Really more an atheist.

Don’t forget that not long before him Socrates was murdered by the state on the charge of impiety.

Plato in Timeaus refuses to even entertain a rejection of intelligent design “because it’s impious.”

By the time of Lucretius, Epicureanism is very much rejecting intelligent design but does so while acknowledging the existence of the gods, despite having effectively completely removed them from the picture.

It may have been too dangerous to outright say what was on their minds, but the Epicurean cosmology does not depend on the existence of gods at all, and you even see things like eventually Epicurus’s name becoming synonymous with atheism in Judea.

He is probably best described as a closeted atheist at a time when being one openly was still too dangerous.

Or we’re in a microverse powering his spaceship.

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You can simply replace evil with suffering, or ig a christian context might say sin? The point is the paradox is a structure, if any choice of word makes it work, then it works.

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So wait the argument is that yes, by human definition, God is evil, but that he thinks all the atrocities in the world are totally awesome? That doesn’t make him less evil

The problem my agnostic ass meets with good ol’ Epi is the disingenuousness inherent in assuming “Godly” rationale to “human logic” semantics. My dude, people can’t agree on human meaning and I’m supposed to make assumptions on God?

I think the idea here is that this deity being perfect would give some sort of absolute underpinning to the universe, having been designed by an intelligent mind. If it’s made in this systemic way, even if we don’t currently comprehend it properly, given enough time, we should be able to figure out at least some of the rules, providing insight into the nature of things and the mind of the universe’s creator.

I know they didn’t have spring mattresses in your day but the mattress factory also knows the result my mattress should have gotten at testing but tested it anyways…because the testing provides the necessary shape.

The mattress factory isn’t claiming their process is infallible, though, and they have QC exactly because they admit this and don’t want a factory defect to get out to customers. That’s a big difference from the omnipotent, omniscient deity being spoken of in the paradox here.

I already had coffee tho, so the middle atheist ground is in effect; none of it [is] real, nothing matters except trying to not be total cockwaffles so everyone else can enjoy their nihilism too.

This might just be the most British summation of my own beliefs I’ve ever read.

God having different morals makes a lot of sense. If you’re a super being that knows most people are going to end up eternally in a pleasurable afterlife at the end of the day, what’s a little temporary suffering while we meet?

Just saying, going to work isn’t so bad when I know I get to go home, maybe a grab a pizza with the money I earned on the way back.

why not? you can choose to eat a banana or an apple, both perfectly non evil

An all-powerful god wouldn’t be affected by such logic. They could have changed the rules to allow for free will without evil.

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That would fall under the “then God is not good/not all loving”. You described it as if it were a privilege, but the capacity of evil causes indescribable suffering to us and to innocent beings such as small children and animals. If God lets all of this happen just because he wants some replicas of himself or because he thinks it is such a gift to be like him despite it, he’s an egotistical god.

Also, if he gets bored of pure goodness, blissfulness, and perfection, then it was never pure goodness, blissfulness, and perfection for him. Those things, by definition, provide eternal satisfaction. So he either never created that (evil branch again) or he cannot achieve those states even if we wanted to. If he cannot achieve those states even if he wanted to, if he lacks enjoyment and entertainment and has to spice his creation from time to time, then he’s not all powerful.

Also, many people argue the necessity of evil as a requisite for freedom. If God needs to allow evil so we can be free, then he’s bound to that rule (and/or others): not all powerful.

If humans aren’t predictable to this god, then that god isn’t all-knowing.

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In my quick searching, I can’t find much info on it. It seems that he made it in response to the idea that there were Greek gods that were concerned with humanity’s wellbeing and actively took a positive part in our existence. His ideas don’t apply to one religion or even try to say that there is no god, rather he is just saying that the gods are too busy / unconcerned with humanity’s wellbeing which was not the common view of the period.

We don’t know if evil is relative, but you can follow the dilemma with different wording.

We don’t like our wellbeing and our ability to make our own decisions taken away from us. We suffer, which is something we want to avoid in general terms. It goes beyond humanity, as many animals also seem to seek the satisfaction of their will (being it playing, feeding, instinctively reproducing, etc.) and seem adverse to harm and to losing their life.

So… If we are such creatures, it’s natural we don’t like situations and beings that go against this. We don’t like volcanic eruptions when they’re happening with us close the crater. We don’t like lions or bears attacking us. We especially don’t like other humans harming us as we suspect they could have done otherwise in many cases. We simply don’t like these things because of our ‘programming’ or ‘design’.

Problem? There are a few. The first is God asks us to like him when he’s admitting that he is actively doing the things we dislike almost universally as human beings. That makes us fall into internal conflict and also into conceptual dilemmas. Perhaps due to our limitations, but nonetheless real and unsolvable to us.

Then you can argue that the way we are is designed by him, so why design something that is going to live, feel, think certain things as undesirable and then impose such things unto them? Let’s say I cannot say that’s evil, I at least can say it’s impractical as it will certainly cause trouble to his mission of accepting him (and following him). If that obstacle for us is part of the plan, that’s not for me to say, yet it is an obstacle in our view and experience. In human terms, all this might be classified as unfair or sadistic*, which is the reasoning in the guide and how you can follow it in this perhaps closer way.

Now, about this last part, while we can argue that *those terms arise from our own dispositions and might be different to other dispositions (aliens that do not experience pain, for example), is that enough to invalidate our perspective? Then what’s the place of empathy, which I am assuming is also a part of God’s gifts to us? What’s the place of compassion, as written in many religious texts of supposedly divine inspiration? If we need to carry our dispreference, displeasure, dislikeness—suffering—and not to classify it as necessarily evil when the gods impose it to us (as it is our judgment only), then why classify it as evil in other circumstances?

I hope I am getting my new point though. What this all seems to conclude is that if the lack of respect for the suffering of the animal kingdom is not worthy of being classified as bad (for whatever reason, here I argued that because this comes to be only by our characteristics/disposition); if, therefore, we cannot say a god is evil for going against our wellbeing and against our ability to make our own decisions, then I fail to understand many other things that tend to follow religious thinking and even moral thinking.

I agree that “all powerful” is an ambiguity here. For example, the famous “can he make a boulder so heavy he can’t move it?”

There will always be paradoxes in the universe. So you’d have to go to each respective believer to figure out what “all powerful” means. Maybe making a utopia is impossible.

Philosophy is fun