This is, entirely unironically, the central tenant of the Catholic teaching on the subject.
It really does just boil down to "You can't adjudicate the morality of the Divine." And, for the most part, its a line of reasoning that hierarchical social structures condition us to accept. God is just the CEO of the Universe. If you accept that your boss at the toxic waste and murder machines factory is Beyond Good and Evil, believing it about God is downright trivial.
I mean, dealing with the Problem of Evil (or Suffering or however you want to describe it) isn't unique to Christianity. It certainly isn't one that's gone unanswered. Hell, a cornerstone of the orthodoxy is that the Original Sin of defiance of God's Will is at the root of all evil.
I think there's a superficial knee-jerk response to these beliefs that boil down to "No, that sounds like some made up bullshit". But you can dig deeper and talk about the fundamental impulses toward pride and gluttony and conclude there's a kernel of truth over the religious pastiche.
God is, at the end of the day, an unproveable/unrefutable hypothesis. But the immediate causes of human suffering are knowable, tangible, and preventable. Whether you're blaming a god or snubbing one, if you're doing so on the grounds that nobody stopped one human from abusing or neglecting another it would seem like your accusation is misplaced.
Human suffering doesn’t just come from human actions.
Virtually all modern human suffering is the result of deliberate aggression or institutional neglect.
It also comes from natural causes, genetic defects, disasters, disease and parasites
We've had the technology to mitigate or eliminate these problems for decades.
We've had tools to minimize their impact and insulate against their consequences for centuries.
Natural events are nakedly exacerbated by greedy, gluttonous administrators. You can't blame the Spanish Flu on "nature" because it was the direct result of factory farming and poor hygiene during mass troop mobilization.
You can't dismiss the catastrophic storms wrecking major cities as we hit climate change peaks.
You can't blame famine on deserts that formed in the wake of industrial mining and deforesting.
At some point you have to recognize humankind as an enormous global force within its own right. One that is responsible both for its own preservation and destruction.
The Garden of Eden is metaphorical in that sense. Eating the apple of knowledge means assuming control of your own destiny in a way no other organism on the planet can claim.
If all that exists was the last hundred years thwn you may have a point.
Even prior to the last century, the overwhelming bulk of human suffering was inflicted by other humans. Slavery, most prominently.
But you can’t just shrug aside the thousands of years before that.
You can go back to The Taiping Rebellion, New World colonization, and the Inquisition to find plenty of fully human made disasters before the last century.
I tell this story a lot but as an escaped Xtian the thing that marks the moment I was fully off board with the church was hearing those magic words 'God works in mysterious ways'. I had heard it so many times because of course they say it all the freaking time but that was the time it really clicked for me that I won't be getting any real answers and can stop pretending.
The problem for Christianity is that it doesn't fit with how God is presented. He intervenes in things from time to time. Destroyed civilization with a flood because he didn't like what people were doing with free will.
You might be able to take a Deist stance and make it work. However, then you're implicitly saying there's no evidence for God, and are one step out from agnostic atheism. You could say God changed his mind and saw the flood as a bad idea, but fundamentalists are never going to go for that one.
For that matter, the free will explanation isn't even universal among Christians.
People have free will, because that is the greatest good, but not freedom of consequences (even from god) when they behave bad with that free will. Even though they behave bad, if bad is an objective scale, their bad bahvior was still less bad than having no free will. On this scale, god not punishing them for their bad behavior is more bad than gods punishment. So, because he always has to let the most good thing happen he both has to allow free will and people to do bad and also punish people for doing bad even though he knows they will be bad and he could prevent it. Again I think it's bs, and there's a lot of bad logic in Christianity, but that's their subjective stance (usually but, like you said, not a monolith). It "works" because good and bad isn't something you can logic out very wrll since it's highly subjective.
As someone who is neurodivergent: what a weird fucking non-sequitur-cum-ad-hominem. Fuck you for using "neurotypical" as an insult, like you are somehow better than others because you're so special. You make us look bad. At least your username is accurate.
The god the Abrahamists have chosen to worship is a weather and war god. So he is a vengeful dick.
When the Israelites were still polytheistic they worshipped, besides this war god, a sun god and a god of fertility in the Pantheon. Yet they’ve chosen to solely worship the war god. Says a lot about them.
Old Testament God is super violent and vengeful and definitely C but it doesn't jive with New Testament God so the faithful have to either ignore that fact or twist themselves into logic pretzels with stuff that basically amounts to 'Bible Code' to try and make it make sense.
Growing up as an agnostic atheist, I loved the Epicurean argument. Now as an adult, I feel compelled to ask the definitions of the words Good, Evil, and God before talking about things.
I think most of the arguments surrounding these topics involves complex use of metaphors and abstract concepts that people can spend lifetimes defining, but are happy to argue about in a short form without a mutually agreed definition.
