I’m not going to respond to the other post because I can see we’d just start going in circles.
Here’s our differences as I see them concerning this discussion. I hope it’s understood that I’m not arguing for the existance of an omnipotent god. I’m arguing that while we can reasonably find valid reasons to not believe in one , we can’t really claim logical inevitibility concerning such a beings non existance.
Again, omnipotence means god can do anything but we need to know the intent and purpose of creation to undertand what such a god will do. If we assume an omnipotent being created everything then we ask why. That’s purpose and intent.
I understand your argument that an omnipotent god must want whatever is happening now. In some ways I can accept that although I’d say what is happening now is the illusion of choice and the concepts of good and evil. The journey itself, as I said.
I still mantain that since we can never have the persective to encompass all creation, it’s purpose and intent, it’s reason for being, we cannot adequately judge or claim logically that an omni being that does have that perspective cannot exist. Probably not is as far as we can go.
Anyway, I completely agree that in many relgious god models and doctrines there are plenty of logical conflicts. I think the most a believer can say is I believe in god but I can’t know. When we admit we can’t know we can no longer claim divine authority over others. I hate it when believers preface what is ultimately thier personal view with “according to God or God’s word” They need to take responsibility for your own beliefs and opinions and stop trying to justify them with religious language.
On the other hand, if you take your pit bull to the ring and force it to fight and get torn to shreds, is the dog still obligated to love you? Isn’t pitiful when a dog loves someone who abuses them for no reason? Your hidden assumption is that God is good, and you ignore or try to cover up evidence to the contrary.
I come to the conclusion that you are willfully blind. Tell me why every single little child who died in the tsunami had to. Couldn’t God’s purpose be fulfilled just as well if one fewer baby died? Two fewer? A hundred fewer?
There are always true believers who will make excuses for monsters. Lots of Russians - and even Communists in America - thought that Stalin must have had a good reason for the show trials, and that the starvation of the kulaks was well justified for the greater good of Communism, and that everyone in the Gulag deserved to be. And not even they claimed that Stalin was omniscient. Believers say God is good, and then God sends an earthquake to shake down a cathedral full of worshipers.
Strawman. No one is arguing against any suffering, only needless suffering. Wiping us out in a flood hardly affects anyone’s free will - except destroying the free will of those who die. We can’t take off and fly, and are thus limited. Does that hurt our free will. Would god making it impossible for us to kill in cold blood really affect our free will more than the psychological issues we already have? I bet neither you nor I could just kill someone - do we have less free will than a psychopath who can?
You aren’t god, but you are a human who can think rationally.
I can only guess why bad things happen. I don’t know why God allows them to happen. I do know he often makes the best of them.
God doesn’t send earthquakes; he allows earthquakes, which is an important distinction theologically. And yes, we can come up with theories, but we don’t really understand why because we don’t have God’s perspective.
You’re only allowed to cite free will if you can resolve all the problems with it. Here’s three:
It’s very poorly defined. What’s it free of? I’m not random; all of my decisions are spawned from my knowledge and preferences and emotions. If I hate the taste of peas, and will therefore never willingly choose to eat peas, am I free or not?
It’s not implementable. All models of will divide the decision making process between three processess - deterministic ones, completely nondeterministic (random) ones, and “free will”. We can speculate mechanisms for how deterministic and random processes work pretty easy (the first is computation and the second is signal noise), but what about free will? It’s always described as a magically complex black box; what’s inside? How does it work? Well, the only options are through a mix of deterministice, nondeterministic, and…‘free will’ processes. But how does those free will processes work, under the hood? Well… It’s turtles all the way down.
God supposedly predicts human actions, and events based on human actions. God says there’s going to be a war? I guess we can’t choose peace then. Bye-bye free will.
If you can resolve all of these problems in a definite and nonfallacious manner, after collecting your stack of complementary philosophy doctorate and your nobel prize you may come back and post in this thread using free will as a cite.
“I can’t even think of one way I could be right, but I still am!” is such a compelling argument, isn’t it?
Actually I am including all suffering, because with an all-powerful god watching out for us no suffering is necessary. And I’m including human actions too because there’s no reason not too; forms of non-libertarian free will may exist but they do nothing to excuse god for the evil in the world.
