Most of you should probably go ahead and read Ethics by Spinoza. This whole thing is just atheism circle jerk, nobody outside of atheists actually cares. There's plenty of ways religious people will just spin this with whatever bullshit interpretation. Spinoza's theory, on the other hand, is far more powerful.
“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?”
― Epicurus
Or put another way: Omnipotence, Omniscience, Benevolence; choose any two. The very existence of evil excludes the possibility that there is God-being with all three traits.
Furthermore, he would already know whether or not you'd pass the test before you were even created. So why create you if he already knows you'll fail those tests?
Curiously enough, this (predestination) is one of the core principles behind Calvinism, stemmed from the verse "before ye inhabited the womb, I knew ye" (or something within these lines as I'm writing from memory). I'm not sure what exactly Calvinists even try to achieve with their churches and all the "praise God" thing, given they themselves preach "one doesn't get to the heavens from one's own works" (I.e. no matter how loud they "prayed", if "God" decided they're going downstairs, they will get downstairs).
I'm of the opinion. God will Judge you as He will. Up/down? What is your will compared to His? Maybe you can tell a joke, and he'll let you off with just another round in Samsara?
Didn't make sense to you because it doesn't make any sense in any way ever. An OS/OP being knows how you and your will would react to literally every case and does not need to run any tests. And, if they did, why, there'd still not be any need for suffering. If you are all powerful you design the universe so that all this evil "necessarily" following from free will would not follow from free will. Can't do it? -> not omnipotent.
But some animals living far from humans, il forest and oceans, some we never pay attention to... They too, suffer some sicknesses and the too early lost of their kids. Some get eaten slowly from the inside by parasites, some who did no sin die in some long and painfull cancer…
How does an almighty and perfectly good god does not just allow it, but decided to create this like that, checked it, and found that it is good?
Would the world be worse if innocent animal kids (whose are given no free will) could die with less pain?
But "he" "gave them" a nervous system so they are sensible to torture.
Also, the eternal damnation of human babies who die at birth, before baptism, is not that easy to defend as "perfectly good" nor "moraly the best that can be"… Thanks it is a "forgiving god of love", else the world would be harsh…
Lucifer: Maybe animals also have souls and free will and are being tested as well, and the human only thing is a conceit. Maybe God's a dick (and / or). You decide.
Well, the option "there is not such a thing as an almighty and perfectly good God" seems the best to me...
At most I admit Spinoza's definition of god, but I just give it an other name…
There's been a LOT of attempts to explain this throughout history, none of them are really airtight. Until one day I finally cracked it. Like seriously, I think I have a solution without a contradiction:
What if... God is just not very clever? He's doing his best, ok?
If he's really all powerful - I hear you object - couldn't he simply increase his intelligence? Yes. Yes he could. If he thought of it =(
Tracks with the whole “god made us like him” premise. That just means god is an idiot about half the time. Also explains the cruelty, capriciousness, manipulation, uncaring, etc. with hypothetical random acts of kindness. It also means any potential heaven is going to be a complete crapshoot, you have no idea what fit of pique god will have built heaven in.
Either way, sounds like god is a real dumpster fire and has left humans to stew in their own as well.
As a worldbuilding/fiction device, it's a hell of a lot better - genuine-looking limitations are always more convincing than "completely fantastical bullshit that just can't do any damn thing that you'd expect, for increasingly suspicious reasons", or that keeps switching capabilities after what the story/case needs. They're major alarm bells for not only being made up, but poorly.
It isn't the shtick for the major monotheistic religions, though. That wouldn't be very omnipotent or omniscient.
Stupidity does not square with omniscience and omnipotence, though, unless one desperately needs it to. It would explain a hell of a lot, but you will notice how very little of the scripture goes "god, this god dude is such a stupe, but we're just rolling with it for reasons"
Besides, Hanlon's razor gets sorta short circuited by Occam's, which would seem to take a dim view of an entire bible's worth of waffling to explain suffering, war, famine, kids and good people dying horrifically from cancer, natural disasters etc etc etc
I think religion would be way more convincing and appealing if we just gave up on the "all-powerful" aspect of God and focused on the "all-knowing" and "maximally good" parts
Just accepting many gods rather than just one; each with their own power and personalities... like in old paganisms... it is far more convincing to me. None of the producted texts are absolute truth, just a poetic view according to the dream given by the servant of one of the gods: of course it is not exact, so proving it wrong brings nothing...
Responsabilities are diluted, and if you are more a fan of the god A, you can accuse the god B td oe responsible of most bad things…
That said, the original version of the monotheists god was not claiming to be the only one existing, he was requesting to be the only one they pray for and honor. A bit as it was the minor "god" of jealousy of a large pantheon…
Maybe He created the universe and then the universe took on a life of its own? In the same way that a parent may create a child but doesn't then have absolute power over the child or their behavior?
That's basically deism. Which a lot of enlightenment thinkers believed in. That there's an all powerful God who just chooses not to be involved past the start. Grandfather clock Theory.
