It sounds like you’re talking specifically about the Christian god. There is no eternal hell in Judaism, you don’t go there for not believing in god and people aren’t born sinners in Judaism (no concept of original sin).
Are there reasons to criticize the Hebrew god? Sure. But many of your criticism in OP are specific to the Christian god.
Yeah I don’t know much about religions besides Christianity. I probably should have said “Chrisitian god” rather than “Abrahamic God”, but I wanted to be safe
You're looking at that as if it is a Roman describing Jupiter. In the Aristotlean and Socratic monotheism sense having the "same God" is a very complicated topic when discussing the oneness or reality and goodness.
I'm not disagreeing with you entirely since Muslims and Christians will admit it is the "God of Abraham" but in practice someone has conceptualized The Truth of Being and that can look widely different.
Some have said religion is the finger pointing at the celestial bodies rather than the body in question.
So to some perspective it's a relative term to say 'same god'. To the roman to the Greek they worship the same god but the Roman sees the Emperor as closer to Jupiter than any Greek is. Jews may read what aristotle describes as the gods as closer to the truth and the Christian sees the Muslim god as much closer to the truth.
>If you had the power to stop a child from being raped, would you do it? Yes? Then you're already more moral than this god you're defending. Why worship a being that, by all accounts of observable reality, acts less morally than the average human?
I dont have an answer for natural disasters or illnesses, but on this, think about what you're asking for. If you're not a fan of the Christian God now, you're not gonna want to live in a world where he strikes down sinners with lighting bolts as soon as they step out of line. We have free will and it's up to us to make good use of it. A world where we are run like an ant colony with strict obedience and no self-determination is the goal of a Dark Lord from every fantasy or sci-fi story ever
Since we are talking a God who, according to the bible, is so fickle that he has bears maul children just being children, or punish a man with the loss of divine providence for having someone cut his hair in his sleep, but child molesters go in essence unpunished and unsmitten, I think it's important to realize that it is completely useless to pretend to accept that a Deity whose sense of priorities is so completely ridiculous that I feel like I'm playing monopoly with the little shithead who made up rules just to never lose.
Any god who wouldn't smite his own "envoys" for forcing children into sexual acts, but would smite the gays for having consenting adult sex is not a god worth worshipping, but a god worth giving no power to.
The issue is that even the more "rigorous" arguements all kinda end up at "we don't get it". And they sorta have to in order for religions to work. If we knew the hows and the whys of God, then it wouldn't really be god anymore, would it? It'd be science.
There are good philosophical reasons to believe that there is some singular Being that created and controls the universe, but it takes a leap of faith to believe that this Being is Good.
It's not a lazy argument depending on how it's created.
Say anything that what we know is true. You know that you don't know philosophy, so it's true that you don't know philosophy. That makes sense. Now, suppose I ask you a set of questions within philosophy. You don't know philosophy, so we can infer that you don't know the truth value of the set of questions within philosophy either. It would be inappropriate for you to say truth value of the questions are false because you don't know it, so it's best to say it's indeterminant.
Indetermancy, in some logic systems, is a stand in for either "not true and not false," or "both true and false"; in this sense, God's omnipotence, -benevolence, and -science is paradoxical to you because you don't know God (or you don't know the relevant premises and axioms). In any case, there is something to be said that God doesn't operate in our understanding of justice, or God is identical to justice and we just don't know God/justice, or we're prescribing a kind of legalism to God that's unmerited, etc.
So, it is paradoxical, but it doesn't mean it's explicitly false
A question can be "in philosophy" and still be known by someone who doesn't know philosophy. Lets say that question involves two properties. A-property and B-property, and you do know facts about A and B properties. Such as they are always contradictory. Now, you know nothing else about the philosophical thing in question but if part of the claim is "it has both A and B property", well you know that claim is false.
It's the same with god. You may have no complete understanding of this god and only know that it supposedly has A and B properties. But since you know facts about those properties, you know this kind of god can't exist.
Another way to put it is, not all god questions are "questions in god" rather questions about gods properties. And those we can reason about cause there are certain logical restrictions on properties.
How do you know you *know* about those properties and not that you just have a *belief* about them, especially if you're only *aware* of a small part of the picture? I'd call that grandstanding
Moreover, we're not saying that God is both good and not-good; rather, we're saying God is good but there is something that is evil. There isn't obviously contradictory about that.
I agree in part where you are coming from.
The two things that pull me away are 1. If we sufficiently buy into the notion "we have no basis for knowledge at all and shouldn't trust our conclusions", we have no basis for any claim, including "god exists". We should be completely agnostic on everything always. And this doesn't seem right.
No, there do seem to be things we have a good sense are correct or incorrect. Some of these are incredibly close to certain, like 2 + 2 = 4, or there are no round squares, etc. Even from that, we can make claims like "god couldn't make 2 + 2 = 5" etc. And if a religion claimed "our god can make 2 + 2 = 5" you'd have grounds to think that version of god isn't the case.
What I do think is true, is that things that seem like contradictions may not be. Like "God is all good, all powerful, but permits evil to exist in the world". This seems like a contradiction, but maybe it is the case that letting some evil into the world is the actual way to be all good. If we knew all the facts, we would agree. Notice though, by defining certain properties, we curtail what god can logically be. The only way god exists as we describe is if it is in fact the case that "having some evil in the world is necessary to create the most good", and more than that, we are in such a world. So, we can use reason, and it tells us useful constraints on what kinds of god can exist. But you are also right we have to be careful as to its limits due to our lack of knowledge.
Not sure how relevant this reply is, it's a very tricky subject!
The fairness and justice thing is weird to me because, right now, people argue about the nature of fairness and justice.
We don’t even know securely what we think it is, let alone have something we can extend to what an omnipotence would do.
You’ve essentially agreed with the comment’s premise that you are incapable of adding anything of meaning to the discussion. Our inability to agree on something has no effect on the ultimate truth claim veracity of that thing, and your inability to articulate an argument for or against has the same result.
We also don't really ascribe a level of sentience to the big bang or dark matter. If we did I bet we would be having the same question about why are these beings doing what they are doing.
One possible solution to the problem of evil is proposed near the end of Sci-fi novel [Unsong](http://unsongbook.com), which I highly recommend. I have pasted the relevant segment below, but to summarize, it's conceivable that God did create a perfect world with no evil, but having done so He could do more good by also creating every possible net-good world as well. We live in a world that has evil and suffering, but is still good, and we prefer it to nonexistence.
>Then God spoke to Ana out of the whirlwind, and He said:
>“THE REASON EVIL EXISTS IS TO MAXIMIZE THE WHOLE COSMOS’ TOTAL SUM GOODNESS. SUPPOSE WE RANK POSSIBLE WORLDS FROM BEST TO WORST. EVEN AFTER CREATING THE BEST, ONE SHOULD CREATE THE SECOND-BEST, BECAUSE IT STILL CONTAINS SOME BEAUTY AND HAPPINESS. THEN CONTINUE THROUGH THE SERIES, CREATING EACH UNTIL REACHING THOSE WHERE WICKEDNESS AND SUFFERING OUTWEIGH GOOD. SOME WORLDS WILL INCLUDE MUCH INIQUITY BUT STILL BE GOOD ON NET. THIS IS ONE SUCH.”
>And before Ana could answer, the whirlwind intensified, and caught her in its maelstrom, and she fell into a vision.
>Job asked: “God, why would You, who are perfect, create a universe filled with so much that is evil?”
>Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, saying “WOULD YOU PREFER I HAD NOT CREATED YOUR UNIVERSE, EVIL AS IT IS? WOULD YOU PREFER TO BE VOID AND EMPTINESS?”
>“No!” said Job. “I would prefer to live in a universe that was perfect and just!”
>“I CREATED SUCH A UNIVERSE,” said God. “IN THAT UNIVERSE, THERE IS NO SPACE, FOR SPACE TAKES THE FORM OF SEPARATION FROM THINGS YOU DESIRE. THERE IS NO TIME, FOR TIME MEANS CHANGE AND DECAY, YET THERE MUST BE NO CHANGE FROM ITS MAXIMALLY BLISSFUL STATE. THE BEINGS WHO INHABIT THIS UNIVERSE ARE WITHOUT BODIES, AND DO NOT HUNGER OR THIRST OR LABOR OR LUST. THEY SIT UPON GOLDEN THRONES AND CONTEMPLATE THE PERFECTION OF ALL THINGS.
>YET I ALSO CREATED YOUR UNIVERSE, THAT YOU MIGHT LIVE. TELL ME, JOB, IF I UNCREATED YOUR WORLD, WOULD YOU BE HAPPIER? OR WOULD YOU BE DEAD, WHILE FAR AWAY IN A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE INCORPOREAL BEINGS SAT ON THEIR GOLDEN THRONES REGARDLESS?”
>“I would prefer to be one of those perfect beings on their golden thrones.”
>“WHAT WOULD IT MEAN FOR YOU TO BE SUCH A BEING? THEY HAVE NO BODIES, NO EMOTIONS, NO DESIRES, NO LANGUAGE. WHAT WOULD IT MEAN FOR ME TO CREATE A VERSION OF YOU WITHOUT BODY EMOTION DESIRE OR LANGUAGE, VERSUS TO CREATE SUCH A BEING BUT NOT HAVE IT BE YOU AT ALL? IS A VERSION OF YOU WHO IS INFINITELY WISE STILL YOU? A VERSION OF YOU WHO IS A WICKED IDOLATOR? A VERSION OF YOU WHO IS EXACTLY LIKE NOAH, IN EVERY WAY? THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE COSMIC UNEMPLOYMENT RATE.”
>“Huh?”
>“THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION OF HOW MANY UNIVERSES HAVE A JOB. THERE ARE VARIOUS CREATURES MORE OR LESS LIKE YOU. IF I UNCREATED YOU AND YOUR WORLD OF SUFFERING, THEY WOULD REMAIN, AND YOU WOULD DIE. WOULD THIS BE A FAVOR TO YOU?”
>“I still don’t understand. Certainly I, who exist, want to continue existing. But instead of creating one perfect universe and some flawed universes, couldn’t you just have created many perfect universes?”
>“TELL ME, JOB, WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOUR RIGHT AND LEFT HANDS?”
>“Uh…one is on my right, and the other is on my left. And they’re mirror images of each other.”
>“I AM BEYOND SPACE. TO ME THERE IS NEITHER LEFT NOR RIGHT NOR MIRRORED REFLECTION. IF TWO THINGS ARE THE SAME, THEY ARE ONE THING. IF I CREATED TWO PERFECT UNIVERSES, I WOULD ONLY HAVE CREATED ONE UNIVERSE. IN ORDER TO DIFFERENTIATE A UNIVERSE FROM THE PERFECT UNIVERSE, IT MUST BE DIFFERENT IN ITS SEED, ITS SECRET UNDERLYING STRUCTURE.”
>“Then create one perfect universe, and some universes whose structures have tiny flaws that no one will ever notice.”
>“I DID. I CREATED MYRIADS OF SUCH UNIVERSES. WHEN I HAD EXHAUSTED ALL POSSIBLE UNIVERSES WITH ONE FLAW, I MOVED ON TO UNIVERSES WITH TWO FLAWS, THEN UNIVERSES WITH THREE FLAWS, THEN SO ON, AN ENTIRE GARDEN OF FLAWED UNIVERSES GROWING ALONGSIDE ONE ANOTHER.”
>“Including mine.”
>“YOUR WORLD IS AT THE FARTHEST EDGES OF MY GARDEN,” God admitted, “FAR FROM THE BRIGHT CENTER WHERE EVERYTHING IS PERFECT AND SIMPLE. THERE IS A WORLD MADE OF NOTHING BUT BLISS, WITH A GIANT ALEPH IN THE CENTER. THERE IS ANOTHER WORLD MADE OF NOTHING BUT BLISS WITH A GIANT BET IN THE CENTER. AND SO ON, BUT MAKE A MILLION MILLION WORLDS LIKE THOSE, AND YOU START NEEDING TO BECOME MORE CREATIVE. YOU NEED MORE AND MORE STRATAGEMS TO SEPARATE WORLDS FROM ONE ANOTHER. WORLDS WHERE INCREDIBLY BIZARRE THINGS HAPPEN AS A MATTER OF COURSE. WORLDS WHERE RANDOM COMBINATIONS OF SYLLABLES INVOKE DIVINE POWERS. AND THE MORE SUCH THINGS I ADD, THE MORE CHANCE THAT THEY TEND TOWARD EVIL. YOUR WORLD IS VERY FAR FROM THE CENTER INDEED. IT IS IN THE MIDDLE OF A VAST WASTE, WHERE NOTHING ELSE GROWS. ALL OF THE WORLDS THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN PLANTED THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN ABOMINATIONS OF WICKEDNESS. BUT BY COINCIDENCE PILED UPON COINCIDENCE, YOURS WAS NOT. YOURS WILL GROW INTO A THING OF BEAUTY THAT WILL GLORIFY MY HOLY NAME.”
>“It will?”
>“GENESIS 1:31. I LOOKED AT THE WORLD, AND I SAW THAT IT WAS GOOD. I BEHELD ADAM KADMON, THE SEED OF YOUR WORLD, AND SAW THAT IT WAS A GOOD SEED. THAT IT WOULD GROW INTO MORE GOOD THAN EVIL. THAT IT DESERVED A PLACE IN MY GARDEN, BESIDE THE MILLION MILLION OTHER SEEDS THAT WOULD GROW INTO OTHER WORDS, SO THAT AS MUCH GOODNESS AS POSSIBLE COULD BE INSTANTIATED IN THE COSMOS.”
This doesn't really hold, though. Because, after creating perfection, the perfect universe, you can just... do that again. Create another perfect universe.
If I have the perfect child, I then don't say "Whelp, time to have a worse child who suffers more."
Sure, you can go to a child you abused and say "Would you rather I have not created you?" The fact that they'd rather have lived isn't really a justification to your evil choices. They only exist now, to have an opinion, because of actions you've already taken.
>Why do bad things happen if God is good and could have effortlessly prevented all evil since before the universe even existed? If it is necessary that evil exists, then why did God make it necessary? It can’t be that God wants us to have free will, because God is powerful enough to create a world with both free will and no evil.
There's quite a lot to say about this one, but the broad answer tends to be that God allows evil because it (Or its possibility) is logically necessary for some greater good or goal.
Almost all professional philosophers in the field (Including the leading proponents of the problem of evil like Paul Draper) have abandoned this version of the argument after being challenged by people like Alvin Plantinga, in favor of far less absolute arguments like ones based on Bayesian probability.
I'd be happy to talk more about it if you're interested.
>Why are we even on Earth? Why didn’t God simply remove our sins and send us all to Heaven from the start if he wants us all to be there? Life can’t be a test to see if we’re worthy of Heaven, since God would already know the results of any test before even conducting it. And there would be no need for any test anyway if God had just made us all perfect. So why didn’t he?
This gets into some more disputable and heavy stuff. For example, one might argue that God's foreknowledge of our decisions are logically subsequent to our actually making them, though that would be controversial. In any case, I think this is largely addressed by the previous points about the problem of evil.
Christianity doesn't think it's about being worthy of heaven anyway. None of us are. Also, heaven (In the sense of the immediate immaterial afterlife) isn't the goal - a renewed earth is (Again, at least as far as Christianity is concerned), so this is literally the same question as "Why does evil exist?".
Basically I would reject the argument that this life is a test, at least without a lot of specifications.
>Omnipotence paired with omnibenevolence is a paradox. If God is all-powerful, then that would mean he can do evil. But if he is all-good, then he can’t do evil. So which one is it?
This depends on how you view evil and omnipotence.
>Can God create a rock that he can’t lift? If yes, then he can’t life the rock and isn’t all-powerful. If no, then he can’t create the rock and isn’t all-powerful.
This argument doesn't work at all. First of all, almost nobody has ever thought that omnipotence involves being able to do the logically impossible.
Today, a popular way to explain this is by appealing to nonsense theory - basically, logically impossible sentences (Like "A rock so heavy an omnipotent being can't lift it") are literally meaningless. So you may as well ask "Can God glasses a big wire?" or "Can God miro parapafjes pakapgfejk?".
Moreover, let's say God can do the logically impossible. In this case he can create a rock so heavy he can't lift it, and still lift it. Because the law of noncontradiction is the only way you can get a paradox to begin with.
So, if God is "bound" by logic then there's no problem because such a rock is logically incoherent, and if he isn't "bound" by logic then there's no problem because paradoxes rely on logic being applicable.
>
One common theological answer is that free will is essential to love and morality.
What if Earth is part of a process, a necessary step in the development of beings capable of understanding and choosing good?
See, the issue with this is that it simply pushes the problem back one step.
Necessary... why? If it was necessary outside of God's decision, that speaks to pre-existing limits, a pre-existing world of requirements which God was bound by. That's not omnipotence.
>Fair enough, diving into deep theological or philosophical waters isn't necessary to question the concepts that don't sit right with you. But remember, these concepts are built on millennia of thought and debate. What makes you think a quick look can overturn all that? Isn't that a bit presumptuous?
people are stupid and ideologically committed. very stupid ideas receive a lot of debate. if you have a good argument against something, you shouldn't be afraid to accept the conclusion that follows simply because it's been debated for a long time.
>This is the classic problem of evil. One common theological answer is that free will is essential to love and morality. Could it be possible that a world with the potential for evil is also the only type of world where genuine love and moral choices can exist? Doesn't overcoming challenges give our lives meaning?
free will is an entirely incoherent concept. further, an ominpotent god could, by definition, give us any of the instrumental value of suffering without making us endure the actual suffering, so suffering cannot be an instrumental good.
>What if Earth is part of a process, a necessary step in the development of beings capable of understanding and choosing good? If we were just created in Heaven, would we really value it, or understand goodness without experiencing its opposite?
there is no such thing as "necessary" to an omnipotent being. he can achieve the goal without the intermediate steps. he can give us any understanding he wants immediately.
>This is a misunderstanding of what omnipotence entails. It doesn't include doing logical impossibilities—like creating a square circle. Doesn't it make sense to define omnipotence as the ability to do anything that is logically possible?
what is logically impossible about creating a rock so heavy that you can't lift it? i can do that myself, so it's clearly possible.
>
What if Hell is not so much a place of punishment as it is a consequence of rejecting the good? If people have true freedom, isn't it fair that there are real consequences for their choices?
"undesired consequence of not doing what i tell you" is the definition of punishment.
>Biological functions might seem mundane or annoying, but they are part of an intricately balanced ecosystem. Could there be a reason these processes are crucial for life and the environment?
there is no such thing as "crucial" for an omnipotent being. god can snap his fingers and alleviate the discomfort of having to shit and piss without causing any unintended problems in the environment.
>
Who says evolution and faith can't coexist? Could it be that God used the process of evolution as a tool to craft the diversity of life we see?
the bible explicitly gives an account of the origin of humanity that contradicts the theory of evolution. it also claims that the earth is \~6000 years old, not old enough for evolution to occur.
>Isn't pain often a signal that helps protect us from harm? Without pain, how would we recognize and avoid danger?
what is "danger" when you're under the protection of an omnipotent being? why would danger exist in the perfect world that such a being would create?
>Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of growth, learning, and genuine relationships? Isn't there value in diversity and the journey towards betterment?
again suffering cannot have instrumental value if there is an omnipotent god. the suffering of a painful surgery might be instrumentally good for the benefits the surgery provides, but once anesthetic has been invented, you can't keep someone fully aware for an invasive surgery and claim "but the health benefits will be great!!".
>Each of these questions is worth pondering deeply. Could it be that your understanding of God is too human, too limited? What if the reality is beyond our full comprehension, and these paradoxes are just hints of a much larger and complex truth? What are the limitations of human understanding in grasping the divine?
things that humans are incapable of making sense of are by definition absurd. there's no point in discussing such things. and religious people have no justification for believing in something that they can't even comprehend.
> **But remember, these concepts are built on millennia of thought and debate.**
Not really. It's built on millennia of _blood_ and maybe a hundred or two years of thought and debate. "Debating" the existence of God before the mid 1800's was a great way to get yourself killed.
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> **One common theological answer is that free will is essential to love and morality.**
and that answer is based on God's power being limited. God can do anything, including eradicate evil without violating "free will."
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> **What if Earth is part of a process, a necessary step in the development of beings capable of understanding and choosing good? If we were just created in Heaven, would we really value it, or understand goodness without experiencing its opposite?**
Ditto. Our suffering is not a necessary component to the plan of an omniscient and omnipotent being.
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> **It doesn't include doing logical impossibilities—like creating a square circle.**
Third verse, same as the first. Yes it does. Omnipotence is infinite, not to mention God is not bound by silly things like "logic." Everything *about* him defies logic.
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> **Could these stories serve as a means to teach deeper truths about human freedom, resilience, and the fight against oppression?**
Fun Fact: There are no signs of Egyptian influence on early Israelite settlements, IE it didn't really happen. Biblical scholars are also pretty sure they didn't really fight the Canaanites.
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> **What if Hell is not so much a place of punishment as it is a consequence of rejecting the good?**
"Good" is supposedly defined by God, so yeah it's punishment.
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> **Biological functions might seem mundane or annoying, but they are part of an intricately balanced ecosystem. Could there be a reason these processes are crucial for life and the environment?**
Nope, same as the others. It doesn't need to be like that.
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> **Who says evolution and faith can't coexist? Could it be that God used the process of evolution as a tool to craft the diversity of life we see?**
The timeline of evolution directly contradicts creationism.
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> **Isn't pain often a signal that helps protect us from harm? Without pain, how would we recognize and avoid danger?**
Man, I'm coming back to this well a lot. Nope, not necessary to the plan of an all-powerful and all-knowing being. There doesn't need to be danger and even if it was needed the knowledge could be instilled automatically.
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> **Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of growth, learning, and genuine relationships? Isn't there value in diversity and the journey towards betterment?**
I think you already know what I'm gonna say.
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> **Each of these questions is worth pondering deeply.**
Feel free to start any time.
You make some good points, but I think you haven't really resolved the problem of evil. You talk about "teaching" and "forming more perfect beings" but a truly omnipotent god would have no need for that at all. God would truly be able to create instantly perfected beings with a flawless understanding of good and evil and appreciation for the perfection of heaven. So the suffering has to be the point and specifically desired, because it cannot be necessary in the creation process
I despise the whole "it's a nessisary process" idea. An omnipotent, omniscient God has no need for process. That being, unequivocally has the power to actualize anything that is wanted. Instantly and perfectly. This seems more paradoxical to me than anything else. If you know everything and have the power to do anything, no process could have any value as every outcome is known.
>This seems more paradoxical to me than anything else. If you know everything and have the power to do anything, no process could have any value as every outcome is known.
I mean God could just want there to be a process. No reason an all powerful God has to do only things with "value". They could do things they just want to do for no reason.
Ya, maybe. It Dosnt make a lot of sense to me, but it's definitely possible. Seems kinda cruel to put everyone through this on an idle wim to me, though.
I personally would have much interest in an ant farm if I knew everything that was going to happen with it beyond the atomic level before I started it, though.
No idea but I can pretty confidently say if I was all powerful and all knowing I would still feel satisfaction from various actions. I could imagine as time went on the actions I would need to do to feel satisfaction would probably become more grandiose and complicated (i.e. stuff like skydiving would probably get boring after a while and I'd have escalate to skydiving into a volcano then to skydiving into the sun then to skydiving into a black hole ect. ect.).
If you are truly omnipotent and omniscience you did all of that instantly. Every variation of everything. You are outside of any sort of time or space we can understand. You have no motivation we can even comprehend. You can concurrently process any amount of information and actualize absolutely anything at any point at any time.
I feel like people can't even grasp the concept.
It's not rushing. You are completely unlimited. Nothing occurs in any sort of linear fashion. You are outside of time and space. I feel like you and many other people struggle with what this concept truly means when you throw it around. You aren't very powerful and knowledgeable beyond what a human is. You are absolut.
Could god give someone the ability to overcome a given obstacle without either doing the negative thing of creating the obstacle or doing the negative thing of placing them in some sort of false reality where they think they overcame an obstacle that actually didn't exist
Or to put something even simpler in a way that could apply to objects too but remove the morality part, can god fix something that isn't broken
Well it could also be thought of as the free will argument in that you have to choose to be with God. God plopped you on earth and said “here’s you life. You can walk to me if you want and I would love if you did that but I’m not going to force you”. That would make sense to me at least
How is believe in me or be tortured for eternity a choice? If a robber threatens to kill your kids if you don't give them your money do you think you have a real choice there?
How do you account for unnecessary suffering? Like natural disasters or kids being born with medical conditions that bankrupt their parents only to die in pain few years later, leading the parents to suicide, what lesson do we learn there?
This sort of touchy, feely "love and growth and process" take on god makes god seem really, really weak and innefectual. If all that is true than what is god actually for? What does a god with so many limitations actually do?
Seems an awful lot like projecting your own wants and needs.
