The "God allows bad things to make us stronger" argument is totally invalid.

Great Debates
1

Many have argued that God allows very bad things to happen to us (like the WTC attack) so that we become stronger. The analogy is often made to a parent letting their child grow up, and learn to deal with problems on their own. They say that if humans lived in a world with no danger or pain, they wouldn’t “grow up.”

This argument is invalid. The only reason we value problem-solving skills and the ability to deal with emotional pain is because we live in a world that requires these abilities. In world where a kind and loving God prevented terrors and travesties, these skills would not only be unneeded, we would likely not even have a concept of them in our minds.

The idea of an omnipotent loving God creating a world such as ours is a logical fallacy.

These are the only possibilities I see:

  1. There is no God
  2. God is not omnipotent
  3. God doesn’t care
  4. God is mentally deficient (stupid or insane)
  5. God is evil
2

And before any mentions free-will, can it. What’s the free-will behind a natural disaster?

Quix

P.S. Tangentally related, I’m amazed at the upsurge of “religiosity” as a result of the WTC attack. If 5,000 people dying for no apparent reason doesn’t cause mass apostasy, then what the hell will?

3

I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your premise, but your logic is faulty.

Perhaps God is not simply “kind and loving.” Perhaps he has a much greater plan than you or I can fathom.

Could it be that God is kind and loving but also wants to teach us to be strong?

It appears the solution to your conundrum lies in your own statement: God is like a parent, he both wants the child to grow up and wants to take care of him/her.

(If you’re not a parent, ask one.)

4

[Disclaimer: I am not a parent]

The classic analogy I always hear is, “Sometimes, you have to let your child get burned from the hot stove to know that it’s hot.” Fuck that noise. What kind of a sadistic parent ALLOWS their child to just touch a stove? (Answer to the rhetorical question: Christians, apparently). Isn’t it much nicer, and no less effective, to hold their hand, slowly move it close to the stove, and let them feel the heat without burning themselves?

We’ve done this before with ForceFieldWorld in this thread here, and she was very convincing, IMO. All it would take for me to believe in God again would be for force-fields to suddenly appear around about-to-be-abused children. <waiting patiently…> Oh well.

In short, leander, if God has a plan, it’s faulty and sadistic, and I want no part of it. If, as you say,

Then he fucking sucks at it. Gaudere, for one, could teach him a thing or three (see above link).

Quix

5

And it’s a damn shame that the 5,000 people in the WTC and aboard those airliners won’t be able to learn that lesson. Oh wait, maybe they learned something as their bodies were burned, torn limb from limb, and crushed in the falling towers. Yeah, maybe.

The “logic” of this “maybe God is kind and loving, and wants to teach us to be strong” amounts to a parent killing a child’s friend, and saying “Aw, buck up little guy, you’ll be better for this.”

If you don’t think that’s sick, then I suggest you seek help.

6

The “Loving God” believers could say that the WTC victims (or victims of any disaster) were whisked up to Heaven on the Angel Express. The survivors of the victims should take comfort in knowing that their loved ones have returned home to the Lord. Believers in “Free-Will God” will insist that God does not interfere with evil humans, but deals with evil come judgement day. Any of the above beliefs are fine if they provide comfort. “Faith” and “Logic” are often not compatible, so trying to reconcile a religious belief with a world event will often be a futile enterprise.

7

I’m an agonostic, before anyone jumps down my neck. Let’s assume that there is an all-knowing and all-powerful God; how would you you know what actions (or inactions for those in the freewill camp) are either good or evil according to him? I’m not condoning letting a child burn his hand on the stove (but I’m not a God either), but we’ve all been in circumstances where we let something happen which we normally wouldn’t because we believe that a greater good will come of the situation (i.e. you don’t normally support tearing down a forest, but it’s to build farmland to support a population). And yes, I can see that there are differences to my analogy and the WTC but the principle remains the same. If there actually is an omniscient and omnipotent god no human being can say definitively that his actions are categoricaly evil OR good.
And by the way Quixotic78, where is your justification for
lumping all Christians into a single, negative, category? That’s the same sort of thinking that is people are currently fighting to have applied to Muslims.

8

Oops. “that is people…” should be “…that people are currently fighting to NOT have applied to Muslims.”
Also, I should add that you can’t prove that an omniscient, omnipotent god’s actions (or inactions) are categorically indifferent to good or evil outcomes as well.

9

Ya know, sometimes I think the pantheistic religions have it right (Greek, Norse, Hindu, etc). Maybe disasters on Earth are caused by celestial spats between the gods. The Greek gods especially are pretty vain and self-centered.

10

I just can’t see how you’ve come to that parallel, super_head. Are you saying that God is responsible for the WTC? To make things “better” for us?

I think that Leander is on the right track, and that maybe we can’t see the plan. I mean, how could we? We’re sitting here in a myopic flash-bulb length lifespan in the endless stream of eternity. How could we even attempt to understand the mind of God?

And to say, quixotic78, that God “sucks at it”: I would have to ask, “According to whose values?” Who is to say what is good or bad? If you expect God to intervene for about-to-be-abused children, wouldn’t you also expect him to intervene next time you’re about to lie? Or drive too fast? Or eat too much fatty food? (Not you personally - the generic second-person pronoun).

11

IANAC, and I agree with RevTim that the “make us stronger” argument is invalid. However, I don’t agree with what would appear to be a secondary argument that such events as WTC prove that “The idea of an omnipotent loving God creating a world such as ours is a logical fallacy”

I can think of two logical arguments that are often used against this line of argument.

