Given that God is omniscient and He created man, why did he create people that he knew were doomed to torture for eternity?
Last time I checked, God didn’t create people…people create people. Even in a religious viewpoint (except, I suppose, those religions believing that God creates people ex nihilo and sticks them in the womb) that is true.
I believe he is using “given that” as a substitute for “let’s assume that”.
I’d like to know who’s doomed to an eternity of Hell? Which specific groups of people are we talking about?
Maybe He doesn’t really like us.
Maybe it has something to do with Free Will.
Maybe we don’t have an immortal component which can be tortured eternally.
Maybe it is a little hubristic to presume you know the result of any Divine judgement.
Correction…speaking from a Catholic perspective, God creates SOULS, people create flesh. (Although even God created all the matter that would become flesh.)
As to the OP…it depends on what your take on “doomed to hell” is. If you’re a believer in predestination (and I know there’s various definitions on this, so forgive me if I’m misdefining someone’s creed), then you believe that God pre-selects who will be “saved” and who isn’t. I can’t answer that one, because 1) I don’t believe in predestination, because 2) it’s a paradox for God to be that picky.
The other school of thought is that people “save” themselves, or as the Catholic Church understands it, man participates in the graces God gives him for redemption; i.e., man chooses to accept the redemption Christ provided on the cross. There, you still have an all-knowing God, so God being omnipotent at least knows in advance who will choose to repent and who won’t. So given that some people probably have chosen or will choose not to repent, why did God create them?
The short answer lies in why God created man to begin. The classic Catholic answer is that man was created to know, love, and serve God. However, “love” has to be a freely made choice. It’s contrary to the nature of love for God to create someone that ** cannot** not love. In order for man (and woman…we’re not sexist here) to truly God, the possibility of rejection has to exist.
It’s the old “Love Potion #9” story. Boy fls in love with girl, girl doesn’t return boy’s love. Mysterious man offers boy a potion that will make girl love boy. Boy buys potion and girl drinks. Girl’s madly in love with boy, but boy is incredibly bored with it. Boy realizes that he wanted girl to freely accept him, and having her forced into loving him like this isn’t nearly as satisfying. (Boy returns to mysterious man and learns the antidote costs $10,000.)
Maybe He doesn’t really like us.
Maybe it has something to do with Free Will.
Maybe we don’t have an immortal component which can be tortured eternally.
Maybe it is a little hubristic to presume you know the result of any Divine judgement.
Hey, Doc, this thread is about predestination, not reincarnation.
Very true. But if man creates flesh, can God refuse to create a soul for it? In other words, which comes first, the soul or the flesh?
I have many question to ask at Judgement. The mechanics of that double posting will be on the list.
It’s not so much that he pre-selects who will be saved. If God is all knowing, he knows everything a person will do from conception to death. So if he creates a person, or even a soul(as ResIpsaLoquitor would have it), and he knows ahead of time that this person will eventualy not make the right decision and end up not going to Heaven, what chance does this person have of being “saved”? None.
It’s as if I am making a batch of chocolate chip cookies, forget the chips in one batch, and go ahead and make the cookies anyway. What are the chances of any of these cookies having chocolate chips in them? And more importantly, why did I go ahead and make the cookies if knew ahead of time that they were already ruined?
Do you mean that God is craving for some attention? Why would god want to be loved? I can’t imagine a perfect and omnipotent being needing love…
Anyway, it doesn’t change a thing : free will or not, God knows exactly who he is creating, and what will be the result (the guy created will love god or not). Hence he deliberatly create people who will love him and people who won’t love him. Being omniscient, he can’t ignore that. He even choose the proportion. He could as well choose to create more or less people who will “freely choose” to love him. He could create only one guy who will love him, or only one who won’t. For an omniscient being, creating people isn’t random. It’s like choosing which beads (blue or red, for instance) he will put on a string. He already knows which color (faith) the bead (man) will have.
Perhaps you could say that the man still has “free will” (he chose himself if he will love god or not), but from the omniscient being point of view, it doesn’t change a thing. Amongst a myriad of choices, he picked/created men knowing perfectly in advance if they will love him or not. It’s a conscious choice to create say 1 billion people who will love him a lot, 1 billion who will somewhat love him, 1 billion who couldn’t care less, 2 billions who will love another god, etc…
God can’t ignore their future choices. He could have chosen any other combination.
The only way out from this is to assume that god is partly ignorant. When he picks the bead/create the man he doesn’t know in advance if the bead/man is blue or red/will have faith or not. But then, he isn’t omniscient…
Or else that he doesn’t control who is created and who isn’t…But then he isn’t omnipotent…
Slight hijack…
Y’know, I’m not sure, as this has been an ongoing theological debate. Short answer is that it’s simultaneous (I suppose), since the church holds that life begins at conception. (St. Thomas Aquinas originally believed the soul arrived at “the quickening,” when the woman could first feel the baby stirring in her womb, but that view has since been rejected.)
