Fun fact, if you arrive at this conclusion as an 8 year old in Sunday school at your ultra fundamentalist Baptist Church and proceed to tell the teacher, you get yelled at and spanked by the teacher and your parents! Ask me how I know.
How do you know?
I think the fundamental issue with this is that it presumes that our understanding of morality is perfect. If an all-knowing, all-powerful God acted contrary to our understanding of morality, or allowed something to happen contrary to our understanding of morality it would make sense for us to perceive that as undermining our understanding of God, making him imperfect. An all-knowing, all-encomposing God may have an understanding that we as mortals are incapable of understanding or perceiving.
It presumes to know a perfect morality while also arguing that morality can be subjective. It doesn't make sense, just like an irrational belief in a God. I think the best way to go about this is to allow people to believe how they want and stop trying to convince people one way another about their beliefs. People get to believe differently and that is not wrong.
Edit: holy shit those reddit comments are full of /r/iamverysmart material lmfao
I don't know if I misunderstood you, but "making millions of people suffer horribly and needlessly for no fault of their own might just be the most ethical thing there is, you never know, so let's not draw any conclusions about God allowing that to happen." just seems like a rather unconvincing line of thought to me. It's essentially just saying "God is always right, accept that"
I guess god just gave us the moral understanding that his (in)actions are insanely immoral to test our unquestioned loyalty to him, or he just likes a little trolling. Or maybe he just doesn't exist...
Any God that could prevent the suffering of millions and still allow it is not a God worthy of your worship.
An all-knowing, all-encomposing God may have an understanding that we as mortals are incapable of understanding or perceiving.
That being could make us understand.
If you skip the "evil" part and just start talking about "things that are bad for us humans" it's still true though. Sure, maybe child cancer is somehow moral or good from the perspective of an immortal entity, but in this case this entity is obviously operating on a basis that is completely detached from what's meaningful to us. Our lives, our suffering, our hardship - obviously none of all this is relevant enough to a potential god to do anything about it. Or he would, but can't. Hence the Epicurean paradox.
One answer I've heard from religious people is that life after death will make up for it all. But that doesn't make sense either. If heaven/paradise/whatever puts life into such small perspective that our suffering doesn't matter, then our lives truly don't mean anything. It's just a feelgood way of saying god couldn't care less about child cancer - because in the grand scheme of things it's irrelevant anyway.
To us humans, our lives aren't meaningless. Child cancer isn't irrelevant. We care about what's happening in this life and to the people we care about. How could a god be of any relevance to us if our understanding of importance, of value, of good and bad, is so meaningless to them? Why would we ever construct and celebrate organized religion around something so detached from ourselves? The answer is: We wouldn't.
Either god is relevant to our lives or he isn't. Reality tells us: He isn't. Prayers don't work, hardship isn't helped, suffering isn't stopped. Thought through to it's inevitable conclusion the Epicurean paradox is logical proof that god as humans used to think about him doesn't exist, and if something of the sorts exists, it's entirely irrelevant to us.
I think the fundamental issue with this is that it presumes that our understanding of morality is perfect.
By that measure, all religions have the fundamental issue of presuming that they have any actual knowledge or understanding of their god(s).
"Uhhh mysterious ways is why children get cancer"
This is a copout and you're a silly little guy
What's the definition of "all powerful"? Would an all-powerful being need to be able to draw a square without it being a rectangle? Or to build a house without walls?
If the answer is "no", then I'd argue that the left most arrow/conclusion is logically wrong/misplaced/invalid. Assuming that "free will" is not possible without "evil".
Agreed.
Evil is also a subjective concept, the same action can be perceived as good or evil depending on the understood context.
When you allow action on the subjective experience of life aka free will, you also allow evil to emerge from those actions as those interaction collide with the subjective experience of others.
Well sure. You could argue that evil is subjective. But even so we could just go with gods definition of "evil" things and use the 10 commandments as what he deems good or bad. In which case he created a world in which people will do the things he told them not to (same with the Apple) which makes him either not good or not all powerful.
Personally God becomes a lot more palettable when he is a non all powerful and non all knowing higher dimensional being that just created us and can't be fucked dealing with this problem he created. Like avoiding cleaning the dishes in the sink.