Are programmers all powerful over code they created and then released into the wild? (TLDT: No, but there is likely some control, especially over new versions)
The metaphor would be code running "locally", not released into the wild. So yes. Whatever you originally wrote you could remove, rewrite, augment or fix. If god "released us into the wild" then god is not omnipotent anymore, and it also would never be required for an omnipotent entity.
Perhaps, also perhaps the classic Jesuit argument that for judgement to be meaningful free will must exist applies. Similarly a scientist should state the results being experimented on before running the experiment rather than just running p-values on a bunch of resultant data and claiming whatever pops as the intended result. Perhaps God is a scientist with a multiverse of experiments with small tweaks to initial conditions. In that sense you'd have a bunch of (or just one) locally running code(s), but effectively in the wild for fear of tainting the results.
I'm agnostic FWIW, I just find these ideas fertile ground for playing with thoughts.
Perhaps, also perhaps the classic Jesuit argument that for judgement to be meaningful free will must exist applies.[...]
Perhaps God is a scientist with a multiverse of experiments with small tweaks to initial conditions.
Not in any of the mainstream monotheistic views that would be relevant. They are omniwhatever as a matter of... well, canon, I guess.
Omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience all make an intuitive sense to me as characteristics of a God entity, but I’ve never really understood why omnibenevolence is considered a required trait as well.
Because without omnibenevolence, he is the root cause of all pain and suffering, and therefore not only unworthy of worship, but deserving rebellion, resistance, and ultimately deposition.
It may be that they beleive that those who suffer are actually morally corrupt in some way, even themselves, which is part of why the wealthy become so admired.
Okay, say you have an ant farm or something like that. You have the power to pour bleach in your ant farm and kill all of them at once. Or you could drop food in there. They are aware of you and think of you like a god, so they worship you. But when they do shitty things to each other, they wonder why you didn't step in and intervene. You qualify as all-powerful and all-knowing (imagine you can see all the pathways from both sides), so, why don't you step in? The fact is, you don't really care. You might care that you have an ant farm. You care about the bigger picture. But the small things? Like who gets to be queen and the shitty things they do to each other? It's not really your concern.
If a god were a real thing, it would be some kind of life force that is quite beyond our understanding, and thus, it wouldn't really care about our internal struggles, if it had a motivation to see us as a species succeed (in what? just surviving? Basically).
It's easy to say gods don't exist, but, we really don't know what's out there in the stars. Imagine something could live in space without oxygen, and imagine it can't be seen by our instruments. That might be like a god. We don't really know.
You're not omniscient or omnipotent in the ant farm - you have a very limited view and very limited powers. "Doesn't care" does not mesh with god being all-loving, which is the 3rd part of the standard bs.
It’s easy to say gods don’t exist, but, we really don’t know what’s out there in the stars.
It's easy to say "until someone proves anything at all, which seems like a fair thing to request, you don't need to act as if you believe it", and also true. While it can't be conclusively disproven that maybe some god is lurking around out there, earthly religion makes testable, falsifiable claims all the time. Which are then tested, and falsified
Dropping in food and burning the whole thing down are pretty powerful, but not ALL powerful. These are things that any of us could do for/to each other.
Also, none of us really know what's happening in that ant farm. God supposedly knows all of our names and relationships to others and sees every single thing we do on a very granular level.
If your claim is that God is just an entity looking down at us and blindly fucking around with the environment, that may be possible, but there's no more reason to worship that being than the weather itself.
It's more accurate to say that the existence of any god is inversely proportional to the relevance of that god.
Sure, there could be a hidden god out there in the stars that never interacts with us at all. That would be really difficult to disprove. But it's also pointless to disprove, because in our practical everyday lives, it makes no difference whether such a god exists or not. If you want to talk about a god that actually does things and actually has some impact on our real lives, well then -- now that's testable and disprovable.
God either doesn't exist or doesn't matter. And the difference between those two isn't terribly important.
I’ve never understood the hype surrounding this pseudo-dilemma in atheist circles. The answer is actually quite simple: being all-powerful doesn’t mean being capable of doing impossible things. If your definition of omnipotence includes the ability to do the impossible, then, as a Christian, I have no problem saying that God is not omnipotent, but that is merely a matter of wordplay.
There are many valid criticisms of religion and even of theism, but this one has never really made sense to me.
The answer is actually quite simple: being all-powerful doesn’t mean being capable of doing impossible things. If your definition of omnipotence includes the ability to do the impossible, then, as a Christian, I have no problem saying that God is not omnipotent
Well, yeah, if you simply believe different things, then criticisms of the beliefs you don't hold aren't a problem.
Now, I'd wager that out of the ~2.25 billion Christians, about 2 billion of them would be at best skeptical that you qualify as a Christian at all and essentially all of them would vehemently disagree with you, but they disagree with each other about nearly everything too, so you aren't exactly objectively wrong to call yourself a Christian.
However, that doesn't make others wrong to level these criticisms at the vast majority of Christians who do believe that "through God, all things are possible" literally means all things, even things that are otherwise contradictory.
being all-powerful doesn’t mean being capable of doing impossible things
So ... can your god, for example...
