God Is Impossible: Problem of Evil

That is a good point. Take for example killing. Every animal does it in order to eat and survive - even humans. But killing and eating other humans is considered horrible. It is a value judgement created because humans have the ability to think. In past religions human sacrifice was considered a good thing because it appeased the gods. Animals would never do that. They only kill to eat or to defend themselves.

 

What the hell that guy - whoever he is - has to do with this conversation is presumably a secret you'll take to your grave.

If only you knew how close that is to the truth.

You're under the impression members of cannibalistic societies don't have the ability to think?

 

Make up your mind then: Is God to blame for not stopping our misery? Or not?
I don't see how if there is no God.

There is much misery and sadness. But also much joy and kindness. I admire the people I know who get much comfort from God and do much good for their fellow human beings (even though I can't escape the conclusion that God is a non intervening
being)...But hey! I could be wrong.

It's better to dwell in the light
than darkness.

 

Dude you're a trip. You said God makes things good by mere command - which logically includes the Holocaust. Congratulations that puts you in a very select class of fanatics. You also said God couldn't make certain things good by command (like the Holocaust) because there are reasons why something should be considered good. Isn't logic fun?

 

That remains a problem of your definition of love. Love always has a object to act upon. "You eat fish such that you can't be a loving person" is a fallacious statement as fish is never used as a measurement of your love". Similarly, a Shepherd is supposed to love only His sheep but not the wolves trying to harm them, that is He's supposed to hate the wolves.

 

PERFECT!!!! That shows you're failure to understand unconditional love, -or to even think about it!

[yawn]

 

It's rather a human centered line of fallacious reasoning.

Heaven is a place maintained by God as it's His dwelling place. Any place outside His dwelling place is a hell. Ever since Adam was driven out of Eden (a dwelling place of God), humans are not living inside God's realm. That's why Satan is said to be the god of this place, by his power, his influence and his freewill.

Earth is never the ultimate goal, the ultimate goal is the final heaven. An analogy is that Heaven is like an aquarium while earth acts as its filter. A filter is never supposed to be clean or else it loses its functionality. A filter is supposed to fill with 'evil' such that a clean aquarium is assured and secured. Earth as a filter is for all kind of evil (due to freewill) to show up openly and under witnessing such that they can be legitimately destroyed once and for all.

 

Your mother's love can be unconditional but only for you, not the one trying to harm you. That's the basic concept you however get it wrong! Unconditional never means your mother loves everyone (or everything) alike. It always has an object to act upon.

 

THEN IT IS CONDITIONAL UPON THE IDENTITY OF THE SUBJECT. Sheesh.

 

No I don't think that and I didn't say that.

 

I know well. God lives in the gaps, as it were.

 

One more question, is this itself an instance of human reasoning (the idea that God transcends human thought) applied to how God thinks? If true, wouldn't your point be self-defeating?

 

No doubt the voices in your head attest to your veracity, but the record tells quite a different story.

Then what, exactly, does the capacity for thought have to do with the not quite universal stricture against cannibalism?

You have no idea.

Not really on point; but since you went there, it's worth noting that people who imagine science chases God out of any gaps have never considered in any depth the implications of Quantum Mechanics.

 

Lol. Here you go:

Well that was easy. If the good is good because God commands it, then he can command anything (including the Holocaust) to be moral, since the only reason anything is moral is if God makes it so. I even gave you a second chance, but you doubled down.

No doubt you have done that.

 

Yes, thank you for saving me the trouble of reciting your misrepresentation.

Non sequitur, because it's not in Him to do that, any more than it was in Rembrandt to present feces thrown at a canvas as a work of art.

To be sure, but the proposition you fraudulently attribute to me doesn't follow from that.

Clearly you misunderstand, or are pretending to misunderstand, everything you just quoted.

 

There's another option, "God" is not separate from the experience of suffering. All of consciousness is directly nondual from """"God"""""....such a fabricated word by the way...so humanized.

