A cool guide to Epicurean Paradox
A cool guide to Epicurean Paradox
All religion is not about logic or reason, rather it is about identity. You can join a club for scale model trains, and you can join it for the only reason that you want to and because you enjoy it. You then identify as a member of the train club. It becomes part of your identity.
Religion is similar except it adds a dogma and doctrine that defines your entire world view. To lose this world view is to lose your identity. People would rather die than lose their identity because psychologically one’s identity is synonymous with their life.
The only way a person will lose religion is if they have decided for themself that it’s time for change. Much like an addict, it a personal identity change. You have to say to yourself, I am no longer an alcoholic or I am no longer a Mormon. There is no amount of convincing, rationality, evidence or influence that can change a person until they are ready and willing. It’s transformative and traumatic. You just have to accept those who are lost to it.
To nibble further at the arguments for God: free will is absurd.
If god is all knowing and all powerful, then when he created the universe, he would know exactly what happened from the first moment until the last. Like setting up an extremely complex arrangement of dominoes.
So how could he give people free will? Maybe he created some kind of special domino that sometimes falls leftward and sometimes falls rightward, so now it has "free will". Ok, but isn't that just randomness? God's great innovation is just chance?
No, one might argue, free will isn't chance, it's more complex than that, a person makes decisions based on their moral principles, their life experience, etc. Well where did they get their principles? What circumstances created their life experience? Conditions don't appear out of nowhere. We get our DNA from somewhere. Either God controls the starting conditions and knows where they lead, or he covered his eyes and threw some dice. In either case we can say "yes, I have free will" in the sense that we do what we want, but the origins of our decisions are either predetermined or subject to chaos/chance.
You see, shit like this is why I think some of the Eastern philosophers like Xunzi hit the mark on what "God" is: God is not a sentient being, God does not have a conscious mind like we do, God simply is.
Of course, those people didn't call this higher being the God, they called it "Heaven", but I think it's really referring to the natural flow of the world, something that is not controlled by us. Maybe the closest equivalent to this concept in the non-Eastern world is "Luck" -- people rarely assign "being lucky" to the actions of <insert deity here>, it simply happens by the flow of this world, it is not the action of an all-knowing, all-powerful deity. But like I said, it's merely the closest approximation of the Heaven concept I can think of.
The side effect coming out of this revelation is that, you can't blame the Heaven for your own misfortunes. The Heaven is not a sentient being after all!
The problem my agnostic ass meets with good ol' Epi is the disingenuousness inherent in assuming "Godly" rationale to "human logic" semantics. My dude, people can't agree on human meaning and I'm supposed to make assumptions on God?
Why test if It knows the result of the test?
Geez Epic Manster, I know they didn't have spring mattresses in your day but the mattress factory also knows the result my mattress should have gotten at testing but tested it anyways...because the testing provides the necessary shape.
I still maintain my agnosticism and keep my two extremes whenever I don't feel like just being sure it's all bullshit anyways:
If God exists, it doesn't care for our suffering for reasons wholly beyond us (like a greater suffering of its own and why not, it's shit all the way down).
God exists, cares, is a bit sad, but we're all fucking mattresses where the cosmos is gonna poke, prod, and simulate fucking atop of us until we reach the appropriate factory required settings.
I already had coffee tho, so the middle atheist ground is in effect; none of it real, nothing matters except trying to not be total cockwaffles so everyone else can enjoy their nihilism too.
The bad execution of the flow chart was bothering me enough to create a cleaner version.
The solution I have heard before that I thought was the most interesting would add another arrow to the "Then why didn't he?" box at the bottom:
Because he wants his creation to be more like him.
He's just a lonely guy. He made the angels but they're so boring and predictable. They all kowtow to him and have no capacity for evil (except for that one time). Humans have the capacity for both good and evil, they don't constantly feel his presence, and they're so much more interesting! They make choices that are neither directly in support of or opposition to himself. Most of the time, their decisions have nothing to do with him at all!
Humans have the capacity to be more like God than any of his other creations.
