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[Cthulhu]

My problem with the Epicurus argument:  If God is actually truly omnipotent, then he doesn't have to behave logically and you can't predict his actions with logic, making the argument useless.  If he isn't omnipotent, then you can't say in good faith that he is able to eliminate all suffering (Christians usually use free will to explain the existence of evil).

[MetalSlimeHunt]

My problem with the Epicurus argument:  If God is actually truly omnipotent, then he doesn't have to behave logically and you can't predict his actions with logic, making the argument useless.

It doesn't make the argument useless, it makes theology as a whole useless. Humans operate on logical guidelines. We cannot conceive of non-logical thought. There's no point in even talking about it then, you might as well say "It's magic." and refuse to elaborate.

If he isn't omnipotent, then you can't say in good faith that he is able to eliminate all suffering (Christians usually use free will to explain the existence of evil).

If he's so unpowerful he can't make any difference, I think we can safely say he isn't a god. That makes you or I more powerful, since we are all capable of positively affecting the world where as this god's actions are currently unrecognized.

[Reudh]

So that's the name of that idea!

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?

[kaijyuu]

Is our god Omnipotent and Good? If so, then why does disease, famine and other horrors occur?

Ooh I like this one since you have to think outside the box to understand why a god can be omni-benevolent and allow suffering.

First off, don't be constrained by your own perspective. Consider the situation from His.


Analogy: Video game design. A designer makes a world for you to play around in, and they have a goal in mind for you when you play it. They want you to have fun.

But as you should know, games aren't fun without obstacles. And hitting an obstacle isn't exactly a pleasant experience (outside of DF anyway). I doubt you cheer every time you fall into a pit in Mario. So, is the designer "bad" or "evil" because they added a feature that can make your experience unpleasant? Of course not; that obstacle may provoke a negative reaction, but it's necessary for the game to work. Also note perspective; to Mario, falling into a pit is one of the worst things that can happen to him. If he were sentient, he'd probably consider it horrific since it's at or near the bottom of his scale of "good vs bad," "pleasure vs pain." It's one of the few things that can kill him regardless of what powerup he has, even a star! How horrific!


So, God makes his own world (or worlds) too! But his goal isn't the same as a video game designer's. It probably is not fun. In fact, insert whatever goal you want for him here; I'm going with "learning and growing" since that's the most common theory.

In order to teach you stuff, he's probably going to have to have obstacles. And they won't be fun. They'll be unpleasant, most likely. And due to our limited perspective, horrific. We're in Mario's position here, unable to see outside the world we exist in. So, our measure of "good vs bad" will cap off at the worst and best this world has to offer, much like Mario's caps off at the worst and best his world does. In God's perspective however, where our lives are pretty damn short and transient, that little bit of pain isn't of much more concern than Mario falling into a pit is to us. It serves a purpose and isn't inherently evil. Misery builds character, essentially.



Now you could argue that killing babies with nasty diseases and stuff like that doesn't seem to serve any useful purpose to teach anyone anything. I probably agree with you, there. But if we accept God being omnipotent, he probably stacked the deck to make everything have a purpose, even if you can't see it. You can only see the effects of an event on the world from your tiny perspective, while God can see the effects of everything. He understands chaos theory; you're terrified by it.

[Reudh]

Hmm, I guess, but the whole idea of god going "Oh, I made this fantastic new creature, I shall call it the Guinea Worm!" and then having that guinea worm drunken by someone thirsty, and having it burst out through an eyeball in gruesome fashion (rare, usually affects arms, trunk or legs), especially if it's a child, really doesn't make me feel good.

Knowing that there are people suffering through no fault of their own pains me. I would do something about it too if my financial situation ever picks up.

Is it a 'course hazard'?

If so, then this is the most creepy course hazard I have ever seen.

Is it because to make some people's lives pleasure others must suffer?
What a whacky god of balance that is.

No. We humans make a mess of our world enough as it is without putting things down to 'Oh, god did it because we were foolish/needed to grow/didn't sacrifice enough virgins/whatever.'

[kaijyuu]

Is it because to make some people's lives pleasure others must suffer?
What a whacky god of balance that is.

This is why, if life is a "test" or a "learning experience" of some sort, I would think multiple universes tailored to each and every participant would be ideal, rather than sticking everyone in the same one.

Maybe you're the only one that "really" exists and the rest of us are NPCs, who's lives are tailored to teach/test you. Or not, since I exist, therefore you're the NPC. So ha!

No. We humans make a mess of our world enough as it is without putting things down to 'Oh, god did it because we were foolish/needed to grow/didn't sacrifice enough virgins/whatever.'

Maybe God did it so we'd band together and solve the problem. He plopped down something nasty so we could overcome it, not so we could suffer by it. He doesn't want sacrifices, he wants us to get our shit together.

Maybe. I dunno what's going through a dude's head that I don't know exists or not. Maybe we're in a Dwarf Fortress equivalent and he's laughing as we get brutally slaughtered.