This is an excellent question - sinless free will is by definition possible. Unless you’re saying that God doesn’t have free will?
But the argument actually is “Libertarian free will doesn’t exist. Why did this god create us knowing we would ‘sin’? To add a little exciting variety to the suffering that the volcanos and diseases competition were causing?”
Okay, thanks, this is where I thoughtVoyager was going. #3 is a red herring; knowing the future is not the same as determining the future. #1 is a valid point, but no matter how much you dislike peas, you could eat them. Whether or not you do really comes down to #2 which is the crux of the free will problem.
I’m on the fence about Free Will myself. It’s an interesting philosophical question. Christian tradition is clear that we have the ability to distinguish and choose between good and evil. That seems to be our experience, although it could be an illusion. I mean, there are evil things I could do and get away with, so the only thing seemingly stopping me from doing them is the fact that they’re evil. Why do I choose that way? I suspect that this all ties back to the fact that humans are created “in the image of God” with the capacity to make those decisions. But in my day-to-day life, the mechanism doesn’t matter to me.
You keep forgetting that the point is for you to disprove God, not for me to prove him. I haven’t claimed to be able to do so. Not knowing God’s motives doesn’t make God puff out of existence.
The traditional answer to his question (aside from “we don’t really know why”) is that God created us because it is Gods nature to exist in community, in relationship, and God created the world to be in relationship with him. Real relationships must be mutual, so God created us with the ability to ignore him. And, because we have turned away from God, the whole world suffers things like volcanoes and diseases and so forth as well (note: that’s a theological answer, not a scientific one: I know about tectonic plates and germ theory).
Again, God is not disprovable. I can’t prove he exists; maybe I can’t even make a compelling argument for you. But everything I’ve said is pretty true to traditional Christian theology; I’m not making this up as I go along. This is why I snerked at claims that “all God theories are easily disprovable.” That’s just laughable.
Sin is poorly defined. If sin means going against any jot or tittle of whatever holy writ you happen to accept, I’ll agree that inability to sin and free will are incompatible.
However, if you believe that god is omnibenevolent, that all in our word is for the best, god could reduce suffering without reducing free will by making the most horrible of offenses impossible. A world without a mass murderer is better than a world without one. Would we really be worse off if the 9/11 hijackers had been incapable of carrying out their mission?
Then we get to natural evil. The tsunami not happening would have decreased on one’s free will, and increased it for those who died. The only way you can respond to me constructing a world much like ours but incrementally better is to state by assertion that every action of God’s is for the best in some unknown way.
I think we can construct situations where there is no solution that does not involve some suffering. Say Girl A loves Boy B, and Boy B can’t stand Girl A. Someone is going to get hurt, unless God so micromanages the world such that this is not possible. In that case, I might say that I suffer through lack of free will in my romantic decisions. I think it is enough to say that an omnibenevolent God minimizes suffering, not eliminate it - but he clearly doesn’t even come close to doing this.
Nah - God is sinless by definition, so he is unconstrained. In the Biblical view, he is clearly not constrained from killing all sorts of people and ordering the deaths of more.
In Judaism you sin, you ask for atonement, you get given it and live another year, and you eventually die. In Christianity, God knows we sin, and the punishment is eternal suffering. Except when you accept Jesus - but God didn’t even get around to sending him for a long time. Why a benevolent God would set up this scenario is beyond me.
Certian prediction of the future is only possible if it’s predetermined; if you can’t be wrong, then people have no choice but to act as you predicted. I’ll note that this doesn’t mean that the prediction itself removed your supposed free will; you might have never been able to act any differently than you did, and the fact somebody could predict you with certainty merely demonstrated that fact.
And, who says I could choose to eat the peas? I don’t think I could. Under different circumstances I might have made a different choice, but that says nothing about my ability to make a different choice under the identical circumstances. (Circumstances include my own internal and mental state, of course.)