Yeah, it's that. I'm a Christian, but I have atheist close friends, and I love our debates, but it's because we respect each others enough to accept and recognise that we use the words differently. It's generally not the case on the net.
The Epicurian argument is strong only if you have a very broad definition of all-powerfulness. A definition that classical Christian theology doesn't have, as it recognizes a lot of logical limitations. All-powerfulness is the capacity to do everything possible. So yes, the Christian God is limited.
One of these logical limitations is: God can't create anything free without allowing their creation to do thing that they disapprove, thus God being good, they can't create freedom without accepting the existence of evil, which is not a thing per se, but the absence of good. God chose freedom over perfection, and it's not a human.thing, but a cosmological one.
So yeah, this is a strong argument only of you are already convinced, but it's generally the case on religious matters. I tend to tink that the only purely rational position is true agnosticism, but sometimes for important things you have to make choices without being sure. That's why I'm an agnostic theist.
One of these logical limitations is: God can't create anything free without allowing their creation to do thing that they disapprove, thus God being good, they can't create freedom without accepting the existence of evil, which is not a thing per se, but the absence of good. God chose freedom over perfection, and it's not a human.thing, but a cosmological one.
What I don't get is - didn't God create the necessity of evil for freedom to exist, just like he created everything else? He could have chosen to create the concept of freedom such that it still doesn't allow for evil, but for some reason didn't choose to do so, right?
Or is God bound by rules from an even higher power?
They're bound by logic. They can make anything possible, but 2+2 will never be 5, and even God can't change that. Something can't be and not be. Something thus can't be free without having any choice, or it's not freedom.
But didn't they create this logic, just like everything else? So either they've deliberately bound themselves, or some even higher being created that logic by which they are bound.
Something thus can't be free without having any choice, or it's not freedom.
Why is the freedom to do evil things necessary for freedom per se? You can have plenty of choice without the ability to do evil.
You can have plenty of choice without the ability to do evil.
It's not a question of choice, nature for example doesn't have any choice, and there are illnesses and natural catastrophes. It's a question of being. God being the Good, they can't create something purely good that is not them, or bound by them, thus or not different, or not free. But they didn't created evil, evil doesn't exist, evil is just something not good, thus not God. And it's a spectrum, from almost good to almost not good.
Logic is a result of the rules of our universe, no? A universe could be created where 2 + 2 = 5. Logic dictates that matter can't be created, yet God made our universe, right? But sounds like you're saying God is bound by rules from an even higher being - after all, isn't the idea that everything has to have an origin, except God?
It's not a question of choice, nature for example doesn't have any choice, and there are illnesses and natural catastrophes.
Well yes, illnesses and natural catastrophes exist because God created them, right? They could have created a universe that can't have viruses existing, or where earth quakes are impossible.
But they didn't created evil, evil doesn't exist, evil is just something not good, thus not God. And it's a spectrum, from almost good to almost not good.
But didn't God create the very distinction of things being good or not good? Why couldn't an all-powerful being have chosen to create the universe such that everything is good?
The actual argument is everything has to have an origin inside the universe, thus our universe to exist must have a cause exterior to it. We call this cause God. It's not a question of higher being, just that a universe where the effect predates the cause can't hold. God is not less omnipotent because they can't make a round square.
Why couldn't an all-powerful being have chosen to create the universe such that everything is good?
I thought I answered this question twice, I'm sorry if I'm not clear, English is hard for me. So I'll try again: because it's logically impossible to have a universe which is not a part of God, thus independant and free, that is also perfectly good, as God is perfectly good. Put as a formula, the formulas
universe = good
and
universe ≠ God
are not possible at the same time if
God = good
I always see it coming back "evil is required for free choice".
Doesn't make any sense to me. Does gravity limit my free choice because i can't just fly into the sky? Or does death limit my free choice because i might just want to continue to exist on this plane? Does my body limit my free choice because i might just want to be non corporeal (but not divine at the same time), not bound by hunger, disease, ....
All of the above are not an issue for "free choice", but allowing me to "choose for evil" somehow is?
If a world where crime and pain and disease and ... doesn't exist. I don't see how there would be no free choice in that world. We would be bound by the restrictions of that world, just as we are currently bound by the restrictions of the current world.
It imo just sounds like a really lame excuse for the problem of evil. It does seem to work for those who believe in a god apparently, but i find that hard to understand. Our choices are incredibly limited, and we still regard it as "free will". But that one choice, o boy, that one choice that if god could prevent us from making it, and thus would disprove him being good if that was an option. That one specific choice, yeah, that's obviously not possible. He's all powerful, but that's just how it is you know?
