Subnostr

A God that is all knowing & all powerful in some arbitrary sense that allows Him to do anything at any time, a God that can easily smite evil doers, would necessarily be responsible for allowing evil to exist & to go uncorrected. There would be good reason to hate such a being.

But if God is reality, or the underlying laws that bring reality into existence, then those who deny God are responsible for evil. And salvation would only be possible through knowledge & acceptance of God.

Both concepts of God could accurately be described as all knowing, all powerful, & infinite, but IMO only one of them makes any sense.

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Discussion

Kudzai Kutukwa 2y ago

The second reason makes sense, human beings are free moral agents that can choose to do good or evil. They aren’t robots, which the 1st reason implies implicitly, because if they were then the “robot programmer” would be at fault.

61bb909b... 2y ago

I think both are somewhat correct. Thoughts?

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Kudzai Kutukwa 2y ago

Your note leans more in the direction of 2 than 1 and I largely agree, but my only issue is the idea that He “allows suffering”. My view is that a lot of the suffering that takes place is not because God allowed it but because Christians allowed it. The earth is man’s domain and God gave it to man to dominate and thus He can’t unilaterally move without man’s invitation, not because He doesn’t have the power to do so, but because that’s how He chose to do things. Matthew 18:18 also supports this idea as well as Philippians 2:7-9 and Matthew 28:18-19. Christians haven’t been using their authority in Christ to bind the works of darkness in prayer and in casting out devils, not just out of people but of regions and territories on the earth; hence evil is prevailing when it shouldn’t be. (Matthew 16:18-19, Mark 16:17-18)

61bb909b... 2y ago

I think your emphasis on our responsibility as humans is entirely justified. But God did allow suffering if he allowed Christians to allow suffering. He chose to create this world.

My contention is that this doesn’t make God less morally perfect. Given the desire to have humans who can make non-coerced decisions, he has to allow suffering because evidently there’s no possible world where we are all truly free yet also don’t do evil.

Force2B 2y ago

I really like this, very thought provoking and I have been leaning towards this way of thinking lately.

I’ll definitely be chewing on this tonight.

61bb909b... 2y ago

Good topic.

A syllogism:

If God is all-knowing, he knows about all evil.

If God is all powerful than he can stop all evil.

If God is maximally loving, he would want to stop all evil.

Evil exists.

Therefore a God who is all-knowing, all-powerful and/or all-loving does not exist.

The problem is that 2 and/or 3 aren’t necessarily true.

God cannot do illogical things (like make square circles or free robots). To have truly free humans existing, he can’t stop all evil.

Is it true that God would be unloving for allowing evil? A father who takes his kid to the dentist loves his child enough to allow pain for a greater good. So also, God may allow pain and suffering for a good reason.

This is the Christian story and I think it makes sense. So, yes, humans are responsible for evil because God can’t stop us without violating our free will or killing us all off.

See William Lane Craig’s work on the problem of evil. Here’s an intro:

https://youtu.be/k64YJYBUFLM?si=00IGQ6vRn9WefYJu

Jeff Swann 2y ago

The logic of "allowing pain & suffering for a good reason" requires one to treat people as some sort of collective blob where individuals don't matter. A good father does not allow his children to destroy themselves or to kill & rape & enslave each other. Those behaviors would be indications of a father's failure.

61bb909b... 2y ago

I don’t follow your blob comment.

The dentist analogy is just stating that a child with limited knowledge may think his father hates him for taking him to such a dreadful place. We are such small children. It’s perfectly logical to say that this argument is not necessarily valid because we don’t have all the counterfactuals as fallible humans. In other words, we think the dentist sucks, wait until all of our teeth rot out. The father cannot avoid the dentist. God cannot force humans to be perfect.

61bb909b... 2y ago

Furthermore, killing, rape, and enslavement are all just words for extreme sin. If God could have a good reason for allowing me to hit my finger with a hammer, I don’t know why he couldn’t use extreme evil and abuse for good also.

In fact I know many terrible stories where people, while not justifying their abusers, see that they had valuable lessons and could help others in the midst of their pain.