There’s still some goofy unanswered questions; for example, when identical twins exist, are both souls present at conception, or is a second soul formed at the moment of twinning? (A soul can’t split, by the way…theologically, it’s believed to be an indivisible entity.) Another weird one is whether a clone would have a soul. Most scholars say yes to that one, although there’s still uncertainty for reasons I don’t understand. However, the language of several encyclicals often uses language such as “the unborn child must be treated as a person from conception,” such that even if a clone didn’t have a soul, it still has to be treated as though it did.
I’m glad nobody bit on the “which specific groups of people are going to hell” post, that would turn this into some spiteful hate thread. So lets be thankful we’re past that.
I’m an atheist, but I know enough about this from Christian friends to help out. The main hurdle to understanding this problem is shedding the stereotypical vision of hell. It is not a place of “punishment”, per se. It is simply eternal separation from god. “Salvation” is a reward, hell is the default. There are no demons with pitchforks, or any of that mumbo-jumbo that simply isn’t Biblical, and few Christians believe that hell is torturous in any way. So it’s not like creating a person to torment him, it’s creating people knowing that you will only reward some of them.
It’s like seeing two bums on the street. You can only buy lunch for one of them with the money you have in your wallet. You help the one, but not the other. Is helping the one somehow unjust because you didn’t help both? No, the act of helping the one is still a good act. Abstaining from a good act (in this case, divine salvation) isn’t equivalent to doing a bad act.
Free will is not the issue here, but I have gotten into that in two other threads, so I’ll try to answer what I think is the issue.
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You are assuming that god does not value people who are “doomed.” That is not so obvious. Perhaps someone who is doomed is also a great author or musician, and maybe their subject matter consists of things that god does not approve of. They could still have a value to him, in the same way that you enjoy watching a violent movie or reading a black comedy. That brings up a new question. Is it possible for god to value things that he does not approve of, and would in fact punish? Is it possible for the value of such a person to be more important than the sadness god feels about that person being doomed? I’m not sure of the answer to this. I hope that the sadness of anyone being doomed would outweigh any value that person had, but I don’t know god’s value system.
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Another possibility is that you are mistaken about the nature of being “doomed.” Maybe doom isn’t so bad after all, which would mean that the value of the person would have much less sadness, if any, to overcome.
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And finally, maybe nobody is doomed after all. Maybe there is something indestructible and valuable in all of us, and god will accept all of us. Maybe we get to keep trying until we get it right. There are many conceivable ways in which nobody turns out to be permanently doomed. Personally, I believe this last possibility to be true, because the sadness of anyone being doomed seems to me to outweigh any value they had.
It may be true that most Christians in the world today no longer believe in those concepts, and I certainly agree that they’re “mumbo-jumbo”, but they can’t be easily dismissed as un-Biblical:
And there is ample Biblical support for the notion that people are “condemned” to hell by God:
If God can forsee His own actions, then He has no 'free’choice in what He does, as there can be no possibility that He could choose differently. If there were, then His knowledge would be incorrect.
for laughs
Actually, I don’t think it changes a thing. If you tell “Everybody will have ice-cream, except you, Tom, because you’ve been a bad boy”, it’s still a punishment. Being deprived of something is a punishment(*) And in the case of hell, it’s an eternal punishment. Even a very slight or barely significant punishment, if it lasts forever, will necessary be disproportionnate with even the most awful sin imaginable (which will necessarily be limited in extent and duration, since we aren’t omnipotent nor live forever).
So, it seems to me that replacing a “lake of fire” by a “lack of god” doesn’t make any significant difference, apart the “eek factor”.
(*)(except if one isn’t conscious that he’s deprived of something…and even if he is, it’s not obvious to me it isn’t a punishment…Tom doesn’t know that the ice-cream is in the fridge but you know it is and willingly don’t give it to him…he’s less happy than he could be).
I tend to share this opinion. I could also say that since god is supposed to be perfect (by whatever standart) he must act in a perfect way, hence there’s only one way he can act. Once again, no “free will”. That’s another discrepancy in the christian concept of god, IMO.
I’ve also an issue with people stating that god could want love in any way, or could “feel sadness” as a previous poster wrote. If god was sad, he wouldn’t be perfect. It would also mean that he would be affected by an event independant from him (lack of proper love, damnation of a being who has free will, etc…), hence wouldn’t be omnipotent (how could a being be omnipotent and affected in any way by some exterior event/being. It would mean that this event/being has a power on god)
Actually, I think the same way about any kind of feeling which could be attributed to a perfect and omniscient god. Such a god couldn’t be compassionnate, for instance. He could only be totally unaffected by anything, in other words, it would be a totally indifferent god…And in this case we come back to the issue you pointed at. How could this god be constructed as having “free will”?
On the overall, it seems to me that the christian god is given contradictory attributes. A loving, but not all-powerful god (say, in a dualist religion) is logically consistent (at first glance), an all-powerful god without free will (probably a sort of pantheist concept) too, etc…But the combination of all these attributes don’t add up logically.