I really don't get how this is supposed to make any sense. Any god worth being called a god could have made a world without suffering, while still allowing for free choice. Choice is always limited, and evil & suffering aren't special in any way. Take them away and i can still choose to enjoy a billion different things, while not having to suffer at all.
the existence of evil, which is not a thing per se, but the absence of good
...what? The absence of good is indifference. Evil takes effort, you have to work at it. It's the difference between trying to help the homeless, ignoring the homeless, and burning down tent cities.
It's a philosophical position of St. Augustine. Defining Evil as the absence of Good akin to darkness being the absence of light, or cold being the absence of heat.
This is kind of what I was talking about in my top post about diving into discussions without even agreeing on definitions.
Without a shared vocabulary, 2-way communication doesn't actually occur. It's just two people talking past each other, both missing each other's points.
I wouldn't be so quick to draw a hard line in the sand about the definition of something as abstract and nebulous as "Evil."
You might find this video interesting, it's about a comic book villain but gets into very very abstract stuff.
In one of the Discworld books there are two gods. One is the mighty Thunderer, who has temples all over the vast Empire. The other is a Frog God worshipped by a tribe of about fifty people in a swamp. When they have a fight the Frog knocks the other guy out, because nobody really believes in the Thunderer and the Frog's people have strong faith in him.
So you’re arguing a mix of Voltaire’s “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” and John Lennon’s “God is a concept by which we measure our pain”?
He caused it/allowed it to happen because he wants to test YOUR faith and make sure you're cool with needless pain and suffering so long as it means you get to go to heaven/avoid an eternity of torture.
In Buddhism, the concept of God as a powerful creator is not central. The question of "why terrible things happen" is addressed through the teachings of karma and interdependence. Terrible things occur due to the collective actions aka karma of beings, influenced by ignorance, attachment, and aversion, rather than a deliberate act of a deity. Thus, from a Buddhist perspective, the most aligned answer would be that terrible things happen because of the causes and conditions created by sentient beings themselves, rather than any of the options listed.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
If God is unable to prevent evil, then he is not all-powerful.
If God is not willing to prevent evil, then he is not all-good.
If God is both willing and able to prevent evil, then why does evil exist?
Its clearly because clearly god has realized the best thing ever is isekai so he made earth and made us all isekai MCs. The terrible things that happen just give sus unique back stories when we get isekai'd so we all get to be unique MCs. /s
If you'd read more than 3 books of fiction (the Bible can be only one of them), you'd probably have cultivated a level of imagination that suprasses this meme.
I think the Pope and Cardinals would all choose B and then proceed to schpiel about how this life is a trial and he takes each of us at precisely the time of his choosing for good reasons inconceivable to mere mortals bla bla bla
they'd pull out Job. And basicaly say "you're too stupid to understand. to limited. How dare you question god? that's not your job, now get on your hands and knees and clean my shoes with your tongue. Oh and give me your money because I need it more than you and god says you have to. You didn't earn it anyway, it all came from god, too."
In the medieval ages, people were popping out 5-15 children on average. Child mortality was extremely high, with roughly 80% of children dying before they were 5 y/o.
Now, what should god do (if they existed)? Let the children life and cause overpopulation, which leads to famine and disaster, or kill a lot of children? There's literally no solution.
That was until contraceptives were found. And interestingly, contraceptives exist at roughly the same time that antibiotics exist, thus preventing both high child-mortality and overpopulation.
Funny ideas but completely wrong. Contraceptives existed throughout the human history. And antibiotics were discovered a bit later than Haber dealt with overpopulation problem.
C sort of implies B or A. If he causes them then he doesn’t prevent them because either he can’t or he doesn’t want to. It would be kind of weird if he caused a terrible thing and then prevented it before it happened.
It's not that deep:
1- In the case of natural evils: C. God causes them, but they are morally neutral from the spiritual perspective. If what matters is salvation and glory to God it doesn't change anything if you died by tornado or by anything else, and inevitable death might even be a net positive individually and to others (Ind: the person might repent about something, social: seeing the frailness of life leads to less self love, while increasing compassion)
2- In the case of human caused evils: B with an asterisk. Given that He has imposed upon Himself the restriction of respecting free will, He won't stop people from doing evil deeds, even though He wants them to do good and He can make them do it. Why God chooses to do it like this is a mistery and doesn't really matter, but it seems to be because He wants people to freely choose to worship Him.
I’m not necessarily a theist, but this overused argument is flawed. It could be that terrible things happen because, for whatever reasons that could be incomprehensible to our teeny human brains, these terrible things happening are necessary to serve a greater good or purpose for the long run.
What that purpose could be, I have no friggen clue. But humanity has near zero understanding of the universe beyond us (I’m talking about the answers to fundamental questions; why are we here? Do we have a purpose for existence? Etc) and to claim that there is 100% nothing existing beyond ourselves is just as ignorant as claiming there is some personalized God directing everything. We have no fucking clue what’s out there, and anything else is the ego talking.