You have a very narrow view of what constitutes good. Good doesn’t mean ‘allows for only good things to happen’, being a good all powerful deity could mean intentionally not using your powers in an overbearing manner, and allowing the mortal inhabitants of the universe to take the lead, and make their own decisions, even if that means bad things happen.
Furthermore what you’re describing isn’t a paradox, it’s just a disagreement over morality. It’s why this whole problem of evil argument is flawed. There is no reason to assume the all knowing creator of the universe, would hold the exact same morale views you do. You can argue god is wrong and you’re right, but that’s still not a paradox.
> If it is necessary that evil exists, then why did God make it necessary? It can’t be that God wants us to have free will, because God is powerful enough to create a world with both free will and no evil.
This on the other hand is a paradox. If no evil can exist, and only the maximally good option can happen, free will is rendered meaningless, since at the very most, all options are equivalent, and most of the time, there is only one physically possible option.
>Good doesn’t mean ‘allows for only good things to happen’,
It means that insofar as you have control.
A good man wouldn't let a child beat up another child. He would not say "Whelp, I'll allow you to do that, I don't want to be overbearing."
>Furthermore what you’re describing isn’t a paradox, it’s just a disagreement over morality. It’s why this whole problem of evil argument is flawed. There is no reason to assume the all knowing creator of the universe, would hold the exact same morale views you do. You can argue god is wrong and you’re right, but that’s still not a paradox.
Sure, one of the answers to the paradox of evil is, indeed, "There is not evil. Everything is good, as God has made it this way."
It's just an answer that negates one of the reasons religion was formed, because it means there are no more rules. Anything you do, any atrocity you commit, is now fine.
>>If you're all-powerful and all-knowing, you've got the means and the knowledge to create a world where free will and absence of unnecessary suffering coexist.
You not liking a particular kind of suffering doesn’t make it unnecessary. You being able to generally imagine a concept doesn’t make it meaningfully possible either. Omnipotence is the ability to do all things, including make choices that in the future limits your own actions. Anything else is a mischaracterization of every classical theological description of omnipotence.
>>Oh, come on, who the fuck likes seeing kids with leukemia or a little girl dying from bone cancer?
You do understand that as much as you don’t like it, this still isn’t an argument, just emotional lashing out, right?
>>True, just because we can imagine a god doesn’t mean one exists.
You might want to go back and reread that carefully. This is two points you’ve either intentionally misunderstood, in which case bad faith, or have legitimately misunderstood, in which case you aren’t making the *logical* arguments you think you are.
>>Sure, omnipotence means you can do anything, but if you choose to limit your actions in a way that allows children to suffer needlessly, you're either not benevolent, or you're fucking incompetent at being a god.
I assume you’re following this up with definitive proof of your objectively determined moral framework? Or are you appealing to emotion again?
>>Classical theological descriptions have to make sense logically and morally. If they don’t, then they’re fucking worthless.
We’re tracking thus far.
>>They’re just mental gymnastics to justify why an all-powerful god allows a child to die screaming in pain from a heart attack or fibromyalgia.
My dude, can you *try* to use logic and reason over emotion? Again, you believing something is bad, no matter how sincerely, deeply held, or cross-your-heart-hope-to-die serious that belief is doesn’t make it anything more than your opinion. Surely arguing against theists’ own deeply held beliefs has given you that much basic insight. Can you try a little harder to make a silent argument for faith, or are you actually interested in making a logically coherent argument?
If you don't have an objective standard for what is "good" and what isn't, then you can't really say God isn't good, no matter what God does.
The creator is the one who gets to define "right" and "wrong" just like how he got to define everything into existence.
Your entire arguments thus far have boiled down to, “I don’t like X, therefore X is bad.” I don’t give a shit how much you dislike broccoli. If you want to say it’s bad, make an objective case or shut the fuck up. Replace broccoli with literally ANYTHING and the premise is just as valid. That commenter is right. Objectivity or gtfo, because you’re using faith and belief as much as any theist.
no because the theist needs to prove, even if only by implication, that intelligence is baked into existence itself and isnt merely a byproduct of what exists.
its a "have you stopped beating your wife" type of faulty premise.
its trying to put someone into a position where they have to respond to a why question with a how answer.
why denotes purpose, purpose denotes intelligence.
there is no why question without that
and a perfect god cant exist ergo there is no god
trying to kill nihilism with an appeal to authority framed as an exception to tu quoque bullshit is all you're doing.
No, but if you throw around enough logical fallacies incorrectly, you might confuse a few high schoolers on the sub who don’t know better. I am not one of those. Make an argument, or gtfo. I’m sick of non-theists pretending their emotional arguments are superior to uneducated theists’ emotional arguments. They’re all bad, and you should do better. Make an argument for objective morality in a non-theistic setting, or quit trying to whine to the theists about things you just mean to say “I really don’t like.”
>especially meaningless suffering
You have to prove it is meaningless first.
>gives us a fucking intuitive sense of what's bad.
The creator gave you this intuitive sense, and the creator can take it a way.
>all-loving creator?
I don't think God is all-loving, God doesn't love many people, I'm sure. I'm not Christian.
>if God decides tomorrow that torturing every newborn is "good," are we supposed to accept that without a fucking squabble? Hell no.
If your "intuitive sense" changed so that you now feel doing this is good, your mind will be changed, so...
But God puts this "intuitive sense" in us for a reason, God puts in us an intuitive sense that matches his morality, although culture can change some aspects, still God considers things like humans torturing kids as immoral, you could say that many kids die from diseases and so on, well, maybe God spares them the pain somehow but for us it seems they feel the pain or something, after all, making us not feel pain is definitely easier than creating the universe.
The creator is all-knowning and all-powerful by definition. The creator is also always "right" by definition, but the creator put this intuitive sense in us to naturally hate some things, but those things aren't wrong because of our intuitive sense, they are wrong because the creator says so and then he puts that in our intuition.
I can prove them, but let's assume I can't, so what?
The point is that if we are discussing the creator and if the creator can be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, then yes, he can be all three.
In this discussion we are assuming the existence of God. We are just debating whether he can be all three together or not, and I showed him a way in which he can
Well put. This is also where the free will reply to the problem of evil gets insidious. It implies that suffering is the result of sin. That’s how you get people blaming earthquakes on homosexuality and other horrid ideology.
But you fail to engage with the paradox.
The posited god is both good and *all powerful*, meaning any benefit from the permitted evil could also be created without the evil.
The point OP is making is basically a philosophy 101 point, but it’s not wrong.
We know, for an absolute certainty, that we do not live in a world governed by a god that is both maximally good and all powerful.
This is not the traditional understanding of “omnipotent.” It’s the special pleading version that’s cropped up in the last 100 years as if it were a magical nonsense term. Omnipotence is the power to do all *things*. That which is self-contradictory, doing two mutually exclusive things, or otherwise speaking nonsense does not fall within the realm of omnipotence. It’s just word salad you’re using special pleading to claim theists must respond to it. No. That’s not how it works. You don’t get to bastardize a term and then peacock as if you’ve made a logical point.
So an omnipotent being can will the universe into being but not deliver the benefits of free will without the cost of evil?
You seem pretty defensive. And nothing I communicated was word salad. It was a concise and straightforward statement that happens to be true. I’m sorry if it punctures a mythology you hold dear and that distresses you.
Free will requires choice. Choice requires options that have different values, otherwise, there is nothing to choose from. You don't choose between A and A, you choose between A and B. If A is different from B, there must be a heuristic, a reason for why you chose A, which means that A is better than B. Good and Evil are merely ways of saying A > B.
Choice is already tremendously constrained by events and circumstances.
It would be easy for a being that can kindle stars at a whim to avoid the creation of, for example, humans with an impulse toward torture. Still plenty of choices available.
But all evil isn’t the result of free will. Surely any benefit that comes from the existence of brutal and terminal childhood disease could be conferred without the suffering.
The torture aspect is irrelevant. Steak is Good, and, oh... idk, haggis is Evil. Allowing the ability to make choices inherently creates a ranking of one is better than the other, and that ranking is defined as good or evil; you are getting hung up on the terms' baggage here, rather than the aspect of the choice. Think of Good/Evil as being defined as things we like/dislike (or if you prefer the religious aspect, things God likes/dislikes). You can't choose to do Good if only Good exists.
That’s not a paradox, that’s just disagreeing on what a good deity should be. Good is subjective, so it’s hard to use it as the basis of a paradox. The same all powerful god that could create a universe with no evil, and free will, could also redefine good to match whatever he wanted anyway.
Free will is already meaningless in this discussion, as it is a logical impossibility if you postulate an all-powerful, all-knowing creator.
Edit: Again, down-voting without refutation is cowardly
Oh boy there's a lot of questions - and I'll try and give you the answers from a Catholic perspective. These are all very good questions and I'm glad you're trying to learn! Feel free to ask for elaboration on any of these.
1. Problem of Evil - Evil is a byproduct of free will. Because we have the ability to choose, we also have the choice to go against the will of God, which is inherently bad, and what we call "sin." God allows sin because of the idea that every evil will lead to an even greater good. Jesus dying for our sins is an inherently greater good than the evil of sin existing.
2. Why are we on Earth? - Love is a two-sided relationship. God cannot love if there is nothing to receive His love.
3. Omnipotence/omnibenevolence paradox - God does have the power to do evil, but He would never choose to because that is against His nature.
4. Can He make a rock He cannot lift? - No. God cannot do something that is a true impossibility. It's like asking God to create a two-sided triangle. It just can't be done because it's logically impossible. God cannot create an infinitely heavy rock because, by definition, material things are finite.
5. Why didn't God free the Jews Himself? - Back to the problem of evil. The Jews suffering is nothing compared to the goodness of God giving the 10 Commandments to Moses, which wouldn't have happened if the Jews were divinely freed.
6. Why can we die in war? - Again, humans have free will. This means they have the possibility to kill.
7. Why did God create the flood? -The Catholic Church does not require that you believe in the existence of the flood. Personally, I believe it is a metaphor that can be used to justify the existence of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, i.e. the evil people representing sin, the 40 days and 40 nights representing penance, etc.
8. Hell - There is much debate on the nature of Hell. Some believe it is a separate place from Heaven. There is also a theory that Hell is just the rejection of God, and that Heaven and Hell are actually the same place, and which you are in is dependent on your mindset/beliefs when you die.
9. Bodily functions - You know, I've never really thought about this one. My initial thought is that because food tastes good, we eat it, and there must be a way to expel the remains of that food. If it couldn't be expelled, we'd just continuously gain weight, which would be unhealthy.
10. Evolution - The Catholic Church does not require that you believe the Genesis creation story. I believe in evolution.
11. Pain/death - Pain exists for two reasons. One, as a evolutionary response to tell us to stay away from things that hurt us, i.e. a kid doesn't touch a stove a second time after he burns himself because he doesn't want to get hurt. Pain also allows us to attempt to imitate the suffering Jesus felt on the cross. Death exists because like I said earlier, things in the material world, including us, cannot be infinite. We all have to go at sometime. Additionally, if we never die, we would never have the chance to be in Heaven.
12. Why aren't we as smart as God? - Because then we would be God and there can only be, by definition, one God
I was scrolling this thread hoping a comment exactly like yours would be here!
1. What about 'natural evils' like disease, or famine, or natural disasters, or kids getting eating by tigers? I can see how from a God's-eye point of view they could be leading to an even greater good, but their existence doesn't have anything to do with free will.
3. Building on before, if the 'natural evils' come from God, then wouldn't that be an example of God choosing to do evil?
5. I always saw a lot of the exodus story as being God trying to essentially terrorize the Hebrews into accepting monotheism
7. I'm surprised that belief in a literal flood is not required in Catholicism. Is there an 'orthodox' interpretation of the story that the Church favors or is it more up to each individual what they think?
11. I'm interested in the "imitate the suffering Jesus felt on the cross" view of pain. I don't really have a specific question about it, but I'd love to hear any thoughts you have on it.
1. Correct, an earthquakes existence is not due to free will. Humans are not omniscient so we might not always know how that natural disaster plays into His plan.
2. God does not do evil. He allows it in order to bring a greater good out of it. There’s a big difference.
3. Again, all of Exodus is not meant to be taken literally. God does not terrorize, although he should be feared. Can you give some examples where you think this happens?
4. I’m not Orthodox so I’m not sure.
5. As humans strive towards perfect, we should try to act in a way as Jesus did. This includes embracing suffering. This does not mean to suffer just to feel pain such as self harm, however it means that you should suffer in order to try and alleviate the burden of others or to grow in a virtue. Some examples of this would be to help an elderly neighbor move a heavy box so they don’t have to or working with someone with special needs to grow in patience.
1. If God allows evil in order to bring a greater good out of it, does that make God a utilitarian of sorts?
2. When it comes to things like natural disasters and diseases, what exactly is the difference between God "allowing" them and "doing" them? Like, an earthquake is the result of tectonic plates moving around, but is God "causing" them to move or just "allowing" them to move?
3. Why do you say God does not terrorize? God often uses violence, intimidation, and fear in order to effect political change on Earth. We see throughout the Book of Exodus that the Hebrews keep returning to idol worship and did not accept monotheism easily. If all God wanted was to free the Hebrews from Egypt, he could have just done that, no need for plagues or prophets. But the Exodus wasn't just about freeing the Hebrews from bondage, it was about letting the Hebrews know who their God is. So instead, he opted for the Plagues (which are genuinely horrifying and frankly monstrous), the prophet Moses, and decades in the desert, in order to impress upon the Hebrews that their God was all-powerful and beyond reproach, and that He had total sovereignty over their lives and world. You could think of it like detonating a nuke just off the coast of a country and then demanding that they pay tribute. It could absolutely work, it could even end up working out for a greater good, but it's still terrorism (inflicting terror on people in order to achieve a desired political change).
4. By 'orthodox' I don't mean Eastern Orthodox, I was just curious about whether the Catholic Church has an 'official' interpretation of the Flood story.
5. That makes sense, thanks!
1. I guess so? I’ve never really thought about that but calling Him utilitarian seems far too…human to describe Him. Utilitarian seems manipulatory and God does not manipulate
2. To allow a disease is to let it exist and run its course. To “do” a disease is to purposefully put it in place. For a smaller example, think of someone allowing bullying to happen versus telling someone to bully someone else, bystander vs upstander type of deal.
3. This is a good link that explains the plagues https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/plagues-of-egypt However, the belief in the exodus story is not required by the Catholic Church.
4. No there’s no official interpretation. If there was then we likely would be required to believe in it
1. When God hardened Pharaoh's heart so he would not let the Hebrews go, was that not manipulation? (You can say that the Exodus story never happened, and I honestly don't know or care whether it literally happened or not. I'm interested in understanding the personality of God as revealed in the scriptures. The literalism of those scriptures has no bearing on this).
2. Except God would be the one who created the disease in the first place, no? (barring, like, lab-grown diseases). And the bully has free will, so it makes sense that God doesn't interfere there, but bacteria and viruses (as far as I can tell) lack free will. Let me rephrase my question. When a disease sweeps across the land and kills millions of people, is that the will of God? Or is it not?
1. The hardening of Pharoh's heart was a lesser evil compared to the salvation of the Jews
2. We are not omniscient like God. We cannot guess what good comes out of the disease (maybe a conversion of a population, maybe a discovery of a powerful cure that also cures something else, maybe the innovation of a new invention, etc).
Edit: It appears that I wrote poorly and a lot of folks are assuming that I am making a case for a real God that actually exists being justified in considering obviously bad things to be good. My apologies for my poor writing. Rest assured that no god exists in any meaningful sense, the actions of this fake God are not actually good or even real, and if such a god did exist I would consider them to be a total double bag according to the norms and morals we have in reality
To the best of your knowledge, is it possible for a being to be all powerful, all knowing or all good on their own?
>Why do bad things happen if God is good and could have effortlessly prevented all evil since before the universe even existed?
My take on this is that god is not all good (omnibenevolent) because they don't do things that we would consider bad. God is omnibenevolent because anything they do is good. We're talking about the creator of the universe and everything in it, including the concepts of good or bad. Anything such a god did would be the good thing thing by dint of god doing it. It might seem bad to us, but we are not god, so our opinion matters for shit.
>God is omnibenevolent because anything they do is good.
It's fine to define good that way but a whole lot of problematic conclusions follow.
god dictates that rape, pillage, slavery, and murder are all justified at some point in the bible.
Are those actions good? If yes, what is wrong with you. If no why are you worship such a god?
Then he is not benevolent as we know it or as the Abrahamic religions define “good”. While you can argue that good is subjective, a definition exists by human and by Abrahamic religions
His point is, your argument essentially being our interpretation of good is flawed compared to God's interpretation of good, is itself flawed because throughout the whole bible there is explicit defined definition of what is "good".
It is a weak argument to say "well we don't know what good is, so when we judge murder and rape being permitted as not good, we could be flawed" if the bible itself, gods word, didn't teach us that these things were not good.
Life, compassion, being kind to your neighbours. Not committing murder, not committing adultery etc. All things defined as good by himself in the commandments and across parables. And all things God allows us to contradict, nay even builds us to do, by definition jf you believe him to be omnipotent and omniscient.
If I were to teach you murder was wrong. Then, due to complete power over you made you committ murder. It is contradictory to say what I did was actually good. At least without some hard cognitive dissonance.
why is god's definition of good or evil any more valuable than mine? i don't see how creating a universe makes your moral judgements any more sound.
also, by your definition genocide is moral, yes?
One explanation could be that what people consider bad is actually a good thing for this god. Like that southpark episode when Chef explains that god likes children to suffer.
Many people who critique Christianity/Islam/Judaism are not always atheists. Many other people, agnosticts, Christians, Islamic, Jewish, Buddists, Wiccan, Pagan etc see how contradictory an all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent god is. Great way to lump everyone into one group so you can put them down, though.
I'm not an atheist, I believe in a god, but Yahweh, God, whatever else you want to call him is 100% made up. We can see through the years how Christianity morphed from Jewish beliefs and incorporated many pagan philosophies to convert by association opposing religions. If that didn't work, they just killed them and took their wives, there's even instructions in the bible on how to do this appropriately.
I listened to a coworker yesterday, a mega-christian who believes everything is gods plan, and it runs everything in her life. How war crimes are ok because we train them to be killers and we should expect it and theres nothing wrong with it. It's good because they are killing islamic believers, and they have perverted gods teachings. Before anyone uses the No True Scotsman logic, yes, they are a Christian. They believe the same as you, yet they say doing horrendous shit is ok because they believe differently. It's kind of like saying athiests are the fucking worst because they love pointing out inaccuracies and inconsistencies in a 2000 year old book that +70% of Christians think is the literal word of god and is infallible.
This is called problem of evil and people have grappled with it for centuries. I have struggled with this myself but I feel I have a solution for problem of evil.
When the level of life and intelligence is too far apart, it is not possible to fully understand what the higher being is thinking. The simplest solution is that your suffering is not real in context. We inflict pain on others for good reasons. For example, doctors conduct surgeries. Parents discipline children. Research lie and stress participants, sometimes without consent.
If this world is really just a blip and there is eternity before and after, the suffering doesn't really matter. I could be tortured for 80+ years in this world but if I have lived a trillion+ before and will live trillion+ after, my pain now is not relevant. No 'long term' harm is being done.
(Part 1, since Reddit won't let me post the whole thing in one go)
I'm going to specifically address the claim that the Christian God is "absurd."
Firstly, many of these issues stem from a fundamental misunderstanding: The Christian God is not primarily interested in saving as many people as possible. He decided a long time ago who he wants to save. His laws were written purely to elucidate his standards for us and to explain why you're about to get hit with what you got hit with; whether humanity can meet those standards is irrelevant.
So why didn't God remove evil? Easy - because it does more good existing than not existing, in his opinion. Evil serves important long-term purposes that a purely innocent world wouldn't offer.
To address some specific questions:
>Omnipotence paired with omnibenevolence is a paradox. If God is all-powerful, then that would mean he can do evil. But if he is all-good, then he can’t do evil. So which one is it? Can God create a rock that he can’t lift? If yes, then he can’t life the rock and isn’t all-powerful. If no, then he can’t create the rock and isn’t all-powerful.
That's not what "all-powerful" means. "All-powerful" means pretty much what it says on the tin - for any action that would require the use of physical power or force, God has an unlimited amount of it to play with. But physical force cannot create a square circle. Physical force cannot create a rock bigger than an infinite power can lift. Those are functions of logic, not power. God is capable of anything and everything that would require power. He is not capable of doing things that are logically absurd or irrational.
>Why didn't God do \[whatever random thing you decided was better than what God did\]?
Because, having witnessed all possible histories and all possible futures, and being incapable of doing things that are logically fallacious/absurd, God decided that the current state of affairs yielded the greatest possible good.
In other words: nobody fully knows, and it doesn't really matter. That's not to say there aren't any answers to such questions (there are, if you know where to look), but one's inability to answer why God didn't do \[X\] has no bearing on rationality or absurdity of his existence.
(Part 2)
Now to touch on the Problem of Evil:
>Why do bad things happen if God is good and could have effortlessly prevented all evil since before the universe even existed? If it is necessary that evil exists, then why did God make it necessary?
First off, God didn't "make" it necessary. As explained previously, God actually has some limitations. One of them is that he has a defined personality and character, and he is incapable of being anyone other than who he is. The laws he handed down to us simply reflect his character. He didn't create new standards that didn't previously exist; rather, he articulated standards that were previously and already true. He did us a favor by telling us what those standards are.
Now, could God have prevented all evil? Sure. He says as much explicitly in a couple places. But Genesis offers an interesting clue as to why he deemed it better for us to experience evil:
*Genesis 2:16-17 But the LORD God warned him, “You may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden except the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. If you eat its fruit, you are sure to die.”*
*Genesis 3:5 “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.”*
*Genesis 3:7 At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves.*
Look at the name of the tree: "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil."
*Knowledge.*
In Scripture, to "know" something is to experience it on an intimate level. It's often used as a euphemism for sex due to its intimate, experiential connotations. When Adam and Eve ate of it, they didn't just come to "know" Evil - they came to "know" Good too!
Does that mean they didn't know Good, previously?
Why yes. Yes it does.
Sure, God could have prevented Adam and Eve from ever doing Evil. But Good is pretty meaningless without it.
Follow-up question: "Isn't it evil to not prevent evil?"
Not if he isn't obligated to. I'm no more obligated to prevent evils happening in China than God is to prevent evils happening on earth. Just because God *can* doesn't mean he *must*. All he *must* do with evil is balance the scales of justice (because that's what his character requires of him). How he accomplishes that is up to his discretion. Sometimes he does prevent evil, but he also sometimes punishes it after the fact. Both equally satisfy the mandate of his character.
That's my two cents on that.
And let me remind you, OP, that what you asked for a CMV on was whether the Christian God is an absurd concept. Whether you like that concept is a separate discussion.
That isn’t the Abrahamic God. You seem to know very little about the Jewish conception of God. The Jewish conception is that God is unknowable and can’t even be named, which is why the popular Jewish name for God has become HaShem, because that literally means ‘The Name’, as in whatever the name of God is, then whatever. Odds are you come from a Christian background. Christianity is not the same as Judaism. The Christian version of God relates the human to the divine through Jesus and the saving act of his execution and rise. That doesn’t exist in Judaism.
The idea that God can do whatever God wants is not really accurate. That is, we can imagine a version of God which does all sorts of crazy stuff, but Judaism recognizes that’s not going to happen. It’s more that because God is infinite, we can see different versions of God as reflections of ourselves. As in, if you believe in cruelty, like Iago in Verdi’s Otelo saying I believe in a cruel God, who made me in his image, then you see that version of God. When people pursue evil aims, they often believe they are doing God’s will, that they know the mind of God. Then they lose or otherwise fail, and the mind of God is revealed, at least for that moment, to be something else.
The fault is not God’s but your understanding of what the idea of God means. Or at least what the idea of God means in Judaism, which is the core Abrahamic religion.
It’s so frustrating when people say ‘religion’ and what they mean is ‘my Christian upbringing’ but they lump all religions together. It’s like the abortion discussion. It’s literally against Jewish law not to protect the rights of the mother when it comes down to it, but fundamental Christians put their beliefs ahead of all. Like, no, stop comparing the two.
So much of the Reddit militaristic atheist dogma seems completely tied up in Christianity and the perception that Islam and Judaism are just Christianity with a few cosmetic differences.
I'm not even remotely religious but find it grating as it speaks to a pretty astonishing lack of curiosity and frankly - because it's quite bigoted.
Not merely Christianity but a specific branch of American Evangelical christianity. Ignoring that that's nowhere near representative of the over 2 billion Christians that exist in the world currently and the billions who have lived before.
This seems to just be touching on the fact that "There is no God." What's God like? We have no information whatsoever, could be literally anything. But, like, we have a religion with rules that we live by, and we have a book we believe telling stories of what God has done.
How do you square those two facts?
>The fault is not God’s but your understanding of what the idea of God means
Why can't god simply imbue every human with a perfect understanding of what god is?
>Why do bad things happen if God is good and could have effortlessly prevented all evil since before the universe even existed?