Turn water into wine?
Die and then come back to life 3 days later?
Walk on water?
Create the entire universe from nothing?
What exactly is and is not 'impossible' for your god? What kind of god can do those things, but can't, say ... prevent Epstein and his rich friends from raping kids for decades? Why is one possible and the other impossible?
He can't make that 1+1 equals 3. He can't make something exist and not exist at the same time. He can't make freedom without giving the possibility to disobey. These examples exist since at least the Middle Ages…
I'll break it down like this. Is all suffering necessary? Like do infants really need to get leukemia to achieve God's grand plan? Does he have the power to achieve his goal without giving infants leukemia?
It boils down to the fact that either he is not able to, and therefore not all powerful, or he is and chooses to give babies cancer anyway, and therefore not all good.
You seem to think that God is a micromanager which decide everything. It's not the Biblical God. This is explained by the myth of creation (yes it's a myth, but it's not because it's not historical that it's not meaningful). Evil and suffering wasn't in God's plan. What was in God's plan, was freedom for the Creation, which is not possible without an alternative: follow God's will, or not. The Creation chose to try an other way, and God cried. But he respected the choice.
Did God create the universe? Did he know evil and suffering would occur before he created the universe? Could he have created the universe another way?
If the answer to all 3 is yes, everything must be according to his plan. If the answer to any is no, you have to get rid of either all-knowing or all-powerful.
I guess my next question would be why would it be impossible? I'll accept that he can't do logically impossible things, like make a square circle, but the idea that he could have made changes to nature is not logically impossible.
If your definition of omnipotence includes the ability to do the impossible, then, as a Christian, I have no problem saying that God is not omnipotent, but that is merely a matter of wordplay.
Like I said, if it's your definition, then I have no problem saying that God is not omnipotent. It's not a gotcha when I already said that I agreed with that…
Well, the christian's claim is that god created the world as it is, in 6 days, and that each day he checked what he did and that he saw it was good. And so he not only created pain for innocent baby animals, but he also validated it as good. May is it onavoidable, but we are still able to regret it. Is our moral highes than god's moral? Or are we wrong and should we train ourself to feel joy at the idea of a new born baby mouse tortured by a cat who may (or not) eat it after his play (when the baby mouse died)?
If your god is not all powerful, then your religion lied to you about what your god even is.
According to your lore, his will is our reality - he isn't bound by the laws of our universe, he made them. So he didn't just allow evil and suffering to exist, he actively put it here. Why worship a being so full of hate?
It depends on how you define the words. Is omnipotence the capacity to do absolutely everything? Then yes, God is not omnipotent. But no philosopher or theologian ever defined omnipotence like that. Using that against Christianity is a strawman. Omnipotence, clearly defined is the capacity to do anything possible. So God can't make a squared circle but he's still omnipotent. He can't create a universe where everything follows his will and still is free at the same time, but he's still omnipotent.
Impossible according to what? The laws of the universe that god made? Couldn't he just as easily have made different laws?
And why is the capability to commit evil always a defining characteristic of free will? We also cannot breathe underwater, fly, or lift a freight train with our god-given anatomy, so do we actually have free will?
Compare it to our own legal system: you have free will to choose what you want for dinner tonight, right? Loads of restaurants with loads of entrees, grocery stores stocked with whatever you need to cook up your creation: the combination of options is unfathomably vast. Free, right? ...but wait, according to the law, you're not allowed to cannibalize your neighbor's 4 year old kid, so I guess that makes you a mindless drone cuz if evil isn't on the menu then neither is free will.
So let's put that restriction back in god's court: he doesn't need to enforce his law, he just wills it and so it is: you still have the unfathomably huge number of non-evil options, but this time cannibalism is actually impossible: you are literally incapable of committing or even considering it because divine intervention will not let you - do you have free will?
Our freedom exists within the constraints of some system. Both legal and divine. There are loads of things we aren't free to do - the capacity to commit evil taken away from us would be a drop in the ocean.
And why is the capability to commit evil always a defining characteristic of free will?
Because freedom is not absolute, one is always free in relation to something. Since God is love, freedom in relation to God is necessarily the freedom not to love and therefore, the freedom to do evil.
Logic according to what? What makes you believe logic predates creation? If you're citing genesis, you might want to reread it: it's vague as fuck and certainly doesn't address the (non)existence of logic prior to creation.
Kinda sounds like you're making shit up, in which case you might want to review revelations too, which instructs not to do that or sky daddy will give you that eternal spanking.
Because freedom is not absolute
Yeah no shit, that's half the point of my last post, the other half being why it's so important to you for evil to be part of that freedom, which...
Since God is love, freedom in relation to God is necessarily the freedom not to love and therefore, the freedom to do evil.
Speaking of logic, that's flawed as fuck. The absence of love is not synonymous with the presence of evil. The absence of love is just the absence of love. All the people, critters, things in your life that you've paid no mind to? That's absence of love. They mean nothing to you - and that's fine. The presence of love? Your friends, family... I don't need to elaborate here do I? But evil? Hopefully this is something you've never been compelled to do - causing suffering for its own sake. That's not fine... and the universe we're stuck in is absolutely stuffed with it.