A) Would not desire faith, as it has concerns far grander than whatever some malformed ape thinks about it.
Or
B) It would not be worthy of faith, because it has the capacity to reveal these machinations in exchange for this obeisance, and chooses to watch us suffer and still expects us to thank it for our suffering.
Or
C) It would not be worthy of faith, because it has decided to test us, like some cosmic Jigsaw. Fuck that.
I hold with Stephen Fry: if I were to discover that god exists after death, my only response would be "how dare you". If it did exist, it would not be an entity worthy of our faith, let alone love or admiration.
So anything bad that ever happens to you is your own fault?
Do you just walk around through life assuming cancer patients did something awful to deserve their disease? Cause that's the only way this analogy makes any sense...
Everyone dies saban. Are you saying that if everyone doesn't die peacefully in their sleep, and unless no one ever gets bruised or cut or hurt or harmed in any way, it means there is no god?
Empiricism, as an epistemological view, argues that knowledge is based on experience and that it is tentative and probabilistic, subject to revision and falsification.
Metaphysics, on the other hand, traditionally explores mind-independent features of the world, including the nature of existence, the features all entities have in common, and their division into categories of being.
It's so hard to believe in anything anymore. I mean, it's like, religion, you really can't take it seriously, because it seems so mythological, it seems so arbitrary...but, on the other hand, science is just pure empiricism, and by virtue of its method, it excludes metaphysics. I guess I wouldn't believe in anything anymore if it weren't for my lucky astrology mood watch.
Steve Martin
That just to try and get you into a better headspace? Levity, anyone?
Due to the abstract nature of its topic, metaphysics has received criticisms questioning the reliability of its methods and the meaningfulness of its theories.
The problem is that metaphysics isn't even meaningful.
You obviously can't say the same for science. Because science is the reason we can write together.
Metaphysics boils down to Descartes: "I think therefore I am", and that's it, it never got any further!!
The why question is a nonsense question. For science it's obvious, because it improves our lives.
But if you are thinking along the lines of why do we exist, or why does the universe exist, those are questions that don't have a rational answer.
The questions that may have answers are based on the how not the why.
Now you're just trying to pivot without having admitted that your analogy only makes sense if you assume everyone who gets cancer must have done something to deserve getting it.
No one claims your mom is omnipotent and omnipresent you eggplant. And if they did, you’d think nothing of such a ridiculous claim. Which is what a rational person would do.
BeCaUsE hE's MyStErIoUs!
This is, entirely unironically, the central tenant of the Catholic teaching on the subject.
It really does just boil down to "You can't adjudicate the morality of the Divine." And, for the most part, its a line of reasoning that hierarchical social structures condition us to accept. God is just the CEO of the Universe. If you accept that your boss at the toxic waste and murder machines factory is Beyond Good and Evil, believing it about God is downright trivial.
One of the earliest forms of copium
I mean, dealing with the Problem of Evil (or Suffering or however you want to describe it) isn't unique to Christianity. It certainly isn't one that's gone unanswered. Hell, a cornerstone of the orthodoxy is that the Original Sin of defiance of God's Will is at the root of all evil.
I think there's a superficial knee-jerk response to these beliefs that boil down to "No, that sounds like some made up bullshit". But you can dig deeper and talk about the fundamental impulses toward pride and gluttony and conclude there's a kernel of truth over the religious pastiche.
God is, at the end of the day, an unproveable/unrefutable hypothesis. But the immediate causes of human suffering are knowable, tangible, and preventable. Whether you're blaming a god or snubbing one, if you're doing so on the grounds that nobody stopped one human from abusing or neglecting another it would seem like your accusation is misplaced.
Human suffering doesn't just come from human actions.
It also comes from natural causes, genetic defects, disasters, disease and parasites
Virtually all modern human suffering is the result of deliberate aggression or institutional neglect.
We've had the technology to mitigate or eliminate these problems for decades.
We've had tools to minimize their impact and insulate against their consequences for centuries.
Natural events are nakedly exacerbated by greedy, gluttonous administrators. You can't blame the Spanish Flu on "nature" because it was the direct result of factory farming and poor hygiene during mass troop mobilization.
You can't dismiss the catastrophic storms wrecking major cities as we hit climate change peaks.
You can't blame famine on deserts that formed in the wake of industrial mining and deforesting.
At some point you have to recognize humankind as an enormous global force within its own right. One that is responsible both for its own preservation and destruction.
The Garden of Eden is metaphorical in that sense. Eating the apple of knowledge means assuming control of your own destiny in a way no other organism on the planet can claim.
You take a very narrow view of history.
If all that exists was the last hundred years thwn you may have a point.
But you can't just shrug aside the thousands of years before that.