[Graebeard]

kaijyuu, your answer to the problem of evil is popular (Milton's paradise lost may be my favorite example) but I've never heard the video game analogy.  I like it, but I'll have to think more on it.

The free will and, for lack of a better phrase, "character" argument is sometimes compelling, but I suspect I would be less open to it if I were more directly familiar with true suffering.  I've had bad things happen to me and to my friends/family, but any way you slice it I'm still in the to 10% of all humans ever to exist regarding quality of life, opportunity, safety and medical care.

[cerapa]

I think calling a near-omnipotent entity "evil" or anything else to be a futile matter, simply due to of the completely different perspective that such an entity might have. Its not guaranteed that we absolutely anything in common in terms of morality.

For example, I could even bring up ourselves. With our imaginations we can create universes without absolutely any effort. And with some effort, we can even make them consistent in terms of rules and events. For practical purposes, we are gods in these universes, as we have absolute control over everything, with the exception of what we prohibit ourselves from doing(can you create a rock you cant lift?). We are constantly destroying universes because we simply forget about them. From the perspective of the inhabitants, this is absolutely horrible. But from ours it is nothing. If anyone dies in our thoughts, then we dont care, and if we did, then we can just bring him/her back, simply by choosing for that to happen. Everything that anyone thinks is purely our own choice. If we wanted to build "character" into someone, we could just will it to be so. Everything that happens is isolated from us, nothing from it could hurt us, or challenge our power.

[Jelle]

The existence of a god is, by nature of godhood, impossible to measure. Therefore it is impossible to make any logical argument to either prove or disprove the satement. Frankly I think claiming either to be true is a silly waste of thought.
This extends to believing in any theory that cannot or has not yet been proven/disproven. Humanity has a tendency to fill up missing information, often through wishful thinking, a trait I think has no place in logical thought.

Just my thought on the matter. Don't hate me if I insulted someone by poor choice of words, english isn't my native language

[The Fool]

Might be a bit odd, but I choose to fashion my own beliefs based on what I read and believe.

I believe that the world was created from a single, one dimensional point of energy that burst into light at the Big Bang event. The light vibrated in one dimensional space, creating an unstable vacuum of light.

As for an afterlife there is at least ghosts. Whether it's a parallel dimension, or electro-magnetic waves within the brain I don't know. No one really does. All I know is that I had one hell of a haunted house before, and everyone in my family and one other person saw something in that house.

Other than that I have an odd miss match of beliefs from the Bible, Koran, and Soloman's Key (hooray for the occult). I'm still piecing together what to believe, but I don't think that any single religion has it exactly right. I don't really want to discuss my beliefs in detail until I piece everything together. All that I'll say is that there is no true good or evil.

[GlyphGryph]

Since there were some questions, I will present my evidence for god(s) and the logical conclusion to wish they lead. There are a few a great many assumptions involves that I find reasonable, but they may end up being wrong, mostly based on evidence reaching well beyond it's scope. Hence the low and almost completely random confidence states earlier and the susceptibility of it to changes in the evidence.

0) Gods are relative. Gods may or may not have their own creator deities, and may or may not consider themselves gods when compared to their creators (but might, when compared to their creations). Evidence, again, comes from our own experience with other humans, which may not hold and the fact that causal chains do not simply "stop", in our experience.

1) There are an infinite number of universes. This is the biggie - it's not needed for this calculation to hold, but the more universes there are the more likely it is to be true that our universe was created (and is potentially managed) by god(s). We know at least several universes exist, though, since we are able to fabricate them, but this assumption is relative to the number of universes that exist at our complexity level or greater.

2) We are able to fabricate inferior artificial universes. See: Dwarf Fortress. These have their own internal rules and logic, and while they certainly don't have the complexity of properties we'd associate with our own universe, I would argue they still manage to exist.

3) Each universe of sufficient complexity that contains intelligent life will contain at least one species that desires and eventually obtains the ability to fabricate somewhat complex artificial universes, containing "living" beings. Any universe without complex beings can be removed from our calculations (because we aren't in one of them) and this is justified for those primarily by the fact that universes are big (or at least ours is).

4) Any universe with the ability to create one such artificial universe will create more than one. Again, this seems reasonable - we rarely do things once, and it's unlikely we are the only race to ever exist.

5) From 3 and 4, one can deduce that the number of artificial universes will quickly dwarf the number of "natural" universes (should such a thing exist).

6) This is only compounded by the fact that artificial universes are those most likely to be conducive to the development life, mirroring the experience of an entity that exists in a universe that was clearly conducive to life.

7) This is compounded again by the fact that universes of sufficient complexity and fidelity should be capable of creating universes of sufficient complexity and fidelity to create universes capable of creating ours, and so on up the chain.

Conclusion: We most likely find ourselves within an artificial universe. We do, in fact, have gods, one or more depending on whether you consider the observer/programmer/button-flicker all equally gods - though we know nothing about them, and have no way of interacting with them. We have no idea what, if any, tools they have with which to observe us, if they've even noticed that in the entire universe our particular species exists, or interact with us. We have no idea what their morality is, what they find good or bad or humorous, or if they hold us, simple artificial beings, of being of any value. (again, if they've even noticed we exist)

Random supposition:
They might be entirely capricious, or distant observers only using us as educational models. They may be oblivious, having decided not to watch the universe's progress (yet) at all.