First, that on a divine scale and timeline the tragedy of the WTC could be outweighed by positive reactions to it. For example it is now possible that a horrified world could band together, and do some good things that otherwise may not have happened (horribly optimistic, I know, but there you go). This would also allow, in some judo’esque way, for evil to defeat itself, the positive reaction being greater than the negative action.

Secondly, it could be argued that a kind and loving God would not interfere in such events, as to some extent it would be the divine scale equivalent of allowing your children to make mistakes rather than trying to control their lives. I really hope that I won’t offend people by making them think I’m thoughtlessly comparing the slaughter of 5,000 people to something as banal as dating a bad boyfriend - I’m just trying to create a relative point of view of a supposedly infinite being who has a responsibility for 3.5 billion or more and can place the victims in an eternal paradise, so that their loss of earthly life isn’t as bad as it would appear down here.

12

I agree, except I don’t recall ever having encountered anyone who believed this, at least not in such a simplistic way. I’m not saying it’s definitely a straw man, but I do seem to detect the faint aroma of dry grass.

are you talking about the general problem of freewill?

13

Quickly, Asylum, I didn’t mean to disparage all Christians with my parenthetical comment. But I still think that if you’re willing to let your child burn herself on a stove, rather than exploring equally as effective alternatives, then there’s something wrong with you.

Marcus, according to whose values? Why, God’s values. The values that hold life as dear, the values the prohibit murder, rape, child abuse, and so forth. I sure as hell didn’t come up with the rules, but I still respect them. I suppose it’s too much to expect God to do the same.

And yes, it would be nice if he wanted to intervene for women about to be raped, or for murders about to occur, or etc. ForceFieldWorld was just one well-refined example. It’s not like I’m saying, “Gee, if only we had force fields around children, this world would be perfect.” I AM contending that the world would be better with said force fields.

Gary Kumquat, if one applies your first point of logic, then why didn’t God allow NYC to be nuked off the face of the earth? Surely, if 5,000 deaths is a powerful unifying force for good, then 7,000,000 deaths is 1,400 times stronger. As long as he’s going to play with a “The Ends Justify the Means” motif, why not go hog wild? Have some really bad means, but some really good ends?

Secondly, you compare the WTC to dating a bad boyfriend. I won’t be offended; I see that you’re comparing the essence, not the degree. So, you’d stand idly by if your daughter were dating an abusive man, just to prove your point? Just to be able to say, at the end of the day, “Well, I guess Sally won’t date anymore jerks. My work here is done”? (Not just YOU; anyone who espouses this particular belief).

14

Would it? Is it better to refrain from “evil” because you don’t want to do it, or because you are prevented from doing it?

If your behaviour is being observed or moderated, it will usually be different, but it doesn’t change who you are (witness our behaviour at work versus our behaviour at home). The fact that the force field prevents “evil” is treating the symptom, not the cause.

Put in a different way, you haven’t chosen not to abuse a child if you had no choice.

15

I think there’s probably an argument that a teenage daughter would only resent constant interference in what she percieves to be her private affairs.

16

Bizarrely, you’re the second person to mention my daughter’s dating habits in a debate in two days. I’m starting to think she’s got some explaining to do.

To your points though:

I really fail to follow your first argument. The idea that allowing a bad thing to happen if the end result was a great good, does not mean that making the first event really bad would achieve an even greater good.

Could a truly loving parent allow their child to be hurt, rather than try to live their life for them? I would say in some instances yes. It’s definitely a debateable issue though.

17

Well, my reference was more to the analogy which had been brought up that God is like a parent who lets us make mistakes so we’ll be stronger and learn from them. Let’s amend it to say that this parent knew their child’s friend was about to be murdered, but did nothing to prevent it, because after all - losing a close friend might toughen you up emotionally and make you cling to your parents a little tighter. Of course, even in this situation, if the parent knew the murder was about to occur and did nothing to stop it… I’d see’em in jail in a heartbeat. Same for the Big Guy, although I’m not sure where we would keep him.

Which, unfortunately, renders every promise this god (or any similar god) has made as completely meaningless. We can sit here, in our myopic view, and say that God will keep his promises because he is Good. However, we’ve just decided we can judge good/evil in the God-scheme of things, and thus he could change his mind on a whim and send all the Christians to Hell - for the greater good, of course, which we can’t see. We no longer have any basis to define Good as anything other than “what God wills” - no matter what that might be.

18

Ask the child who has been abused whether their abuser’s freedom to abuse is “worth” their suffering, likely severe mental trauma, possible agonising death/injury, and their later possible prediliction for abusing their own children. If it is superior, as you claim, to allow a person to choose not to abuse a child rather than preventing them, then would you allow an adult to abuse a child in front of you while doing nothing to physically restrain the abuser?

There are many evil acts we are physically incapable of commiting, yet I do not see people complaining that their freedom has been infringed by their inability to instantly brain-damage another person by wishing it, or by their inability to cause cancer in others by sneaking lima beans in their food. Therefore I think it is clear that we do not need to be physically capable of any particular evil in order to be “free.” Yet God, apparently, choose to make child abuse a evil we are capable of.

Nor have you chosen not to instantly brain damage others, nor have you chosen not to give people cancer. I could come up with a hundred evils that we are restrained from doing. Yet child abuse is one thing that God has seen fit to allow, though we are restrained from doing so many others. I certainly must question his decision here.

[Edited by Gaudere on 10-08-2001 at 08:27 AM]

19

That, of course, should say “we can’t judge good/evil in the God-scheme of things” - remind me not to post before my morning beer.

20

How could it be a strawman, when it’s the only issue I’ve brought up? All I’m addressing is what I stated in the OP, not free will.