligation to do anything if dont have a choice?). Also, once again, if God were to meddle in our affairs anytime a bad thing happened, we would be robots. Or at the very least we would not know the difference between bad and good since God would not allow “bad” to happen.
Look, we can choose to disagree and that’s perfectly fine with me. Overall the only thing I am really concerned about is your character and whether it improves society. I have no way of knowing any of this based on some message forum.
I simply find it amazing that people still believe that a religion that 3 out of 4 people believe in that has lasted for over 2000 years is illogical. I can assure you, there is nothing wrong with the logic. At all. And what I am trying to get at is that these reasons are really ultimately just excuses. The only justifiable reason for believing or not believing is genuine belief. I constantly see people try and rationlize their reasons for not believing. I constantly try and see people rationalize their reasons for believing. You cannot rationalize it. Either you do not believe because you genuinely do not believe (and not enough evidence would be a big factor in this) or you do believe because you genuinely believe (and knowing Love would be a big factor). But trying to single-handedly show that there is anything wrong with the logic either shows you have an incredible ego, or you simple do not understand the logic behind it. If my brother hits me and I say that I dont really love him anymore, would any of you say that it’s true? Why is this any different than God existing or not existing?
This is where our disagreement starts. I have all the evidence I could ever want. I personally know the changes made in me from knowing Christ. When I read his words, they “penetrate even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” Noone has ever come close to having the intelligence that He has had. In less than a year, our church alone has given out over 100,000 meals for thanksgiving, given hundreds of presents to kids whose parents are in prison who otherwise wouldnt have had presents, partnered with www.xxxchurch.com, built the largest AIDS hospice is South Africa, built a bigger church to hold 3000 people, have given $50,000 to hurricane katrina relief (going to $150,000), have given $150,000 to the Tsunami relief, and just closed on the citylink center which will feed less fortunate people in the Cincinnati area. And this is just a secondary goal. The main goal is to come to know Christ. Everything else follows naturally. Really, all this makes no sense to those who are about the physical. Anything spiritual seems like nonsense. It’s no wonder since giving up things in our lives is not something any of us “want” to do. My life would be much easier to not believe and all these reasons are not ultimate reasons why I believe. The ultimate reason I believe is because I genuinely believe.
For the love of whatever you value, please use your brain. God can do whatever he wants. Once again, to do what you are proposing, we would have to be robots. Therefore, if he did what you are proposing, we would not be talking right now. We get that you are looking for a way to show that belief is irrational, but you will not find such an argument. You say that God should show us evidence. If he showed us this tell-all evidence then there would be no purpose to life. The perfect way to get around discrimination is by faith. Everyone has an equal opportunity to die to our so called crosses. Of coarse this is not easy for anyone.
Der Trihs, if you would use even a hint of logic in your discussions on religion it would be much easier to have conversations with you. Unfortunately you know that discussions on religion are not as easily proveable as scientific fact so you have no problem spreading slander to further your points. If at any time you would start using logic, I am sure that you can actually get people to understand your viewpoint. However, your completely illogical assumptions discredit your character more than they help prove your point. So please, do us a favor, let go of all this bullshit you hold against religion, and start being rational. I would love to understand where you are coming from but I am afraid your emotions are clouding your judgments.
If I eventually see God, then I’ll eventually believe he exists. Until then, I won’t.
What do you mean when you say we’re all “evil?” Are we born that way? If we’re born that way, it’s not our fault, so how can it be said that we have free will. The Christian concept of Original Sin is incompatible with free will.
I was talking about “moral obligations” as formulated in religious ethos. For those (like me) who have no religious ethos, then I agree, moral obligations are completely self-imposed and ultimately inconsequential.
Two things: first, if I stop my six year old from trying to swing my six month old around by her heels, I am not interfering with my six year old’s free will, I’m just exercising my own. God has the same ability.
Second, God still has the ability to choose only to create people who he knows will (FREELY) choose the good, or at least, avoid choosing to do great evil. If he can make one Gandhi or Martin Luther King or Albert Schweitzer or Jesus of Nazareth then he can make a billion of them.
3 out of 4 people are Christians? Um…no…only about 1/3 of the world is Christian and that number is dropping. I would also add that there was once a time when the vast majority of the world believed that the sun and the moon were gods and they believed it for more than 2000 years, so a majority beliefe means nothing. That’s called an ad populum argument and it’s a logically fallacy.
I can assure you there’s plenty wrong with the logic.
I think this really only goes one way. Non-belief is a default that doesn’t have to be rationalized. It’s only positive believe which requires some sort of internal justification. I don’t know anybody who has to “rationalize” the fact that they don’t believe in elves or goblins and it’s the same way with gods. They either never acquired the belief or they came to a conclusion that the reasons for their previous belief were no longer convincing.
We all have this intrinsic good about us. It is only by choice that we decide to bring out the good in us. It is only by choice that we decide to die to our crosses. You do not seem to get the incredible brilliance of this. We all have an equal opportunity. Anyone at anytime can choose to give up their crosses. Just because we cannot judge those who do not give to society as much as someone who has had more chances, does not mean that God can’t.