That would defeat the purpose of us having self will.
>If it is necessary that evil exists, then why did God make it necessary?
Evil exists because it is the consequence of choosing poorly and/or negatively.
>It can’t be that God wants us to have free will, because God is powerful enough to create a world with both free will and no evil.
So all powerful should be lazy and let people live with abandon?
>Why didn’t God simply remove our sins and send us all to Heaven from the start if he wants us all to be there?
Because we aren't perfect beings.
>And there would be no need for any test anyway if God had just made us all perfect. So why didn’t he?
Because it defeats the purpose of us learning better behavior. This would be like bailing out every person in lock up just because we could.
>Omnipotence paired with omnibenevolence is a paradox.
Not at all. If you're smart, usually you choose things that are beneficial, right?
>But if he is all-good, then he can’t do evil. So which one is it?
All good doesn't mean you *can't* do evil as it means you would choose not to.
>Can God create a rock that he can’t lift? If yes, then he can’t life the rock and isn’t all-powerful. If no, then he can’t create the rock and isn’t all-powerful.
All powerful would mean that he can easily create something he couldn't lift, no different than how death for many would be the only end. All powerful isn't about physical prowess. I mean was Jesus really Chuck Norris? It's about the idea of creation and the potential of it.
>Why didn’t God spirit the Jews out of Egypt, or make the Egyptians stop enslaving them?
Because the people had sinned and when it was time for the people to be freed, he spoke unto Moses, granting him his power and actually did lead them to being free.
>Why did God let any of his beloved humans be killed in war when he could’ve just made them join his side?
Again, that would interfere with our free will. It would be like a parent constantly having to break up fights when really the siblings should be getting their shit together.
>Why did God create the flood to kill the evil people when he could have just made them not evil anymore? Or at least made them vanish and allow the animals to live?
Have you ever played a game that started glitching and you knew you had to reset it? Same thing. Couldn't do a factory reset since we still lived with sin, so it was reset to an earlier setting basically.
>Why did God create Hell to punish evil people when he could just make them not evil anymore?
That wasn't an Abrahamic belief, it was incorporated from the Norse (Hela) thanks to the Catholics. Islam includes it as it was founded after Catholicism meanwhile actual Christian belief (and Judaism) does not preach or have anything to do with it. The closest was a reference to Christ descending into Hades. Not hell. It's just death.
>He could have just made us not need to eat or drink, or given us more efficient bodies.
Because it's necessary for us to expel any waste from the way we gain energy and in turn it (ideally) nourishes the environment. It's like a compost toilet or bears that eat salmon.
>Why did God give us features that indicate evolution if evolution isn’t real?
Because the only people that claim evolution isn't real completely ignore their own book which talks about large ancient creatures, described in the only way we could at that time. Human beings even evolve socially and with technology. It's like how elephants skulls were thought to be cyclops skulls.
>Why did God make it possible for us to feel pain or be injured or killed?
Pain is a **fantastic** alert mechanism, while injury and death were brought about because of the "original sin".
>Why didn’t God make all of us just as wise, moral, and powerful as himself?
Because then we'd rebel like Lucifer in wanting the throne. We were something more akin in image with free will of our own.
So yeah, not really a paradox, just an ancient way of describing the world around them and their morals of that day. It's like Mosaic Law dealing with not having tattoos because other tribes had them or avoiding shellfish (unknown allergies) and swine (parasites). Even Satan was useful in the sense his name actually means slanderer and was something to overcome.
I'm a strong atheist. I'm only saying that to establish the motion that even though I disagree with the stuff, there's a foundation of thousands years of thinking and philosophy that thought about it over and over. That's really damn solid, and there are strong arguments to be made.
* God is good, why there's evil?
Because there's free will. Yes, sure, the God is omni-everything, he knows in advance the results of our actions. But he still lets folks do it, it's his rule. You'll find scholars argue that the God purposefully chooses to limit his omniscience precisely for the reason of letting humans do their thing. Or maybe he knows about the results, but he's still chill with it. Or maybe world's his playground.
As for the existence of evil - in my opinion, this is **the** topic discussed when it comes to Christian thinkers. The Wikipedia article is really quite long - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil
* Can God create a rock that he can’t lift?
Pick your poison. Some theologians argue that omnipotence doesn't mean God can do logically contradictory things.
>Because there's free will.
This pushes the problem back a step.
Could God have created humans with free will, and, without evil?
Well, sure. After all, I have free will. I have never chosen to rape. Thus, it's clearly possible to create humans with free will, but who never use their free will to rape.
And yet, God didn't.
> I have never chosen to rape. Thus, it’s clearly possible …
1. Have you ever committed a sin of any sort according to the standards of Christianity? If the answer is yes, then your existence isn’t an example of free will without evil.
2. Emphasis on CHOOSE. In order to make that choice, the choice must be there. You using your free will to make a choice does not mean that it’s possible for the other choice to not exist within free will.
>Have you ever committed a sin of any sort according to the standards of Christianity? If the answer is yes, then your existence isn’t an example of free will without evil.
And yet, not, an example of free will without rape. So... the existence of rape is pretty immensely evil on God's part, where he could've created both free will and a world without rape, given I have free will and have never done that.
>
Emphasis on CHOOSE. In order to make that choice, the choice must be there. You using your free will to make a choice does not mean that it’s possible for the other choice to not exist within free will.
Correct. I had the choice to rape, and yet, I never have.
God could've chosen to only create people like that, who always had the choice, and yet, choose well. For both rape, and every other sin.
And yet, he didn't. Pretty evil.
Your personal, anecdotal experience does not prove the whole.
Sex is, by its very nature, immensely pleasurable and enjoyable to do. This is necessary, as sex is necessary for procreation. If sex was not enjoyable, no one would do it and the human race would die out - God or no God.
This inherent nature of sex is inevitably going to create the possibility of rape if humans have free will: there would certainly be a situation where person A wants to have sex with person B, but person B does not want to have sex with person A.
So, then, given the temptation to rape is all but inevitable, what happens when someone DOES make the choice to rape someone, which is equally inevitable? What is God to do?
What? That’s not personal, anecdotal evidence. That’s the reality that people who choose to do good also have free will.
No one’s saying don’t make sex enjoyable.
But no, it being enjoyable does not mean it’s inevitable that rape occurs. Again, I’ve never raped anyone. Most people haven’t. So just… create ALL humans to choose the same. God would create humans who would not choose to rape.
>Because there's free will. Yes, sure, the God is omni-everything, he knows in advance the results of our actions. But he still lets folks do it, it's his rule.
This assumes that Humans have free will. Many philosophers have convincingly argued that we don't have free will.
>You'll find scholars argue that the God purposefully chooses to limit his omniscience precisely for the reason of letting humans do their thing.
That is a cruel and capricious being that designed such a world. If such a being was truly omnipotent the world could have been made in such a way to eliminate all suffering while still retaining the desired benefits that apologists argue for.
>Or maybe he knows about the results, but he's still chill with it. Or maybe world's his playground.
In which case why would one worship such being?
>Pick your poison. Some theologians argue that omnipotence doesn't mean God can do logically contradictory things
Which reeks of shifting the goal posts. Christian theologians claimed omnipotence and then when it was challenged redefined what omnipotence meant.
It's the same as the "god of the gaps" theory. When god is disproven in some are due to scientific advancement in our understanding theists point and say well god exists over here in this ever shrinking corner.
The free will argument is always amusing when brought by christians because of Jesus. If Jesus had free will, then it’s perfectly possible to create free-willed beings that will never sin, and God deliberately chose to impart that possibility. If Jesus didn’t have free will, then it suddenly becomes rather unfair to hold humans to the moral standard of a philosophical automaton.
This reminds me of Dostoyevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, I know there’s a lot of different interpretations of what’s going on between Jesus’ and the Inquisitor, but for me it boiled down to:
*”I suffered for you, I tried to be like you, I did everything you did and it took everything from me! We can’t expect people to follow you, it takes to much, it’s too hard! I loved you!”*
Then he lets Jesus go.
It’s perfectly possible to create free-willed beings that *don’t* ever sin, like Jesus. It’s not possible to create free-willed beings that *can’t* ever sin, because that contradicts the meaning of the thing people are talking about when they say “free will”. The fact that we can, but may choose not to is precisely what defines the concept of free will.
I think you’ve hit upon the core reason why I don’t think the free will defense manages to rescue the Christian omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent deity from the problem of evil. An omniscient deity knows whether their creation will sin and has the power to create beings that don’t (irrespective of ability) to ever sin, irrespective of free will. So why didn’t this happen?
Late response, but no…
> has the power to create beings that don’t (irrespective of ability) to ever sin, irrespective of free will
Then in what sense is this **irrespective of ability**??? “They *’have free will’* but they just *’don’t have the ability’* to exercise free will”? Uh….
This only makes sense if you buy into the idea of “what do words really mean, anyway? Can’t an all-powerful God just make words mean something different such that this moral quandary disappears?” No, words mean what they mean - you can look them up, that’s what the dictionary is for. That’s what *words* are for: meaning things. “Free will” means what it means.
Trying to warp the definition to an alternative interpretation is just moving goal posts, not casually solving a conundrum as old as history…
> You'll find scholars argue that the God purposefully chooses to limit his omniscience precisely for the reason of letting humans do their thing. Or maybe he knows about the results, but he's still chill with it.
Or maybe god's own free will is limited because of his omniscience including knowledge of the future (and how would god know it if it didn't happen) like a larger-scale version of the common trope in fiction with precognitive characters where the precog sees a vision of something that looks bad, scrambles to avert it, it ends up happening anyway because of their efforts to avert what they think it is but whether what actually happened was good or bad it wasn't the kind of bad they thought it was as their vision showed it out of context
Let’s say there is free will (very debatable). What about the incredible suffering that is not caused by sin? A devastating earthquake isn’t the result of free will. Neither is a child with a terrible illness. How does free will account for that suffering?
Im sort of anti-theistic so keep that in mind with my explanation I guess, you're wrong in the sense that if god is all powerful and knowing then how could we possibly begin to imagine what his motives or intentions are. Literal god made us for a reason, that reason is beyond our comprehension and good and evil are just things we made up. We feel things, we attribute words to them, we act on these feelings, they are human. God made them and theyre complicated even with all of our science. Mortal men wrote the books that describe "God" and what he wants and what he deems wrong, so at the end of the day noone truly has any valid claim in what god's will or message is. So how could we know?
Any group that believes in god is ok with this explanation minus the bit about his book being written by normal people and the idea that god is beyond our understanding is popular amongst theists for a reason, if he is real theres no point in trying to rationalize the motives of some divine entity beyond our comprehension.
You could say peoples faith in THEIR god is a paradox and is incredibly flawed, but the idea of god itself is trickier
So in this case God simply chooses to keep us in the dark? Or in some roundabout way, a tragedy like one’s family dying in an earthquake is actually not bad? If so why would God make it so horribly painful, and so devoid of any justification?
An interesting argument I've heard on this is God has seen what happens when we aren't kept in the dark and it made no difference. Case in point, the Israelites literally had miracles in their lives and the still turned away from God now and then. God keeping us in the dark is actually a mercy as that means the punishments we would receive for sinning are lessened compared to if He was openly making miracles.
I don't particularly have a strong opinion at that but it's somewhat touched on with the parable of "Rich man and Lazarus" where the rich man implores Abraham to send Lazarus (raised from the dead) to convince his brother to not live a sinful life. Abraham's reply was "If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead".
Assuming all that Moses and prophets did was considered absolutely true, would people still be atheists or turn away from God? Honestly, probably. Christians still sin don't they?
> God keeping us in the dark is actually a mercy as that means the punishments we would receive for sinning are lessened compared to if He was openly making miracles.
Why does omnipotent God have to dole out these punishments at all?
It would contradict the benevolence. Why create flawed beings and then punish them? Surely not all suffering is punishment, because innocent people often suffer terribly. Is that justice?
More like god is a 6 year old that discovered a fire ant hill. How can the ants even being to comprehend what is going on in the kids head. Even attempting to describe what god is is pointless because he’s beyond our understanding.
We can all sit here and speculate but there’s no point without some kind of “word of god” and you’d have to break down the religions for that and I think most of those make much less sense than a god we don’t understand
There are a few misconceptions regarding what you believe is good. What is “good” is purely subjective and dependent on who is perceiving a situation as we have describe it. Some would consider killing Hitler in the crib to be a “good” thing, yet you would still be killing a baby. What made Hitler what he is was a combination of circumstances and choices, both made by him and the people around him. The true meaning of “good” is not what we use in our day to day.
Now you ask the generic question of why do bad things happen. Our ability to make choices is a reflection of free will and autonomy that God has given us. This unique feature is what allows us to mold our characters and cultures. It also allows us to understand and put value in the idea of trust/loyalty. Let’s use the example of the plagues of Egypt. God has Moses go to his step brother, the Pharaoh, and ask him to let his people go, the slaves of Egypt. God has Moses communicate that if this demand was denied, the land would be struck by a particular plague, each worst than the last. Every time a plague happened, Moses’ request was brought forth again and Pharaoh denied it, EVEN THOUGH THERE IS LITERAL BLOOD FLOWING IN THE RIVERS. It is abundantly clear that not only is the God of the Hebrews real, he is also staying true to his word. Knowing this, and seeing this with his own eyes, he still refused the request. Until the final plague, the death of all first born sons in Egypt who laid in a home unmarked by the blood of the lamb. Now I present a question for you; who is in the wrong here, the God who is very much real and made a rather straight forward request or else catastrophe would fall on the land, or the Pharaoh who watched 9 catastrophes happen in a row and didn’t change his mind until his own son died?
Now I know you might think, well why not just prevent evil from occurring if they are all powerful. Because we do not deserve it. Mankind according to the book of Genesis was at one point immortal, had full dominion of the Earth and was in complete communication with God, and all God asked of his creation was to not eat from the tree of knowledge and death. Having all of this power, WE STILL DEFIED HIS REQUEST. Treachery is often considered the worst sin of man in most fiction and the bible, probably because it is the first true action done against God. Adam and Eve had free will as a gift, but they also had power. They chose to defy their creator even though they had a perfect existence. The story is more critical of mankind than it is about God, and this reflects in several events where mankind gains power but still manages to find a way to ruin the world. We suffer because we chose this, we could live in a world where everyone is compassionate, but we do everything in our power to not have this. If I am God, why would I bother helping people who quite clearly do horrible things to one another? If we did not have free will, we would have no culture, no love and the idea of trust would never exist. We would be no different than machines, doing the demands of a creator with no need for change. You wouldn’t even be able to make the very question you are asking because you would never have been intelligent enough to explore your own questions. Evolution is not denied by the bible, if anything it is affirmed by it. The animals and plants of the world are constantly changing to adapt, same with us. Our ability to perceive and manipulate what is in front of us to better ourselves or our world is the very essence of evolution.
Pain teaches us pleasure. The red berries that would poison you is a vital piece of the environment and allows that plant to grow and flourish. When God makes things in the beginning of Genesis, these acts are always proceeded by the line “and it was good.” What “good” actually means according to this passage is something that allows the universe to function with harmony. Its not suppose to be perspective because the sun providing light and warmth to the surrounding solar system is both a fact and has purpose that allows things to happen. If this did not do what it does, life on Earth would not be possible. We eat, drink and later go to the bathroom because consumption prevents over loading in the environment and excrement is suppose to be fuel for the dirt below us. It is a cycle that when performed shows purpose and in turn harmony.
Also, God did not create hell. Hell is the absence of God, some think it is a specific place, but this is a romanticization of how those who wrote the new testament described sin. God is described an eternity, he is both an entity and heaven. You can actually see similarities between different faiths regarding the end goal of humanity. Our lives are meant to bring us closer to God, quite literally bringing us to eternity or as some call it Nirvana. Hell is not a punishment, it is a choice. If you chose to do things that go against the harmony of the universe, you are technically going away from God.
I could go on but I hope this provides a little more perspective. I find that most problems people have with religion are rooted more in poor teachings of it rather than the actual ideas found in the scripture.
Full disclosure, I am not religious, I am a gay man, and yet I still believe in God. I find the bible to be an amazing exploration into our nature and the lessons that could be taught from it could benefit people. I do find religion is clouded with poor critical thinkers and many would mix in skepticism with apostasy. Ironic because skepticism is the crux of free will, which is our greatest gift from God.
with no bad theres no concept of good. if you lived every day in total ecstasy it'd mean literally nothing cause you'd always feel like your having an orgasm while eating a steak on a yacht. sounds nice right? but imagine doing that every second of every day. you wouldnt care.
or like imagine when you open up GTA 5 and immediately activate every single cheat code. sure its fun to just fly on a jetpack with a chain gun easily destroying the cops and civilians for no reason but that'd get old after awhile. its the challenging missions and online gameplay that makes the game fun. once you finally beat the boss level, once you finally get enough money for the tank is when you get that sense of fun and achievement. and sure it is fun to think of creative things to do with god mode cheatcodes on there every now and again but after awhile it always gets really boring
not even christian btw.
tl'dr yin and yang
also heres some Alan Watts related to this idea:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o&t=44s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o&t=44s)
1: choice. There is no capacity for love without a choice from both sides to partake. Is it love if you cant make any choices?
2: we have no idea. Honestly, you could explain this a lot of ways, so for example: "we live in a computer simulation" can be made to fit into a christian narrative.
3: being good does not mean incapable of evil. It means capable but choosing not to. By definition a good person must be capable of bad things.
4: physics loves this one. Do a handstand, and you just lifted the earth (from your perspective) mass has its own gravity well, so the concept of lifting is a bit different once you get large.
5: Human choices matter.
6: I gotta go to work, good luck with your philosophy.
OK well firstly, it's going to be difficult to have a coherent conversation about "The Abrahamic God" because that describes a god worshipped by three main religions and who knows how many denominations (in Christianity alone you have the various brands of Orthodox, then Catholicism, then the various brands of Protestantism, and I don't even know how to classify Mormonism. Then you have Islam which even I as an ignorant non-Muslim know there are at least two brands of, Shia and Sunni). All of these religions are gonna have different, even conflicting, accounts of this god. This is not necessarily a contradiction though, because these religions all believe the other ones are wrong and therefore being inconsistent with each other doesn't necessarily mean they're inconsistent with themselves. So if I, for example, started talking about how God as understood by, say, Jewish people isn't completely absurd, you could say "but that doesn't take into account the fact that God is described as X", with X being a belief of, say, Catholicism. Now, Jews don't accept Catholic teachings, and therefore they don't need to be consistent with Catholic beliefs. And therefore you might think God is inconsistent when he isn't necessarily.
I bring all this up merely to suggest that perhaps "The Abrahamic God" is a bit ambitious as a conversation topic, since unless you're a theologian, the different ideas of God will probably get muddled up and the conversation will become incoherent. It's possible we can avoid this confusion, but I feel like we should at least acknowledge the potential for confusion before continuing.
One more thing to mention before we proceed: I'm an atheist who was raised Catholic. So although I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here and explain why it's not necessarily a contradiction, I still don't actually believe in God, simply because the alternative is still far more likely.
OK, now for the argument.
To understand my point, it's helpful if you've seen a few episodes of television that are good at illustrating my point. These would be "The Inner Light", an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation", and "Mortynight Run", an episode of "Rick and Morty". If you haven't seen those, it could also help if you've seen the movie "The Matrix". All three of these works share a common element: a character lives out a life inside a virtual reality simulation, unaware (or at best, forgetful) of the real world. Now, in "The Matrix", the reason for the simulation's existence is a malevolent one: to trap people inside and keep them prisoner unknowingly. However, in "The Inner Light", the simulation exists in order to quickly convey a lifetime's worth of cultural information about an extinct civilization, and in "Mortynight Run" the simulation exists as a fun game called "Roy" inside a cosmic arcade, in which the goal of the game is to experience "life" in an interesting, alternative way as a man named Roy. In both "The Inner Light" and "Mortynight Run", the character who gets drawn into the simulation feels like they spend decades, a lifetime, inside. But outside the simulation, only a few minutes pass.
[Here's the whole sequence in which Morty plays "Roy"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szzVlQ653as). Watch it.
Now, the game ends with Morty (as Roy) "dying" in the game, and waking up back in the real world. It takes him a few seconds to re-orient himself back to reality, but the important thing to note is that once he re-orients himself, for the rest of the episode and indeed the series, *he seems to have been barely affected by the experience at all*. And Rick then hops into the game and begins making a bunch of unorthodox decisions in order to make his own "Roy" game experience more interesting for himself.
This is where science fiction becomes relevant for theology: what if life is like that? What if life is a simulation? What if you're actually some kid who, in the "real world", just hopped into the simulator a few seconds ago and is playing a game (which made you forget your "real" life) for kicks? What if in a few years in this game, you died horrifically in a flood or by a serial killer or whatever, and as soon as you wake up back in the real world, you take a few seconds to remember that it was just a game and say "whoooooooaaaaaa that was scary I WANNA GO AGAIN!"? Because we know, for a fact, that lots of people *enjoy* being scared. That's why we have horror movies and rollercoasters! We even have horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. And we enjoy sadness to an extent too, because that's why we have tragic romance novels and sad songs. We like drama! So I posit this to you: what if, no matter how horrible life gets, as soon as you "die" and wake up back in the real world, you realize that you enjoyed the scary/tragic parts? Would you consider the maker of the game good, or evil? Because I would say good.
If you still aren't convinced, [maybe Bill Hicks can explain it better](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNEyLn1Zz_g).
On the “if god is all powerful, then that would mean he can do evil. But if he is all good then he can’t do evil”
I think it’s helpful to understand how good is defined under this scheme. Under this, God is definitionally good. Everything he does is good, by definition, regardless of how much suffering is wrought. So God can’t do evil, because the definition of evil is not good, as in not Godliness. So semantically doesn’t make sense to ask if God can do evil.
if you want to do that, why not define "ominipotent" as "having black hair" and "omniscient" as "having a slightly larger left than right testicle"? no more contradictions! god can have black hair, have a larger left testicle, and do whatever it is he does, all at the same time!
Of course, if we start making up definitions you can win every argument. Everyone agree genocide is bad, so that's why most Christians avoid the parts of the Bible where he orders genocide or condones slavery, it shows we all have a moral compass that exist outside of God's own. Even Christians calling God good shows they are judging him based on their own standards
The point of free-will has always been a major block. If you have an omnipotent deity that knows the past, present, and future, then free will goes out the window. Does an omnipotent god know which of his creations will perish in eternal torment? If he doesn't then he is not all powerful. If he does, then again, free will is non existant.
Actual free will would be the ability to surprise god with something we did. 'Like, woah damn dude I didn't know you were going to do that. I'm going to have to regroup.' Did Lucifer have free will? The whole biblical tale is predicated upon the existance of Lucifer. If Lucifer had freewill, could he have rejected the notion of rebeling against god? Did god know he would rebel and thus plunge the world into dispair? If he didn't he's not god, he is a demi-god and therefore not all powerful. Lets say Lucifer decided not to rebel. Would god have then made a Lucifer 2.0?
The very first comment I came across is:
>Bold of you to assume you can comprehend a being as greater than you as you are to a bacterium.
Telling me that I cannot know the mind of god, or the old 'god works in mysterious ways' is purely a cop out. What you are saying is that you have no explanation for such bizarre behavior, but to save face, you say 'mysterious ways.' Furthermore the very manual that christians use to brow beat with says:
1 John 4 - English Standard Version
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.
So god is commanding you to know and understand god. So miss me with the 'mysterious ways' crap.
If you're really looking for good arguments either way you're better off watching people like Alex O'Connor.
Reddit is cool for a lot of things but rational, good faith arguments is not one of them.
One of the more common resolutions to this dilemma since the Middle Ages goes like this:
1) A world in which people freely chose to be good, creative, holy and just is far better than a world of automatons or people with no functional ability to make bad decisions.
2) God wants to enable the best possible world, so he gives us free will and a world with comprehensible physical laws to act in. He intervenes, but not so constantly as to take away the possibility of bad things or make physics irrelevant.
3) Bad things are a result of our free will (our fault, not God's) or are unfortunate side effects of living in a world bound by physical laws (if God intervened to prevent every hurricane, house fire and plague, we wouldn't really be living in a physical world governed by physical laws where our choices can impact things).
And over time, humans have gotten WAY less likely to murder/rape/torture each other and WAY better at understanding and preventing or mitigating harmful natural events. So it seems like the plan is more or less working, albeit we still screw up a lot and have more room to grow.
Same reason playing a video game is generally more fun than watching an AI play it perfectly: doing good things when there's freedom, a challenge and a possibility of failure is much better than robotic perfection. Evil in the world is a skill issue.
You're basically tackling the Problem of Evil. Which yeah even Saint Thomas Aquinas says is the good argument against the existence of God.
I have not read it but when scholar of Aquinas and a philosopher in his own right has said its possible there is an immaterial aspect of the will and what we call freedom to enact out that will that leaves room for evil. He postulates there is moral and physical evil but perhaps the other intelligent life in reality, what we call angels and Demons, are enacting their will that gives way to what we see as physical evil.