Epicuro is a good example of why God doesn't exist: the universe doesn't make any sense if God exists. It's nonsensical if you try to place any intent on it. If it's simply the chaos of the physical order of matter, then it makes more sense. It's still bizarre that anything should exist at all, but at least you don't have to do the mental gymnastics required to justify its existence in the face of an all-powerful deity.
I don't think it's that God couldn't create a universe without evil, it's just there's a process for making us good AND retaining our freewill.
So he's letting us help to create a universe without evil...
Evil is necessary in this process, but evil is really just God "occluded" - Satan is in this sense working for and with God in this process of teaching humans about good, hence the line "God works in mysterious ways"... We don't know the process, which is why it's faith-based.
It's like yes, your parents could give you a lifetime of pocket money all at once, but they're not going to because you have to learn patience, self-discipline, and saving up for the things you want (or can afford). You have to make choices in that process to learn about those things.
Humans are temporal... God is not.
So for God, God created a world without evil in which humans have freewill... It's already been done, instantly for God.
But we don't live on the same temporal plain.
Claiming God can't do it, is like being the kid asking for ALL the pocket money at once. Parents could do that, but they're letting time and your own temptation teach you the lessons.
That's part of the mysterious ways. But in faith, outside of time, and with the right beliefs and choices, a world without evil where people in your life still have freewill already exists... It's up to you to live there in it, in time.
...and you may end up living there anyways.
Does "all powerful" really mean all? I mean, a lìfe sentence is only about 30 years. Since it's all just social constructs (and even if it isn't) the precise meaning of the word could different that you'd think.
Maybe god was all powerful until they created free will and found that they made free will stronger than themselves. But since god made free will, god is still all powerful.
Like humans making machine learning. We can only influence it, not control it. Does that mean we are not in control? No, we could simply pull the plug.
God could also simply pull the plug, but likely doesn't want to because we are their creation. It's only a last resort.
Anyways, that's my two cents.
Okay, I can partially respond to this. (I'm a satanist, so don't @ me over this.)
First, we're using mortal definitions of good and evil, which may not conform to what a god would define as good and evil. Moreover, if you say that god's will is good, and that everything that happens is the will of god because that god is all-powerful, then everything is good because that is what god wills. That means that, yes, the rape of children is good, because that was god's will. If god created everything and is all-powerful, then this is a logical conclusion.
Second, you can say that god knows the outcome, but that we don't. We believe that we have choice, but god already knows what we're going to choose, even though we don't know until we make the choice. This is determinism. Under this model, god is giving us enough rope to hang ourselves, and we condemn ourselves to hell, rather than god condemning us.
There can't be free-will if there wasn't any choice. If there there are choices, there is the potential for evil choices.
So it's kinda like saying "if God is all powerful could He create a mountain on Earth but also make it so the Earth is a perfect sphere?" It's just pointing out that a planet that's a perfect sphere wouldn't have mountains and a planet with mountains are not perfect spheres. Which isn't exactly deep philosophical thought that needs a flow chart.
Also if proving something about religion is paradoxical proves that religion is wrong, by the same logic proving something about math or science is paradoxical proves those are wrong. Halting Problem? Math is false! Schrodinger's Cat? Physics is false!
But outside atheist dogma, most people accept there are things about the universe that are paradoxical. The Halting Problem doesn't mean we should discard mathematics, Schrodinger's Cat doesn't mean we discard Physics. Following this trend means that all of the efforts by atheists to point out paradoxes in religion doesn't accomplish anything.
Have you considered that maybe God, who is love according to the Bible, designed this universe to be a complete demonstration of love? How can you fully demonstrate love if you don't show what it means to love someone who's evil and considers you an enemy, or someone who doesn't even believe you exist, or someone who once thought they knew you but were being deceived by people with evil motives?
obviously made by someone who hasn't read the first page of the bible (like most). 1 huge point missing, god created earth not the universe, and other gods exist in the bible but are never talked about. this information is within the first couple pages of the bible. some translations can also make this harder to understand.
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