I’ll wait to respond to that until you respond to my actual question. Your post assumed you can reason that a God could exist that would not be like the God of the OT. I’m curious how you’ve done so and what his character would be.
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Sorry, I misunderstood the question; I thought you asked how I thought the OT God was a douche.
If a God were to exist, God would probably be similar to the Universalist All Loving God typically depicted in NDE stories at www.nderf.org; the God depicted in the 4700 NDE stories there is definitely not a jealous God and is fine with us making mistakes and learning from them.
A rather more fatherly/motherly God than even the Christian God of the bible.
I looked at the website but I’m not really seeing a summary of who God is. So this God does what if we don’t learn from our mistakes? Is he sovereign or powerless over events? Does He love everyone including the worst of humanity - Hitler, serial killers, etc?
Here’s a few examples
https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1sandi_t_ndes.html
https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1nancy_r_ndes.html
https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1rachel_f_nde.html
You seem completely unable to grasp the idea that “it says so in this old collection of texts I have” isn’t a compelling reason to accept any of it. If you want to persuade someone to come over to your side of things, you should try to wrap your head around this idea that they don’t already believe it(otherwise they wouldn’t need that persuasion). Thus to merely regurgitate the texts at us is guaranteed to remain ineffective.
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I don’t really see why that would be the case. The idea of a god who is all-loving and nice, or at least is supposed to be, is pretty much an invention of the people whose beliefs gave rise to Judaism. Most other Gods are prone to the full range on human emotions and motivations.
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I was explaining that I don’t have a problem with God working the way He describes in the Bible in the text that @Witchdoc pointed out. If I have to go through suffering in order to bring someone else to repentance, that’s OK with me. Besides those verses are pointing to the covenant of grace. God had warned Israel in the old covenant that if they didn’t obey they would be exiled and perish. But still He didn’t give up on the nation - they had to see there was no life there in exile to turn back to Him.
Even if you think sharing Bible texts is ineffective; the Bible says differently.
In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; 17 and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, 18 praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication.
So even if sharing the Bible has no effect on you; I just defended my faith and I took steps toward memorizing more scripture. I also pray for you.
I appreciate that your posts are almost always informative and substantive whether about science or other topics.
What do you suggest would be persuasive? As far as beliefs or non-belief of those in the forum, I probably know the least about yours.
I don’t think those are the only two possibilities, or rather there are embedded limiting assumptions that may or may not be true. You mention God would have had to send the pandemic, but it could also have been that God held back the pandemic until the mRNA tech was in place. On the other side you said that God would have had to create the vaccine technology, but he could have simply providentially ( or “fortuitously” or “coincidentally”) guided researchers in developing a particularly effective set of vaccines with minimal side effects. He wouldn’t have had to create it out of nothing, which is sort of what your statement sounded like (not sure if that was your intent or not).
That’s a good question, but there’s always a lot of issues with these couldn’t-he-have scenarios:
- maybe God did do something similar (not with a vaccine, but maybe other things) and it could have been even worse, hard to imagine though it might be
- perhaps God allowed the 1918 flu to show humanity that war has horrible consequences and that there are other things to be spending money and effort on
Bottom line, I think, is that for Christians we are inclined to believe that good things come from God because he has demonstrated himself to be loving and trustworthy to us and that bad things are either for some greater benefit or because of someone else’s decisions. Statement’s like Fuz Rana’s and @swamidass’s are reflections of prior belief rather than convincing evidence for belief.
If you win $20 million in a lottery should your response be “but why wasn’t it $100 million”? I’m not trying to equate death and human suffering with the lottery, I’m just saying that the “it could have been better” question becomes sort of absurd because no matter how little suffering and pain we could always demand less and no matter how much good we gain we could always demand more. It doesn’t really help determining the question of God’s existence one way or another. I’m not sure it even helps determining his character all that much. If you view God as inherently evil or bad you will find your “evidence” in the world. If you view God as inherently loving and good you will likewise also find your “evidence” in the world.
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I am thankful also that we know enough science to rapidly advance in vaccine research in this pandemic, and for me as an atheist, one should thank all those who advanced the science to get us to this point in history.
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I wonder how God set the acceptable level of death before he intervenes. And I wonder how it keeps changing at various times.
Well, that worked out great, didn’t it? Lesson learned, and we haven’t had any wars since. You are implicitly accusing God of incompetence.
How did he do that? Not, apparently, through his actions in history.
Yes, but don’t those feel like nothing more than excuses to you, if you really think about it?
Good things are good acts of God, and bad things are either good things we don’t recognize with our limited perspective or they aren’t God’s fault. That’s a rationalization scheme to fit any possible pattern of data.
What if you try to use the empirical data to test both hypotheses without bias toward one or the other? What would you decide then?