So again, why does free will - even specifically in the context of freedom from love - have to include evil?
Of course. All the answers are simple, in such a way that it's easy to show how they're all really bad arguments. Such as "Well it's simple really, one of the three main characteristics of god, that literally everyone knows, just isn't true when inconvenient to my position."
Hence the "hype" - it's pretty useful to have an argument that, no matter what people try to argue, immediately has to result in something stupidly obviously illogical, something that contradicts one or more lore points, some cop out bs, bad faith argumentation, or everything all at once.
I explicitly said that there were good criticisms of religion and theism, so please read messages to the end before answering. Atheists, both friends and strangers, asked me very hard questions, and I'm thankful to them for that, because these hard questions made me grow. It's just that this one is not one of them.
I explicitly said that there were good criticisms of religion and theism, so please read messages to the end before answering.
See, this is exactly the bad faith argumentation and copout bullshit that I was literally just talking about.
"Please refrain from insinuating that just because you find the argument too difficult, I didn't read it" blah blah etc, see how easy that was and didn't address any of the actual questions? Real obvious stuff.
Atheists, both friends and strangers, asked me very hard questions, and I’m thankful to them for that, because these hard questions made me grow. It’s just that this one is not one of them.
Maybe it could be, if you had the time, balls and intellectual honesty to engage with it
It's pretty funny, this tone you're taking just because you're on the Shit Arguments side. Which you evidently know, or you'd be able to come up with better stuff.
It's funny indeed because I just took your tone. Look at my answers to other people on this thread: legitimate criticism call serious answers from me. Aggressiveness and strawmen don't.
Not indirectly, he directly created the universe. But the laws of logic still apply. Omnipotence is not the capacity to do everything, but to do everything possible. He can't create a squared circle, but that doesn't mean he's not omnipotent.
Ok but we can agree that God could stop the Nazis from committing genocide?
Which he didn't.
Yes yes I know, freedom of mind and all that shit.
But ok let's say a child born with a disability because of the mother was drinking while pregnant. What did the child do that god let it be born with a crippling disability?
For example god could make us humans not being intoxicated by alcohol. He could perform wonders and heal the child. But it is a long time since the last wonder of God....
Pretty much since our understanding of the world grew and we can logically explain even previous wonders which then weren't ones
What if God were to intervene every time a human being chose evil? Can we imagine such a world? There would be no more suffering, sure, but there would be no freedom either. That is worse than a totalitarian regime; even with surveillance cameras and smartphone trackers, we still retain some private space, if only within our own minds. But what if the dictator is God? He is omnipotent and omniscient; He needs no cameras. Is that really an enviable world? It would be worse than a mere lack of freedom: we would desire to act on our own, yet the axe would fall every single time. Where would the line be drawn: only at serious wrongdoing? Even so, we would know we were constantly being watched. Such a God would rule through fear.
God chose another path; a better one, I think. Rather than imposing Himself upon us or crushing us with His omnipotence (even an omnipotence limited by logic), He chose total weakness. He chose to suffer with us. That is the meaning of the Incarnation and the Cross: He did not die so much for us as with us. He does not impose Himself; He offers an invitation. He does not wish to reign through fear, but through love.
God gave us a law of love so that suffering might cease. He gave us a moral sense. He gave us a reason to fight against disease and natural disasters. He gave us the keys to break the cycle of violence. He gave us everything we need, so let's stop hiding behind Him like spoiled children! And in the meantime, he accompanies those who are suffering and welcomes those who are departing.
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Most of you should probably go ahead and read Ethics by Spinoza. This whole thing is just atheism circle jerk, nobody outside of atheists actually cares. There's plenty of ways religious people will just spin this with whatever bullshit interpretation. Spinoza's theory, on the other hand, is far more powerful.
Most of the Bible clearly illustrates the malevolence of the Christian god...
religious people will probably point to Job without breaking a sweat
Meanwhile gnostics: Yes
“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?”
― Epicurus
Or put another way: Omnipotence, Omniscience, Benevolence; choose any two. The very existence of evil excludes the possibility that there is God-being with all three traits.
Omniscient and omnipotent are mutually exclusive, as knowing what will happen means the future is locked in.
"god is all knowing" vs. "i have free will"
christians press both buttons without thinking about it.
Gods jerking off to the sin he knew you were going to commit, did nothing to prevent, and will now make you burn over.
God created you just to make you suffer.
Ancient (and a very few modern) Gnostics decided to run with "God is an asshole and we are all prisoners here"
The classic response:
"He is testing us"
And here I thought that God was all-knowing, so he should know how we would react before having to test us
Imagine murdering a family member of someone's and claiming you're just testing them.
That's God in their situational view of things.
Furthermore, he would already know whether or not you'd pass the test before you were even created. So why create you if he already knows you'll fail those tests?