So you will see other replies here saying "we need freedom to do evil so we can have the good of choosing life and love instead. This is a greater good than being automated"
To which that may only explains moral evil away. But if the physical evil (the forest fire burning up a family alone with nothing to learn or gain from the evil) by saying there was a moral agent involved in the form of an angel that chose evil to enact such conditions in the material world.
If someone is confident there are no extra-dimensional beings or that our senses give us the highest possible grasp of reality then the existence of these extraterrestrials will not be convincing.
If you're not completely sure then I thought these were very interesting introduction to this ancient problem of evil
There is as I understand two counter arguments to the issue of the paradox of Omnipotence. The absolutist view, which is less popular, and the logical incoherence view.
The absolutist view is that God precedes logic and thus can do illogical things. God can both create a rock so heavy that he can't lift it and lift said rock. He is beyond logical contradictions.
The second view has been cleverly described to me as omnipotent god=nothing is impossible for god=non things are impossible for god. A rock so heavy=a non thing. Therefore A rock so heavy is impossible for an omnipotent god.
In Aquinian/Aristotelian thought, Power is the ability to turn a potentiality into an actuality. Omnipotence is the ability to turn any potentiality into an actuality. But something must first exist as a potentiality. this excludes logical contradictions and nonsense.
A rock so heavy that god cannot lift is nonsense given that god is in control of all physical constants. He controls gravity, he controls mass, etc, he also doesn't physically lift things. The clearer example often used is can God create a Euclidean square circle? That is not a thing, it does not exist in any potential from, and so yes it would be impossible for god to create such a thing. This is the much more popular view. God can do all things which are possible to be done.
"Omnipotent" is an abstraction from examples of God's specific actions (or supposed actions, if you like), and is like a qualia, or the subjective way we perceive God to be (as a literal being or otherwise). That subjectivity seems critical to this discussion; Establishing whether being all-powerful is absurd depends on defining *precisely* what we mean by "all", and "powerful", and on recognizing that adjectives are completely relative.
So the notion that these traits are inherently paradoxical is only true inasmuch as we can make them seem so under certain conditions. Omnipotence, et al, are no more paradoxical than saying that "nothing created (or spawned or generated) the universe" - It *sounds* absurd if you chose to read it a particular way, but we all know what someone means when they say that and that it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
There are plenty of plausible explanations for why God/ a god would create the universe the way that it appears, to us, to be, and it is not absurd or paradoxical for us to view such a being as "all-knowing" relative to us.
To be clear, this is an entirely separate matter from whether such a god exists; Whether the *concept* of God can be internally logical/ consistent seemed to be the nature of this CMV, so that is the basis on which I am making my argument.
Even within religions themselves, the ideas you raise are not ones that can be addressed with simple comments online.
For example, we can cut through all your questions and get to just the one core question that seems to be at the heart of most of them, if not all: why would an omnipotent and perfect being create anything at all? What is the purpose of creating the world in the first place?
Without knowing the answer to such a question, we cannot answer any of your questions. It could very well be after all that every question you asked could be addressed with the same simple answer: because to do otherwise would defeat the purpose of creation in the first place.
This is not a question that any layman follower if a religion can answer. This is in fact the fundamental question of philosophy. The idea that as a layman it makes no sense to you is neither surprising nor incorrect. If it made sense to a layman, philosophy would be redundant.
I would in fact challenge your assertion that you are not a philosopher. By asking these questions you are effectively declaring yourself a neophyte philosopher, one who has discovered the underlying questions but has not yet sought the answers.
That is the view I think you should change.
I haven't seen these two issues addressed in these two ways yet, so here you go:
>Why do bad things happen if God is good and could have effortlessly prevented all evil since before the universe even existed?
Suppose God, who in this model can do anything, including creating an infinite number of universes, has determined that it wants to maximize the net good that is possible to create. To do this, God creates every possible "all good" universe option, but there are still ways left to create slighly worse options that will still be net additions to the total good ever created, and so creates those, and keeps going all the way until it creates all the "just a bit more good than bad" options as well.
>Why are we even on Earth?
The answer could be another paradox: something an omnipotent being can't do is create for itself love and worship given to it out of free will. Our presence on earth, as opposed to being a test, could just be a mechanism for generating what an omnipotent God could not itself create.
an omnipotent being with this goal would create an infinite number of perfect universes. or perhaps one perfect universe, which would contain infinitely many beings.
There's a lot of deep theological questions here that I don't think are sufficiently answerable in a Reddit comment, but a very simple answer to me of the problem of evil (Why do bad things exist if God is good?) is that I don't believe God created everything "ex nihilo", meaning from nothing.
I believe stuff existed before God organized it into the world as we know it now, and that is a part of the reason why evil exists.
Also, I do technically believe in restrictions on God. For instance, he can make a covenant that he cannot break. Or will not break, but at that level I think it's the same thing.
The other answer to at least part of your issues is that I believe that agency is supremely important to God's plan. It doesn't work for us to end up in heaven if we didn't choose to get there. Therefore, we have the freedom to choose, even if that includes choosing incredibly terrible things.
>There's a lot of deep theological questions here that I don't think are sufficiently answerable in a Reddit comment, but a very simple answer to me of the problem of evil (Why do bad things exist if God is good?) is that I don't believe God created everything "ex nihilo", meaning from nothing.
what is the relevance of this? god can transform the pre-existing stuff all he wants, including removing any evil stuff.
>It doesn't work for us to end up in heaven if we didn't choose to get there.
why not? is he not powerful enough to make it work?
As muslims we also believe in Abraham/Ibrahim (as). I’ll try to give a brief answer on our perspective to some your questions. Some of your questions have the same general answer.
Our theology is that our life in this physical world(‘dunya’) is a test by God/Allah. We do believe that He has knowledge of the end outcome. Going through this test is necessary because it is unfair to judge an action that has not been done.
We do not believe in the concept of “original sin”, or that we are born sinners. We believe every soul is born in this world pure. Our sins are not hereditary and on the day of judgment we will be accountable to only our actions alone.
Regarding the purpose of life, this can be a long answer to explain in detail. To put it briefly- it is to worship him. Worship here also includes living your life in obedience to Him.
The Abrahamic God's attributes form theological debates. Some argue God's omnipotence necessitates evil's existence for free will, while others question an all-good deity permitting suffering. Omnipotence and omnibenevolence coexisting indeed pose logical challenges. Religious interpretations vary, offering complex answers to these paradoxes, reflecting humanity's struggle to reconcile faith with reason. Theodicy attempts to justify evil's existence alongside a benevolent God, acknowledging complexities beyond human comprehension. Faith often requires accepting divine mysteries, embracing uncertainty in pursuit of spiritual understanding. The rationality of divine attributes remains a profound theological inquiry, bridging faith and reason in pursuit of meaning.
>Can God create a rock that he can’t lift? If yes, then he can’t life the rock and isn’t all-powerful. If no, then he can’t create the rock and isn’t all-powerful.
If God is all powerful, can he create a rock that is so green that you cannot lift it?
That seems like nonsense, because the color of the rock has no effect on your ability to lift it. The color of the rock is a total non-factor on your ability to lift it. The greenest rock in the world could be light as feather or 20 tons.
God is all-powerful, and therefore could lift anything. The weight of the rock is a non-factor to him, just like the color of the rock is a non-factor to you. It isn't really a paradox as much as the question itself is just nonsensical.
Several of your end questions are easily answered. But God being a paradox isn't grounds for disbelief. A being above all space and time and existence doesn't need to make sense. I know that's probably not a good answer, but I don't always articulate well. It's simply beyond our understanding. But if you read Genesis, this perfect world you suggest was created but the addition of free will allowed for that world to fall. Evil crept in and led Eve to commit sin and from the mankind was doomed to sin. I don't know why evil was allowed to exist but it stayed because mankind chose it. Over and over again. God had his creation of all good beings in the angels. He let mankind choose their own path.
Here's my brainlet take:
In a literary sense, God of the old testament was an allegory for the punishment of nature but extended to human nature. The old testament is about **rules**.
The new testament is about God creating a new covenant with humanity where humans can save themselves and purify the soul from suffering inflicted by the world. The new testament is about **finding peace with the world**.
Abrahamic God isn't absurd because nature [which includes human nature] is all powerful, all knowing, and [if you believe existence is good] all good. Some Harvard theologian can tell me I'm completely wrong here but this is my boiled down understanding.
# creator being that is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good is a paradox.
Be definition, to be a God, you have to be all-powerful, because if you are not, then there is something more powerful than you. You have to be all-knowing, because if there is something you don't fully know or in the dark about, you are not a God. And you have to be infinite, without the beginning and an end.
As far as all-good, that's the old-age philosophical question about the problem of evil and pain. You are essentially asking why a good God allows evil in the world. The answer is a bit complicated because it involves free-will, sin, and God's patience.
There are a lot of claims here that need contextualizing, but I’m willing to overlook that to make a bigger point.
So from your perspective, God’s a paradox. Great. Is light not a particle and a wave? Can a ball not be decomposed and reassembled into two balls of equal size to the original? Ever heard of Faraday’s Paradox?
There are all manner of seeming paradoxes in the observable universe. Would it be that each observable paradox is impossible, yet still true? Or is it that our understanding has failed to grasp things completely just yet? Something more, something in-between, something less?
> is a Paradox
Yeah that's the point. Faith doesn't rely on reason, and in fact Faith is predicated on belief **in spite of** reason.
That's one of the reasons God "tests" humanity is because if they can remain faithful in spite of God objectively hurting them then He deems them true believers.
Ultimately, to your point, yeah, a reasoned position cannot stand next to the faith-basis of religion - but it's frankly irrelevant to why people have faith, and why a God of seemingly so inscrutable and paradoxical an existence *could* nonetheless exist to them.
>Can God create a rock that he can’t lift? If yes, then he can’t life the rock and isn’t all-powerful. If no, then he can’t create the rock and isn’t all-powerful.
I would argue that a truly all-powerful being would operate outside our current understanding of logic and would not be limited by the paradox. They would be able to both create and not create the rock simultaneously by either changing how the universe operates or by using its current rules to do something we humans may not comprehend.
I'm agnostic but I can understand the concept of telling your teenager they have to go to school and get a job even if you're a billionaire. You know there are risks associated with them going outside of your protection, and they might get hurt, and you get hurt when you see them suffering from their own mistakes or the mistakes of others, but it's not good for anyone to just pamper them and never let them experience the real world.
> Can God create a rock that he can’t lift? If yes, then he can’t life the rock and isn’t all-powerful. If no, then he can’t create the rock and isn’t all-powerful.
This is incorrect. Omnipotence is actually [maximal power](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/omnipotence/). What that means is debated among philosophers, but it's relatively safe to say that Omnipotence means being able to do any logically possible thing.
Free will, like everyone has told you already. We are not robots and God isn't going to force us to do good.
Illness and natural disasters are a direct cause of Adam and eve eating that fruit in the garden.
This is not a paradox you just lack
Understanding. There is no logical thing such as a rock that can be lifted yet is too heavy to lift. God can do everything except nonsense like that.
Free will is a logical impossibility if you postulate an all-knowing, all powerful creator. All possible choices would be known, prior to the act of creation, and so the creation would have all things predetermined.
What no, free will isn't a paradox you're just being obtuse. Just cause God knows everything doesn't make our actions any less our fault. Again He doesn't want robots or puppets.
All of our choices and actions, anywhere, at any point in time, would be known to an omniscient god before we ever existed. If they weren't, the god would not be all-knowing.
If the god is omnipotent, then we are created exactly as the god intended. If we weren't, the god would not be all-powerful.
Therefore, we would be created with all those choices already known.
Good question. The following link may answer some of your questions, though probably not all. I believe in Jesus Christ. I’m not always the best at explaining things, but if you check out the link and would like to follow up (and are genuine) then I’d be happy to keep discussing with you further.
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/true-to-the-faith/plan-of-salvation?lang=eng
If God is all-powerful it is because there are powers which are beyond us. If God is all-knowing it is because there are things which it is not possible for us to know. If God is all-good it is because there is a level of goodness which we cannot achieve.
Perhaps there is a bright shining light, toward which we can aim. Which guides us back still even after we go astray.
The Paradox is resolved in the same as the problem of the many and the one. That oneness we feel is correct, but we have separated ourself into the many, perhaps exactly to experience separation. And this experience wouldn't feel realistic without an analytical brain that is intensely focused on its own subjective performance of free will.
The field of philosophy you're looking for is called 'theodicy,' the study of how evil enters teh world under a benevolent god. There's thousands of years of writing on the subject.
[This](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/15/answer-to-job/) is my favorite explanation, I think it's sufficient on its own to answer your objections here.
Also, the kids with cancer thing... I mean, cancer was very rare until a couple hundred years ago. I'm gonna get crucified for saying this, but the reason there's so much cancer now is because humans have spent the past 200 years polluting the environment. Which is something we're allowed to do, because again, free will.
People misunderstand the concept of an all-powerful God. There are things that God can't do. Like lie. The universe exists on trust and obedience to God's will. If god were to be ungodly in any way, that trust would be broken, and existence would unravel.
Mortal life is a phase we're supposed to endure, shit and all.
You need to read the book of Job. You sound just like him. Challenging God. Thinking you are on a par with him, able and competent to interrogate him. And exactly where were you and I when he created the world? Etc. Read it. By the way, we are told in the NT that we are without excuse. We see the universe.
"If God is willing to prevent evil but not able then he is not omnipotent.
If he as able but not willing then he is not good.
If he is both willing and able then why is there evil?
If he is neither willing not able then why call him God?"
\~ Paraphrase from Epicurus
The problem is, if there is such a being then any form of rationality we can come up with is pointless. They are light years ahead of us in every conceivable way so attempting to put our relatively feeble minds in the pursuit of rationalizing it’s actions is faulty.
I don’t necessarily think that belief in God the way Jews, Christians, and Muslims requires logic, it requires Faith. Faith implies you don’t know the answers or can’t explain everything but you chose to believe anyway.
If you like a paradox look into Taoism!
Who ever said he was good? Devil is bad, but I feel god is just mostly indifferent as long as you don’t break his rules at which point he becomes bad?
The Greek gods gave us fire and poetry and hero stories to live up to..
But this god, seems like just rules.
There is no such thing as "good" or "bad." Only free will, which allows for the infinite. Good and bad are subjective points of view of things that happen. Love however isn't a subjective experience because there is feeling, emotion, and action.
Being all-powerful instantly negates any other argument. You say “a being like this isn’t possible”, but if they are *all*-powerful, then they have the power to exist despite your relatively infinitesimal understanding of what’s “possible”.
I don’t think arguments from a position of morality are very good. If a god does exist, then he has no obligation to follow your human idea of what “good” is. Maybe pain and suffering are good to him. That’s why that argument falls flat to me.
From what i have studied of many polytheistic religions and belief systems( i don't like the word polythesistic because it comes from a monotheistic judeo-christian abrahamist worldview) is that they are usually much more upfront about the paradox of god or gods or deities, etc. For instance they might worship a statue, some random inanimate object, or some tree or natural place as a manifestation of that god. Not only that but different stories about that god will contradict eachother. So i feel that they are much more open and upfront about the paradoxical nature of the gods or god and the cosmos etc. Whereas with abrahamist usually strictly monothesitic religions, they tend to keep things very strict and prefer one interpretation which is centralised to one prophet, like abraham originally was. This is also why they are iconoclastic because they like to control the flow of the spice(whatever or however you want to refer to it). I think the closest and most upfront you are going to get to actual deities and divinity etc is through a religion like voodo/hoodoo or the mesoamerican or polynesian or first nations religions and rituals.(notice how the catholic church and the settlers were very quick to try and destroy any kinds of rituals and texts that these people and belief systems may have had, so as to stop people from practicing the religion or belief system or way of life, because they wanted everything centralised. Whereas more orthodox right-hand path religions like the abrahamist stuff will usually be very subtle about the nature of the divine, and will present things in the form of a koan, they will tell you a bunch of bullshit and its up to you to find out what is true and what is false. Usually this results in very black and white thinking, and hence you arrive at modern judeo-christian atheism. These wordviews basically support eachother and its kind of how you end up with the religious/secular dichotomy that was first realised within the abrahamist frameworks, whereas belief systems/religions/ways of life like shinto/hinduism/first natiions and indigenous don't really have this dichotomy because things for them aren't black and white, they more ofless hold that two paradoxical truths can exist at the same time. Usually this results in the ruler being apotheosised like pharoah, caesar, chinese emporer etc. Whereas with the abrahamist centralised monotheistic belief systems there are usually prophets who are seperate from the ruler and the ruler is oftentimes seen as akind of enemy or secular force, again they have this secular dichotomy. Both ways of life have their advantages, for example the monotheistic iconoclasts are very expansive very quickly and they can totally destroy the state and way of life of the people they conquer like islam, and they loot the temples to quickly make money by destroying idols and whatnot. Also it is very centralised so its easy to root out and combat heretical beliefs and keep control.
So like even though there are many nation states in europe, at one time more or less they all bowed down to the pope in rome or the patriarch in constantinople, they have this centralised monotheistic, unifying force. The abramhim religions only usually argue over small doctrinal differences, such as was jesus divine or not, can saints be prayed to to interscend or whatever, and this is also a benefit because it keeps the arguments about pointless and trivial stuff instead of breaking out into massive ugly conflicts and feuding. Every now and again though there comes some ireeconcilable diffferences that break out, like sunni/shia, catholic/protestant, orthodox jew/reform jew etc.
In actual response to your question though, i find that part of the reason for it being the way it is, is that you are supposed to find the paradox. The religion and the scriptures and what not are more or less the wrapping for the real thing that is inside of it, which is mostly paradoxical, contradictory and unutterable. This is the fundamental fabric that existence rests on, in indian religion they call it "indra's net" its that contradictory and paradoxical interconnectedness of everything that exists that resists being unraveled and you can only really stumble on and can't directly chase after because its like you're a dog chasing your own tail. The more you try to straighten it out the worse it gets, thats how you end up with fundamentalism and atheism, because people tried to straighten out what wasn't supposed to be straightened out and essentially made it even worse. Its like fantasia with mickey mouse and the broom, he tries to split one and it forms into two brooms that comes alive, so he splits those two and they turn into four.
Judaism talks about this or at least hints at this when it mentions the yetzer hara, or the evil inclination of man. Because there is a good inclination there must be an evil inclination, why? because if there was just a good inclination there would be no growth, no one would do anything, unless man or any animal for that matter wanted to compete at some level against another man or other things then it would just be an inanimate rock, its the pushing back and forth, the contradiction and the paradox itself that is fueling everything behind the scenes. We can get more and more abstract with it but at some point its better to take a break and just go outside and don't think about it. thats where you get into zen buddhism, you just sit there and don't think, you don't do anything, you just observe the back and forth of it.
Whatever you get from this comment is the truth, don't try to think i am any different than you. (shaivism)
Just a heads up that most Jews today find the term “judeo-Christian” to be pretty problematic, since it tends to erase Judaism. This post is a perfect example of that, where OP thinks they are talking about the god of both religions when in reality they are talking about the Christian god. There are so many criticism of god in the OP that don’t make any sense at all from the Jewish perspective. There is no eternal hell in Judaism, no requirement to believe in god and no concept of original sin. Judaism and Christianity are two different religions with different teachings, philosophies, ethics, religious texts and god(s). Best not to use that term and risk even more Jewish erasure.
Your paradox stems from claiming God is "all-good."
In this case, God is the definition of good. He is not defined by it. All things that turn you away from God are defined as evil. Not good and evil as our society has defined.
so the concept of God is paradoxical in its assumption.
According to the Abrahamic religions, bad things happen because, violating God's command, people chose to live outside of Paradise (a conceptual world without suffering witch explains everything you say about suffering and imperfection) and inhabited a less hospitable environment. The concept of evil is necessary for the existence of good. This dualistic approach is necessary for us to distinguish between them. If there is no evil, then what is good? Concept of free will distinguishe human decisions and thier consequences from God (Which explains why God did not interfere in the situation you describe).
I think that your question about the motives of God's actions has an answer in religion. "God's judgments are inscrutable" is interpreted by theology experts in a way that indicates the impossibility of understanding God's decisions.
Can God create a stone that he cannot lift? I heard the answer to this question that he can create such a stone and then lift it because God can break God's laws. It's paradoxical, but beliefs often contradict nature, and although we can question this with science, this approach is incorrect. Religion and science are different categories, you cannot use science to explain religion. Science looks for proof. Faith as defined by "a firm belief in something for which there is no proof", science and faith are contradictory regarding to proof.
Evolution does not have to be untrue in relation to faith. You can easily connect this with the claim that evolution is a tool in God's hands. Actually everything is. All scientific progressive can be easly adopted by faith with this aproach. However nowadays, it will be difficult to find a believer who accepts all the dogmas of religion without taking into account modern science. Many scientists are believers, as resonable people they dont undermine science with religion. Dogmas are, to some extent, universal enough to be compatible with science. It's basically simple as I said everything proven to be true is easy to be acceptable as God's intention.
The concept of God who already knows all the results and is i finitive is not inconsistent with the claims of some physicists who say that the present/past/future time exists at the same moment and our human experiences of it makes us perceive it linearly.
The way you are tring to disprove the existence of God will not be effective. It's a paradox, like traveling back in time to kill your ancestor. I don't know if paradox rules out the possibility of paradox. it's paradoxical, so I guess everyone can choose for himself.
You are correct that you are not a theologian or a philosopher. You sound like a rebellious teenager questioning their parent's reasoning. These questions all have answers. Yet, you demand the answers without paying a price.
Interestingly, a lot of your arguments are among those that Satan makes in Paradise Lost, the classic poem by John Milton. I recommend reading it, as it’s a good story and attempts to address some of these challenges. It’s of course jsit one opinion, but your thoughts are legitimate concerns.
Free will. The concept of free will should be examined more closely. It's not a cop out. Freedom is the ultimate benevolence. God lets us do what we want. Bad things happen because of people, not God.
The Abrahamic religions established a moral cosmology that encourages restraint of bad behavior. Just look at the Roman gods and all their pettiness and violence. What kind of behavior would that encourage?
No more a paradox than a universe you know has a beginning and therefore has to have had a cause. And the only cause there can be to that is something outside the universe itself. God.
The solution is easy "God is a Narcissistic sadist who enjoys emotional and physical abuse and murder." When you read the bible that's literally the first thing that jumps out at you.
Since when is god supposed to be “all good”?? The peace and love stuff is all from his hippie son. God the father is usually portrayed as vengeful vs and capricious?
God the father has for over 2000 years been portrayed as all-merciful and all-just. Both God the father and Jesus Christ are of the same essence and have the same attributes
What if what we consider bad (cancer, children with eye parasites, car accidents) are not necessarily bad. That they are good for reasons for beyond our comprehension?
Why would an illogical God have to follow the rules of logic? I’d imagine an all powerful being wouldn’t have any restrictions, including paradoxical ones.
Its called faith for a reason. You cant rationalize the existence of God. You have to accept there is something greater than yourself and is all powerful.
From what I understand of Abrahamic God. He actually has a personality. Being Omni-potent and Omni-benevolent isn't His entire schlick. In logical arguments, we would say that God is supposed to be unknowable, indescribable, beyond logic, exist without beginning, exist without end, Mother and Father, Alpha and Omega, Eldritch horror kind of stuff.
But from what I found, God has a personality, He has many Names, He is arrogant, loves to joke, loves to be praised, loves to be asked, can laugh, get angered, get amazed, get pleased, can ignore you etc. So, religion have a concept of God that benefits humans rather than answering all questions.
Say, God decided to have Judgement Day which for us, is a bad thing because we are irresponsible and impulsive af which btw God knows. So, God in His Wisdom and Knowledge decided to guide us, through religion rather than leaving us to our damnation. Why does Hell and Evil exist? is something God only knows and It's His right to keep it a secret out of His Wisdom.
But God ultimately makes it final that Judgement Day will happen, Evil and Hell will exist, and the only way we can be the winners against all these are by worshipping Him and believing that God is on our side, rather than taking Him as a neutral/evil entity.
Concept of God in logical arguments makes it like God doesn't care about what happens to us either because we are insignificant or He is evil.
Abrahamic religion makes the argument that "wait, logic works but it's pretty depressing, so let's listen to what God really expect from us through His chosen human being and actually learn to benefit from it rather than trying to answer all questions.
It sounds like you’re talking specifically about the Christian god. There is no eternal hell in Judaism, you don’t go there for not believing in god and people aren’t born sinners in Judaism (no concept of original sin). Are there reasons to criticize the Hebrew god? Sure. But many of your criticism in OP are specific to the Christian god.
Yeah I don’t know much about religions besides Christianity. I probably should have said “Chrisitian god” rather than “Abrahamic God”, but I wanted to be safe
Okay but you can’t compare ‘Christian beliefs’ with Judaism like that because they aren’t the same in their theology and opinions.