First off I want to make perfectly clear that I do not have all the answers. If I were to ask you incredibly tough questions about how the universe came to be, I would expect you to do research on the answers or you would point me to an expert on the matter. My point being, please do not be illogical here and expect me to have all the right answers. It doesnt matter who you drill with hard questions, they will at one point make a mistake. Now after having said that, I do not know whether I beleive in being born of original sin. Rather I think I would go the other way and say that we are born perfect. It is by choice that we become imperfect. Take the billions upon billions of subtle little choices we make in life and factor in the odds of never once sinning and you have an almost statistical impossibility. Now of coarse that one time is possible, say as Christ did, but that is just not realistic for us.
Two problems with this for me.
We would have no concept of good and bad. We would not be able to learn from mistakes.
There would be no reason for faith. Faith is what allows life to be what it is. If God just acted in all our affairs, there would be no need for faith. We would simply look at the evidence and know. This erases the entire need for life.
I have big problems with this. I would not be here right now. That’s a big problem for me. Would I get lucky that God cut the line before me?, or would he cut the line after me and not give me a chance to live?
My apologies. I meant to stick “in the US” in there. Also, yes that was not good reasoning. Just because a certain amount of people believe in something does not make it true. Point noted.
This is where I want you to give me something that is wrong with the logic. Anything. I can assure you that you simply do not have a grasp on what I believe. I would like to get to the point with you where we agree that there is nothing wrong with the logic and that both believing and not believing take a propensity to believe.
Can we agree that, even if you do not understand exactly how things could work the way they do, that they could work? Meaning, the reasons you stated above are not justifiable reasons to disbelieve in God. They could be part of the reason, but not anywhere near the reason. That is the whole intention of this thread right there.
Now, I would argue that you could not simply create pain at 1/4 the level it is at now. That would directly affect all of our consequences and just lead to more sinning. Do you see what I am saying? All you would be doing is shifting the amount of sinning with the amount of pain. Why in the world would more sin be okay in Gods eyes?
If you get one thing, get this:
One thing is completely clear here. We are not arguing at all. Those who are giving possible reasons for why things could not work do not see other possible reasons for why they could work. All it takes is a propensity to believe each of those reasons. For example, if someone does not understand why God hates sin (which has about 30 other assumptions underneath it), then it makes more since to them how the amount of suffering should go down. Once you realize the 30 assumptions beneath why God hates sin, then you realize this is not a good explanation. At the root of most of these discussions, is what I would consider those who recognize the spirit and those who do not. If you do not know things that are bad, then you cannot base other assumptions on that. Likewise, if you do not know the spirit, then you cannot understand later assumptions on it. Therefore, the entire conversations we are having, boil down to a propensity to believe.
Firstly, just over 2000 years ago, nobody believed in Christianity. Were they all wrong?
Your entire Church used to believe the Earth was the centre of the Universe. Do you agree they were all wrong?
There is a thriving Christian belief that the World is 6000 years old. Do you agree?
Secondly, an older religion than Christianity (that also uses the Old Testament) states that Jesus is not the Messiah. Are they ‘illogical’? How do you know they are wrong?
Thirdly, when you claim 75% of the World believe in Christianity, which branch or sect do you mean?
Is Roman Catholicism correct about the Pope?
Are the Wee Frees right in their beliefs?
Is Fred Phelps a leader of the Church?
Did an Angel of the Lord appear to Joseph Smith?
Fourthly, what evidence do you have apart from a personal feeling?
Does prayer work?
If God commanded you to sacrifice your eldest child to Him, would you obey?
See what I did there? I declaimed the truth of my assertion without anything but personal experience and opinion. That’s exactly what you’re doing. So why is it legitimate for you to prove the existence of god by naked appeal to personal prejudice, and it’s illegitimate for me to prove his non-existence by the same method? There is nothing that separates the two approaches. Therefore, merely stating the object you’re trying to prove is not enough to convince someone that your view is corrert. Ergo, we must attempt to divine the truth (that’s a pun) by some other method. In other words, your “evidence” don’t mean shit.
So once we realize an alternative method must be used, the only method we know of to give us reasonably true models of the world around us is the application of reason to our observations. You seemed to pretend in your OP that this was your goal, but your actions since then have shown us that isn’t so.
Anyway, as for the rest, whatever Dio says is right.
First of all, that’s just dodging the question with a nitpick. Creating people who mostly do good raises exactly the same gaping hole in your claims regardless.
But second of all, you still are not confronting the problem of choice. When individuals make choices, SOMETHING has to determine the way in which they choose. If not, then there is no holding them to account for their choices, because there is nothing to hold to account: responsbility cannot work unless there is ultimately some underlying thing that can be judged as inherently good or bad.
It seems to me that your whole schema is obviously self-contradictory in the most obvious ways. What is your reponse to this? How do you rescue the concept from the multiple incoherencies that have been pointed out?
Again, you’re trying to snake your way out of the noose: it doesn’t matter if it turns out to be God’s intention or design: what matters is that it be consistent with whatever free will is. And if one individual is such that it freely chooses good all the time, then a million is no less a denial of anyone’s free will. That’s just simple logic. They CHOOSE to be good.
