I'm not sure how to bulldoze this thread without making walls of text. I'll try to handle myself.
Edit: I think I failed :(
the catholic answer is god gave us free will and still loves us...if he didn't give us free will, we would essentially be slaves.
A slave is a free willed being who is forced to act independently from his or her will. By definition, a being with no free will cannot be a slave.
Whitesky12480 said:
Creating the Earth for that matter is a completely different question. That is something every religion has tried to answer as well as Science. "Why did everything come into being?"
That question is fundamentally meaningless because any answer to it must, in order not to beg the question, refer to entities that are not contained in "everything". By definition, there are no such entities, therefore an answer to the question cannot appeal to anything, i.e. it necessarily does not exist. Deal with it.
Carl said:
The typical response is that "God works in mysterious ways" and honestly there really isn't a much better answer out there than that. Think about it, if you could really understand God (and if he exists) wouldn't that make you an equal with God implying that you are a deity yourself? Just as humans don't understand all the workings of physics and the universe, I would imagine it's next to impossible for humans to understand the workings of a higher being.
Understand, maybe not.
Evaluate, yes. First of all, there is one important thing that you have to understand: brute force is an appropriate substitute to intelligence. In other words, if you give me a problem to solve, the amount of intelligence I need to pour into it is inversely proportional to the amount of resources you give me. Example: you give me one day to solve an incredibly difficult problem. If you give me a pen and a sheet of paper, I will most certainly fail. A calculator will help me, a computer much more. Give me a quantum computer and it opens a whole lot of options. Give me a machine that solves any exponential problem in linear time and I'll just make a 5-line program that'll try all possible solutions. Then I'll get a coffee and when I'll come back it will be done. Give me a machine that runs any algorithm in constant time and I'll solve whatever the fuck you want me to in five minutes, regardless of the problem's complexity.
In a nutshell, what I mean to tell you is that if God is really as omnipotent as everybody makes him out to be, then he has to have a machine that runs any algorithm in constant time. If he does, then he doesn't need to be more intelligent than I am to create this universe because it becomes
trivial. And if he doesn't, that's really fucking bad for the concept of omnimax God.
Unlimited resources to solve a problem don't just make it easier to solve. They make it easy to solve. Period. If you tell me to solve world hunger without giving me any resources, I would have to deploy treasures of cleverness to achieve my goal and maybe I will have to do very complicated compromises, like making a company that exploits workers so I can raise enough money and acquire enough leverage. If you give me 100 billion dollars, well, I'll just throw money to everyone. There's no need for any compromise. The same applies in the case of God. The more power God has, the easier it is for him to make this world better and the more critical we can be of his work.
teekay said:
Myself, I'm a sympathizer with Christianity but not an adherent, but I do believe in God and I don't believe the problem of evil is really a problem at all, mostly because I buy pretty heavily into the eastern idea that all suffering is ultimately a result of our own spiritual failings.
But I don't want to suffer because of somebody else's spiritual failings. It's not very difficult to find an answer to the problem of evil, but when you compare a child born in a rich family to a child born in a starved African village, it's hard not to notice how fucking unfair that is. That's where the difficult problem resides. We might be failing spiritually, we might have "sinned" and condemned our race, but it's kind of disheartening to see who's paying for it and who
isn't.
BAM_UR_DEAD said:
I once heard a tale about a young college student who had a harsh and aetheistic (sp?) professor who began ranting how God could not exist because if he were so loving and great why would there evil. The young student, a Christian, began to disagree, and when the professor heard what he had to say, he mocked the student in front of the rest of his class. The student thought for a moment, and then asked, "Professor, is there such a thing as darkness?" The professor thought for a moment, and then said yes. The student realized that the professor had fallen for the trap, and he continued on. "Really? That isn't true. Darkness is mearly the absence of light. In the same way, Evil is not because of God, it is because of the absence of God in the world today." The professor was stumped at the student's statement, and was quiet.
Darkness and light are a scale that goes from 0 to infinity, so is the cold-hot scale and any other scale where one element is the absence of the other. On the other hand, clearly, whatever evil I am doing, I can make it
more evil by killing or raping one more person. This indicates that evil and good are a scale that extend as much in the negatives as it does in the positives. Thus the comparison you presented fails. Evil is not a lack of good any more than good is a lack of evil.
Whitesky12480 said:
How about the idea that things like Hurricanes and such exist because they are a part of nature. Positives and Negatives, Light and Dark, Yin and Yang...one is needed for the other to exist.