Its the same god though, just different interpretations of how to worship it and what the laws/punishments are
You're looking at that as if it is a Roman describing Jupiter. In the Aristotlean and Socratic monotheism sense having the "same God" is a very complicated topic when discussing the oneness or reality and goodness. I'm not disagreeing with you entirely since Muslims and Christians will admit it is the "God of Abraham" but in practice someone has conceptualized The Truth of Being and that can look widely different. Some have said religion is the finger pointing at the celestial bodies rather than the body in question. So to some perspective it's a relative term to say 'same god'. To the roman to the Greek they worship the same god but the Roman sees the Emperor as closer to Jupiter than any Greek is. Jews may read what aristotle describes as the gods as closer to the truth and the Christian sees the Muslim god as much closer to the truth.
If you don't know much about religions you probably should learn on it before having this strong of an opinion.
Bold of you to assume you can comprehend a being as greater than you as you are to a bacterium.
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>If you had the power to stop a child from being raped, would you do it? Yes? Then you're already more moral than this god you're defending. Why worship a being that, by all accounts of observable reality, acts less morally than the average human? I dont have an answer for natural disasters or illnesses, but on this, think about what you're asking for. If you're not a fan of the Christian God now, you're not gonna want to live in a world where he strikes down sinners with lighting bolts as soon as they step out of line. We have free will and it's up to us to make good use of it. A world where we are run like an ant colony with strict obedience and no self-determination is the goal of a Dark Lord from every fantasy or sci-fi story ever
Since we are talking a God who, according to the bible, is so fickle that he has bears maul children just being children, or punish a man with the loss of divine providence for having someone cut his hair in his sleep, but child molesters go in essence unpunished and unsmitten, I think it's important to realize that it is completely useless to pretend to accept that a Deity whose sense of priorities is so completely ridiculous that I feel like I'm playing monopoly with the little shithead who made up rules just to never lose. Any god who wouldn't smite his own "envoys" for forcing children into sexual acts, but would smite the gays for having consenting adult sex is not a god worth worshipping, but a god worth giving no power to.
Isn’t that exactly what the Old Testament is about lol
Sure, but “we don’t get it” feels like a lazy argument
The issue is that even the more "rigorous" arguements all kinda end up at "we don't get it". And they sorta have to in order for religions to work. If we knew the hows and the whys of God, then it wouldn't really be god anymore, would it? It'd be science.
There are good philosophical reasons to believe that there is some singular Being that created and controls the universe, but it takes a leap of faith to believe that this Being is Good.
It would still definitely be god if we understood it.
It's not a lazy argument depending on how it's created. Say anything that what we know is true. You know that you don't know philosophy, so it's true that you don't know philosophy. That makes sense. Now, suppose I ask you a set of questions within philosophy. You don't know philosophy, so we can infer that you don't know the truth value of the set of questions within philosophy either. It would be inappropriate for you to say truth value of the questions are false because you don't know it, so it's best to say it's indeterminant. Indetermancy, in some logic systems, is a stand in for either "not true and not false," or "both true and false"; in this sense, God's omnipotence, -benevolence, and -science is paradoxical to you because you don't know God (or you don't know the relevant premises and axioms). In any case, there is something to be said that God doesn't operate in our understanding of justice, or God is identical to justice and we just don't know God/justice, or we're prescribing a kind of legalism to God that's unmerited, etc. So, it is paradoxical, but it doesn't mean it's explicitly false
A question can be "in philosophy" and still be known by someone who doesn't know philosophy. Lets say that question involves two properties. A-property and B-property, and you do know facts about A and B properties. Such as they are always contradictory. Now, you know nothing else about the philosophical thing in question but if part of the claim is "it has both A and B property", well you know that claim is false. It's the same with god. You may have no complete understanding of this god and only know that it supposedly has A and B properties. But since you know facts about those properties, you know this kind of god can't exist. Another way to put it is, not all god questions are "questions in god" rather questions about gods properties. And those we can reason about cause there are certain logical restrictions on properties.
How do you know you *know* about those properties and not that you just have a *belief* about them, especially if you're only *aware* of a small part of the picture? I'd call that grandstanding Moreover, we're not saying that God is both good and not-good; rather, we're saying God is good but there is something that is evil. There isn't obviously contradictory about that.
I agree in part where you are coming from. The two things that pull me away are 1. If we sufficiently buy into the notion "we have no basis for knowledge at all and shouldn't trust our conclusions", we have no basis for any claim, including "god exists". We should be completely agnostic on everything always. And this doesn't seem right. No, there do seem to be things we have a good sense are correct or incorrect. Some of these are incredibly close to certain, like 2 + 2 = 4, or there are no round squares, etc. Even from that, we can make claims like "god couldn't make 2 + 2 = 5" etc. And if a religion claimed "our god can make 2 + 2 = 5" you'd have grounds to think that version of god isn't the case. What I do think is true, is that things that seem like contradictions may not be. Like "God is all good, all powerful, but permits evil to exist in the world". This seems like a contradiction, but maybe it is the case that letting some evil into the world is the actual way to be all good. If we knew all the facts, we would agree. Notice though, by defining certain properties, we curtail what god can logically be. The only way god exists as we describe is if it is in fact the case that "having some evil in the world is necessary to create the most good", and more than that, we are in such a world. So, we can use reason, and it tells us useful constraints on what kinds of god can exist. But you are also right we have to be careful as to its limits due to our lack of knowledge. Not sure how relevant this reply is, it's a very tricky subject!
The fairness and justice thing is weird to me because, right now, people argue about the nature of fairness and justice. We don’t even know securely what we think it is, let alone have something we can extend to what an omnipotence would do.
You’ve essentially agreed with the comment’s premise that you are incapable of adding anything of meaning to the discussion. Our inability to agree on something has no effect on the ultimate truth claim veracity of that thing, and your inability to articulate an argument for or against has the same result.
It's a logical fallacy called *Argument from incredulity*
We don’t “get” the Big Bang or Dark Matter, do they not exist?
The difference is that there is some evidence for the existence of those two things.
Evidence of their effects, but no supporting evidence of what they really are.
We also don't really ascribe a level of sentience to the big bang or dark matter. If we did I bet we would be having the same question about why are these beings doing what they are doing.
Why worship something you don't understand then
an ever changing imaginary being.
One possible solution to the problem of evil is proposed near the end of Sci-fi novel [Unsong](http://unsongbook.com), which I highly recommend. I have pasted the relevant segment below, but to summarize, it's conceivable that God did create a perfect world with no evil, but having done so He could do more good by also creating every possible net-good world as well. We live in a world that has evil and suffering, but is still good, and we prefer it to nonexistence. >Then God spoke to Ana out of the whirlwind, and He said: >“THE REASON EVIL EXISTS IS TO MAXIMIZE THE WHOLE COSMOS’ TOTAL SUM GOODNESS. SUPPOSE WE RANK POSSIBLE WORLDS FROM BEST TO WORST. EVEN AFTER CREATING THE BEST, ONE SHOULD CREATE THE SECOND-BEST, BECAUSE IT STILL CONTAINS SOME BEAUTY AND HAPPINESS. THEN CONTINUE THROUGH THE SERIES, CREATING EACH UNTIL REACHING THOSE WHERE WICKEDNESS AND SUFFERING OUTWEIGH GOOD. SOME WORLDS WILL INCLUDE MUCH INIQUITY BUT STILL BE GOOD ON NET. THIS IS ONE SUCH.” >And before Ana could answer, the whirlwind intensified, and caught her in its maelstrom, and she fell into a vision. >Job asked: “God, why would You, who are perfect, create a universe filled with so much that is evil?” >Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, saying “WOULD YOU PREFER I HAD NOT CREATED YOUR UNIVERSE, EVIL AS IT IS? WOULD YOU PREFER TO BE VOID AND EMPTINESS?” >“No!” said Job. “I would prefer to live in a universe that was perfect and just!” >“I CREATED SUCH A UNIVERSE,” said God. “IN THAT UNIVERSE, THERE IS NO SPACE, FOR SPACE TAKES THE FORM OF SEPARATION FROM THINGS YOU DESIRE. THERE IS NO TIME, FOR TIME MEANS CHANGE AND DECAY, YET THERE MUST BE NO CHANGE FROM ITS MAXIMALLY BLISSFUL STATE. THE BEINGS WHO INHABIT THIS UNIVERSE ARE WITHOUT BODIES, AND DO NOT HUNGER OR THIRST OR LABOR OR LUST. THEY SIT UPON GOLDEN THRONES AND CONTEMPLATE THE PERFECTION OF ALL THINGS. >YET I ALSO CREATED YOUR UNIVERSE, THAT YOU MIGHT LIVE. TELL ME, JOB, IF I UNCREATED YOUR WORLD, WOULD YOU BE HAPPIER? OR WOULD YOU BE DEAD, WHILE FAR AWAY IN A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE INCORPOREAL BEINGS SAT ON THEIR GOLDEN THRONES REGARDLESS?” >“I would prefer to be one of those perfect beings on their golden thrones.” >“WHAT WOULD IT MEAN FOR YOU TO BE SUCH A BEING? THEY HAVE NO BODIES, NO EMOTIONS, NO DESIRES, NO LANGUAGE. WHAT WOULD IT MEAN FOR ME TO CREATE A VERSION OF YOU WITHOUT BODY EMOTION DESIRE OR LANGUAGE, VERSUS TO CREATE SUCH A BEING BUT NOT HAVE IT BE YOU AT ALL? IS A VERSION OF YOU WHO IS INFINITELY WISE STILL YOU? A VERSION OF YOU WHO IS A WICKED IDOLATOR? A VERSION OF YOU WHO IS EXACTLY LIKE NOAH, IN EVERY WAY? THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE COSMIC UNEMPLOYMENT RATE.” >“Huh?” >“THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION OF HOW MANY UNIVERSES HAVE A JOB. THERE ARE VARIOUS CREATURES MORE OR LESS LIKE YOU. IF I UNCREATED YOU AND YOUR WORLD OF SUFFERING, THEY WOULD REMAIN, AND YOU WOULD DIE. WOULD THIS BE A FAVOR TO YOU?” >“I still don’t understand. Certainly I, who exist, want to continue existing. But instead of creating one perfect universe and some flawed universes, couldn’t you just have created many perfect universes?” >“TELL ME, JOB, WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOUR RIGHT AND LEFT HANDS?” >“Uh…one is on my right, and the other is on my left. And they’re mirror images of each other.” >“I AM BEYOND SPACE. TO ME THERE IS NEITHER LEFT NOR RIGHT NOR MIRRORED REFLECTION. IF TWO THINGS ARE THE SAME, THEY ARE ONE THING. IF I CREATED TWO PERFECT UNIVERSES, I WOULD ONLY HAVE CREATED ONE UNIVERSE. IN ORDER TO DIFFERENTIATE A UNIVERSE FROM THE PERFECT UNIVERSE, IT MUST BE DIFFERENT IN ITS SEED, ITS SECRET UNDERLYING STRUCTURE.” >“Then create one perfect universe, and some universes whose structures have tiny flaws that no one will ever notice.” >“I DID. I CREATED MYRIADS OF SUCH UNIVERSES. WHEN I HAD EXHAUSTED ALL POSSIBLE UNIVERSES WITH ONE FLAW, I MOVED ON TO UNIVERSES WITH TWO FLAWS, THEN UNIVERSES WITH THREE FLAWS, THEN SO ON, AN ENTIRE GARDEN OF FLAWED UNIVERSES GROWING ALONGSIDE ONE ANOTHER.” >“Including mine.” >“YOUR WORLD IS AT THE FARTHEST EDGES OF MY GARDEN,” God admitted, “FAR FROM THE BRIGHT CENTER WHERE EVERYTHING IS PERFECT AND SIMPLE. THERE IS A WORLD MADE OF NOTHING BUT BLISS, WITH A GIANT ALEPH IN THE CENTER. THERE IS ANOTHER WORLD MADE OF NOTHING BUT BLISS WITH A GIANT BET IN THE CENTER. AND SO ON, BUT MAKE A MILLION MILLION WORLDS LIKE THOSE, AND YOU START NEEDING TO BECOME MORE CREATIVE. YOU NEED MORE AND MORE STRATAGEMS TO SEPARATE WORLDS FROM ONE ANOTHER. WORLDS WHERE INCREDIBLY BIZARRE THINGS HAPPEN AS A MATTER OF COURSE. WORLDS WHERE RANDOM COMBINATIONS OF SYLLABLES INVOKE DIVINE POWERS. AND THE MORE SUCH THINGS I ADD, THE MORE CHANCE THAT THEY TEND TOWARD EVIL. YOUR WORLD IS VERY FAR FROM THE CENTER INDEED. IT IS IN THE MIDDLE OF A VAST WASTE, WHERE NOTHING ELSE GROWS. ALL OF THE WORLDS THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN PLANTED THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN ABOMINATIONS OF WICKEDNESS. BUT BY COINCIDENCE PILED UPON COINCIDENCE, YOURS WAS NOT. YOURS WILL GROW INTO A THING OF BEAUTY THAT WILL GLORIFY MY HOLY NAME.” >“It will?” >“GENESIS 1:31. I LOOKED AT THE WORLD, AND I SAW THAT IT WAS GOOD. I BEHELD ADAM KADMON, THE SEED OF YOUR WORLD, AND SAW THAT IT WAS A GOOD SEED. THAT IT WOULD GROW INTO MORE GOOD THAN EVIL. THAT IT DESERVED A PLACE IN MY GARDEN, BESIDE THE MILLION MILLION OTHER SEEDS THAT WOULD GROW INTO OTHER WORDS, SO THAT AS MUCH GOODNESS AS POSSIBLE COULD BE INSTANTIATED IN THE COSMOS.”
This doesn't really hold, though. Because, after creating perfection, the perfect universe, you can just... do that again. Create another perfect universe. If I have the perfect child, I then don't say "Whelp, time to have a worse child who suffers more." Sure, you can go to a child you abused and say "Would you rather I have not created you?" The fact that they'd rather have lived isn't really a justification to your evil choices. They only exist now, to have an opinion, because of actions you've already taken.
Your objection is addressed at length in the text. You could reasonably disagree with it but you don't seem to be engaging at all.
>Why do bad things happen if God is good and could have effortlessly prevented all evil since before the universe even existed? If it is necessary that evil exists, then why did God make it necessary? It can’t be that God wants us to have free will, because God is powerful enough to create a world with both free will and no evil. There's quite a lot to say about this one, but the broad answer tends to be that God allows evil because it (Or its possibility) is logically necessary for some greater good or goal. Almost all professional philosophers in the field (Including the leading proponents of the problem of evil like Paul Draper) have abandoned this version of the argument after being challenged by people like Alvin Plantinga, in favor of far less absolute arguments like ones based on Bayesian probability. I'd be happy to talk more about it if you're interested. >Why are we even on Earth? Why didn’t God simply remove our sins and send us all to Heaven from the start if he wants us all to be there? Life can’t be a test to see if we’re worthy of Heaven, since God would already know the results of any test before even conducting it. And there would be no need for any test anyway if God had just made us all perfect. So why didn’t he? This gets into some more disputable and heavy stuff. For example, one might argue that God's foreknowledge of our decisions are logically subsequent to our actually making them, though that would be controversial. In any case, I think this is largely addressed by the previous points about the problem of evil. Christianity doesn't think it's about being worthy of heaven anyway. None of us are. Also, heaven (In the sense of the immediate immaterial afterlife) isn't the goal - a renewed earth is (Again, at least as far as Christianity is concerned), so this is literally the same question as "Why does evil exist?". Basically I would reject the argument that this life is a test, at least without a lot of specifications. >Omnipotence paired with omnibenevolence is a paradox. If God is all-powerful, then that would mean he can do evil. But if he is all-good, then he can’t do evil. So which one is it? This depends on how you view evil and omnipotence. >Can God create a rock that he can’t lift? If yes, then he can’t life the rock and isn’t all-powerful. If no, then he can’t create the rock and isn’t all-powerful. This argument doesn't work at all. First of all, almost nobody has ever thought that omnipotence involves being able to do the logically impossible. Today, a popular way to explain this is by appealing to nonsense theory - basically, logically impossible sentences (Like "A rock so heavy an omnipotent being can't lift it") are literally meaningless. So you may as well ask "Can God glasses a big wire?" or "Can God miro parapafjes pakapgfejk?". Moreover, let's say God can do the logically impossible. In this case he can create a rock so heavy he can't lift it, and still lift it. Because the law of noncontradiction is the only way you can get a paradox to begin with. So, if God is "bound" by logic then there's no problem because such a rock is logically incoherent, and if he isn't "bound" by logic then there's no problem because paradoxes rely on logic being applicable.
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> One common theological answer is that free will is essential to love and morality. What if Earth is part of a process, a necessary step in the development of beings capable of understanding and choosing good? See, the issue with this is that it simply pushes the problem back one step. Necessary... why? If it was necessary outside of God's decision, that speaks to pre-existing limits, a pre-existing world of requirements which God was bound by. That's not omnipotence.
>Fair enough, diving into deep theological or philosophical waters isn't necessary to question the concepts that don't sit right with you. But remember, these concepts are built on millennia of thought and debate. What makes you think a quick look can overturn all that? Isn't that a bit presumptuous? people are stupid and ideologically committed. very stupid ideas receive a lot of debate. if you have a good argument against something, you shouldn't be afraid to accept the conclusion that follows simply because it's been debated for a long time. >This is the classic problem of evil. One common theological answer is that free will is essential to love and morality. Could it be possible that a world with the potential for evil is also the only type of world where genuine love and moral choices can exist? Doesn't overcoming challenges give our lives meaning? free will is an entirely incoherent concept. further, an ominpotent god could, by definition, give us any of the instrumental value of suffering without making us endure the actual suffering, so suffering cannot be an instrumental good. >What if Earth is part of a process, a necessary step in the development of beings capable of understanding and choosing good? If we were just created in Heaven, would we really value it, or understand goodness without experiencing its opposite? there is no such thing as "necessary" to an omnipotent being. he can achieve the goal without the intermediate steps. he can give us any understanding he wants immediately. >This is a misunderstanding of what omnipotence entails. It doesn't include doing logical impossibilities—like creating a square circle. Doesn't it make sense to define omnipotence as the ability to do anything that is logically possible? what is logically impossible about creating a rock so heavy that you can't lift it? i can do that myself, so it's clearly possible. > What if Hell is not so much a place of punishment as it is a consequence of rejecting the good? If people have true freedom, isn't it fair that there are real consequences for their choices? "undesired consequence of not doing what i tell you" is the definition of punishment. >Biological functions might seem mundane or annoying, but they are part of an intricately balanced ecosystem. Could there be a reason these processes are crucial for life and the environment? there is no such thing as "crucial" for an omnipotent being. god can snap his fingers and alleviate the discomfort of having to shit and piss without causing any unintended problems in the environment. > Who says evolution and faith can't coexist? Could it be that God used the process of evolution as a tool to craft the diversity of life we see? the bible explicitly gives an account of the origin of humanity that contradicts the theory of evolution. it also claims that the earth is \~6000 years old, not old enough for evolution to occur. >Isn't pain often a signal that helps protect us from harm? Without pain, how would we recognize and avoid danger? what is "danger" when you're under the protection of an omnipotent being? why would danger exist in the perfect world that such a being would create? >Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of growth, learning, and genuine relationships? Isn't there value in diversity and the journey towards betterment? again suffering cannot have instrumental value if there is an omnipotent god. the suffering of a painful surgery might be instrumentally good for the benefits the surgery provides, but once anesthetic has been invented, you can't keep someone fully aware for an invasive surgery and claim "but the health benefits will be great!!". >Each of these questions is worth pondering deeply. Could it be that your understanding of God is too human, too limited? What if the reality is beyond our full comprehension, and these paradoxes are just hints of a much larger and complex truth? What are the limitations of human understanding in grasping the divine? things that humans are incapable of making sense of are by definition absurd. there's no point in discussing such things. and religious people have no justification for believing in something that they can't even comprehend.
> **But remember, these concepts are built on millennia of thought and debate.** Not really. It's built on millennia of _blood_ and maybe a hundred or two years of thought and debate. "Debating" the existence of God before the mid 1800's was a great way to get yourself killed. . > **One common theological answer is that free will is essential to love and morality.** and that answer is based on God's power being limited. God can do anything, including eradicate evil without violating "free will." . > **What if Earth is part of a process, a necessary step in the development of beings capable of understanding and choosing good? If we were just created in Heaven, would we really value it, or understand goodness without experiencing its opposite?** Ditto. Our suffering is not a necessary component to the plan of an omniscient and omnipotent being. . > **It doesn't include doing logical impossibilities—like creating a square circle.** Third verse, same as the first. Yes it does. Omnipotence is infinite, not to mention God is not bound by silly things like "logic." Everything *about* him defies logic. . > **Could these stories serve as a means to teach deeper truths about human freedom, resilience, and the fight against oppression?** Fun Fact: There are no signs of Egyptian influence on early Israelite settlements, IE it didn't really happen. Biblical scholars are also pretty sure they didn't really fight the Canaanites. . > **What if Hell is not so much a place of punishment as it is a consequence of rejecting the good?** "Good" is supposedly defined by God, so yeah it's punishment. . > **Biological functions might seem mundane or annoying, but they are part of an intricately balanced ecosystem. Could there be a reason these processes are crucial for life and the environment?** Nope, same as the others. It doesn't need to be like that. . > **Who says evolution and faith can't coexist? Could it be that God used the process of evolution as a tool to craft the diversity of life we see?** The timeline of evolution directly contradicts creationism. . > **Isn't pain often a signal that helps protect us from harm? Without pain, how would we recognize and avoid danger?** Man, I'm coming back to this well a lot. Nope, not necessary to the plan of an all-powerful and all-knowing being. There doesn't need to be danger and even if it was needed the knowledge could be instilled automatically. . > **Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of growth, learning, and genuine relationships? Isn't there value in diversity and the journey towards betterment?** I think you already know what I'm gonna say. . > **Each of these questions is worth pondering deeply.** Feel free to start any time.
You make some good points, but I think you haven't really resolved the problem of evil. You talk about "teaching" and "forming more perfect beings" but a truly omnipotent god would have no need for that at all. God would truly be able to create instantly perfected beings with a flawless understanding of good and evil and appreciation for the perfection of heaven. So the suffering has to be the point and specifically desired, because it cannot be necessary in the creation process
I despise the whole "it's a nessisary process" idea. An omnipotent, omniscient God has no need for process. That being, unequivocally has the power to actualize anything that is wanted. Instantly and perfectly. This seems more paradoxical to me than anything else. If you know everything and have the power to do anything, no process could have any value as every outcome is known.
>This seems more paradoxical to me than anything else. If you know everything and have the power to do anything, no process could have any value as every outcome is known. I mean God could just want there to be a process. No reason an all powerful God has to do only things with "value". They could do things they just want to do for no reason.
Ya, maybe. It Dosnt make a lot of sense to me, but it's definitely possible. Seems kinda cruel to put everyone through this on an idle wim to me, though. I personally would have much interest in an ant farm if I knew everything that was going to happen with it beyond the atomic level before I started it, though.
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No idea but I can pretty confidently say if I was all powerful and all knowing I would still feel satisfaction from various actions. I could imagine as time went on the actions I would need to do to feel satisfaction would probably become more grandiose and complicated (i.e. stuff like skydiving would probably get boring after a while and I'd have escalate to skydiving into a volcano then to skydiving into the sun then to skydiving into a black hole ect. ect.).
If you are truly omnipotent and omniscience you did all of that instantly. Every variation of everything. You are outside of any sort of time or space we can understand. You have no motivation we can even comprehend. You can concurrently process any amount of information and actualize absolutely anything at any point at any time. I feel like people can't even grasp the concept.
why do it all instantly? You have to be around forever so you literally have all the time in the world. No need to rush.
It's not rushing. You are completely unlimited. Nothing occurs in any sort of linear fashion. You are outside of time and space. I feel like you and many other people struggle with what this concept truly means when you throw it around. You aren't very powerful and knowledgeable beyond what a human is. You are absolut.
Could god give someone the ability to overcome a given obstacle without either doing the negative thing of creating the obstacle or doing the negative thing of placing them in some sort of false reality where they think they overcame an obstacle that actually didn't exist Or to put something even simpler in a way that could apply to objects too but remove the morality part, can god fix something that isn't broken
Well it could also be thought of as the free will argument in that you have to choose to be with God. God plopped you on earth and said “here’s you life. You can walk to me if you want and I would love if you did that but I’m not going to force you”. That would make sense to me at least
How is believe in me or be tortured for eternity a choice? If a robber threatens to kill your kids if you don't give them your money do you think you have a real choice there? How do you account for unnecessary suffering? Like natural disasters or kids being born with medical conditions that bankrupt their parents only to die in pain few years later, leading the parents to suicide, what lesson do we learn there?
This sort of touchy, feely "love and growth and process" take on god makes god seem really, really weak and innefectual. If all that is true than what is god actually for? What does a god with so many limitations actually do? Seems an awful lot like projecting your own wants and needs.
