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
Don’t know why so many children in developing countries need to be tested so much. That QA department has warped priorities.
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?
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.
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?
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…
Imagine murdering a family member of someone’s and claiming you’re just testing them.
That’s God in their situational view of things.
Feeling cute
Might give a kid bone cancer and kill him with a horrible, expensive, slow and painful death to test his parents later. Idk
I read a book back in the day that had the idea of a God that was just as confused about his origin as we were. He didn’t know how he was made, so he experimented and made Earth with the hope that he will create another version of himself. I think he got bored in the story and stopped checking on us. Idk it’s been a while.
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
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
The “toddler god” idea has a flaw; he’d have tantrums.
Like flooding the entire earth?
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
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.
This perfectly lines up with a series called Miracle Workers and in it Steve Buscemi is God and he’s an absolute fuck up.
“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.
“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?”
― EpicurusOr 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.
But if we’re “made in His image,” wouldn’t benevolence be a question of mood? The reality is that Father is in Heaven, therefore, he has poor awareness of the maladies of the flesh so he needed a meat thermometer (his boy)?
Isn’t it supposed to be omniscient too? Also Catholics say god is perfect and maximally just so no mood should affect it.
Omniscient and omnipotent are mutually exclusive, as knowing what will happen means the future is locked in.
Not really. Nothing says that an omniscient being wouldn’t know all possible futures that depend on its decisions in the present.
Most of the Bible clearly illustrates the malevolence of the Christian god…
Meanwhile gnostics: Yes
Cathars: yes
Ancient (and a very few modern) Gnostics decided to run with “God is an asshole and we are all prisoners here”
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.
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…
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.
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.
So we’re really just making this shit up.
I mean. Yeah
I personally think if there is one capital G god, that being most certainly just want some fun and we are a massive source of entertainment for that God.
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.
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
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.
religious people will probably point to Job without breaking a sweat