Curiously enough, this (predestination) is one of the core principles behind Calvinism, stemmed from the verse "before ye inhabited the womb, I knew ye" (or something within these lines as I'm writing from memory). I'm not sure what exactly Calvinists even try to achieve with their churches and all the "praise God" thing, given they themselves preach "one doesn't get to the heavens from one's own works" (I.e. no matter how loud they "prayed", if "God" decided they're going downstairs, they will get downstairs).
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I'm of the opinion. God will Judge you as He will. Up/down? What is your will compared to His? Maybe you can tell a joke, and he'll let you off with just another round in Samsara?
Because we still have the free will to make those choices. Or some such nonsense. It didn’t make sense to me either :p
Didn't make sense to you because it doesn't make any sense in any way ever. An OS/OP being knows how you and your will would react to literally every case and does not need to run any tests. And, if they did, why, there'd still not be any need for suffering. If you are all powerful you design the universe so that all this evil "necessarily" following from free will would not follow from free will. Can't do it? -> not omnipotent.
Yeah. You right. Now explain all that to my extremely Mormon dad lmao.
Oof. Well, there's no real need to argue the specifics unless one is really bored.
But some animals living far from humans, il forest and oceans, some we never pay attention to... They too, suffer some sicknesses and the too early lost of their kids. Some get eaten slowly from the inside by parasites, some who did no sin die in some long and painfull cancer…
How does an almighty and perfectly good god does not just allow it, but decided to create this like that, checked it, and found that it is good?
Would the world be worse if innocent animal kids (whose are given no free will) could die with less pain?
‘lol animals can’t feel things. They don’t have souls.’
Is how they justify it.
But "he" "gave them" a nervous system so they are sensible to torture.
Also, the eternal damnation of human babies who die at birth, before baptism, is not that easy to defend as "perfectly good" nor "moraly the best that can be"… Thanks it is a "forgiving god of love", else the world would be harsh…
Lucifer: Maybe animals also have souls and free will and are being tested as well, and the human only thing is a conceit. Maybe God's a dick (and / or). You decide.
Well, the option "there is not such a thing as an almighty and perfectly good God" seems the best to me... At most I admit Spinoza's definition of god, but I just give it an other name…
There's been a LOT of attempts to explain this throughout history, none of them are really airtight. Until one day I finally cracked it. Like seriously, I think I have a solution without a contradiction:
What if... God is just not very clever? He's doing his best, ok?
If he's really all powerful - I hear you object - couldn't he simply increase his intelligence? Yes. Yes he could. If he thought of it =(
"if you're a dumbass and you know it, clap your hands"
suddenly, rolling thunder
Tracks with the whole “god made us like him” premise. That just means god is an idiot about half the time. Also explains the cruelty, capriciousness, manipulation, uncaring, etc. with hypothetical random acts of kindness. It also means any potential heaven is going to be a complete crapshoot, you have no idea what fit of pique god will have built heaven in.
Either way, sounds like god is a real dumpster fire and has left humans to stew in their own as well.
All-powerful, all-seeing and loving. 1 and 2 can't be true for someone who dropped the ball this bad
Seeing is not the same as understanding.
Maybe humans like suffering and dying. They all seem to do it, so they must like it.
I like this idea of an all powerful toddler god
As a worldbuilding/fiction device, it's a hell of a lot better - genuine-looking limitations are always more convincing than "completely fantastical bullshit that just can't do any damn thing that you'd expect, for increasingly suspicious reasons", or that keeps switching capabilities after what the story/case needs. They're major alarm bells for not only being made up, but poorly.
It isn't the shtick for the major monotheistic religions, though. That wouldn't be very omnipotent or omniscient.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Stupidity does not square with omniscience and omnipotence, though, unless one desperately needs it to. It would explain a hell of a lot, but you will notice how very little of the scripture goes "god, this god dude is such a stupe, but we're just rolling with it for reasons"
Besides, Hanlon's razor gets sorta short circuited by Occam's, which would seem to take a dim view of an entire bible's worth of waffling to explain suffering, war, famine, kids and good people dying horrifically from cancer, natural disasters etc etc etc
This perfectly lines up with a series called Miracle Workers and in it Steve Buscemi is God and he's an absolute fuck up.
I think religion would be way more convincing and appealing if we just gave up on the "all-powerful" aspect of God and focused on the "all-knowing" and "maximally good" parts
Just accepting many gods rather than just one; each with their own power and personalities... like in old paganisms... it is far more convincing to me. None of the producted texts are absolute truth, just a poetic view according to the dream given by the servant of one of the gods: of course it is not exact, so proving it wrong brings nothing... Responsabilities are diluted, and if you are more a fan of the god A, you can accuse the god B td oe responsible of most bad things…
That said, the original version of the monotheists god was not claiming to be the only one existing, he was requesting to be the only one they pray for and honor. A bit as it was the minor "god" of jealousy of a large pantheon…
So we're really just making this shit up.
I mean. Yeah
ever tried to talk to a christian about how an omniscient god clearly obviates any concept of free will? they really don't like that.