Even prior to the last century, the overwhelming bulk of human suffering was inflicted by other humans. Slavery, most prominently.
You can go back to The Taiping Rebellion, New World colonization, and the Inquisition to find plenty of fully human made disasters before the last century.
I tell this story a lot but as an escaped Xtian the thing that marks the moment I was fully off board with the church was hearing those magic words 'God works in mysterious ways'. I had heard it so many times because of course they say it all the freaking time but that was the time it really clicked for me that I won't be getting any real answers and can stop pretending.
Reincarnated as the Christian God!??
"He gave us free will" aka he doesn't want to.
Yeah I'm not religious but this is it. Christians believe free will is "more good" than the bad things it leads to are bad.
The problem for Christianity is that it doesn't fit with how God is presented. He intervenes in things from time to time. Destroyed civilization with a flood because he didn't like what people were doing with free will.
You might be able to take a Deist stance and make it work. However, then you're implicitly saying there's no evidence for God, and are one step out from agnostic atheism. You could say God changed his mind and saw the flood as a bad idea, but fundamentalists are never going to go for that one.
For that matter, the free will explanation isn't even universal among Christians.
People have free will, because that is the greatest good, but not freedom of consequences (even from god) when they behave bad with that free will. Even though they behave bad, if bad is an objective scale, their bad bahvior was still less bad than having no free will. On this scale, god not punishing them for their bad behavior is more bad than gods punishment. So, because he always has to let the most good thing happen he both has to allow free will and people to do bad and also punish people for doing bad even though he knows they will be bad and he could prevent it. Again I think it's bs, and there's a lot of bad logic in Christianity, but that's their subjective stance (usually but, like you said, not a monolith). It "works" because good and bad isn't something you can logic out very wrll since it's highly subjective.
If you make a child, you are responsible for it. Should parents drop children in a forest to be at the mercy of nature?
I don't know what you're trying to argue here. Do you want my opinion? The opinion of Christians? The opinion of people who view nature to be god?
In my opinion, no. Obviously not. But I also am not a Christian.
Oh well, you are neurotypical likely, you would not get it.
As someone who is neurodivergent: what a weird fucking non-sequitur-cum-ad-hominem. Fuck you for using "neurotypical" as an insult, like you are somehow better than others because you're so special. You make us look bad. At least your username is accurate.
Dude forgot to add himself as admin.
this user does not have sudo access
this incident will be reported.
https://xkcd.com/838/
::: spoiler click me :::
He's up there raging because his own system hit him with the ol "new password can't be the same as the old password"
That's just seems shitty
dualism
A: then he isn't god.
B: then he isn't good.
C: then he is evil.
D: the truth.
If you want to short circuit a certain type of theist
E: He's actually just a small g god who died when we stopped sacrificing bulls to him
Amazing how much death and destruction have come out of arguing over who has the best Invisible Friend.
nO bUT ThEyRE jUSt LyInG iTs aLWAyS aCtUaLlY aBoUT GreEd
Yes, we know, but why would they think that's better?
The god the Abrahamists have chosen to worship is a weather and war god. So he is a vengeful dick.
When the Israelites were still polytheistic they worshipped, besides this war god, a sun god and a god of fertility in the Pantheon. Yet they’ve chosen to solely worship the war god. Says a lot about them.
Please let me remake this:
A. He can't, so he is not worthy being worshiped.
B. He doesn't want, so he is not worthy being worshiped.
C. He causes them, so... uhm, actually maybe? Depends, is He doing terrible things to me and my friends, or my enemies?
D. He doesn't exist, so he is not worthy being worshiped.
Side comment - C is obviously excuse to let us do terrible things to them. If You like being evil, surem that do work.
Except god is a hypocrite and will judge you for it for not following his rules.
welcome to religion. A tool for the elites to get rubes to do terrible things to their enemies while paying you for the privilege.
What, do anyone pay minor sheeps?
last time I've checked, was that sheeps had to pay (as totally free, optional donations, but no less than price-list).
I don’t know. At this point I’m leaning toward C.
Me too, but only because I very strongly lean toward "god was created by man" rather than the other way around.
Really if you believe that God created the universe, then C logically follows.
But if we were created in the image of God, then B is very likely, too. Just look at what we do to characters that we create in The Sims.
Basically, the bibble confirms it's C.
Old Testament God is super violent and vengeful and definitely C but it doesn't jive with New Testament God so the faithful have to either ignore that fact or twist themselves into logic pretzels with stuff that basically amounts to 'Bible Code' to try and make it make sense.
Growing up as an agnostic atheist, I loved the Epicurean argument. Now as an adult, I feel compelled to ask the definitions of the words Good, Evil, and God before talking about things.