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No, I was accusing humanity of a general inability to learn from our own failure (and given how we’ve responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems we still haven’t learned a lot).
For the Christian, Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection are incredible demonstrations of just that.
Sometimes, I suppose. Like I’ve said before, Christianity isn’t without its uncertainties, mysteries, or occasional doubts. Theodicy is absolutely the #1 area for those, as far as I can see, for both believers and non-believers alike. I’ve come to my own way of understanding it, but it’s not they same for all Christians for sure. I believe God has given creation (the universe as well as humanity specifically) a large amount of self-determination or freedom. I think we see that in evolution, and in the human experience. To me this means that not everything God wants to happen actually happens because he leaves an amount of choice to us. I don’t see God as the meticulous micro-manager who has to decide which football team wins on a Friday night by weighing the sins and prayers of the players and parents.
There’s no way that I can see to run that test, as much as I would like to. The empirical data is that both evil and good, pain and joy, suffering and love exist in the world. There is no objective way that I can see to move from that data to the (non)existence or nature of God. Do you see any? As you pointed out earlier, theism seems to end up being a “rationalization scheme to fit any possible pattern of data”. I think the best an atheist can do is to say that because theism can explain any possible pattern, it explains none of them and is therefore unnecessary.
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Then why would God attempt to teach us lessons in ways that don’t work? Once again you’re implicitly accusing him of incompetence.
Sure, you have that one. But you were appealing to something else, weren’t you?
Then you can’t appeal to events we observe as evidence of divine action. Or perhaps this is another layer of excuse. If things go wrong, it’s our fault and God is allowing us freedom. If things go right, that’s God helping us.
Yes, definitely. We can rule out certain sorts of God. We can rule out one that’s omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, because such a God wouldn’t permit, say, the Black Plague to happen. If there’s a God at all, the evidence would seem to suggest that he lacks at least one of the three omnis. As far as I can see, events happen more or less randomly with respect to our needs, which suggests to me that nobody is intervening. There are various explanations for that lack. One is of course that there is no God. Another would be that he is detached from us. And another is that he’s so capricious that his intervention mimics randomness. The only way you can save your 3-omni version is rationalization, and the most I can hope for is that you realize that’s what it is.
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Why can’t God be good while allowing evil? What is your reasoning for this?
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Maybe at some point we’ll learn? 
I’m sure many people do learn, even if not humanity in general has.
I actually wasn’t, maybe others were.
I already said it’s not evidence …
I agree that there probably are some limits based on the data. If I believed this life was all there was then I would probably agree with you, however, I don’t. In other words, our data set is not complete and so I’m not sure we can use this data conclusively, which is what I said previously. God can be omnipotent (and even omniscient) while choosing to limit his power in some ways in order to give freedom to the creation he wishes to have a relationship with. In fact, that seems loving in a lot of ways. Omnibenevolence seems to be the crux of the issue, but of course that’s no different than what we’ve already been talking about so we’re just restating the problem by talking about omnis.
Well, that’s gotta be better than an irrationalization, right? 
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What about all those countries that did a far better job than the US without vaccines, armed only with common-sense public health measures? Don’t most of them have a much lower proportion of Christians, particularly evangelicals, than the US?
Where is God’s influence in those differences? What message is He sending?
I don’t see that John was in any way demanding that the data be used conclusively, just that they be used.
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Perhaps Evangelicals are particularly hard-headed … 
Who knows, maybe he had nothing to do with it, or maybe he’s working in each country/culture differently, I honestly have no idea. Recognizing or thanking God for a good thing doesn’t discount other actors (such as the scientists who developed these vaccines) nor does it mean that if the same thing doesn’t happen everywhere that it necessarily reflects anything about those people groups. This reminds me a bit of John 9:1-5,
As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
I don’t know fully what these verses mean but I interpret them to mean that we shouldn’t look to natural evils as being the result of sin, but that there is opportunity for something better despite or through them.
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What does the Black Plague have to do with evil?
What is the basis for your assumption?
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But that didn’t stop you from speculating, did it?
What I find interesting is that you don’t seem to want to consider the possibility that God is using SARS-CoV-2 to send messages to particular groups. Wouldn’t that be much more consistent with a lot of the differences between nations, and even between Christian denominations?
I don’t claim to either, but I’m asking about differential “natural evils,” so that really doesn’t fit the bill. I seem to recall a few of those from the OT…
I’m assuming that based on @John_Harshman’s statement, he thinks the plague is incompatible with omnibenevolence if God is also omniscient and omnipotent. Let him correct me if I’m wrong please. You give off the impression that you’re only trying to be argumentative by jumping in to question me on my question of someone else. It’s frustrating because it’s happened before.
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