Its kinda hard for the creator of the universe to not be all powerful though. The other two are much more maliable.
Maybe He created the universe and then the universe took on a life of its own? In the same way that a parent may create a child but doesn't then have absolute power over the child or their behavior?
That's basically deism. Which a lot of enlightenment thinkers believed in. That there's an all powerful God who just chooses not to be involved past the start. Grandfather clock Theory.
Are programmers all powerful over code they created and then released into the wild? (TLDT: No, but there is likely some control, especially over new versions)
The metaphor would be code running "locally", not released into the wild. So yes. Whatever you originally wrote you could remove, rewrite, augment or fix. If god "released us into the wild" then god is not omnipotent anymore, and it also would never be required for an omnipotent entity.
Perhaps, also perhaps the classic Jesuit argument that for judgement to be meaningful free will must exist applies. Similarly a scientist should state the results being experimented on before running the experiment rather than just running p-values on a bunch of resultant data and claiming whatever pops as the intended result. Perhaps God is a scientist with a multiverse of experiments with small tweaks to initial conditions. In that sense you'd have a bunch of (or just one) locally running code(s), but effectively in the wild for fear of tainting the results.
I'm agnostic FWIW, I just find these ideas fertile ground for playing with thoughts.
Not in any of the mainstream monotheistic views that would be relevant. They are omniwhatever as a matter of... well, canon, I guess.
God is an almighty asshole.
Proof number one:
There is evil on this world and life is unfair.
God could do sth. about it, but doesn't.
God is all knowing, so you can't just say he didn't know.
Proof number two:
Religious people are more often intolerant than atheists.
Proof number three:
We are made in God's image. And I see a lot of assholes around here.
Whelp that's it, now I can believe in god.
Omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience all make an intuitive sense to me as characteristics of a God entity, but I’ve never really understood why omnibenevolence is considered a required trait as well.
Because without omnibenevolence, he is the root cause of all pain and suffering, and therefore not only unworthy of worship, but deserving rebellion, resistance, and ultimately deposition.
Because if the god is evil, then fuck him
It may be that they beleive that those who suffer are actually morally corrupt in some way, even themselves, which is part of why the wealthy become so admired.
If god actually existed, he would be both. So there is no wrong button.
For the same reason you do.
Okay, say you have an ant farm or something like that. You have the power to pour bleach in your ant farm and kill all of them at once. Or you could drop food in there. They are aware of you and think of you like a god, so they worship you. But when they do shitty things to each other, they wonder why you didn't step in and intervene. You qualify as all-powerful and all-knowing (imagine you can see all the pathways from both sides), so, why don't you step in? The fact is, you don't really care. You might care that you have an ant farm. You care about the bigger picture. But the small things? Like who gets to be queen and the shitty things they do to each other? It's not really your concern.
If a god were a real thing, it would be some kind of life force that is quite beyond our understanding, and thus, it wouldn't really care about our internal struggles, if it had a motivation to see us as a species succeed (in what? just surviving? Basically).
It's easy to say gods don't exist, but, we really don't know what's out there in the stars. Imagine something could live in space without oxygen, and imagine it can't be seen by our instruments. That might be like a god. We don't really know.
You're not omniscient or omnipotent in the ant farm - you have a very limited view and very limited powers. "Doesn't care" does not mesh with god being all-loving, which is the 3rd part of the standard bs.
It's easy to say "until someone proves anything at all, which seems like a fair thing to request, you don't need to act as if you believe it", and also true. While it can't be conclusively disproven that maybe some god is lurking around out there, earthly religion makes testable, falsifiable claims all the time. Which are then tested, and falsified
Dropping in food and burning the whole thing down are pretty powerful, but not ALL powerful. These are things that any of us could do for/to each other.
Also, none of us really know what's happening in that ant farm. God supposedly knows all of our names and relationships to others and sees every single thing we do on a very granular level.
If your claim is that God is just an entity looking down at us and blindly fucking around with the environment, that may be possible, but there's no more reason to worship that being than the weather itself.
It's more accurate to say that the existence of any god is inversely proportional to the relevance of that god.
Sure, there could be a hidden god out there in the stars that never interacts with us at all. That would be really difficult to disprove. But it's also pointless to disprove, because in our practical everyday lives, it makes no difference whether such a god exists or not. If you want to talk about a god that actually does things and actually has some impact on our real lives, well then -- now that's testable and disprovable.
God either doesn't exist or doesn't matter. And the difference between those two isn't terribly important.
I’ve never understood the hype surrounding this pseudo-dilemma in atheist circles. The answer is actually quite simple: being all-powerful doesn’t mean being capable of doing impossible things. If your definition of omnipotence includes the ability to do the impossible, then, as a Christian, I have no problem saying that God is not omnipotent, but that is merely a matter of wordplay.
There are many valid criticisms of religion and even of theism, but this one has never really made sense to me.
Well, yeah, if you simply believe different things, then criticisms of the beliefs you don't hold aren't a problem.