I think most of the arguments surrounding these topics involves complex use of metaphors and abstract concepts that people can spend lifetimes defining, but are happy to argue about in a short form without a mutually agreed definition.
Yeah, it's that. I'm a Christian, but I have atheist close friends, and I love our debates, but it's because we respect each others enough to accept and recognise that we use the words differently. It's generally not the case on the net.
The Epicurian argument is strong only if you have a very broad definition of all-powerfulness. A definition that classical Christian theology doesn't have, as it recognizes a lot of logical limitations. All-powerfulness is the capacity to do everything possible. So yes, the Christian God is limited.
One of these logical limitations is: God can't create anything free without allowing their creation to do thing that they disapprove, thus God being good, they can't create freedom without accepting the existence of evil, which is not a thing per se, but the absence of good. God chose freedom over perfection, and it's not a human.thing, but a cosmological one.
So yeah, this is a strong argument only of you are already convinced, but it's generally the case on religious matters. I tend to tink that the only purely rational position is true agnosticism, but sometimes for important things you have to make choices without being sure. That's why I'm an agnostic theist.
What I don't get is - didn't God create the necessity of evil for freedom to exist, just like he created everything else? He could have chosen to create the concept of freedom such that it still doesn't allow for evil, but for some reason didn't choose to do so, right?
Or is God bound by rules from an even higher power?
They're bound by logic. They can make anything possible, but 2+2 will never be 5, and even God can't change that. Something can't be and not be. Something thus can't be free without having any choice, or it's not freedom.
But didn't they create this logic, just like everything else? So either they've deliberately bound themselves, or some even higher being created that logic by which they are bound.
Why is the freedom to do evil things necessary for freedom per se? You can have plenty of choice without the ability to do evil.
Logic is not created, it just is.
It's not a question of choice, nature for example doesn't have any choice, and there are illnesses and natural catastrophes. It's a question of being. God being the Good, they can't create something purely good that is not them, or bound by them, thus or not different, or not free. But they didn't created evil, evil doesn't exist, evil is just something not good, thus not God. And it's a spectrum, from almost good to almost not good.
Logic is a result of the rules of our universe, no? A universe could be created where 2 + 2 = 5. Logic dictates that matter can't be created, yet God made our universe, right? But sounds like you're saying God is bound by rules from an even higher being - after all, isn't the idea that everything has to have an origin, except God?
Well yes, illnesses and natural catastrophes exist because God created them, right? They could have created a universe that can't have viruses existing, or where earth quakes are impossible.
But didn't God create the very distinction of things being good or not good? Why couldn't an all-powerful being have chosen to create the universe such that everything is good?
The actual argument is everything has to have an origin inside the universe, thus our universe to exist must have a cause exterior to it. We call this cause God. It's not a question of higher being, just that a universe where the effect predates the cause can't hold. God is not less omnipotent because they can't make a round square.
I thought I answered this question twice, I'm sorry if I'm not clear, English is hard for me. So I'll try again: because it's logically impossible to have a universe which is not a part of God, thus independant and free, that is also perfectly good, as God is perfectly good. Put as a formula, the formulas
I always see it coming back "evil is required for free choice".
Doesn't make any sense to me. Does gravity limit my free choice because i can't just fly into the sky? Or does death limit my free choice because i might just want to continue to exist on this plane? Does my body limit my free choice because i might just want to be non corporeal (but not divine at the same time), not bound by hunger, disease, ....
All of the above are not an issue for "free choice", but allowing me to "choose for evil" somehow is?
If a world where crime and pain and disease and ... doesn't exist. I don't see how there would be no free choice in that world. We would be bound by the restrictions of that world, just as we are currently bound by the restrictions of the current world.
It imo just sounds like a really lame excuse for the problem of evil. It does seem to work for those who believe in a god apparently, but i find that hard to understand. Our choices are incredibly limited, and we still regard it as "free will". But that one choice, o boy, that one choice that if god could prevent us from making it, and thus would disprove him being good if that was an option. That one specific choice, yeah, that's obviously not possible. He's all powerful, but that's just how it is you know?
I really don't get how this is supposed to make any sense. Any god worth being called a god could have made a world without suffering, while still allowing for free choice. Choice is always limited, and evil & suffering aren't special in any way. Take them away and i can still choose to enjoy a billion different things, while not having to suffer at all.
The answers will always boil down to: "god works in mysterious ways and we must have faith"
...what? The absence of good is indifference. Evil takes effort, you have to work at it. It's the difference between trying to help the homeless, ignoring the homeless, and burning down tent cities.
It's a philosophical position of St. Augustine. Defining Evil as the absence of Good akin to darkness being the absence of light, or cold being the absence of heat.
This is kind of what I was talking about in my top post about diving into discussions without even agreeing on definitions.