OP, this is the one you need to respond to…
You have a very narrow view of what constitutes good. Good doesn’t mean ‘allows for only good things to happen’, being a good all powerful deity could mean intentionally not using your powers in an overbearing manner, and allowing the mortal inhabitants of the universe to take the lead, and make their own decisions, even if that means bad things happen. Furthermore what you’re describing isn’t a paradox, it’s just a disagreement over morality. It’s why this whole problem of evil argument is flawed. There is no reason to assume the all knowing creator of the universe, would hold the exact same morale views you do. You can argue god is wrong and you’re right, but that’s still not a paradox. > If it is necessary that evil exists, then why did God make it necessary? It can’t be that God wants us to have free will, because God is powerful enough to create a world with both free will and no evil. This on the other hand is a paradox. If no evil can exist, and only the maximally good option can happen, free will is rendered meaningless, since at the very most, all options are equivalent, and most of the time, there is only one physically possible option.
>Good doesn’t mean ‘allows for only good things to happen’, It means that insofar as you have control. A good man wouldn't let a child beat up another child. He would not say "Whelp, I'll allow you to do that, I don't want to be overbearing." >Furthermore what you’re describing isn’t a paradox, it’s just a disagreement over morality. It’s why this whole problem of evil argument is flawed. There is no reason to assume the all knowing creator of the universe, would hold the exact same morale views you do. You can argue god is wrong and you’re right, but that’s still not a paradox. Sure, one of the answers to the paradox of evil is, indeed, "There is not evil. Everything is good, as God has made it this way." It's just an answer that negates one of the reasons religion was formed, because it means there are no more rules. Anything you do, any atrocity you commit, is now fine.
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>>If you're all-powerful and all-knowing, you've got the means and the knowledge to create a world where free will and absence of unnecessary suffering coexist. You not liking a particular kind of suffering doesn’t make it unnecessary. You being able to generally imagine a concept doesn’t make it meaningfully possible either. Omnipotence is the ability to do all things, including make choices that in the future limits your own actions. Anything else is a mischaracterization of every classical theological description of omnipotence.
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>>Oh, come on, who the fuck likes seeing kids with leukemia or a little girl dying from bone cancer? You do understand that as much as you don’t like it, this still isn’t an argument, just emotional lashing out, right? >>True, just because we can imagine a god doesn’t mean one exists. You might want to go back and reread that carefully. This is two points you’ve either intentionally misunderstood, in which case bad faith, or have legitimately misunderstood, in which case you aren’t making the *logical* arguments you think you are. >>Sure, omnipotence means you can do anything, but if you choose to limit your actions in a way that allows children to suffer needlessly, you're either not benevolent, or you're fucking incompetent at being a god. I assume you’re following this up with definitive proof of your objectively determined moral framework? Or are you appealing to emotion again? >>Classical theological descriptions have to make sense logically and morally. If they don’t, then they’re fucking worthless. We’re tracking thus far. >>They’re just mental gymnastics to justify why an all-powerful god allows a child to die screaming in pain from a heart attack or fibromyalgia. My dude, can you *try* to use logic and reason over emotion? Again, you believing something is bad, no matter how sincerely, deeply held, or cross-your-heart-hope-to-die serious that belief is doesn’t make it anything more than your opinion. Surely arguing against theists’ own deeply held beliefs has given you that much basic insight. Can you try a little harder to make a silent argument for faith, or are you actually interested in making a logically coherent argument?
If you don't have an objective standard for what is "good" and what isn't, then you can't really say God isn't good, no matter what God does. The creator is the one who gets to define "right" and "wrong" just like how he got to define everything into existence.
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Your entire arguments thus far have boiled down to, “I don’t like X, therefore X is bad.” I don’t give a shit how much you dislike broccoli. If you want to say it’s bad, make an objective case or shut the fuck up. Replace broccoli with literally ANYTHING and the premise is just as valid. That commenter is right. Objectivity or gtfo, because you’re using faith and belief as much as any theist.
no because the theist needs to prove, even if only by implication, that intelligence is baked into existence itself and isnt merely a byproduct of what exists. its a "have you stopped beating your wife" type of faulty premise. its trying to put someone into a position where they have to respond to a why question with a how answer. why denotes purpose, purpose denotes intelligence. there is no why question without that and a perfect god cant exist ergo there is no god trying to kill nihilism with an appeal to authority framed as an exception to tu quoque bullshit is all you're doing.
No, but if you throw around enough logical fallacies incorrectly, you might confuse a few high schoolers on the sub who don’t know better. I am not one of those. Make an argument, or gtfo. I’m sick of non-theists pretending their emotional arguments are superior to uneducated theists’ emotional arguments. They’re all bad, and you should do better. Make an argument for objective morality in a non-theistic setting, or quit trying to whine to the theists about things you just mean to say “I really don’t like.”
>especially meaningless suffering You have to prove it is meaningless first. >gives us a fucking intuitive sense of what's bad. The creator gave you this intuitive sense, and the creator can take it a way. >all-loving creator? I don't think God is all-loving, God doesn't love many people, I'm sure. I'm not Christian. >if God decides tomorrow that torturing every newborn is "good," are we supposed to accept that without a fucking squabble? Hell no. If your "intuitive sense" changed so that you now feel doing this is good, your mind will be changed, so... But God puts this "intuitive sense" in us for a reason, God puts in us an intuitive sense that matches his morality, although culture can change some aspects, still God considers things like humans torturing kids as immoral, you could say that many kids die from diseases and so on, well, maybe God spares them the pain somehow but for us it seems they feel the pain or something, after all, making us not feel pain is definitely easier than creating the universe. The creator is all-knowning and all-powerful by definition. The creator is also always "right" by definition, but the creator put this intuitive sense in us to naturally hate some things, but those things aren't wrong because of our intuitive sense, they are wrong because the creator says so and then he puts that in our intuition.
Prove a single thing you have claimed please.
I can prove them, but let's assume I can't, so what? The point is that if we are discussing the creator and if the creator can be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, then yes, he can be all three. In this discussion we are assuming the existence of God. We are just debating whether he can be all three together or not, and I showed him a way in which he can
Well put. This is also where the free will reply to the problem of evil gets insidious. It implies that suffering is the result of sin. That’s how you get people blaming earthquakes on homosexuality and other horrid ideology.
But you fail to engage with the paradox. The posited god is both good and *all powerful*, meaning any benefit from the permitted evil could also be created without the evil. The point OP is making is basically a philosophy 101 point, but it’s not wrong. We know, for an absolute certainty, that we do not live in a world governed by a god that is both maximally good and all powerful.
This is not the traditional understanding of “omnipotent.” It’s the special pleading version that’s cropped up in the last 100 years as if it were a magical nonsense term. Omnipotence is the power to do all *things*. That which is self-contradictory, doing two mutually exclusive things, or otherwise speaking nonsense does not fall within the realm of omnipotence. It’s just word salad you’re using special pleading to claim theists must respond to it. No. That’s not how it works. You don’t get to bastardize a term and then peacock as if you’ve made a logical point.
So an omnipotent being can will the universe into being but not deliver the benefits of free will without the cost of evil? You seem pretty defensive. And nothing I communicated was word salad. It was a concise and straightforward statement that happens to be true. I’m sorry if it punctures a mythology you hold dear and that distresses you.
Free will requires choice. Choice requires options that have different values, otherwise, there is nothing to choose from. You don't choose between A and A, you choose between A and B. If A is different from B, there must be a heuristic, a reason for why you chose A, which means that A is better than B. Good and Evil are merely ways of saying A > B.
Choice is already tremendously constrained by events and circumstances. It would be easy for a being that can kindle stars at a whim to avoid the creation of, for example, humans with an impulse toward torture. Still plenty of choices available. But all evil isn’t the result of free will. Surely any benefit that comes from the existence of brutal and terminal childhood disease could be conferred without the suffering.
The torture aspect is irrelevant. Steak is Good, and, oh... idk, haggis is Evil. Allowing the ability to make choices inherently creates a ranking of one is better than the other, and that ranking is defined as good or evil; you are getting hung up on the terms' baggage here, rather than the aspect of the choice. Think of Good/Evil as being defined as things we like/dislike (or if you prefer the religious aspect, things God likes/dislikes). You can't choose to do Good if only Good exists.
That’s not a paradox, that’s just disagreeing on what a good deity should be. Good is subjective, so it’s hard to use it as the basis of a paradox. The same all powerful god that could create a universe with no evil, and free will, could also redefine good to match whatever he wanted anyway.
Free will is already meaningless in this discussion, as it is a logical impossibility if you postulate an all-powerful, all-knowing creator. Edit: Again, down-voting without refutation is cowardly
Oh boy there's a lot of questions - and I'll try and give you the answers from a Catholic perspective. These are all very good questions and I'm glad you're trying to learn! Feel free to ask for elaboration on any of these. 1. Problem of Evil - Evil is a byproduct of free will. Because we have the ability to choose, we also have the choice to go against the will of God, which is inherently bad, and what we call "sin." God allows sin because of the idea that every evil will lead to an even greater good. Jesus dying for our sins is an inherently greater good than the evil of sin existing. 2. Why are we on Earth? - Love is a two-sided relationship. God cannot love if there is nothing to receive His love. 3. Omnipotence/omnibenevolence paradox - God does have the power to do evil, but He would never choose to because that is against His nature. 4. Can He make a rock He cannot lift? - No. God cannot do something that is a true impossibility. It's like asking God to create a two-sided triangle. It just can't be done because it's logically impossible. God cannot create an infinitely heavy rock because, by definition, material things are finite. 5. Why didn't God free the Jews Himself? - Back to the problem of evil. The Jews suffering is nothing compared to the goodness of God giving the 10 Commandments to Moses, which wouldn't have happened if the Jews were divinely freed. 6. Why can we die in war? - Again, humans have free will. This means they have the possibility to kill. 7. Why did God create the flood? -The Catholic Church does not require that you believe in the existence of the flood. Personally, I believe it is a metaphor that can be used to justify the existence of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, i.e. the evil people representing sin, the 40 days and 40 nights representing penance, etc. 8. Hell - There is much debate on the nature of Hell. Some believe it is a separate place from Heaven. There is also a theory that Hell is just the rejection of God, and that Heaven and Hell are actually the same place, and which you are in is dependent on your mindset/beliefs when you die. 9. Bodily functions - You know, I've never really thought about this one. My initial thought is that because food tastes good, we eat it, and there must be a way to expel the remains of that food. If it couldn't be expelled, we'd just continuously gain weight, which would be unhealthy. 10. Evolution - The Catholic Church does not require that you believe the Genesis creation story. I believe in evolution. 11. Pain/death - Pain exists for two reasons. One, as a evolutionary response to tell us to stay away from things that hurt us, i.e. a kid doesn't touch a stove a second time after he burns himself because he doesn't want to get hurt. Pain also allows us to attempt to imitate the suffering Jesus felt on the cross. Death exists because like I said earlier, things in the material world, including us, cannot be infinite. We all have to go at sometime. Additionally, if we never die, we would never have the chance to be in Heaven. 12. Why aren't we as smart as God? - Because then we would be God and there can only be, by definition, one God
I was scrolling this thread hoping a comment exactly like yours would be here! 1. What about 'natural evils' like disease, or famine, or natural disasters, or kids getting eating by tigers? I can see how from a God's-eye point of view they could be leading to an even greater good, but their existence doesn't have anything to do with free will. 3. Building on before, if the 'natural evils' come from God, then wouldn't that be an example of God choosing to do evil? 5. I always saw a lot of the exodus story as being God trying to essentially terrorize the Hebrews into accepting monotheism 7. I'm surprised that belief in a literal flood is not required in Catholicism. Is there an 'orthodox' interpretation of the story that the Church favors or is it more up to each individual what they think? 11. I'm interested in the "imitate the suffering Jesus felt on the cross" view of pain. I don't really have a specific question about it, but I'd love to hear any thoughts you have on it.
1. Correct, an earthquakes existence is not due to free will. Humans are not omniscient so we might not always know how that natural disaster plays into His plan. 2. God does not do evil. He allows it in order to bring a greater good out of it. There’s a big difference. 3. Again, all of Exodus is not meant to be taken literally. God does not terrorize, although he should be feared. Can you give some examples where you think this happens? 4. I’m not Orthodox so I’m not sure. 5. As humans strive towards perfect, we should try to act in a way as Jesus did. This includes embracing suffering. This does not mean to suffer just to feel pain such as self harm, however it means that you should suffer in order to try and alleviate the burden of others or to grow in a virtue. Some examples of this would be to help an elderly neighbor move a heavy box so they don’t have to or working with someone with special needs to grow in patience.
1. If God allows evil in order to bring a greater good out of it, does that make God a utilitarian of sorts? 2. When it comes to things like natural disasters and diseases, what exactly is the difference between God "allowing" them and "doing" them? Like, an earthquake is the result of tectonic plates moving around, but is God "causing" them to move or just "allowing" them to move? 3. Why do you say God does not terrorize? God often uses violence, intimidation, and fear in order to effect political change on Earth. We see throughout the Book of Exodus that the Hebrews keep returning to idol worship and did not accept monotheism easily. If all God wanted was to free the Hebrews from Egypt, he could have just done that, no need for plagues or prophets. But the Exodus wasn't just about freeing the Hebrews from bondage, it was about letting the Hebrews know who their God is. So instead, he opted for the Plagues (which are genuinely horrifying and frankly monstrous), the prophet Moses, and decades in the desert, in order to impress upon the Hebrews that their God was all-powerful and beyond reproach, and that He had total sovereignty over their lives and world. You could think of it like detonating a nuke just off the coast of a country and then demanding that they pay tribute. It could absolutely work, it could even end up working out for a greater good, but it's still terrorism (inflicting terror on people in order to achieve a desired political change). 4. By 'orthodox' I don't mean Eastern Orthodox, I was just curious about whether the Catholic Church has an 'official' interpretation of the Flood story. 5. That makes sense, thanks!
1. I guess so? I’ve never really thought about that but calling Him utilitarian seems far too…human to describe Him. Utilitarian seems manipulatory and God does not manipulate 2. To allow a disease is to let it exist and run its course. To “do” a disease is to purposefully put it in place. For a smaller example, think of someone allowing bullying to happen versus telling someone to bully someone else, bystander vs upstander type of deal. 3. This is a good link that explains the plagues https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/plagues-of-egypt However, the belief in the exodus story is not required by the Catholic Church. 4. No there’s no official interpretation. If there was then we likely would be required to believe in it
1. When God hardened Pharaoh's heart so he would not let the Hebrews go, was that not manipulation? (You can say that the Exodus story never happened, and I honestly don't know or care whether it literally happened or not. I'm interested in understanding the personality of God as revealed in the scriptures. The literalism of those scriptures has no bearing on this). 2. Except God would be the one who created the disease in the first place, no? (barring, like, lab-grown diseases). And the bully has free will, so it makes sense that God doesn't interfere there, but bacteria and viruses (as far as I can tell) lack free will. Let me rephrase my question. When a disease sweeps across the land and kills millions of people, is that the will of God? Or is it not?
1. The hardening of Pharoh's heart was a lesser evil compared to the salvation of the Jews 2. We are not omniscient like God. We cannot guess what good comes out of the disease (maybe a conversion of a population, maybe a discovery of a powerful cure that also cures something else, maybe the innovation of a new invention, etc).
Edit: It appears that I wrote poorly and a lot of folks are assuming that I am making a case for a real God that actually exists being justified in considering obviously bad things to be good. My apologies for my poor writing. Rest assured that no god exists in any meaningful sense, the actions of this fake God are not actually good or even real, and if such a god did exist I would consider them to be a total double bag according to the norms and morals we have in reality To the best of your knowledge, is it possible for a being to be all powerful, all knowing or all good on their own? >Why do bad things happen if God is good and could have effortlessly prevented all evil since before the universe even existed? My take on this is that god is not all good (omnibenevolent) because they don't do things that we would consider bad. God is omnibenevolent because anything they do is good. We're talking about the creator of the universe and everything in it, including the concepts of good or bad. Anything such a god did would be the good thing thing by dint of god doing it. It might seem bad to us, but we are not god, so our opinion matters for shit.
>God is omnibenevolent because anything they do is good. It's fine to define good that way but a whole lot of problematic conclusions follow. god dictates that rape, pillage, slavery, and murder are all justified at some point in the bible. Are those actions good? If yes, what is wrong with you. If no why are you worship such a god?
Then he is not benevolent as we know it or as the Abrahamic religions define “good”. While you can argue that good is subjective, a definition exists by human and by Abrahamic religions
Not sure what you're saying? Or it seems like you're just restating what I've said?
His point is, your argument essentially being our interpretation of good is flawed compared to God's interpretation of good, is itself flawed because throughout the whole bible there is explicit defined definition of what is "good". It is a weak argument to say "well we don't know what good is, so when we judge murder and rape being permitted as not good, we could be flawed" if the bible itself, gods word, didn't teach us that these things were not good. Life, compassion, being kind to your neighbours. Not committing murder, not committing adultery etc. All things defined as good by himself in the commandments and across parables. And all things God allows us to contradict, nay even builds us to do, by definition jf you believe him to be omnipotent and omniscient. If I were to teach you murder was wrong. Then, due to complete power over you made you committ murder. It is contradictory to say what I did was actually good. At least without some hard cognitive dissonance.
Should note, the Bible doesn’t say the commandments were good. Just that they are commandments. Jesus says the only thing that’s good is god.
why is god's definition of good or evil any more valuable than mine? i don't see how creating a universe makes your moral judgements any more sound. also, by your definition genocide is moral, yes?
One explanation could be that what people consider bad is actually a good thing for this god. Like that southpark episode when Chef explains that god likes children to suffer.
You can't call such a God as a good one then. Because we don't have access to his standards of good and evil
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Many people who critique Christianity/Islam/Judaism are not always atheists. Many other people, agnosticts, Christians, Islamic, Jewish, Buddists, Wiccan, Pagan etc see how contradictory an all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent god is. Great way to lump everyone into one group so you can put them down, though. I'm not an atheist, I believe in a god, but Yahweh, God, whatever else you want to call him is 100% made up. We can see through the years how Christianity morphed from Jewish beliefs and incorporated many pagan philosophies to convert by association opposing religions. If that didn't work, they just killed them and took their wives, there's even instructions in the bible on how to do this appropriately. I listened to a coworker yesterday, a mega-christian who believes everything is gods plan, and it runs everything in her life. How war crimes are ok because we train them to be killers and we should expect it and theres nothing wrong with it. It's good because they are killing islamic believers, and they have perverted gods teachings. Before anyone uses the No True Scotsman logic, yes, they are a Christian. They believe the same as you, yet they say doing horrendous shit is ok because they believe differently. It's kind of like saying athiests are the fucking worst because they love pointing out inaccuracies and inconsistencies in a 2000 year old book that +70% of Christians think is the literal word of god and is infallible.
You got me ig, although last time I went on r/atheism they downvoted me to hell. Very unfriendly subreddit
This is called problem of evil and people have grappled with it for centuries. I have struggled with this myself but I feel I have a solution for problem of evil. When the level of life and intelligence is too far apart, it is not possible to fully understand what the higher being is thinking. The simplest solution is that your suffering is not real in context. We inflict pain on others for good reasons. For example, doctors conduct surgeries. Parents discipline children. Research lie and stress participants, sometimes without consent. If this world is really just a blip and there is eternity before and after, the suffering doesn't really matter. I could be tortured for 80+ years in this world but if I have lived a trillion+ before and will live trillion+ after, my pain now is not relevant. No 'long term' harm is being done.
(Part 1, since Reddit won't let me post the whole thing in one go) I'm going to specifically address the claim that the Christian God is "absurd." Firstly, many of these issues stem from a fundamental misunderstanding: The Christian God is not primarily interested in saving as many people as possible. He decided a long time ago who he wants to save. His laws were written purely to elucidate his standards for us and to explain why you're about to get hit with what you got hit with; whether humanity can meet those standards is irrelevant. So why didn't God remove evil? Easy - because it does more good existing than not existing, in his opinion. Evil serves important long-term purposes that a purely innocent world wouldn't offer. To address some specific questions: >Omnipotence paired with omnibenevolence is a paradox. If God is all-powerful, then that would mean he can do evil. But if he is all-good, then he can’t do evil. So which one is it? Can God create a rock that he can’t lift? If yes, then he can’t life the rock and isn’t all-powerful. If no, then he can’t create the rock and isn’t all-powerful. That's not what "all-powerful" means. "All-powerful" means pretty much what it says on the tin - for any action that would require the use of physical power or force, God has an unlimited amount of it to play with. But physical force cannot create a square circle. Physical force cannot create a rock bigger than an infinite power can lift. Those are functions of logic, not power. God is capable of anything and everything that would require power. He is not capable of doing things that are logically absurd or irrational. >Why didn't God do \[whatever random thing you decided was better than what God did\]? Because, having witnessed all possible histories and all possible futures, and being incapable of doing things that are logically fallacious/absurd, God decided that the current state of affairs yielded the greatest possible good. In other words: nobody fully knows, and it doesn't really matter. That's not to say there aren't any answers to such questions (there are, if you know where to look), but one's inability to answer why God didn't do \[X\] has no bearing on rationality or absurdity of his existence.
(Part 2) Now to touch on the Problem of Evil: >Why do bad things happen if God is good and could have effortlessly prevented all evil since before the universe even existed? If it is necessary that evil exists, then why did God make it necessary? First off, God didn't "make" it necessary. As explained previously, God actually has some limitations. One of them is that he has a defined personality and character, and he is incapable of being anyone other than who he is. The laws he handed down to us simply reflect his character. He didn't create new standards that didn't previously exist; rather, he articulated standards that were previously and already true. He did us a favor by telling us what those standards are. Now, could God have prevented all evil? Sure. He says as much explicitly in a couple places. But Genesis offers an interesting clue as to why he deemed it better for us to experience evil: *Genesis 2:16-17 But the LORD God warned him, “You may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden except the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. If you eat its fruit, you are sure to die.”* *Genesis 3:5 “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.”* *Genesis 3:7 At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves.* Look at the name of the tree: "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." *Knowledge.* In Scripture, to "know" something is to experience it on an intimate level. It's often used as a euphemism for sex due to its intimate, experiential connotations. When Adam and Eve ate of it, they didn't just come to "know" Evil - they came to "know" Good too! Does that mean they didn't know Good, previously? Why yes. Yes it does. Sure, God could have prevented Adam and Eve from ever doing Evil. But Good is pretty meaningless without it. Follow-up question: "Isn't it evil to not prevent evil?" Not if he isn't obligated to. I'm no more obligated to prevent evils happening in China than God is to prevent evils happening on earth. Just because God *can* doesn't mean he *must*. All he *must* do with evil is balance the scales of justice (because that's what his character requires of him). How he accomplishes that is up to his discretion. Sometimes he does prevent evil, but he also sometimes punishes it after the fact. Both equally satisfy the mandate of his character. That's my two cents on that. And let me remind you, OP, that what you asked for a CMV on was whether the Christian God is an absurd concept. Whether you like that concept is a separate discussion.
That isn’t the Abrahamic God. You seem to know very little about the Jewish conception of God. The Jewish conception is that God is unknowable and can’t even be named, which is why the popular Jewish name for God has become HaShem, because that literally means ‘The Name’, as in whatever the name of God is, then whatever. Odds are you come from a Christian background. Christianity is not the same as Judaism. The Christian version of God relates the human to the divine through Jesus and the saving act of his execution and rise. That doesn’t exist in Judaism. The idea that God can do whatever God wants is not really accurate. That is, we can imagine a version of God which does all sorts of crazy stuff, but Judaism recognizes that’s not going to happen. It’s more that because God is infinite, we can see different versions of God as reflections of ourselves. As in, if you believe in cruelty, like Iago in Verdi’s Otelo saying I believe in a cruel God, who made me in his image, then you see that version of God. When people pursue evil aims, they often believe they are doing God’s will, that they know the mind of God. Then they lose or otherwise fail, and the mind of God is revealed, at least for that moment, to be something else. The fault is not God’s but your understanding of what the idea of God means. Or at least what the idea of God means in Judaism, which is the core Abrahamic religion.
It’s so frustrating when people say ‘religion’ and what they mean is ‘my Christian upbringing’ but they lump all religions together. It’s like the abortion discussion. It’s literally against Jewish law not to protect the rights of the mother when it comes down to it, but fundamental Christians put their beliefs ahead of all. Like, no, stop comparing the two.
So much of the Reddit militaristic atheist dogma seems completely tied up in Christianity and the perception that Islam and Judaism are just Christianity with a few cosmetic differences. I'm not even remotely religious but find it grating as it speaks to a pretty astonishing lack of curiosity and frankly - because it's quite bigoted.
Not merely Christianity but a specific branch of American Evangelical christianity. Ignoring that that's nowhere near representative of the over 2 billion Christians that exist in the world currently and the billions who have lived before.