Now, I'd wager that out of the ~2.25 billion Christians, about 2 billion of them would be at best skeptical that you qualify as a Christian at all and essentially all of them would vehemently disagree with you, but they disagree with each other about nearly everything too, so you aren't exactly objectively wrong to call yourself a Christian.
However, that doesn't make others wrong to level these criticisms at the vast majority of Christians who do believe that "through God, all things are possible" literally means all things, even things that are otherwise contradictory.
So ... can your god, for example...
Turn water into wine?
Die and then come back to life 3 days later?
Walk on water?
Create the entire universe from nothing?
What exactly is and is not 'impossible' for your god? What kind of god can do those things, but can't, say ... prevent Epstein and his rich friends from raping kids for decades? Why is one possible and the other impossible?
He can't make that 1+1 equals 3. He can't make something exist and not exist at the same time. He can't make freedom without giving the possibility to disobey. These examples exist since at least the Middle Ages…
I'll break it down like this. Is all suffering necessary? Like do infants really need to get leukemia to achieve God's grand plan? Does he have the power to achieve his goal without giving infants leukemia?
It boils down to the fact that either he is not able to, and therefore not all powerful, or he is and chooses to give babies cancer anyway, and therefore not all good.
You seem to think that God is a micromanager which decide everything. It's not the Biblical God. This is explained by the myth of creation (yes it's a myth, but it's not because it's not historical that it's not meaningful). Evil and suffering wasn't in God's plan. What was in God's plan, was freedom for the Creation, which is not possible without an alternative: follow God's will, or not. The Creation chose to try an other way, and God cried. But he respected the choice.
Did God create the universe? Did he know evil and suffering would occur before he created the universe? Could he have created the universe another way?
If the answer to all 3 is yes, everything must be according to his plan. If the answer to any is no, you have to get rid of either all-knowing or all-powerful.
I say no to the last one. But that doesn't mean he's not all-powerful in the proper sense of the word, because he can't do impossible things.
I guess my next question would be why would it be impossible? I'll accept that he can't do logically impossible things, like make a square circle, but the idea that he could have made changes to nature is not logically impossible.
He can change nature. But not in a way that would preserve freedom and make nature obey all his wishes at the same time. That is the squared circle.
I'm not talking about obeying his wishes, I'm talking about unnecessary suffering. Could he make a world with free will and no baby cancer?
Oh? So he's not omnipotent then?
I'll cite myself one message higher:
The passive-aggressive "as per my last email" doesn't magically make that bs make sense. You do understand that, right?
Omnipotence is defined as "unlimited power". god can't do X -> god is not omnipotent. Extremely simple stuff if you're not an apologist.
Like I said, if it's your definition, then I have no problem saying that God is not omnipotent. It's not a gotcha when I already said that I agreed with that…
Well, the christian's claim is that god created the world as it is, in 6 days, and that each day he checked what he did and that he saw it was good. And so he not only created pain for innocent baby animals, but he also validated it as good. May is it onavoidable, but we are still able to regret it. Is our moral highes than god's moral? Or are we wrong and should we train ourself to feel joy at the idea of a new born baby mouse tortured by a cat who may (or not) eat it after his play (when the baby mouse died)?
Even if you take that myth literally, which I don't, he says things are good before the Fall, then before “pain for innocent baby animals”.
If your god is not all powerful, then your religion lied to you about what your god even is.
According to your lore, his will is our reality - he isn't bound by the laws of our universe, he made them. So he didn't just allow evil and suffering to exist, he actively put it here. Why worship a being so full of hate?
No, according to my lore, the world escaped God's will. That's like the first pages of the Bible. That's the meaning of the Fall's myth.
...and which defining pillar of your god are you going to rugpull to rationalize the world being able to escape god's will?
Every explanation for this shit is him situationally not being all powerful, all knowing, or all good.
It depends on how you define the words. Is omnipotence the capacity to do absolutely everything? Then yes, God is not omnipotent. But no philosopher or theologian ever defined omnipotence like that. Using that against Christianity is a strawman. Omnipotence, clearly defined is the capacity to do anything possible. So God can't make a squared circle but he's still omnipotent. He can't create a universe where everything follows his will and still is free at the same time, but he's still omnipotent.
Impossible according to what? The laws of the universe that god made? Couldn't he just as easily have made different laws?
And why is the capability to commit evil always a defining characteristic of free will? We also cannot breathe underwater, fly, or lift a freight train with our god-given anatomy, so do we actually have free will?
Compare it to our own legal system: you have free will to choose what you want for dinner tonight, right? Loads of restaurants with loads of entrees, grocery stores stocked with whatever you need to cook up your creation: the combination of options is unfathomably vast. Free, right? ...but wait, according to the law, you're not allowed to cannibalize your neighbor's 4 year old kid, so I guess that makes you a mindless drone cuz if evil isn't on the menu then neither is free will.
So let's put that restriction back in god's court: he doesn't need to enforce his law, he just wills it and so it is: you still have the unfathomably huge number of non-evil options, but this time cannibalism is actually impossible: you are literally incapable of committing or even considering it because divine intervention will not let you - do you have free will?