Ike 2y ago

There's no way to help the ants in an ant farm without wrecking the whole thing

nix 2y ago

As a thought exercise, what if you merge the two? That would make God an all-powerful being which is aware of the laws that bring reality into existence :-)

It seems to me that evil and good is like light and dark, and they both define each other and cannot exist without one another.

Allamex 2y ago

1. If he is all powerful and all knowing then why didn’t he make a perfect system by which we perform perfectly (aka robots)? Thus freedom allows us the ability to love/hate God. Technically Adam & Eve were close to perfect humans but they had Free Will and chose the knowledge of good and evil (that’s the point of the story).

What creator would want to make a robot that loves them unconditionally? In order to prevent this you would have to remove yourself from responsibility of the decisions your creation makes. It would be pointless and stupid to do otherwise. Even dogs (man’s best friend) don’t love people unconditionally.

2. If Satan exists then those that deny God are not responsible for evil… Satan is. God created Satan and man. The Bible displays sin as being pushed by Satan (a fallen angel) in the form of a serpent.

If God is reality then there is no life after death and there is no point to good or evil. It only stands to change the reality for others based on your decisions.

Reality/Time&Space≠God

Without God there is no good or evil.

61bb909b... 2y ago

We are accomplices to Satan when we piss in God’s garden.

Jeff Swann 2y ago

Those who deny reality create hell. Satan is the most fallen because he believed he was God, he is the most deluded. Similarly Gates & Soros & others with a God complex regularly do things to create hell on earth. That pattern seems pretty clear IMO.

Being the laws that bring all that is into existence & gives rise to intelligent beings which can seek to know Him is pretty perfect if you ask me. It's at least not a failure until existence ends or whatever intelligence there is ceases to be.

I think the story of the fall is more about the beginning of consciousness & how things often get harder when we become conscious of them, before they can get better or easier. But it's kind of an inevitable thing. In order to develop proper aim & to achieve our full potential we have to miss quite a bit first.

mleku 2y ago

Mises discusses the matter in Human Action, and basically leads you to the conclusion that he can only be all knowning and not all powerful.

an all powerful god will not let the universe stay on a continuing track, he can change it any time. and he doesn't need to know what it is, either. not exactly useful for praying to either then, since much of what praying for is to borrow his eyes.

the reality supports option 1.

Jeff Swann 2y ago

I think praying has a number of potential benefits. It can be a form of meditation, it can help to focus one's mind on finding a solution to a problem, & either it helps us to program our own subconscious or to communicate with whatever super consciousness there may or may not be. If God or reality has some sort of consciousness that we can communicate with, then God works through people. Though, even if we are just talking to ourselves, "God works through people" is really true either way. It is the people who best understand reality (those objectively closest to God) who are best a shaping reality anyway.

I don't think it is incorrect to refer to the laws of the universe as all powerful. They created everything, they are perfectly strict & unforgiving, & they are impossible to cheat or defy. The only way for any living being to avoid destruction is via acceptance & submission to said laws.

mleku 2y ago

the laws are incontrovertible, and there is no will in them, they just act automatically so they are not powerful, they simply must be obeyed.

funny thing, you had 17 dingleberries and i never followed you before so i guess lots of the ppl I am following follow you.

i had a very very strange dream this morning. Like me and my friend were recruited to be part of some project, the weird thing was it seemed like they were all russians.

i had this kind of a vision thing at the old 19th century train station in budapest some years ago, that God is like all of the good things collected together into the infinite future.

i kinda came up with this idea that the universe has a beginning but no end, because it is in this constant process of dividing, that space itself is constantly increasing, and this causes gravity, and from there everything else. i dunno if i came up with it because the tao te ching also has a verse which says that there is a beginning but no end because of the way the universe works.

this idea that god is the collecting of all the good things took on a new meaning to me when i learned about this stuff with Atlantis from The Apocalypse of Yajnavalkya. and my strange dream suddenly brings it into a new focus like i am now "working for" this invisible organisation. there seemed to be no bosses, and no particular task, and everyone was so happy and strange.

something is going on - i think some people are fully conscious of it and some less so. but it's ... well, i have no idea what it is but it just seems like a good thing.