Without a shared vocabulary, 2-way communication doesn't actually occur. It's just two people talking past each other, both missing each other's points.
I wouldn't be so quick to draw a hard line in the sand about the definition of something as abstract and nebulous as "Evil."
You might find this video interesting, it's about a comic book villain but gets into very very abstract stuff.
https://youtu.be/fcJ8QmogoXY
This also depends on once definition of freedom.
there is a fucked up fifth answer that works for theists, E. terrible things don't exist
F. He's testing us
F is just B with rose tinted glasses.
I'd say it's C. He would choose to test people.
E. Invented by humans
That follows from D.
Yes, he didn't exist until he was invented. 😁🫠
In one of the Discworld books there are two gods. One is the mighty Thunderer, who has temples all over the vast Empire. The other is a Frog God worshipped by a tribe of about fifty people in a swamp. When they have a fight the Frog knocks the other guy out, because nobody really believes in the Thunderer and the Frog's people have strong faith in him.
I miss Terry. Discworld should be read by everyone!
Don't blame makind for that. It was necessary.
So you’re arguing a mix of Voltaire’s “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” and John Lennon’s “God is a concept by which we measure our pain”?
God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth!
Religious people be like:
he won't, because he doesn't interfere
He causes them, because it's the circle of life
He can't, because doing so would cause chaos
He doesn't exist, because you don't believe
I think they also say, he causes them to teach us things.
Yeah that little kid that drowned in the pool really learned her lesson, I guess...
He caused it/allowed it to happen because he wants to test YOUR faith and make sure you're cool with needless pain and suffering so long as it means you get to go to heaven/avoid an eternity of torture.
It's all a test. If you can't put up with horrible shit while being alive, how you gonna become an angelic slave and sing happy songs for eternity?
In Buddhism, the concept of God as a powerful creator is not central. The question of "why terrible things happen" is addressed through the teachings of karma and interdependence. Terrible things occur due to the collective actions aka karma of beings, influenced by ignorance, attachment, and aversion, rather than a deliberate act of a deity. Thus, from a Buddhist perspective, the most aligned answer would be that terrible things happen because of the causes and conditions created by sentient beings themselves, rather than any of the options listed.
Isn't there that philosophical argument about how God can't be both all-good and all-powerful? If he's all-good, he would have to stop bad things.
It's been well over a decade since philosophy class, but this reminded me of that argument.
Forgot who made it though.
Epicurus.
It's the Epicurean Paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurean_paradox
In summary:
For most catholic priests.... The D is always the answer.
Its clearly because clearly god has realized the best thing ever is isekai so he made earth and made us all isekai MCs. The terrible things that happen just give sus unique back stories when we get isekai'd so we all get to be unique MCs. /s
Who is sus and why do you give him unique back stories?
Their logic would be
C
If something bad happens to someone it’s because they deserved it
“But they were a good person”
They were going to do something terrible
If you'd read more than 3 books of fiction (the Bible can be only one of them), you'd probably have cultivated a level of imagination that suprasses this meme.
It's just that the model of divinity as an lawful authority is complete bullshit, and has nothing to do with spirituality
I think the Pope and Cardinals would all choose B and then proceed to schpiel about how this life is a trial and he takes each of us at precisely the time of his choosing for good reasons inconceivable to mere mortals bla bla bla
they'd pull out Job. And basicaly say "you're too stupid to understand. to limited. How dare you question god? that's not your job, now get on your hands and knees and clean my shoes with your tongue. Oh and give me your money because I need it more than you and god says you have to. You didn't earn it anyway, it all came from god, too."
Think about the following:
In the medieval ages, people were popping out 5-15 children on average. Child mortality was extremely high, with roughly 80% of children dying before they were 5 y/o.
Now, what should god do (if they existed)? Let the children life and cause overpopulation, which leads to famine and disaster, or kill a lot of children? There's literally no solution.
That was until contraceptives were found. And interestingly, contraceptives exist at roughly the same time that antibiotics exist, thus preventing both high child-mortality and overpopulation.
Funny ideas but completely wrong. Contraceptives existed throughout the human history. And antibiotics were discovered a bit later than Haber dealt with overpopulation problem.
Yeah bro, you make a sheep intestine condom and get back to us on the efficacy
we are just bald monkeys, stop pretending otherwise
go fuck a banana!
E. You deserved it
hear me out.
what if it's actually B and C?
Then it is not worthy of worship.
C sort of implies B or A. If he causes them then he doesn’t prevent them because either he can’t or he doesn’t want to. It would be kind of weird if he caused a terrible thing and then prevented it before it happened.