Any of their actions are, by definition, super natural - they are not governed by our universal laws, and they are likely not constrained by them in any interactions they might have with us. They can see and do anything, but might not, because like us they are merely mortal, and time and effort are precious and their intellect is not unlimited. They are, to us, effectively omniscient (they can see anything they wish to see, and if they keep logs, anything that ever was, and maybe even run and revert the whole thing, giving them knowledge of the future barring intervention) and omnipotent (they literally control everything - but this does not mean they are in absolute control, since like in sim games, such control would be an incredibly amount of effort for little reward.

[RAM]

Be snotipmussa rou lliw tawh so? Ngithemos sdeen tub "[cenerefer edshilbup ees] in denifed as yportne in noticuder a is doog..." to "Yppah M'i newh is doog!" morf ngithyna be dlouc it, esicerp be to deen tnsoe'd notiinifed eth. Ngineam veah to redro in notiinifed esriquer ngithyerve.

Nevorp be to slaif tath ngeib yna of ytilarom eth teufer to detagilbo yllarom am I reofreeth. Cenedive lebiafirev of cenesba eth in do tonnac I, veitanertla of tros meos is reeth tath eddivorp, chiwh, ytiriorepus larom sti edmirfnoc, ytiliba my of tseb eth to, dah I sselnu reulaif larom a be to veah dlouw tnemtimmoc a chus. Sdog of rouvaf in ytilarom nwo my nodnaba I tath reiquer dlouw dna, me to riorepus yllarom is dog tath estats doog is dog.

Veers ouy owh esoth of ssenithrow eth yfirev to ytud a veah ouy, notiearc rou rof it ngiwo to as... Ytnaiterc latot a yllautca is esitilibissop sseltimil of tou ytilear neo of cenatsixe eth os, nosierv a is cenatsixe of cenecsba eth neve, tsixe to sah ytilear of nosierv meos. Yrassecennu dna tnevalerri, llew, is dlrow rou of rotearc eth as dog.

Yrotsih in stca edliver ylsouminanu tsom eth of meos of treah eth at notisequ a be to smees chiwh, 'noserp' a be to ederdisnoc ton is or is tawh of erttam a be to smees lla it. Soulucidir smees sertcarach eth to notiaerdisnoc ngitnarg of eadi eth, seac erthei in. Tcilfnoc yartrop to is noticif citamard geaerva eth of tnoip eth as tsuj, ytisioruc sti yfsitas to stimil of dlrow a edtearc dog, stimil touthiw ngieb a as, tath be to smees ioranesc lacitcarp tsom eth. Tsixe soed dog tath ngimussa.

Dilav ylveitcejbo ylrean yrev is dna flesti seoprup eth of keas eth rof notiaverserp-fles dna, ytiliba of keas eth rof tnempoleved latnem, notiaripsni of keas eth rof ytisrevid sgearoucne it... Ytilarom of cerous a as seoprup a of tuisrup eth keil I. Yrartibra of nosiufni an thiw meas eth yllacisab is ytilarom siougiler. Serttam leacs-geral or mert-ngol rof chum do tnsoe'd tub ytiecos a nginaitnaim at doog ytterp is it. Ssem a of tib a be to smees lla it ytilarom namuh of uessi eth on.

Y.T.
Iinas rouy vereserp to erdro in nosisucsid erthruf morf flesym veomer to veah lliw I so it to dettimmoc am I tub lepeop meos erthob to smees deoc my sp.

[kaijyuu]

I decoded about 3 lines of that before giving up.

[Fenrir]

I have no interest in understanding anyone that has no interest in being understood.

Megaman, having cancer limits one’s choices, and it is not always the result of us “screwing up”. One does not choose cancer (people do get cancer without smoking, so do not bother mentioning that), and it interferes with the exercise of one’s own will by forcing the person to deal with it or die, or even deal with and die anyway.

So now, it causes harm and interferes with our free will, so why would a benevolent god invent something like that? This is just one example; there are innumerable other hardships that are not our fault and do not contribute to our free will.

GlyphGryph, that is the best argument that I have ever heard. I need to think about it more, but I can not immediately be sure that there is something wrong with it.

[DrPoo]

INB4TEHLOCK

I dunno, i recently abandoned christianity, mostly in protest against my mother.
I dunno if there is a god or not, but i get mad when people say "There is"/"There isnt"/"Exists"/"Dosent Exist", because really, we cant proove their existence, nor their nonexistence.

I like that buddhism stuff, though

Oh yeah, also if i was god i would for sure have made the universe logical, and therefore explainable by science. Who knows if god just obscures itself from logic.
Oh yeah, and i would also be both ben and malevolent, i dunno something is just fun.

Maybe we are like the toys of some cosmic horror equalivent of a child with an antfarm.