Would a deist god be MORE perfect than the Christian god?

Great Debates
1

Let me first define what I’m thinking about with the deist god.

Suppose such a god created the universe with certain initial conditions, created the laws by which the universe would function, and had a perfect ability to reason. (Christians would probably agree with all three of these things.)

A deity with these attributes could easily create any world it wanted simply by manipulating the starting conditions and the natural laws that operate upon those conditions and using perfect reason and knowledge to calculate what the state of the universe would be at any future time. Such a god wouldn’t need to tinker with the world after creating it.

The Judeo-Christian god, on the other hand, seems to tinker with the world constantly. Its always doing a little favor for this guy, a little favor for that guy, releasing people from bondage, picking sides in wars and helping his team win, smiting some people and saving others.

This leads me to believe that the Christian god is either A) changing its mind about what it wants, or B) lacks the knowledge to perfectly predict the course of events, thus creating a need to make adjustments, or C) lacked the power to create the world the way it wanted it to be at the time of creation and is now making small adjustments to move closer to its goal. Any of these is a glaring example of imperfection.

So might we not say that the deist god is a far better example of a perfect deity than the Judeo-Christian god is? Might we not also say that an orderly world following a set of natural laws is a more perfect creation than a world where the deity is constantly butting in, invalidating and superseding those laws?

2

The traditional answer is that the J-C God created mankind with something rather miraculous: free will. This allows us to tinker with the universe, and, in fact, we did so…and broke it.

Yep. Broke the cosmos. Clean busted it. God had to step in and tinker, to repair the damage, or else Hell would end up with everything and everyone…

The sociological answer is that mankind has always used gods, spirits, imps, sprites, angels, totems, etc. to explain the world. As the world changed, the nature of these characters changed also. The God that helped make the world make sense to a tribe of desert nomads is very different from the God that helped make the world make sense to Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein.

So… By Today’s Standards, yes, an impersonal deist God makes quite a bit more sense. He isn’t all decked out in unnecessary trappings such as favoring one tribe of desert nomads, nor getting a virgin with child, nor dictating holy books, whether on gold plates or not.

All of that fooferaw just lowers him to the status of a Zeus or Odin, rather than the Supreme Architect who crafted the laws of physics, in my opinion…

As the OP indicates, why would God need to break his own set of rules to rescue a little girl from a rampaging tornado when she prays properly? He should have set up the rules so that tornadoes never threatened her in the first place.

And as the OP does not ask, why would such a God spare one little girl for her prayers…and allow a million others to die in misery? At least we can respect the Deist deity for letting people live or die on a level playing field, neither striking people down nor rescuing them.

Trinopus

3

The J-C “God” is the same as the One we name Allah in Arabic.
Yet the idea of how He “interacts” with creation is very different.

God lets the creation work in a way the “deist” pictured in the OP does.
The idea that God constantly interferes with life on earth - especially with human life - is in my opinion a Christian approach.

Muslims don’t “expect” God to furfill all their wishes and to “save” them and to stop misery on earth.
Most Christians do from, which comes the idea that God is constantly busy to arrange things and grand “favours” .

My experience is that indeed such things can happen, yet it is not what you can “demand” from God as if you have some claim on God because you believe in God.

Most Christians seem to think that if you only pray and pray and utter your wishes God most certainly shall interfere. They have the expectation and certitude to be “saved” if you only believe Jesus is God.

I don’t have such expectations. And it has no place in my religion to “demand” answers. Let be to “demand” something about what happens in the afterlife.

So I should say that God and the “deist” from the OP are much one and the same.
Salaam. A

4

Well, this obviously means that your God does interfere with human life after creation.

The deist god does not. The deist god does not need to. In fact, I don’t see any debate here. A god who creates the world and doesn’t need to interfere with it is smarter than the god who creates the world and does interfere, given that we are assuming that both of these gods could be responsible for the world as exists today.

5

No, I don’t mean that.

I mean: it can happen that you ask assistance and get it.
There is no reason to see any “direct interference” with your life behind it let be any “need” for God to directly interfere with it.

There is no “need” for God to interfere with anything He created since God is eternal, transcendent and the Creator of all.

You do agree that your deity is the Creator, no? So that means that the deity keeps the creation going = interfering with it since when the deity disappears, creation ends to exist and to create.

Can you maybe explain more detailed why your deity is that smarter then the God as we imagine ourselves?

Salaam. A

6

Unless God does not, in fact, mind tinkering with the world. If creation is an ongoing act by choice, then there is no failure; you argument in any case relies on your assumption of a lazy God, or that God must do something immediately because He can.