Fucking Abrahamic religions
So for the sake of a thought experiment:
in this thought experiment B or C or both is the case:
what is the best course of action?
comply with regulations and hope to get on the good side or suffer the consequences of the alternative
worship doesn't require benevolence. fear keeps people in line just as well.
pretty sure thats the case for many religious people. telling you the god isn't "good" would upset the rules, so why would they
Pretty sure every pope is a multimillionaire (or at least lives exactly like one) without having to answer this question 🫤
It's not that deep:
1- In the case of natural evils: C. God causes them, but they are morally neutral from the spiritual perspective. If what matters is salvation and glory to God it doesn't change anything if you died by tornado or by anything else, and inevitable death might even be a net positive individually and to others (Ind: the person might repent about something, social: seeing the frailness of life leads to less self love, while increasing compassion)
2- In the case of human caused evils: B with an asterisk. Given that He has imposed upon Himself the restriction of respecting free will, He won't stop people from doing evil deeds, even though He wants them to do good and He can make them do it. Why God chooses to do it like this is a mistery and doesn't really matter, but it seems to be because He wants people to freely choose to worship Him.
source?
Imagine asking for a source on a philosophical argument lmao
"Yeah, no, Descartes, I'll read it when it's peer reviewed. Yes in LaTeX please"
You so dense you think I didn't mean The Bible, book whatever, chapter something, verse somesuch?
I’m not necessarily a theist, but this overused argument is flawed. It could be that terrible things happen because, for whatever reasons that could be incomprehensible to our teeny human brains, these terrible things happening are necessary to serve a greater good or purpose for the long run.
What that purpose could be, I have no friggen clue. But humanity has near zero understanding of the universe beyond us (I’m talking about the answers to fundamental questions; why are we here? Do we have a purpose for existence? Etc) and to claim that there is 100% nothing existing beyond ourselves is just as ignorant as claiming there is some personalized God directing everything. We have no fucking clue what’s out there, and anything else is the ego talking.
That's a lot of words for have faith.
In such a case as you describe, this god either:
A) Would not desire faith, as it has concerns far grander than whatever some malformed ape thinks about it.
Or
B) It would not be worthy of faith, because it has the capacity to reveal these machinations in exchange for this obeisance, and chooses to watch us suffer and still expects us to thank it for our suffering.
Or
C) It would not be worthy of faith, because it has decided to test us, like some cosmic Jigsaw. Fuck that.
I hold with Stephen Fry: if I were to discover that god exists after death, my only response would be "how dare you". If it did exist, it would not be an entity worthy of our faith, let alone love or admiration.
I make my room filthy and dangerous every day. My roommates are getting hurt!
Why doesn't my mom clean it up for me? She certainly could. Does she want me to live in squalor? Perhaps she MAKES the mess!
IDK, maybe mom doesn't exist.
Does your mom...
Put eye parasites that blind children in your room?
Force you to eat and breathe through the same tube?
Give you horrible cancers?
Put drugs in your room and then get mad when you use them?
Tell you to love her unconditionally after doing all of these things?
So anything bad that ever happens to you is your own fault?
Do you just walk around through life assuming cancer patients did something awful to deserve their disease? Cause that's the only way this analogy makes any sense...
Everyone dies saban. Are you saying that if everyone doesn't die peacefully in their sleep, and unless no one ever gets bruised or cut or hurt or harmed in any way, it means there is no god?
sabin FTFY.
But true statement based on empirical evidence.
Also true statement based on empirical evidence.
Why can you understand one, but not the other?
Empiricism, as an epistemological view, argues that knowledge is based on experience and that it is tentative and probabilistic, subject to revision and falsification.
Metaphysics, on the other hand, traditionally explores mind-independent features of the world, including the nature of existence, the features all entities have in common, and their division into categories of being.
That just to try and get you into a better headspace? Levity, anyone?
Also from Wikipedia on metaphysics:
The problem is that metaphysics isn't even meaningful.
You obviously can't say the same for science. Because science is the reason we can write together.
Metaphysics boils down to Descartes: "I think therefore I am", and that's it, it never got any further!!
And what's the point of quoting a joke?
Metaphysics addresses "why". Like, "why are we doing science anyway?"
Can't answer that with the scientific method.
The why question is a nonsense question. For science it's obvious, because it improves our lives.
But if you are thinking along the lines of why do we exist, or why does the universe exist, those are questions that don't have a rational answer.
The questions that may have answers are based on the how not the why.
Now you're just trying to pivot without having admitted that your analogy only makes sense if you assume everyone who gets cancer must have done something to deserve getting it.
"
No one claims your mom is omnipotent and omnipresent you eggplant. And if they did, you’d think nothing of such a ridiculous claim. Which is what a rational person would do.
I understand you think I'm a member of the nightshade family. Cool.
I’ll take Pascal’s wager and believe you’re an eggplant hooked up to a computer, just promise me a good time when I die.
Your mother, the allpowerful being.
It's an analogy.
Less anal, more logos next time.
It's a meme