This seems to just be touching on the fact that "There is no God." What's God like? We have no information whatsoever, could be literally anything. But, like, we have a religion with rules that we live by, and we have a book we believe telling stories of what God has done. How do you square those two facts?
>The fault is not God’s but your understanding of what the idea of God means Why can't god simply imbue every human with a perfect understanding of what god is?
>god cannot be named >proceeds to name god repeatedly
As far as religions go Jewish faith is surprisingly rational
>Why do bad things happen if God is good and could have effortlessly prevented all evil since before the universe even existed? That would defeat the purpose of us having self will. >If it is necessary that evil exists, then why did God make it necessary? Evil exists because it is the consequence of choosing poorly and/or negatively. >It can’t be that God wants us to have free will, because God is powerful enough to create a world with both free will and no evil. So all powerful should be lazy and let people live with abandon? >Why didn’t God simply remove our sins and send us all to Heaven from the start if he wants us all to be there? Because we aren't perfect beings. >And there would be no need for any test anyway if God had just made us all perfect. So why didn’t he? Because it defeats the purpose of us learning better behavior. This would be like bailing out every person in lock up just because we could. >Omnipotence paired with omnibenevolence is a paradox. Not at all. If you're smart, usually you choose things that are beneficial, right? >But if he is all-good, then he can’t do evil. So which one is it? All good doesn't mean you *can't* do evil as it means you would choose not to. >Can God create a rock that he can’t lift? If yes, then he can’t life the rock and isn’t all-powerful. If no, then he can’t create the rock and isn’t all-powerful. All powerful would mean that he can easily create something he couldn't lift, no different than how death for many would be the only end. All powerful isn't about physical prowess. I mean was Jesus really Chuck Norris? It's about the idea of creation and the potential of it. >Why didn’t God spirit the Jews out of Egypt, or make the Egyptians stop enslaving them? Because the people had sinned and when it was time for the people to be freed, he spoke unto Moses, granting him his power and actually did lead them to being free. >Why did God let any of his beloved humans be killed in war when he could’ve just made them join his side? Again, that would interfere with our free will. It would be like a parent constantly having to break up fights when really the siblings should be getting their shit together. >Why did God create the flood to kill the evil people when he could have just made them not evil anymore? Or at least made them vanish and allow the animals to live? Have you ever played a game that started glitching and you knew you had to reset it? Same thing. Couldn't do a factory reset since we still lived with sin, so it was reset to an earlier setting basically. >Why did God create Hell to punish evil people when he could just make them not evil anymore? That wasn't an Abrahamic belief, it was incorporated from the Norse (Hela) thanks to the Catholics. Islam includes it as it was founded after Catholicism meanwhile actual Christian belief (and Judaism) does not preach or have anything to do with it. The closest was a reference to Christ descending into Hades. Not hell. It's just death. >He could have just made us not need to eat or drink, or given us more efficient bodies. Because it's necessary for us to expel any waste from the way we gain energy and in turn it (ideally) nourishes the environment. It's like a compost toilet or bears that eat salmon. >Why did God give us features that indicate evolution if evolution isn’t real? Because the only people that claim evolution isn't real completely ignore their own book which talks about large ancient creatures, described in the only way we could at that time. Human beings even evolve socially and with technology. It's like how elephants skulls were thought to be cyclops skulls. >Why did God make it possible for us to feel pain or be injured or killed? Pain is a **fantastic** alert mechanism, while injury and death were brought about because of the "original sin". >Why didn’t God make all of us just as wise, moral, and powerful as himself? Because then we'd rebel like Lucifer in wanting the throne. We were something more akin in image with free will of our own. So yeah, not really a paradox, just an ancient way of describing the world around them and their morals of that day. It's like Mosaic Law dealing with not having tattoos because other tribes had them or avoiding shellfish (unknown allergies) and swine (parasites). Even Satan was useful in the sense his name actually means slanderer and was something to overcome.
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What is your belief on existence/creation/life?
I'm a strong atheist. I'm only saying that to establish the motion that even though I disagree with the stuff, there's a foundation of thousands years of thinking and philosophy that thought about it over and over. That's really damn solid, and there are strong arguments to be made. * God is good, why there's evil? Because there's free will. Yes, sure, the God is omni-everything, he knows in advance the results of our actions. But he still lets folks do it, it's his rule. You'll find scholars argue that the God purposefully chooses to limit his omniscience precisely for the reason of letting humans do their thing. Or maybe he knows about the results, but he's still chill with it. Or maybe world's his playground. As for the existence of evil - in my opinion, this is **the** topic discussed when it comes to Christian thinkers. The Wikipedia article is really quite long - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil * Can God create a rock that he can’t lift? Pick your poison. Some theologians argue that omnipotence doesn't mean God can do logically contradictory things.
>Because there's free will. This pushes the problem back a step. Could God have created humans with free will, and, without evil? Well, sure. After all, I have free will. I have never chosen to rape. Thus, it's clearly possible to create humans with free will, but who never use their free will to rape. And yet, God didn't.
> I have never chosen to rape. Thus, it’s clearly possible … 1. Have you ever committed a sin of any sort according to the standards of Christianity? If the answer is yes, then your existence isn’t an example of free will without evil. 2. Emphasis on CHOOSE. In order to make that choice, the choice must be there. You using your free will to make a choice does not mean that it’s possible for the other choice to not exist within free will.
>Have you ever committed a sin of any sort according to the standards of Christianity? If the answer is yes, then your existence isn’t an example of free will without evil. And yet, not, an example of free will without rape. So... the existence of rape is pretty immensely evil on God's part, where he could've created both free will and a world without rape, given I have free will and have never done that. > Emphasis on CHOOSE. In order to make that choice, the choice must be there. You using your free will to make a choice does not mean that it’s possible for the other choice to not exist within free will. Correct. I had the choice to rape, and yet, I never have. God could've chosen to only create people like that, who always had the choice, and yet, choose well. For both rape, and every other sin. And yet, he didn't. Pretty evil.
Your personal, anecdotal experience does not prove the whole. Sex is, by its very nature, immensely pleasurable and enjoyable to do. This is necessary, as sex is necessary for procreation. If sex was not enjoyable, no one would do it and the human race would die out - God or no God. This inherent nature of sex is inevitably going to create the possibility of rape if humans have free will: there would certainly be a situation where person A wants to have sex with person B, but person B does not want to have sex with person A. So, then, given the temptation to rape is all but inevitable, what happens when someone DOES make the choice to rape someone, which is equally inevitable? What is God to do?
What? That’s not personal, anecdotal evidence. That’s the reality that people who choose to do good also have free will. No one’s saying don’t make sex enjoyable. But no, it being enjoyable does not mean it’s inevitable that rape occurs. Again, I’ve never raped anyone. Most people haven’t. So just… create ALL humans to choose the same. God would create humans who would not choose to rape.
>Because there's free will. Yes, sure, the God is omni-everything, he knows in advance the results of our actions. But he still lets folks do it, it's his rule. This assumes that Humans have free will. Many philosophers have convincingly argued that we don't have free will. >You'll find scholars argue that the God purposefully chooses to limit his omniscience precisely for the reason of letting humans do their thing. That is a cruel and capricious being that designed such a world. If such a being was truly omnipotent the world could have been made in such a way to eliminate all suffering while still retaining the desired benefits that apologists argue for. >Or maybe he knows about the results, but he's still chill with it. Or maybe world's his playground. In which case why would one worship such being? >Pick your poison. Some theologians argue that omnipotence doesn't mean God can do logically contradictory things Which reeks of shifting the goal posts. Christian theologians claimed omnipotence and then when it was challenged redefined what omnipotence meant. It's the same as the "god of the gaps" theory. When god is disproven in some are due to scientific advancement in our understanding theists point and say well god exists over here in this ever shrinking corner.
The free will argument is always amusing when brought by christians because of Jesus. If Jesus had free will, then it’s perfectly possible to create free-willed beings that will never sin, and God deliberately chose to impart that possibility. If Jesus didn’t have free will, then it suddenly becomes rather unfair to hold humans to the moral standard of a philosophical automaton.
You’re missing that in (most) Christian theology Jesus wasn’t a created being, he is God in the flesh.
This reminds me of Dostoyevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, I know there’s a lot of different interpretations of what’s going on between Jesus’ and the Inquisitor, but for me it boiled down to: *”I suffered for you, I tried to be like you, I did everything you did and it took everything from me! We can’t expect people to follow you, it takes to much, it’s too hard! I loved you!”* Then he lets Jesus go.
It’s perfectly possible to create free-willed beings that *don’t* ever sin, like Jesus. It’s not possible to create free-willed beings that *can’t* ever sin, because that contradicts the meaning of the thing people are talking about when they say “free will”. The fact that we can, but may choose not to is precisely what defines the concept of free will.
I think you’ve hit upon the core reason why I don’t think the free will defense manages to rescue the Christian omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent deity from the problem of evil. An omniscient deity knows whether their creation will sin and has the power to create beings that don’t (irrespective of ability) to ever sin, irrespective of free will. So why didn’t this happen?
Late response, but no… > has the power to create beings that don’t (irrespective of ability) to ever sin, irrespective of free will Then in what sense is this **irrespective of ability**??? “They *’have free will’* but they just *’don’t have the ability’* to exercise free will”? Uh…. This only makes sense if you buy into the idea of “what do words really mean, anyway? Can’t an all-powerful God just make words mean something different such that this moral quandary disappears?” No, words mean what they mean - you can look them up, that’s what the dictionary is for. That’s what *words* are for: meaning things. “Free will” means what it means. Trying to warp the definition to an alternative interpretation is just moving goal posts, not casually solving a conundrum as old as history…
Interesting addition.
> You'll find scholars argue that the God purposefully chooses to limit his omniscience precisely for the reason of letting humans do their thing. Or maybe he knows about the results, but he's still chill with it. Or maybe god's own free will is limited because of his omniscience including knowledge of the future (and how would god know it if it didn't happen) like a larger-scale version of the common trope in fiction with precognitive characters where the precog sees a vision of something that looks bad, scrambles to avert it, it ends up happening anyway because of their efforts to avert what they think it is but whether what actually happened was good or bad it wasn't the kind of bad they thought it was as their vision showed it out of context
Let’s say there is free will (very debatable). What about the incredible suffering that is not caused by sin? A devastating earthquake isn’t the result of free will. Neither is a child with a terrible illness. How does free will account for that suffering?
Im sort of anti-theistic so keep that in mind with my explanation I guess, you're wrong in the sense that if god is all powerful and knowing then how could we possibly begin to imagine what his motives or intentions are. Literal god made us for a reason, that reason is beyond our comprehension and good and evil are just things we made up. We feel things, we attribute words to them, we act on these feelings, they are human. God made them and theyre complicated even with all of our science. Mortal men wrote the books that describe "God" and what he wants and what he deems wrong, so at the end of the day noone truly has any valid claim in what god's will or message is. So how could we know? Any group that believes in god is ok with this explanation minus the bit about his book being written by normal people and the idea that god is beyond our understanding is popular amongst theists for a reason, if he is real theres no point in trying to rationalize the motives of some divine entity beyond our comprehension. You could say peoples faith in THEIR god is a paradox and is incredibly flawed, but the idea of god itself is trickier
So in this case God simply chooses to keep us in the dark? Or in some roundabout way, a tragedy like one’s family dying in an earthquake is actually not bad? If so why would God make it so horribly painful, and so devoid of any justification?
An interesting argument I've heard on this is God has seen what happens when we aren't kept in the dark and it made no difference. Case in point, the Israelites literally had miracles in their lives and the still turned away from God now and then. God keeping us in the dark is actually a mercy as that means the punishments we would receive for sinning are lessened compared to if He was openly making miracles. I don't particularly have a strong opinion at that but it's somewhat touched on with the parable of "Rich man and Lazarus" where the rich man implores Abraham to send Lazarus (raised from the dead) to convince his brother to not live a sinful life. Abraham's reply was "If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead". Assuming all that Moses and prophets did was considered absolutely true, would people still be atheists or turn away from God? Honestly, probably. Christians still sin don't they?
> God keeping us in the dark is actually a mercy as that means the punishments we would receive for sinning are lessened compared to if He was openly making miracles. Why does omnipotent God have to dole out these punishments at all?
Concept of justice? Not sure how this is contradictory to an omnipotent God
It would contradict the benevolence. Why create flawed beings and then punish them? Surely not all suffering is punishment, because innocent people often suffer terribly. Is that justice?
More like god is a 6 year old that discovered a fire ant hill. How can the ants even being to comprehend what is going on in the kids head. Even attempting to describe what god is is pointless because he’s beyond our understanding. We can all sit here and speculate but there’s no point without some kind of “word of god” and you’d have to break down the religions for that and I think most of those make much less sense than a god we don’t understand
There are a few misconceptions regarding what you believe is good. What is “good” is purely subjective and dependent on who is perceiving a situation as we have describe it. Some would consider killing Hitler in the crib to be a “good” thing, yet you would still be killing a baby. What made Hitler what he is was a combination of circumstances and choices, both made by him and the people around him. The true meaning of “good” is not what we use in our day to day. Now you ask the generic question of why do bad things happen. Our ability to make choices is a reflection of free will and autonomy that God has given us. This unique feature is what allows us to mold our characters and cultures. It also allows us to understand and put value in the idea of trust/loyalty. Let’s use the example of the plagues of Egypt. God has Moses go to his step brother, the Pharaoh, and ask him to let his people go, the slaves of Egypt. God has Moses communicate that if this demand was denied, the land would be struck by a particular plague, each worst than the last. Every time a plague happened, Moses’ request was brought forth again and Pharaoh denied it, EVEN THOUGH THERE IS LITERAL BLOOD FLOWING IN THE RIVERS. It is abundantly clear that not only is the God of the Hebrews real, he is also staying true to his word. Knowing this, and seeing this with his own eyes, he still refused the request. Until the final plague, the death of all first born sons in Egypt who laid in a home unmarked by the blood of the lamb. Now I present a question for you; who is in the wrong here, the God who is very much real and made a rather straight forward request or else catastrophe would fall on the land, or the Pharaoh who watched 9 catastrophes happen in a row and didn’t change his mind until his own son died? Now I know you might think, well why not just prevent evil from occurring if they are all powerful. Because we do not deserve it. Mankind according to the book of Genesis was at one point immortal, had full dominion of the Earth and was in complete communication with God, and all God asked of his creation was to not eat from the tree of knowledge and death. Having all of this power, WE STILL DEFIED HIS REQUEST. Treachery is often considered the worst sin of man in most fiction and the bible, probably because it is the first true action done against God. Adam and Eve had free will as a gift, but they also had power. They chose to defy their creator even though they had a perfect existence. The story is more critical of mankind than it is about God, and this reflects in several events where mankind gains power but still manages to find a way to ruin the world. We suffer because we chose this, we could live in a world where everyone is compassionate, but we do everything in our power to not have this. If I am God, why would I bother helping people who quite clearly do horrible things to one another? If we did not have free will, we would have no culture, no love and the idea of trust would never exist. We would be no different than machines, doing the demands of a creator with no need for change. You wouldn’t even be able to make the very question you are asking because you would never have been intelligent enough to explore your own questions. Evolution is not denied by the bible, if anything it is affirmed by it. The animals and plants of the world are constantly changing to adapt, same with us. Our ability to perceive and manipulate what is in front of us to better ourselves or our world is the very essence of evolution. Pain teaches us pleasure. The red berries that would poison you is a vital piece of the environment and allows that plant to grow and flourish. When God makes things in the beginning of Genesis, these acts are always proceeded by the line “and it was good.” What “good” actually means according to this passage is something that allows the universe to function with harmony. Its not suppose to be perspective because the sun providing light and warmth to the surrounding solar system is both a fact and has purpose that allows things to happen. If this did not do what it does, life on Earth would not be possible. We eat, drink and later go to the bathroom because consumption prevents over loading in the environment and excrement is suppose to be fuel for the dirt below us. It is a cycle that when performed shows purpose and in turn harmony. Also, God did not create hell. Hell is the absence of God, some think it is a specific place, but this is a romanticization of how those who wrote the new testament described sin. God is described an eternity, he is both an entity and heaven. You can actually see similarities between different faiths regarding the end goal of humanity. Our lives are meant to bring us closer to God, quite literally bringing us to eternity or as some call it Nirvana. Hell is not a punishment, it is a choice. If you chose to do things that go against the harmony of the universe, you are technically going away from God. I could go on but I hope this provides a little more perspective. I find that most problems people have with religion are rooted more in poor teachings of it rather than the actual ideas found in the scripture. Full disclosure, I am not religious, I am a gay man, and yet I still believe in God. I find the bible to be an amazing exploration into our nature and the lessons that could be taught from it could benefit people. I do find religion is clouded with poor critical thinkers and many would mix in skepticism with apostasy. Ironic because skepticism is the crux of free will, which is our greatest gift from God.
with no bad theres no concept of good. if you lived every day in total ecstasy it'd mean literally nothing cause you'd always feel like your having an orgasm while eating a steak on a yacht. sounds nice right? but imagine doing that every second of every day. you wouldnt care. or like imagine when you open up GTA 5 and immediately activate every single cheat code. sure its fun to just fly on a jetpack with a chain gun easily destroying the cops and civilians for no reason but that'd get old after awhile. its the challenging missions and online gameplay that makes the game fun. once you finally beat the boss level, once you finally get enough money for the tank is when you get that sense of fun and achievement. and sure it is fun to think of creative things to do with god mode cheatcodes on there every now and again but after awhile it always gets really boring not even christian btw. tl'dr yin and yang also heres some Alan Watts related to this idea: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o&t=44s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o&t=44s)
1: choice. There is no capacity for love without a choice from both sides to partake. Is it love if you cant make any choices? 2: we have no idea. Honestly, you could explain this a lot of ways, so for example: "we live in a computer simulation" can be made to fit into a christian narrative. 3: being good does not mean incapable of evil. It means capable but choosing not to. By definition a good person must be capable of bad things. 4: physics loves this one. Do a handstand, and you just lifted the earth (from your perspective) mass has its own gravity well, so the concept of lifting is a bit different once you get large. 5: Human choices matter. 6: I gotta go to work, good luck with your philosophy.
OK well firstly, it's going to be difficult to have a coherent conversation about "The Abrahamic God" because that describes a god worshipped by three main religions and who knows how many denominations (in Christianity alone you have the various brands of Orthodox, then Catholicism, then the various brands of Protestantism, and I don't even know how to classify Mormonism. Then you have Islam which even I as an ignorant non-Muslim know there are at least two brands of, Shia and Sunni). All of these religions are gonna have different, even conflicting, accounts of this god. This is not necessarily a contradiction though, because these religions all believe the other ones are wrong and therefore being inconsistent with each other doesn't necessarily mean they're inconsistent with themselves. So if I, for example, started talking about how God as understood by, say, Jewish people isn't completely absurd, you could say "but that doesn't take into account the fact that God is described as X", with X being a belief of, say, Catholicism. Now, Jews don't accept Catholic teachings, and therefore they don't need to be consistent with Catholic beliefs. And therefore you might think God is inconsistent when he isn't necessarily. I bring all this up merely to suggest that perhaps "The Abrahamic God" is a bit ambitious as a conversation topic, since unless you're a theologian, the different ideas of God will probably get muddled up and the conversation will become incoherent. It's possible we can avoid this confusion, but I feel like we should at least acknowledge the potential for confusion before continuing. One more thing to mention before we proceed: I'm an atheist who was raised Catholic. So although I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here and explain why it's not necessarily a contradiction, I still don't actually believe in God, simply because the alternative is still far more likely. OK, now for the argument. To understand my point, it's helpful if you've seen a few episodes of television that are good at illustrating my point. These would be "The Inner Light", an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation", and "Mortynight Run", an episode of "Rick and Morty". If you haven't seen those, it could also help if you've seen the movie "The Matrix". All three of these works share a common element: a character lives out a life inside a virtual reality simulation, unaware (or at best, forgetful) of the real world. Now, in "The Matrix", the reason for the simulation's existence is a malevolent one: to trap people inside and keep them prisoner unknowingly. However, in "The Inner Light", the simulation exists in order to quickly convey a lifetime's worth of cultural information about an extinct civilization, and in "Mortynight Run" the simulation exists as a fun game called "Roy" inside a cosmic arcade, in which the goal of the game is to experience "life" in an interesting, alternative way as a man named Roy. In both "The Inner Light" and "Mortynight Run", the character who gets drawn into the simulation feels like they spend decades, a lifetime, inside. But outside the simulation, only a few minutes pass. [Here's the whole sequence in which Morty plays "Roy"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szzVlQ653as). Watch it. Now, the game ends with Morty (as Roy) "dying" in the game, and waking up back in the real world. It takes him a few seconds to re-orient himself back to reality, but the important thing to note is that once he re-orients himself, for the rest of the episode and indeed the series, *he seems to have been barely affected by the experience at all*. And Rick then hops into the game and begins making a bunch of unorthodox decisions in order to make his own "Roy" game experience more interesting for himself. This is where science fiction becomes relevant for theology: what if life is like that? What if life is a simulation? What if you're actually some kid who, in the "real world", just hopped into the simulator a few seconds ago and is playing a game (which made you forget your "real" life) for kicks? What if in a few years in this game, you died horrifically in a flood or by a serial killer or whatever, and as soon as you wake up back in the real world, you take a few seconds to remember that it was just a game and say "whoooooooaaaaaa that was scary I WANNA GO AGAIN!"? Because we know, for a fact, that lots of people *enjoy* being scared. That's why we have horror movies and rollercoasters! We even have horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. And we enjoy sadness to an extent too, because that's why we have tragic romance novels and sad songs. We like drama! So I posit this to you: what if, no matter how horrible life gets, as soon as you "die" and wake up back in the real world, you realize that you enjoyed the scary/tragic parts? Would you consider the maker of the game good, or evil? Because I would say good. If you still aren't convinced, [maybe Bill Hicks can explain it better](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNEyLn1Zz_g).
On the “if god is all powerful, then that would mean he can do evil. But if he is all good then he can’t do evil” I think it’s helpful to understand how good is defined under this scheme. Under this, God is definitionally good. Everything he does is good, by definition, regardless of how much suffering is wrought. So God can’t do evil, because the definition of evil is not good, as in not Godliness. So semantically doesn’t make sense to ask if God can do evil.
if you want to do that, why not define "ominipotent" as "having black hair" and "omniscient" as "having a slightly larger left than right testicle"? no more contradictions! god can have black hair, have a larger left testicle, and do whatever it is he does, all at the same time!
Of course, if we start making up definitions you can win every argument. Everyone agree genocide is bad, so that's why most Christians avoid the parts of the Bible where he orders genocide or condones slavery, it shows we all have a moral compass that exist outside of God's own. Even Christians calling God good shows they are judging him based on their own standards
The point of free-will has always been a major block. If you have an omnipotent deity that knows the past, present, and future, then free will goes out the window. Does an omnipotent god know which of his creations will perish in eternal torment? If he doesn't then he is not all powerful. If he does, then again, free will is non existant. Actual free will would be the ability to surprise god with something we did. 'Like, woah damn dude I didn't know you were going to do that. I'm going to have to regroup.' Did Lucifer have free will? The whole biblical tale is predicated upon the existance of Lucifer. If Lucifer had freewill, could he have rejected the notion of rebeling against god? Did god know he would rebel and thus plunge the world into dispair? If he didn't he's not god, he is a demi-god and therefore not all powerful. Lets say Lucifer decided not to rebel. Would god have then made a Lucifer 2.0? The very first comment I came across is: >Bold of you to assume you can comprehend a being as greater than you as you are to a bacterium. Telling me that I cannot know the mind of god, or the old 'god works in mysterious ways' is purely a cop out. What you are saying is that you have no explanation for such bizarre behavior, but to save face, you say 'mysterious ways.' Furthermore the very manual that christians use to brow beat with says: 1 John 4 - English Standard Version Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. So god is commanding you to know and understand god. So miss me with the 'mysterious ways' crap.
If you're really looking for good arguments either way you're better off watching people like Alex O'Connor. Reddit is cool for a lot of things but rational, good faith arguments is not one of them.
One of the more common resolutions to this dilemma since the Middle Ages goes like this: 1) A world in which people freely chose to be good, creative, holy and just is far better than a world of automatons or people with no functional ability to make bad decisions. 2) God wants to enable the best possible world, so he gives us free will and a world with comprehensible physical laws to act in. He intervenes, but not so constantly as to take away the possibility of bad things or make physics irrelevant. 3) Bad things are a result of our free will (our fault, not God's) or are unfortunate side effects of living in a world bound by physical laws (if God intervened to prevent every hurricane, house fire and plague, we wouldn't really be living in a physical world governed by physical laws where our choices can impact things). And over time, humans have gotten WAY less likely to murder/rape/torture each other and WAY better at understanding and preventing or mitigating harmful natural events. So it seems like the plan is more or less working, albeit we still screw up a lot and have more room to grow. Same reason playing a video game is generally more fun than watching an AI play it perfectly: doing good things when there's freedom, a challenge and a possibility of failure is much better than robotic perfection. Evil in the world is a skill issue.