I will note, that we do have a certain kind of free will - we are assessing situations, weighing options, and actually making decisions. It’s just that this is a mechanical process, which (presuming no randomity) will always churn out the same result in the same circumstances. In real life of course circumstances are never quite the same, resulting in seeming unpredictability; however for an omniscient god with full constant knowledge of our mental state, predicting us would be child’s play; automatic even.
Obviously I’m not on the fence on this subject; but then I’m not bothered by the fact I’m making decisions through a rational, predictable process. I don’t have a god that needs rationalization after all.
You’re mistaken - I’ve provided an argument that, if valid, disproves your god. You are now trying to poke holes in it, which puts the burden of proof in your court until you come up with something solid, which would then volley the burden of proof back to me.
And while “I can’t even think of one way you could be wrong, but you still are!” does have a certain compelling simplicity to it, I’m not quite sure I should feel beaten yet.
Funny that I’ve never even heard that traditional answer. :dubious:
Regardless, as you have laid out a god-theory, I shall assess it:
I see nothing wrong with this - god was lonely so he made friends. A perfectly plausible notion, consistent with omnipotence.
This is pretty dodgy - what does this even mean? “Mutual”? A mutual relationship is just when both people are participating. Regardless, I’ll with tentative suspicion allow that god needed to give people some form of free will in order to make God happy. I utterly reject that this required his creations be created with the ability/inclination towards doing evil; god’s own existence proves that this is unnecessary and would be sadistic of god to include.
What? Why did turning away from God have this effect? Was there a string tied from our ankle to the giant ‘Evil: on/off’ switch, which got pulled when we turned? Who tied it?
Oh wait, the traditional answer (as in, the one in the book) is that god got pissed off and started torturing us out of spite, just like any rational person would do. Yay God?
Of course this raises the question, is he still pissed off? Because if not, why didn’t he just forgive everyone when he calmed down from his divine tantrum? Jesus handed out forgiveness like candy, so it’s clearly possible (as if omnipotence left that to doubt). What reason does God have to persist with his evil?*
This is of course a trick question - the only possible correct answer is some variant of “because the omnipotent god likes things best exactly the way they are, and so is uninclined to change them”.
Unless you manage to beat the POE, which you haven’t done yet, he’s already disproven. And traditional Christian theology says that there was a global flood and no evolution, so yeah, that doesn’t help you any.
And by the way, I said virtually all god-hypotheises can be solidly disproven. I’ll thank you not to misquote me.
Arguably an omnipotent omnsicient god has to micromanage everything; he is directly aware of everything and must choose to act or not. Fortunately for him he can act without effort, eh?. So summoning cupid or predestining everyone with a soulmate would be child’s play. And as for free will, you can’t lose what you never had. So what was the problem again?
Pedant. The bastard is still evil, regardless of the fact he gives himself a pass that he hypocritically denies others. Plus I doubt that Scammer will accept this explanation of God’s free will anyway.
No (omni-)benevolent god would, obviously; a benevolent god would never inflict or allow suffering, for punishment or any other reason. They would always be swooping in with hankies, or quietly re-engineering situations to remove the problem, depending on which they prefer. There are various ways they could deal with evils between individuals, but none of them would involve inflicting suffering as punishment.
I can think of various non-benevolent reasons a god might set up such a secenario, though frankly the less absurd ones require the god to be nonomnipotent as well. Otherwise we’re pretty much limited to talking about continuous childish tantrums and grudges, or fiendish pointless mind games.
Hang on a moment. I don’t see how this logically follows through. Doesn’t the last statement presuppose knowledge of God’s objectives - and, if it doesn’t, doesn’t it then imply that *our *conceptions of God’s objectives have some merit, and that he may be judged against them?
Hey, I can suffer from missing things I’ve never had - Raquel Welch, for instance. (You can tell my age.) Plus if everyone were happy, we’d miss out on most of our great literature. So I reject the possibility of a zero suffering solution - but that doesn’t give god a pass by any means.
I never said sinless != evil. Theft is a sin, but refusing to steal a loaf of bread from a rich person for your starving baby is evil.
No (omni-)benevolent god would, obviously; a benevolent god would never inflict or allow suffering, for punishment or any other reason. They would always be swooping in with hankies, or quietly re-engineering situations to remove the problem, depending on which they prefer. There are various ways they could deal with evils between individuals, but none of them would involve inflicting suffering as punishment.