 

Since all rulers are appoited by Yahweh to disobey or to be unloyal to them is to be be disobedient and disloyal to Yahweh himself.

The purpose of the biblical stories is to teach complete obedience and loyalty to the Boss. It's a military code of conduct intended for everyone.

 

I don't. It doesn't. I didn't say it did.

 

So there are somethings that are impossible for God to command to be good?

So goodness is not something that comes from being commanded by God (but from his nature)?

 

Given this,

I daresay one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. How about you?

Right.

Wrong, since His commands proceed from His nature.

 

The Buddha said: If God permits evil to exist, He cannot be good, and if He is powerless to prevent it, He cannot be God.

What to make of the Buddhist viewpoint? Perhaps chalk it up to this: they are said to be atheists (yet are spiritually and morally admirable. The Dalai Llama seems to be one of the finest humans on the planet).

IMO, the arguments cited in the OP have no validity. The existence of evil is not mysterious, problematic, or decreed. God is present only as a humanized ideal and a program regulating space-time reality, perhaps attributable to an Absentee Landlord/Creator.

 

Unless
A) we actually deserve what happens without realizing it, or
B) it serves some greater good, in a way that we can't fully comprehend

Another possibility is that evil could be relatively insignificant compared to some higher level of future existence. As analogy, grabbing away a lollypop from a happily content baby and then the baby cries. Or an employee who steals lots of money out of a safe and gets away with it, but actually it was all a test and the founder of the company would have turned the company over to him and made him CEO if he had been honest.

 

This is incoherent. If his commands proceed from his nature, then it's his nature that confers the goodness, not the command -> God commands the good because it's good. And as you have said, God doesn't have the power to make something good by mere command (e.g. the Holocaust) - so goodness is not something that is conferred on something (or made good) by virtue of being commanded, since as you say, there are somethings that are impossible for God to command to be good, but by virtue of God's nature, which the command then reflects.

Again: A) Does God command the good because it is good? or B) Is it (the good) good because God commands it.

You replied "either or both." It can't be both or you would have a viciously circular argument (begging the question): God commands the good because it's good and it is good because God commands it. So we can dismiss that fairly quickly. So it has to be one or the other. You have claimed A is true (God commands something because its good - grounded in his nature) and thus have denied that B is true - that anything can be made good by a command from God (because there are somethings that God cannot command to be good). So your claim that it can be either A or B has been refuted...by your own argument. And you are left with A (or perhaps you want to claim that your position is separate from A and represents a novel approach to this issue C - but if this were the case, you should have claimed that neither A and B are true, which is traditionally how this objection goes).

But the claim that God's nature is good in and of itself still has to be justified. Would God's nature be good no matter what it is? If yes, then the concept of the good is completely arbitrary (and therefore meaningless). No matter what God's nature/character is, he would be good. If no, then presumably there are some properties that God must have in order to be considered good or some reasons for why some properties are thought to be better than others and those moral reasons would be external to God. If you deny this and say there is no external reasons separate from God (that God's nature alone grounds morality), then you beg the question (since you have given no explanation for why God's nature is good - i.e. you haven't explained why one ought to think that God is good). In other words, the claim that "God is good" would literally be nonsense because the term "good" is unintelligible. Moreover, you commit yourself to a pretty thorough-going nihilism in that without God there would be no morality, so if God didn't exist then there would be nothing immoral about the Holocaust. Meaning that the immorality/badness of the Holocaust has nothing to do with the extraordinary suffering of its victims (since that suffering takes place regardless of whether or not God exists).

 

No, there's a perceptual deficiency on your end.

No, you're speciously trying to detach the latter from the former, when they are no more separable than is malice aforethought from an act of murder.

It can be, and it is.

No, it's just exposing the hidden premise of the question (that it can't be both) as unfounded.

 

I think the major point that is being missed is we are conceptualizing "God" as separate from our experience. God is not separate from our own suffering.