Our freedom exists within the constraints of some system. Both legal and divine. There are loads of things we aren't free to do - the capacity to commit evil taken away from us would be a drop in the ocean.
Logic. Logic precedes the Creation.
Because freedom is not absolute, one is always free in relation to something. Since God is love, freedom in relation to God is necessarily the freedom not to love and therefore, the freedom to do evil.
Logic according to what? What makes you believe logic predates creation? If you're citing genesis, you might want to reread it: it's vague as fuck and certainly doesn't address the (non)existence of logic prior to creation.
Kinda sounds like you're making shit up, in which case you might want to review revelations too, which instructs not to do that or sky daddy will give you that eternal spanking.
Yeah no shit, that's half the point of my last post, the other half being why it's so important to you for evil to be part of that freedom, which...
Speaking of logic, that's flawed as fuck. The absence of love is not synonymous with the presence of evil. The absence of love is just the absence of love. All the people, critters, things in your life that you've paid no mind to? That's absence of love. They mean nothing to you - and that's fine. The presence of love? Your friends, family... I don't need to elaborate here do I? But evil? Hopefully this is something you've never been compelled to do - causing suffering for its own sake. That's not fine... and the universe we're stuck in is absolutely stuffed with it.
So again, why does free will - even specifically in the context of freedom from love - have to include evil?
Of course. All the answers are simple, in such a way that it's easy to show how they're all really bad arguments. Such as "Well it's simple really, one of the three main characteristics of god, that literally everyone knows, just isn't true when inconvenient to my position."
Hence the "hype" - it's pretty useful to have an argument that, no matter what people try to argue, immediately has to result in something stupidly obviously illogical, something that contradicts one or more lore points, some cop out bs, bad faith argumentation, or everything all at once.
I explicitly said that there were good criticisms of religion and theism, so please read messages to the end before answering. Atheists, both friends and strangers, asked me very hard questions, and I'm thankful to them for that, because these hard questions made me grow. It's just that this one is not one of them.
See, this is exactly the bad faith argumentation and copout bullshit that I was literally just talking about.
"Please refrain from insinuating that just because you find the argument too difficult, I didn't read it" blah blah etc, see how easy that was and didn't address any of the actual questions? Real obvious stuff.
Maybe it could be, if you had the time, balls and intellectual honesty to engage with it
You can't make strawmen and cry when people don't engage to them.
It's pretty funny, this tone you're taking just because you're on the Shit Arguments side. Which you evidently know, or you'd be able to come up with better stuff.
It's funny indeed because I just took your tone. Look at my answers to other people on this thread: legitimate criticism call serious answers from me. Aggressiveness and strawmen don't.
The Bible says god is allmighty.
In the literal meaning. God has created us, the world and indirectly the universe.
If an allmighty God who has the power to create a world or a universe can't stop catastrophes from happening then what the fuck is wrong with them?
People in the old testament argued that they must have sinned, because God has sent them a catastrophe.
So according to the Bible God is creating catastrophes for a reason....
Not indirectly, he directly created the universe. But the laws of logic still apply. Omnipotence is not the capacity to do everything, but to do everything possible. He can't create a squared circle, but that doesn't mean he's not omnipotent.
Ok but we can agree that God could stop the Nazis from committing genocide?
Which he didn't.
Yes yes I know, freedom of mind and all that shit.
But ok let's say a child born with a disability because of the mother was drinking while pregnant. What did the child do that god let it be born with a crippling disability?
For example god could make us humans not being intoxicated by alcohol. He could perform wonders and heal the child. But it is a long time since the last wonder of God....
Pretty much since our understanding of the world grew and we can logically explain even previous wonders which then weren't ones
What if God were to intervene every time a human being chose evil? Can we imagine such a world? There would be no more suffering, sure, but there would be no freedom either. That is worse than a totalitarian regime; even with surveillance cameras and smartphone trackers, we still retain some private space, if only within our own minds. But what if the dictator is God? He is omnipotent and omniscient; He needs no cameras. Is that really an enviable world? It would be worse than a mere lack of freedom: we would desire to act on our own, yet the axe would fall every single time. Where would the line be drawn: only at serious wrongdoing? Even so, we would know we were constantly being watched. Such a God would rule through fear.
God chose another path; a better one, I think. Rather than imposing Himself upon us or crushing us with His omnipotence (even an omnipotence limited by logic), He chose total weakness. He chose to suffer with us. That is the meaning of the Incarnation and the Cross: He did not die so much for us as with us. He does not impose Himself; He offers an invitation. He does not wish to reign through fear, but through love.
God gave us a law of love so that suffering might cease. He gave us a moral sense. He gave us a reason to fight against disease and natural disasters. He gave us the keys to break the cycle of violence. He gave us everything we need, so let's stop hiding behind Him like spoiled children! And in the meantime, he accompanies those who are suffering and welcomes those who are departing.
maybe
probably not though
it was written
by men
and you know how men are
The bible only claims he created the world.
Reason being the people of that time did not have the concept of an universe yet.
Which is why I said indirectly.