I can think of various non-benevolent reasons a god might set up such a secenario, though frankly the less absurd ones require the god to be nonomnipotent as well. Otherwise we’re pretty much limited to talking about continuous childish tantrums and grudges, or fiendish pointless mind games.
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God swooping in is interesting. If such a god existed, we would never know anything but bliss, which we wouldn’t appreciate not knowing anything else. We’d thus have no great incentive to thank god, since we know that the more suffering goes on around you, the louder the prayers. The only survivor of 100 in a plane crash thinks god is many times greater than the only survivor of a car crash killing 3. Since God is really into us kissing his butt, god would be fed up with the situation. Since God knows this in advance, he’d never bother even creating us. If God did, it must have been only for the sadistic pleasure of watching us suffer and give thanks that we don’t suffer worse.
See, now if God was benevolent, you would have had Raquel Welch. (Or at least you’d think you have; which from an edited-memory standpoint is as good or better!)
And you’re slipping - God could just say ‘let there be great literature’, and lo, there would be bestowed unto us great literature, prefaced in small print with “no actual entities were harmed in the making of this fully-immersive simulation. Any similarities between characters and any persons named Raquel Welch is purely intentional.”
Why yes, I’ll argue against any position presented, however flippant. Why do you ask?
Right - you were being pedantic about my use of the word ‘sin’. Though I suppose this is a good time to note that any god that lets you get into a situation where you have to make the described choice is…wait for it…
…a sinner!
Yeah, the Christian God seems pretty desperate for human accolades, doesn’t he? The entire situation seems pretty deliberately engineered to fabricate gratitude towards God and Jesus, and if we’re going to dismiss the notion that this was merely a method of drawing in adherents to the church then it does leave God seeming rather desperate for attention.
One model I’ve entertained is that there are piles of gods that are real that are all in one big game, Vishu and Thor and Athena and Bacchus and everyone; and the one that collects the most adherents and supplicants wins. (The prize presumably having something to do with Raquel Welch.) So each tries different tactics to draw in suckers, making promises or threats, or denying the existence of the competition…
Of course let’s note that in this model God isn’t omnipotent, obviously - he has equals in competition.
I still can’t understand why I should trust any human who claims to have insight into such an (apparently) ineffable and undefinable God. So much for any and all scripture and sermons.
Sorry folks to butt in now after so many posts, but it took me longer than I expected to find this quote from Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
So, to answer the OP: what people think of religion depends very much on who they are, and always has.
I could use a little clarification here, actually; if you believe He’s “omnipresent”, what does it mean to add that He’s “outside the universe”? Doesn’t “omnipresent” mean that He’s currently in my kitchen and on the moon while also being at Yankee Stadium and Buckingham Palace? We can prove that I’m not omnipresent by noting that I’m not currently at the local ice-cream parlor; you apparently grant that God isn’t currently at the local ice-cream parlor; help me out, here.
No. Ineffability is binary. God either is or isn’t ineffable.
We don’t need to know what they “look like” to have a full concept in mind, especially one against which we can measure actual performance. For example, I can have a full mental concept of “infinity” sufficient to know whether a proposed series sum tends to infinity or not. Same-same with perfect love or perfect power. After all, love and power are human concepts.
All-loving. ALL-loving. It’s really not that hard - words have meaning.
Because if an omnipotent, good-intentioned deity uses an imperfect instrument while stating in it that it is intending to be his perfect word, either he doesn’t mean it to be perfect (meaning he’s a liar, so goodbye all-good) or it’s only as perfect as he can make it (so goodbye all-powerful)
It’s not “sorta-effable”. The fact that you even make the attempt belies your own stated belief in ineffability.
That’s not how logic works. We don’t need to experience omnipotence ourselves to evaluate some other entity’s claims to it. All that’s needed is the definition.
No. The only way you can get around this is as you’ve done, by claiming logic just doesn’t, and can’t, be applied to god. That’s as may be, but it’s you retreating from the attempt, not a failure in the soundness of the logic. You’re rejecting the founding premises, not the logical argument.