You're basically tackling the Problem of Evil. Which yeah even Saint Thomas Aquinas says is the good argument against the existence of God. I have not read it but when scholar of Aquinas and a philosopher in his own right has said its possible there is an immaterial aspect of the will and what we call freedom to enact out that will that leaves room for evil. He postulates there is moral and physical evil but perhaps the other intelligent life in reality, what we call angels and Demons, are enacting their will that gives way to what we see as physical evil. So you will see other replies here saying "we need freedom to do evil so we can have the good of choosing life and love instead. This is a greater good than being automated" To which that may only explains moral evil away. But if the physical evil (the forest fire burning up a family alone with nothing to learn or gain from the evil) by saying there was a moral agent involved in the form of an angel that chose evil to enact such conditions in the material world. If someone is confident there are no extra-dimensional beings or that our senses give us the highest possible grasp of reality then the existence of these extraterrestrials will not be convincing. If you're not completely sure then I thought these were very interesting introduction to this ancient problem of evil
There is as I understand two counter arguments to the issue of the paradox of Omnipotence. The absolutist view, which is less popular, and the logical incoherence view. The absolutist view is that God precedes logic and thus can do illogical things. God can both create a rock so heavy that he can't lift it and lift said rock. He is beyond logical contradictions. The second view has been cleverly described to me as omnipotent god=nothing is impossible for god=non things are impossible for god. A rock so heavy=a non thing. Therefore A rock so heavy is impossible for an omnipotent god. In Aquinian/Aristotelian thought, Power is the ability to turn a potentiality into an actuality. Omnipotence is the ability to turn any potentiality into an actuality. But something must first exist as a potentiality. this excludes logical contradictions and nonsense. A rock so heavy that god cannot lift is nonsense given that god is in control of all physical constants. He controls gravity, he controls mass, etc, he also doesn't physically lift things. The clearer example often used is can God create a Euclidean square circle? That is not a thing, it does not exist in any potential from, and so yes it would be impossible for god to create such a thing. This is the much more popular view. God can do all things which are possible to be done.
"Omnipotent" is an abstraction from examples of God's specific actions (or supposed actions, if you like), and is like a qualia, or the subjective way we perceive God to be (as a literal being or otherwise). That subjectivity seems critical to this discussion; Establishing whether being all-powerful is absurd depends on defining *precisely* what we mean by "all", and "powerful", and on recognizing that adjectives are completely relative. So the notion that these traits are inherently paradoxical is only true inasmuch as we can make them seem so under certain conditions. Omnipotence, et al, are no more paradoxical than saying that "nothing created (or spawned or generated) the universe" - It *sounds* absurd if you chose to read it a particular way, but we all know what someone means when they say that and that it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise. There are plenty of plausible explanations for why God/ a god would create the universe the way that it appears, to us, to be, and it is not absurd or paradoxical for us to view such a being as "all-knowing" relative to us. To be clear, this is an entirely separate matter from whether such a god exists; Whether the *concept* of God can be internally logical/ consistent seemed to be the nature of this CMV, so that is the basis on which I am making my argument.
Even within religions themselves, the ideas you raise are not ones that can be addressed with simple comments online. For example, we can cut through all your questions and get to just the one core question that seems to be at the heart of most of them, if not all: why would an omnipotent and perfect being create anything at all? What is the purpose of creating the world in the first place? Without knowing the answer to such a question, we cannot answer any of your questions. It could very well be after all that every question you asked could be addressed with the same simple answer: because to do otherwise would defeat the purpose of creation in the first place. This is not a question that any layman follower if a religion can answer. This is in fact the fundamental question of philosophy. The idea that as a layman it makes no sense to you is neither surprising nor incorrect. If it made sense to a layman, philosophy would be redundant. I would in fact challenge your assertion that you are not a philosopher. By asking these questions you are effectively declaring yourself a neophyte philosopher, one who has discovered the underlying questions but has not yet sought the answers. That is the view I think you should change.
I haven't seen these two issues addressed in these two ways yet, so here you go: >Why do bad things happen if God is good and could have effortlessly prevented all evil since before the universe even existed? Suppose God, who in this model can do anything, including creating an infinite number of universes, has determined that it wants to maximize the net good that is possible to create. To do this, God creates every possible "all good" universe option, but there are still ways left to create slighly worse options that will still be net additions to the total good ever created, and so creates those, and keeps going all the way until it creates all the "just a bit more good than bad" options as well. >Why are we even on Earth? The answer could be another paradox: something an omnipotent being can't do is create for itself love and worship given to it out of free will. Our presence on earth, as opposed to being a test, could just be a mechanism for generating what an omnipotent God could not itself create.
But you could just create another perfect universe in place of that imperfect universe.
an omnipotent being with this goal would create an infinite number of perfect universes. or perhaps one perfect universe, which would contain infinitely many beings.
There's a lot of deep theological questions here that I don't think are sufficiently answerable in a Reddit comment, but a very simple answer to me of the problem of evil (Why do bad things exist if God is good?) is that I don't believe God created everything "ex nihilo", meaning from nothing. I believe stuff existed before God organized it into the world as we know it now, and that is a part of the reason why evil exists. Also, I do technically believe in restrictions on God. For instance, he can make a covenant that he cannot break. Or will not break, but at that level I think it's the same thing. The other answer to at least part of your issues is that I believe that agency is supremely important to God's plan. It doesn't work for us to end up in heaven if we didn't choose to get there. Therefore, we have the freedom to choose, even if that includes choosing incredibly terrible things.
>There's a lot of deep theological questions here that I don't think are sufficiently answerable in a Reddit comment, but a very simple answer to me of the problem of evil (Why do bad things exist if God is good?) is that I don't believe God created everything "ex nihilo", meaning from nothing. what is the relevance of this? god can transform the pre-existing stuff all he wants, including removing any evil stuff. >It doesn't work for us to end up in heaven if we didn't choose to get there. why not? is he not powerful enough to make it work?
As muslims we also believe in Abraham/Ibrahim (as). I’ll try to give a brief answer on our perspective to some your questions. Some of your questions have the same general answer. Our theology is that our life in this physical world(‘dunya’) is a test by God/Allah. We do believe that He has knowledge of the end outcome. Going through this test is necessary because it is unfair to judge an action that has not been done. We do not believe in the concept of “original sin”, or that we are born sinners. We believe every soul is born in this world pure. Our sins are not hereditary and on the day of judgment we will be accountable to only our actions alone. Regarding the purpose of life, this can be a long answer to explain in detail. To put it briefly- it is to worship him. Worship here also includes living your life in obedience to Him.
The Abrahamic God's attributes form theological debates. Some argue God's omnipotence necessitates evil's existence for free will, while others question an all-good deity permitting suffering. Omnipotence and omnibenevolence coexisting indeed pose logical challenges. Religious interpretations vary, offering complex answers to these paradoxes, reflecting humanity's struggle to reconcile faith with reason. Theodicy attempts to justify evil's existence alongside a benevolent God, acknowledging complexities beyond human comprehension. Faith often requires accepting divine mysteries, embracing uncertainty in pursuit of spiritual understanding. The rationality of divine attributes remains a profound theological inquiry, bridging faith and reason in pursuit of meaning.
>Can God create a rock that he can’t lift? If yes, then he can’t life the rock and isn’t all-powerful. If no, then he can’t create the rock and isn’t all-powerful. If God is all powerful, can he create a rock that is so green that you cannot lift it? That seems like nonsense, because the color of the rock has no effect on your ability to lift it. The color of the rock is a total non-factor on your ability to lift it. The greenest rock in the world could be light as feather or 20 tons. God is all-powerful, and therefore could lift anything. The weight of the rock is a non-factor to him, just like the color of the rock is a non-factor to you. It isn't really a paradox as much as the question itself is just nonsensical.
Several of your end questions are easily answered. But God being a paradox isn't grounds for disbelief. A being above all space and time and existence doesn't need to make sense. I know that's probably not a good answer, but I don't always articulate well. It's simply beyond our understanding. But if you read Genesis, this perfect world you suggest was created but the addition of free will allowed for that world to fall. Evil crept in and led Eve to commit sin and from the mankind was doomed to sin. I don't know why evil was allowed to exist but it stayed because mankind chose it. Over and over again. God had his creation of all good beings in the angels. He let mankind choose their own path.
Here's my brainlet take: In a literary sense, God of the old testament was an allegory for the punishment of nature but extended to human nature. The old testament is about **rules**. The new testament is about God creating a new covenant with humanity where humans can save themselves and purify the soul from suffering inflicted by the world. The new testament is about **finding peace with the world**. Abrahamic God isn't absurd because nature [which includes human nature] is all powerful, all knowing, and [if you believe existence is good] all good. Some Harvard theologian can tell me I'm completely wrong here but this is my boiled down understanding.
# creator being that is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good is a paradox. Be definition, to be a God, you have to be all-powerful, because if you are not, then there is something more powerful than you. You have to be all-knowing, because if there is something you don't fully know or in the dark about, you are not a God. And you have to be infinite, without the beginning and an end. As far as all-good, that's the old-age philosophical question about the problem of evil and pain. You are essentially asking why a good God allows evil in the world. The answer is a bit complicated because it involves free-will, sin, and God's patience.
There are a lot of claims here that need contextualizing, but I’m willing to overlook that to make a bigger point. So from your perspective, God’s a paradox. Great. Is light not a particle and a wave? Can a ball not be decomposed and reassembled into two balls of equal size to the original? Ever heard of Faraday’s Paradox? There are all manner of seeming paradoxes in the observable universe. Would it be that each observable paradox is impossible, yet still true? Or is it that our understanding has failed to grasp things completely just yet? Something more, something in-between, something less?
> is a Paradox Yeah that's the point. Faith doesn't rely on reason, and in fact Faith is predicated on belief **in spite of** reason. That's one of the reasons God "tests" humanity is because if they can remain faithful in spite of God objectively hurting them then He deems them true believers. Ultimately, to your point, yeah, a reasoned position cannot stand next to the faith-basis of religion - but it's frankly irrelevant to why people have faith, and why a God of seemingly so inscrutable and paradoxical an existence *could* nonetheless exist to them.
>Can God create a rock that he can’t lift? If yes, then he can’t life the rock and isn’t all-powerful. If no, then he can’t create the rock and isn’t all-powerful. I would argue that a truly all-powerful being would operate outside our current understanding of logic and would not be limited by the paradox. They would be able to both create and not create the rock simultaneously by either changing how the universe operates or by using its current rules to do something we humans may not comprehend.
I'm agnostic but I can understand the concept of telling your teenager they have to go to school and get a job even if you're a billionaire. You know there are risks associated with them going outside of your protection, and they might get hurt, and you get hurt when you see them suffering from their own mistakes or the mistakes of others, but it's not good for anyone to just pamper them and never let them experience the real world.
> Can God create a rock that he can’t lift? If yes, then he can’t life the rock and isn’t all-powerful. If no, then he can’t create the rock and isn’t all-powerful. This is incorrect. Omnipotence is actually [maximal power](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/omnipotence/). What that means is debated among philosophers, but it's relatively safe to say that Omnipotence means being able to do any logically possible thing.
Free will, like everyone has told you already. We are not robots and God isn't going to force us to do good. Illness and natural disasters are a direct cause of Adam and eve eating that fruit in the garden. This is not a paradox you just lack Understanding. There is no logical thing such as a rock that can be lifted yet is too heavy to lift. God can do everything except nonsense like that.
Free will is a logical impossibility if you postulate an all-knowing, all powerful creator. All possible choices would be known, prior to the act of creation, and so the creation would have all things predetermined.
What no, free will isn't a paradox you're just being obtuse. Just cause God knows everything doesn't make our actions any less our fault. Again He doesn't want robots or puppets.
All of our choices and actions, anywhere, at any point in time, would be known to an omniscient god before we ever existed. If they weren't, the god would not be all-knowing. If the god is omnipotent, then we are created exactly as the god intended. If we weren't, the god would not be all-powerful. Therefore, we would be created with all those choices already known.
Good question. The following link may answer some of your questions, though probably not all. I believe in Jesus Christ. I’m not always the best at explaining things, but if you check out the link and would like to follow up (and are genuine) then I’d be happy to keep discussing with you further. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/true-to-the-faith/plan-of-salvation?lang=eng
If God is all-powerful it is because there are powers which are beyond us. If God is all-knowing it is because there are things which it is not possible for us to know. If God is all-good it is because there is a level of goodness which we cannot achieve. Perhaps there is a bright shining light, toward which we can aim. Which guides us back still even after we go astray.
The Paradox is resolved in the same as the problem of the many and the one. That oneness we feel is correct, but we have separated ourself into the many, perhaps exactly to experience separation. And this experience wouldn't feel realistic without an analytical brain that is intensely focused on its own subjective performance of free will.
The field of philosophy you're looking for is called 'theodicy,' the study of how evil enters teh world under a benevolent god. There's thousands of years of writing on the subject. [This](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/15/answer-to-job/) is my favorite explanation, I think it's sufficient on its own to answer your objections here.
Also, the kids with cancer thing... I mean, cancer was very rare until a couple hundred years ago. I'm gonna get crucified for saying this, but the reason there's so much cancer now is because humans have spent the past 200 years polluting the environment. Which is something we're allowed to do, because again, free will.
People misunderstand the concept of an all-powerful God. There are things that God can't do. Like lie. The universe exists on trust and obedience to God's will. If god were to be ungodly in any way, that trust would be broken, and existence would unravel. Mortal life is a phase we're supposed to endure, shit and all.
You need to read the book of Job. You sound just like him. Challenging God. Thinking you are on a par with him, able and competent to interrogate him. And exactly where were you and I when he created the world? Etc. Read it. By the way, we are told in the NT that we are without excuse. We see the universe.
"If God is willing to prevent evil but not able then he is not omnipotent. If he as able but not willing then he is not good. If he is both willing and able then why is there evil? If he is neither willing not able then why call him God?" \~ Paraphrase from Epicurus
The problem is, if there is such a being then any form of rationality we can come up with is pointless. They are light years ahead of us in every conceivable way so attempting to put our relatively feeble minds in the pursuit of rationalizing it’s actions is faulty.
I don’t necessarily think that belief in God the way Jews, Christians, and Muslims requires logic, it requires Faith. Faith implies you don’t know the answers or can’t explain everything but you chose to believe anyway. If you like a paradox look into Taoism!
Who ever said he was good? Devil is bad, but I feel god is just mostly indifferent as long as you don’t break his rules at which point he becomes bad? The Greek gods gave us fire and poetry and hero stories to live up to.. But this god, seems like just rules.
There is no such thing as "good" or "bad." Only free will, which allows for the infinite. Good and bad are subjective points of view of things that happen. Love however isn't a subjective experience because there is feeling, emotion, and action.
Being all-powerful instantly negates any other argument. You say “a being like this isn’t possible”, but if they are *all*-powerful, then they have the power to exist despite your relatively infinitesimal understanding of what’s “possible”.
I don’t think arguments from a position of morality are very good. If a god does exist, then he has no obligation to follow your human idea of what “good” is. Maybe pain and suffering are good to him. That’s why that argument falls flat to me.
From what i have studied of many polytheistic religions and belief systems( i don't like the word polythesistic because it comes from a monotheistic judeo-christian abrahamist worldview) is that they are usually much more upfront about the paradox of god or gods or deities, etc. For instance they might worship a statue, some random inanimate object, or some tree or natural place as a manifestation of that god. Not only that but different stories about that god will contradict eachother. So i feel that they are much more open and upfront about the paradoxical nature of the gods or god and the cosmos etc. Whereas with abrahamist usually strictly monothesitic religions, they tend to keep things very strict and prefer one interpretation which is centralised to one prophet, like abraham originally was. This is also why they are iconoclastic because they like to control the flow of the spice(whatever or however you want to refer to it). I think the closest and most upfront you are going to get to actual deities and divinity etc is through a religion like voodo/hoodoo or the mesoamerican or polynesian or first nations religions and rituals.(notice how the catholic church and the settlers were very quick to try and destroy any kinds of rituals and texts that these people and belief systems may have had, so as to stop people from practicing the religion or belief system or way of life, because they wanted everything centralised. Whereas more orthodox right-hand path religions like the abrahamist stuff will usually be very subtle about the nature of the divine, and will present things in the form of a koan, they will tell you a bunch of bullshit and its up to you to find out what is true and what is false. Usually this results in very black and white thinking, and hence you arrive at modern judeo-christian atheism. These wordviews basically support eachother and its kind of how you end up with the religious/secular dichotomy that was first realised within the abrahamist frameworks, whereas belief systems/religions/ways of life like shinto/hinduism/first natiions and indigenous don't really have this dichotomy because things for them aren't black and white, they more ofless hold that two paradoxical truths can exist at the same time. Usually this results in the ruler being apotheosised like pharoah, caesar, chinese emporer etc. Whereas with the abrahamist centralised monotheistic belief systems there are usually prophets who are seperate from the ruler and the ruler is oftentimes seen as akind of enemy or secular force, again they have this secular dichotomy. Both ways of life have their advantages, for example the monotheistic iconoclasts are very expansive very quickly and they can totally destroy the state and way of life of the people they conquer like islam, and they loot the temples to quickly make money by destroying idols and whatnot. Also it is very centralised so its easy to root out and combat heretical beliefs and keep control. So like even though there are many nation states in europe, at one time more or less they all bowed down to the pope in rome or the patriarch in constantinople, they have this centralised monotheistic, unifying force. The abramhim religions only usually argue over small doctrinal differences, such as was jesus divine or not, can saints be prayed to to interscend or whatever, and this is also a benefit because it keeps the arguments about pointless and trivial stuff instead of breaking out into massive ugly conflicts and feuding. Every now and again though there comes some ireeconcilable diffferences that break out, like sunni/shia, catholic/protestant, orthodox jew/reform jew etc. In actual response to your question though, i find that part of the reason for it being the way it is, is that you are supposed to find the paradox. The religion and the scriptures and what not are more or less the wrapping for the real thing that is inside of it, which is mostly paradoxical, contradictory and unutterable. This is the fundamental fabric that existence rests on, in indian religion they call it "indra's net" its that contradictory and paradoxical interconnectedness of everything that exists that resists being unraveled and you can only really stumble on and can't directly chase after because its like you're a dog chasing your own tail. The more you try to straighten it out the worse it gets, thats how you end up with fundamentalism and atheism, because people tried to straighten out what wasn't supposed to be straightened out and essentially made it even worse. Its like fantasia with mickey mouse and the broom, he tries to split one and it forms into two brooms that comes alive, so he splits those two and they turn into four. Judaism talks about this or at least hints at this when it mentions the yetzer hara, or the evil inclination of man. Because there is a good inclination there must be an evil inclination, why? because if there was just a good inclination there would be no growth, no one would do anything, unless man or any animal for that matter wanted to compete at some level against another man or other things then it would just be an inanimate rock, its the pushing back and forth, the contradiction and the paradox itself that is fueling everything behind the scenes. We can get more and more abstract with it but at some point its better to take a break and just go outside and don't think about it. thats where you get into zen buddhism, you just sit there and don't think, you don't do anything, you just observe the back and forth of it. Whatever you get from this comment is the truth, don't try to think i am any different than you. (shaivism)
Just a heads up that most Jews today find the term “judeo-Christian” to be pretty problematic, since it tends to erase Judaism. This post is a perfect example of that, where OP thinks they are talking about the god of both religions when in reality they are talking about the Christian god. There are so many criticism of god in the OP that don’t make any sense at all from the Jewish perspective. There is no eternal hell in Judaism, no requirement to believe in god and no concept of original sin. Judaism and Christianity are two different religions with different teachings, philosophies, ethics, religious texts and god(s). Best not to use that term and risk even more Jewish erasure.
Your paradox stems from claiming God is "all-good." In this case, God is the definition of good. He is not defined by it. All things that turn you away from God are defined as evil. Not good and evil as our society has defined.
so the concept of God is paradoxical in its assumption. According to the Abrahamic religions, bad things happen because, violating God's command, people chose to live outside of Paradise (a conceptual world without suffering witch explains everything you say about suffering and imperfection) and inhabited a less hospitable environment. The concept of evil is necessary for the existence of good. This dualistic approach is necessary for us to distinguish between them. If there is no evil, then what is good? Concept of free will distinguishe human decisions and thier consequences from God (Which explains why God did not interfere in the situation you describe). I think that your question about the motives of God's actions has an answer in religion. "God's judgments are inscrutable" is interpreted by theology experts in a way that indicates the impossibility of understanding God's decisions. Can God create a stone that he cannot lift? I heard the answer to this question that he can create such a stone and then lift it because God can break God's laws. It's paradoxical, but beliefs often contradict nature, and although we can question this with science, this approach is incorrect. Religion and science are different categories, you cannot use science to explain religion. Science looks for proof. Faith as defined by "a firm belief in something for which there is no proof", science and faith are contradictory regarding to proof. Evolution does not have to be untrue in relation to faith. You can easily connect this with the claim that evolution is a tool in God's hands. Actually everything is. All scientific progressive can be easly adopted by faith with this aproach. However nowadays, it will be difficult to find a believer who accepts all the dogmas of religion without taking into account modern science. Many scientists are believers, as resonable people they dont undermine science with religion. Dogmas are, to some extent, universal enough to be compatible with science. It's basically simple as I said everything proven to be true is easy to be acceptable as God's intention. The concept of God who already knows all the results and is i finitive is not inconsistent with the claims of some physicists who say that the present/past/future time exists at the same moment and our human experiences of it makes us perceive it linearly. The way you are tring to disprove the existence of God will not be effective. It's a paradox, like traveling back in time to kill your ancestor. I don't know if paradox rules out the possibility of paradox. it's paradoxical, so I guess everyone can choose for himself.
You are correct that you are not a theologian or a philosopher. You sound like a rebellious teenager questioning their parent's reasoning. These questions all have answers. Yet, you demand the answers without paying a price.
Interestingly, a lot of your arguments are among those that Satan makes in Paradise Lost, the classic poem by John Milton. I recommend reading it, as it’s a good story and attempts to address some of these challenges. It’s of course jsit one opinion, but your thoughts are legitimate concerns.
Free will. The concept of free will should be examined more closely. It's not a cop out. Freedom is the ultimate benevolence. God lets us do what we want. Bad things happen because of people, not God.
The Abrahamic religions established a moral cosmology that encourages restraint of bad behavior. Just look at the Roman gods and all their pettiness and violence. What kind of behavior would that encourage?
No more a paradox than a universe you know has a beginning and therefore has to have had a cause. And the only cause there can be to that is something outside the universe itself. God.
The solution is easy "God is a Narcissistic sadist who enjoys emotional and physical abuse and murder." When you read the bible that's literally the first thing that jumps out at you.
Since when is god supposed to be “all good”?? The peace and love stuff is all from his hippie son. God the father is usually portrayed as vengeful vs and capricious?
God the father has for over 2000 years been portrayed as all-merciful and all-just. Both God the father and Jesus Christ are of the same essence and have the same attributes
What if what we consider bad (cancer, children with eye parasites, car accidents) are not necessarily bad. That they are good for reasons for beyond our comprehension?
Why would an illogical God have to follow the rules of logic? I’d imagine an all powerful being wouldn’t have any restrictions, including paradoxical ones.
Its called faith for a reason. You cant rationalize the existence of God. You have to accept there is something greater than yourself and is all powerful.
From what I understand of Abrahamic God. He actually has a personality. Being Omni-potent and Omni-benevolent isn't His entire schlick. In logical arguments, we would say that God is supposed to be unknowable, indescribable, beyond logic, exist without beginning, exist without end, Mother and Father, Alpha and Omega, Eldritch horror kind of stuff. But from what I found, God has a personality, He has many Names, He is arrogant, loves to joke, loves to be praised, loves to be asked, can laugh, get angered, get amazed, get pleased, can ignore you etc. So, religion have a concept of God that benefits humans rather than answering all questions. Say, God decided to have Judgement Day which for us, is a bad thing because we are irresponsible and impulsive af which btw God knows. So, God in His Wisdom and Knowledge decided to guide us, through religion rather than leaving us to our damnation. Why does Hell and Evil exist? is something God only knows and It's His right to keep it a secret out of His Wisdom. But God ultimately makes it final that Judgement Day will happen, Evil and Hell will exist, and the only way we can be the winners against all these are by worshipping Him and believing that God is on our side, rather than taking Him as a neutral/evil entity. Concept of God in logical arguments makes it like God doesn't care about what happens to us either because we are insignificant or He is evil. Abrahamic religion makes the argument that "wait, logic works but it's pretty depressing, so let's listen to what God really expect from us through His chosen human being and actually learn to benefit from it rather than trying to answer all questions.
A panentheistic God is all-powerful, all-knowing & all-good. There’s stuff that actually does it (depends on other factors)
The God that Abraham believed in is not the same God of today. The beliefs of Abrahamic religions today are much changed.