I wouldn’t put too much credibility towards the commandments or any established religions for that matter.
The personification of god has always bothered me. The meme is a very effective argument against the all knowing super human god dogma with its cryptic masterplan but it falls flat when you personally relate god more to an intelligent-conscious force of nature.
That's the thing, it seems too simplistic, though probably is a good start towards something, better understanding I suppose.
Like all planar squares must be rectangles, but curved square nonplanar washers exist... and those neither disprove nor prove the existence of a God (or Gods, or any spiritual beings at all)?:-P
The devil as they say is in the details, like what exactly is evil, in order to go from mere wordplay to true philosophical understanding. imho at least.
One day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you'll agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half submerged log.
As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen. Mother and children dining upon mother and children.
And that is when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.
-Sir Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
there is a non terminating loop in this diagram and that is where god is mic drop
I had a conversation that ended up like this with someone who was genuinely trying to convert me to Christianity once. He eventually argued that god doesn't need to be all powerful to be worshipped, since he is at least extremely powerful.
Sounds like he was worshipping a mid tier god. At least it’s better than those waste of space reasonably powerful ones.
This presupposes that "evil" exists as a universal concept that a god is bound, versus a god that exists outside of concepts of morality.
Seem confusing?
That's right - because anything that's made up and subject to interpretation IS!
One of the funniest things humanity has done is to invent the concept of God as a super entity and then reduce him/them/it to their level.
Why would a super entity be bound by "love" which only humans understand ? Why would "it" have the concept of "evil", something that humans invented out of fear.
As a species we just need to accept we are just stupid.
"why can't god create a boulder so heavy that even the can't carry it?" even as a child trying to trick god with basic paradoxes sounded funny to me.
The existence of those paradoxes could also mean that omnipotence in itself is simply impossible.
I once heard omnipotent doesn't mean they can overturn logic itself, which seems a little unintuitve to me, but hey why not.
Being unbound by logic / information theory would make it impossible to reason about anything at all
Just being the devil advocate here: I disagree with the "destroy Satan" part, Satan isn't the definition of evil, he is only the HR department that deal with the evil people, and the part of God not stopping evil, maybe he don't because it go against free will? About the not loving, he promises a perfect infinity world after all of this, after a few centuries of perfection you don't care/remember I guess
Good advocate. Anyway, "God not stopping evil, maybe he don’t because it go against free will" - That enters the loop at the bottom. Could God create a universe where free will exists, but evil does not exist? If yes, then why didn't He? If He could not create such a universe, then he's not all powerful and/or not all loving and good.
"About the not loving, he promises a perfect infinity world after all of this" - Then why do we have to go through this initial, temporary and imperfect part?
Literally advocating for the devil.
Maybe Satan is also all-powerful, and each time they fight it's a coin toss. Unstoppable force meets unmovable object.
Assuming that Christianity is even slightly based in fact and that entities like God and Satan actually exist.
But if Satan is all powerful then God is not, as God could not hold power over Satan.
Kind of falls apart if rejecting the idea of objective good and evil and interpreting the parable of the fruit of knowledge in Eden as the inheritance of a relative knowledge of good and evil for oneself which inherently makes any shared consensus utopia an impossibility.
In general, we have very bizarre constraints on what we imagine for the divine, such as it always being a dominant personality.
Is God allowed to be a sub? Where's the world religion built around that idea?
What about the notion that the variety of life is not a test for us to pass/fail, but more like a Rorsarch test where it allows us to determine for ourselves what is good or not?
Yes, antiquated inflexible ideas don't hold up well to scrutiny. But adopting those as the only idea to contrast with equally inflexible consideration just seems like a waste of time for everyone involved, no?
I have never before encountered an "aC" dating system. A quick google shows the dates to line up with BC, but it's still new.
evil exists -> no
Honestly that's probably the only way out of the problem of evil.
That said you are on a path of ethical relativism, and from a practical standpoint it's fucked up beyond belief.
Also so much of religion is founded on the good/ evil dynamic that if this was removed, everything else would crumble.
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