If GAE were true, the God of the OT is worse than Dawkins and Hitchens describe

Foreseen frustrations deliberately being programmed into the world as natural evils by a temporally omnipresent divine being?

36oq5t

I can’t do this topic.

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God has authority to decide anything because that is what God is: the Creator of the Universe who defines its rules and defines what is good or evil. We can’t even fully understand the behavior of insects and electrons; I think we know that we can’t understand the overall purpose of the Universe.

So assuming God exists, I don’t think we are in a position to say that our suffering is pointless. We have no right to question God’s plans and actions. See the book of Job.

You will appreciate that I found none of your linked arguments compelling or even interesting. Nor did I find your central claim supported by them.

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I deny that being the creator gives him the right to make such decisions, and you fall into the Euthyphro dilemma. Job raises a number of theological problems that we could discuss some time; for one thing, God acts reprehensibly.

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I give God no authority over my life whatsoever.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: Poof He is gone

I don’t know why anyone thought this post should be flagged. That was funny. :slight_smile:

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So, what in your view gives someone or something the right to make decisions about good and evil?

how about their own reasoning, morals, ethics and values?

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It doesn’t seem to be a right. If there is something that’s objectively good or evil, nobody decides that; it just is. If it’s good or evil because God says so, that’s not objective; it’s arbitrary. If there is only subjective good or evil, each person must decide.

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Why is this the case? Is God’s opinion just one among others? Who or what do you think God is?

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No, I’m not. I’m pointing out that your claim that “Unless God’s plan includes allowing us to respond to suffering by improving our conditions and helping each other in our mortal lives” fails because there frequently is and was no way for people to improve their conditions.

It is not at all informative, since it is based on an unjustified assumption and there is no reason to believe it is true. While you are right that this does not make it false, it doesn’t render it convincing either.

Unnecessarily for the purpose you gave, as is shown by the fact that such suffering is not universal - which fact you deleted from your response.

Yes, I’ve read many many attempts to deal with the problem of suffering - and, like yours, they all distil to
‘There must be a reason why God allows such suffering, but I don’t know what it is’.

Which is equivalent to ‘There is a gaping hole in my argument for which I have no solution’.

Come back when you have enough data or capacity or understanding to work out why your god allows suffering. In the meantime, I’ll stick with my own obvious solutions to the problems you find so intractable.

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As you know, I don’t think there is such a thing at all. But if there were, how would you deal with the Euthyphro dilemma?

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But if you want to say something doesn’t exist, then you surely must have at least some idea of what it is that you think doesn’t exist. So I’m curious to know, what kind of God do you think doesn’t exist?

As for Euthyphro, I have my own preferred solution to the dilemma which I will want to tell you later. But I also feel that I won’t be able to articulate it well without first understanding what baggage you mean by the word “God”.

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What do you understand is my idea of God?

I think that no kind of God, or god, exists. But here we’re specifically talking about the sort of God you are assuming: omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent. Beyond that, the Euthyphro dilemma applies to any God (or god) who is assumed to be the source of moral rules; it shows that there can be no such source, whatever its nature.

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Obviously you didn’t find them interesting - I can tell from my site stats that you only read the summary post where I list my arguments, and the only first post of the two that I linked specifically - so you were not intrigued enough to read much of where I actually flesh the arguments out. And obviously you dnn’t find them compelling, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. (Though it’s a different question whether your rejection of these kind of lines of reasoning is rationally justified.)

But that isn’t the point. The point is that I have reasons for believing that God exists and that God is good, reasons which are rationally justified as best as I can tell. And it’s more obvious to me that those reasons are true than the crucial premise of the argument from evil, that God’s existence and goodness is impossible or implausible given the existence of evil.

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Your site stats are wrong. I went to all three of the links. Though I found references to subsequent posts, I didn’t see any links to them. Where were they?

Best I can tell, your reasons are not rational at all, and would be considered so only by a person who already believes their conclusion.

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OK, this is true, but not complete. What would be the difference between God and a group of aliens from Planet X who are practically omniscient, omnipotent, and also omnibenevolent (relative to humans), due to their superlative technological capabilities?

I don’t know, though it would seem as if “omni” is not a relative prefix. Why do you ask?