Again, you’ve completely dodged the question. We were discussing the nature of free will, not any specific being. You claimed that always choosing good is incompatible with free will, end stop. Calling God “omnibenevolent” doesn’t provide any escape route for this clash of contradictory principles. If god is an example of a being that always does freely choose good, then there IS no contradiction in principle. Yet, that supposed contradiction was you only defense against saying that human beings couldn’t have been created such that they would be of such a high character that they freely only chose good.
You have no “billions of examples” without begging the question.
If God cannot create beings who are omnibenevolent AND have free will like him, thenhe’s not omnipotent, since he cannot do something that is clearly possible (since it’s possible for him). And worse, if he cannot or even does not do this for humans, what possible sanity is there in complaining or needing to forgive them for their sins when he created them fundamentally incapable of measuring up to his own self-contradicting standards?
See, it’s just baffling to me how anyone could run around saying things like this without a very obvious question: what makes one person choose one thing and another choose another? For that matter, who the hell is this “we” you are talking about? Am I we different from you we? We obviously make different choices. Perhaps you choose, in the same situations, better than. What accounts for that difference? Please: just TRY to give ANY answer to that which doesn’t throw your whole edifice of free will into total disarray.
Again: are you thinking about the implications of your own statements? If God can judge people, then there must logically be something to judge: some underlying character that is determining the nature of the choices made. Which, of course, tosses the whole idea of free will being a barrier to goodness RIGHT out the window. See what I mean about how even asking the question about where choices come from and how they work fataly undermines the whole evasion you are employing?
The problem is it doesn’t matter to me if they do work or not. If God is evil then I want nothing to do with him/her. And there are so many definitions and viewpoints of god that the idea that one particular one is true while the others are all false is unlikely. Who is to say what is true? We don’t know right now.
Well, that is conjecture. I don’t think I agree with it. For one thing pain is more important than sinning. Another is that there already is alot of sin, and some of the sinners want their victims to suffer and/or could care less. in fact if people really understood the pain they were causing people would be far less evil than they are now. So less pain wouldn’t change anything, it would just make life easier for the world’s victims.
One of the major problems I have with pain is that love is a major cause of pain. I’m not talking about heartbreak and romantic love, I’m talking about parents watching their children get sick and die, or friends watching friends suffer from mental illnesses or people feeling depressed because there is evil in the world. The worst/most evil governments on the planet like North Korea or Saddam’s Iraq were renowned for using people’s love for friends and family as weapons to control them. They’d go after a dissident’s family, friends or kids to make the suffering worse. There is no way to comprehend a benevolent god in a world where our love for each other is a major cause of suffering. I have met alot of people who just became numb because they couldn’t deal with the pain their love was causing.
Belief is 50% genetic though.
We aren’t arguing, we are disagreeing. I don’t dislike you and I really respect all the good your religion has done not only for you but all the good your church has done for the world. But you have to understand that I consider myself a good person too and so do many of the people who disagree with your views. Aside from the lack of evidence and the multitude of gods to pick from (both of which make believing hard to do) we can’t contemplate how a benevolent god could be in charge of a world where even an evil criminal is, at the end of the day, a better man than god. Hardened criminals have to desensitize themselves to their victims. If you read up on serial killers or rapists they usually talk about how they manage to view their victims as objects instead of people and how it can take years of more or less brainwashing to reach this level. On a basic level we are mostly unable to hurt those we understand are individual humans just like us, we have to brainwash ourselves into thinking they are objects or ‘just enemies’ or something like that. Even then conscience eats away at alot of people after the deed. Even a serial rapist is a more moral person than god because at least he has to desensitize himself to the evil he is committing by getting drunk and shutting down the rational, moral part of his brain or viewing his victim as an object. If god is all knowing then he already knows what he is doing and is totally in control of his faculties. In my view, the rapist has more of a conscience and more concern for humanity than a creator god. So either god is made up (since there is no evidence and there are too many explanations to know which is true and which isn’t) or god is either amoral, evil or impotent.
The ends do not justify the means. Even if god believes this most humans do not.
I love how you just hammer me with obviously idiotic questions. If you’re not trying to bring down my character, what are you trying to do?
Christ had not come along so no, there was no way to believe in Christ. I am not going to make judgment calls on other peoples religions. I do not know enough about other religions, but from what I have seen they do not seem that different from Christianity (the modern day religions who do not worship obvious false idols). I love how you put it, “Your entire Church”. Nice. There is a Christian belief that the world is 6000 years old…what’s your point? No I do not agree. I just love how you group all “believers” into one category. That my friend, is discrimination.
No they are not illogical. That is the entire point of what I am saying. There is nothing wrong with the logic. It will always come down to faith. Now if we looked at the genesis story, we could show that that is illogical to take it as a real life story. But you keep saying right and wrong as if I am God. I try to find the truth as best as I know how. I can feel completely confident in saying that I am incredibly impressed with the person I am today based on how I live my life. Who you are is up to you and I do not try and discount you as a person simply because I do not agree with you.
If you would like to make a thread about this, please do. Otherwise your only intent is on bringing down my character instead of having an intelligent conversation about this.