The set of natural numbers does not contain negative numbers and it's never been a problem ;)
kamikaen said:
I'm sure you've heard this before, but God punishing humans and a parent punishing a child are the same (only God-us is on a much larger scale). It's good for us, it's the only way someone with free will learns.
But why do we have to learn? If I'm a serial killer, all God has to do is to put me on an isolated island, create robots impossible to tell apart from humans and then I can kill whoever I want with no consequences and no evil done. Why torture humans over their flaws when it's so fucking easy to work around them?
Deck Knight said:
Catholicism argues from the singular premise that God gave human beings free will. His singular commandment to Adam and Eve was not to eat of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Here's an idea: let's NOT create such a tree.
Here's another idea: if Adam and Eve disobey, kick them out of Eden but remove knowledge of good and evil from their offspring and admit them back, providing them with the same choice.
Here's yet another idea: kick Adam and Eve out, transmit the knowledge to their offspring, make all humans sinful since their very birth, even those who would have obeyed him had they been Adam or Eve, then once you realize this is kind of unfair solve the problem not by reinstating Eden but by sending your son to butchery to give people some profound insight on how to regain what they lost because their ancestors ate a fucking
apple. Also never show yourself because it might clue them
too much.
God allows suffering to occur because great good can come out of suffering. Consider slavery. For centuries Africans suffered in servitude under their own corrupt and treasure-hungry leaders, Arab nations, and finally Europeans. It took a civil war to gain them freedom in America, and is not the world a better, freer, less violent place because mankind has finally learned not to treat its fellow travelers as chattel? Past barbarity can be a thrust for future justice, and so savage and backward can the past appear that no-one will ever even think of returning to such practices. Maybe that wasn't the best example, but it works well enough.
Some people barely suffer at all, while others suffer enormously. That appears to be unfair and it requires explanation. It sounds like a decent point that people suffer for a while in order for lessons to be learned, but most of them don't personally get anything out of it. Why should they suffer if they get nothing out of it? The answer might seem obvious to you, but to me it isn't. In fact, to me, it's clear that the benefit of any form of suffering can be emulated by
delegating the suffering to someone (or something) else. Let me illustrate:
Plan A: amortize suffering by requiring that geographical zones where suffering is the most likely contain a proportion of humanoid robots able to convincingly simulate pain and despair while aiding people who are not robots.
A cool thing about A is that it could be the case and we wouldn't be able to tell. Another cool thing is that lessons would be learned in the same ways with uncompromisingly lower suffering. Basically, A picks out all the "losers" and puts placeholders instead.
Assuming A is not the case, please explain how my solution is not superior to reality in every thinkable way. So far, to me, it looks like I'm beating God at his own game. And I don't even think it's my best shot.
Finally, there is a great deal of mystery in the way God works.
You're badly generalizing the rise of technology and the development of human intelligence to project the intelligence of an alleged God to unprecedented heights. That's how you can come to the conclusion that we can't understand him. Unfortunately, that's... false.
In reality, the more power you have, the less clever you have to be. When you attain God's alleged power, hard problems become so trivial that even we can find excellent solutions to them. Your rationalizations about suffering being a necessary learning step make sense when we're talking about entities that are limited, such as parents. But when you have the power of a God, the sad truth is that all those things have easy workarounds, so easy that we can find them and wonder why God doesn't think of them. I found one as Plan A, but there's a shitload more.
An omnipotent, omnibenevolent God just doesn't hold. No matter how hard you try to rationalize it, it's a sinking ship.
Contrary to popular artistic rendering, Hell is not a burning lake of fire which reeks of sulphur and death, but the complete and total cutting off from God as a result of human denial of him throughout their lifetime.
Whatever that means, can I interact with other people like me? Can I have fun? If so, I really don't give a shit if I'm with God or not.
X-Act said:
About why God created humans: God is love, and created humans (and all His creations) so that he has things to love - besides loving himself in the Trinity.
I love my teddy bear. Big deal.
From the looks of it, God doesn't really care to love people. He wants to be loved. I don't see how else to explain the whole "free will" crud and the necessity to believe in him.
Oh, and about the fruit (there's nothing in the Bible that suggests it was an apple) being eaten by Adam, that was a sin because it was a rebellion from humans towards God. God told humans not to do something, and humans rebelled and told God "hey, you don't order us to do anything, we know what to do better than you". That is what sinning is all about.
Correction: a rebellion from two
particular humans. Extending it to the others is a bit of a stretch, don't you think?
