It's 'his' f*cking design. 'He' can do whatever he likes! Therefore, all the evil that is here was foreseen and judged 'reasonable risk'- surely?
I feel like I've sufficiently replied to these objections above, you're merely restating them. I've already replied to why it can't be limited, or why it's not feasible to eradicate certain evildoers or acts. And how it's the only way to have any kind of independent rational beings at all. I'm not sure what you're confused about.
Besides- how do you even know we are truly free? What if we started out with the ability to bend the will of others for instance? How can you be certain that our 'freedom' is boundless?
You... can bend the will of others. With persuasion or influence, or even in a cruel way with torture and abuse. Many people on this forum have received psychological trauma, so I'm not sure what exactly you mean with that question. Seems obvious.
A lot of what you argue makes sense but I still feel a deep hatred towards God- if there is one. And I'm not willing to forgive them either. Even though I don't have the power or authority to judge them- there we go- I do. Even if that means I'll go to hell, I'll have to accept that.
I just hope there isn't a God because, whatever they are, I don't like their management style and I know I'll be in deep trouble if there is one! Despite likely living a very boring and more sinless life than many of the people who profess to worship 'him'.
I know what you mean. At some point I thought this world is specifically made by some kind of evil agent. But first of all, there needs to be an objective standard for good and evil, otherwise discussing any of this doesn't make any sense. Getting into philosophy and theology really helped me get my thoughts on this in order and discover that the actual thing is completely different from how it's portrayed or what you might hear from modern society, or imagine yourself. So you'd find better answers there, I'm just showing the entry points. It also helped me see that most anything fucked up is the result of human actions, and a lot of things in my life were my own fault.
That said, I think you're better than you give yourself credit for. And the whole "you're in deep trouble and gonna go to hell" thing is an unfortunate result of fearmongering post-reformation adherents (that whole gig is completely arbitrary and made for money). You see a lot of those in the US for example. Remember how you said God should see everything in time at once? In the Christian paradigm, when God decided to take flesh and become a human to dwell among them, he indeed knew that in exchange people would spit on him, persecute him, betray him, torture and kill him. Imagine you're an all powerful God, yet you realize mere humans would do that to you. And he decided to go through it for the humans sake in the first place. Wouldn't you say that's very humble and loving? Lots of apostles did notable evil acts like murder or even essentially serial killing. It's likely that your perception of what God is (and his disposition towards you) is discolored by things you've heard somewhere.
I find it kind of weird when people describe God like they know them. How do you know they are a 'he' even?
Excellent question and insight! The way we speak about God uses words and concepts that we have in our own reality for our own understanding. Yes, indeed, if it's a being that created humans and biology in the first place and is outside of it, how can God be a "he"? How can he be a Father and have a Son that is generated by filiation? Isn't that only a human thing? And indeed, you can't even say that god "exists", because that would be a term in metaphysics. And metaphysics are for created things, so since God is uncreated he is free from the "exists - doesn't exist" dichotomy of created things. Those are just the words in our limited language and consciousness that we utilize to describe things bestowed by divine revelation.
The whole apophatic method is based on that: the divine essence is unknowable to us as created beings because it is uncreated and beyond our reason. There's no way to exactly and sufficiently say WHAT God is. We can only say what it isn't. And get closer by negation, by removing parts of what makes us up: knowledge, reason, consciousness... and it becomes a mystical experience. Yep, just like meditation and similar practices in other religions and spiritual schools. It's an ancient concept.
Does that mean that we can't know God at all? No, because humans can interact with the energies of God which are knowable (you've probably heard someone say something along the lines of "God is love, God is light, etc."). But that's a giant theological topic and nobody wants to read all that here.
Oh, and nobody "created" God, he is uncreated. A big apologetic argument is actually predicated on that, the ontological argument. In logic (and the laws of reality of course), something can't just come from nothing, so you gotta point at some kind of a starting point. In order to avoid infinite regress the only way to do that is to claim that this starting point is uncreated and eternal.
For more info about how stuff was created outside of time and what that means, refer to exegetical literature on Genesis. Time itself is a transcendental category that depends on a lot of other things to even work. And it requires a mind, time is not a physical object.
It's monstrous to my mind that something would set this kind of world in motion intentionally
Yes, I can understand that. The classic reply to that both from scripture and theology is that we as humans don't have a universal omniscient mind so we cannot comprehend and see all the causal chains and events on a cosmic scale to make a judgement why it has to be this way specifically. And that makes logical sense.
There's a more interesting take on this from St. Irenaeus if you want. One of the central concepts in Christianity is theosis (becoming one with God). This approach emphasizes that humans are created with the potential for godliness but are not fully perfected at creation; growth into likeness with God (virtue, maturity) necessarily involves a process in which evil and suffering play a role. Resisting evil is necessary for true virtue, and the development of virtue requires freedom and the reality of evil choices. Natural and moral evils exist not as creations of God but as consequences permitted so that a greater good (human participation in God's goodness through free cooperation) can be realized. So in that kind of view, those atrocious acts of evil that you described are not part of God's direct will but are there for the sake of a higher good: the maturation and salvation of human beings.
If God cannot be evil, then he cannot be good either. If God can only be one way, he can't actually be that way.
...Why? You just made a claim, but you provided zero justification.
The very nature of good and evil requires both to be present. Free will that allows us to choose between good and evil only works IF we all have both good and evil in us.
No, I've already stated above that evil has no ontological status within that paradigm. Please read carefully before you reply. And no, free will can absolutely exist without evil: you can choose between two goods. That's philosophy 101 and is present in most surface level theology as well.
...Maybe you're thinking of "right and wrong" from ethics? That's not the same as "good and evil".
The only things any religious person "knows" of God is what is in their mind and what someone else wrote about God centuries ago. There is no actual evidence of any actual word of God being the word of God
Yeah, you're right that it's a worldview on a faith basis. But hey, here's the thing: every single worldview is based on faith. Knowledge itself has belief as one of it's necessary components (justified true belief + gettier cases). You haven't empirically verified most things in your worldview, so you rely on authoritative sources to gain knowledge like textbooks, media, education (all of those were written by someone!). Some fundamental things can't even be verified empirically at all: logic, universals (like laws and numbers for example), induction, the self, ethics, existence of the outside world, etc. So what it really boils down to is: which one of those worldviews makes logical sense as a whole and holistic system without contradictions? I would argue that the theistic paradigm does, and that there is evidence for it. I already stated that not all evidence is empirical above.
The logic loop fails at almost every turn when it comes to man-made religion and descriptions of God.
I'd say logically the systems that really can't even stand up are those based on naive empiricism, materialism, fundamentalism, determinism, and some others. Funny enough, they have been refuted in philosophy centuries ago, yet somehow today we can still observe dedicated followers of those ("I need scientific empirical proof or I don't believe in it!!!"). Can you actually present your case on what grounds and gives an account for logic in your worldview? Then we can see if your view is more coherent.
Also yeah, there definitely are systems where god is man-made (like neoplatonism, paganism, and other "dead god of the philosophers" cases). They're different from a system based on divine revelation, where man is god-made.
There could be a God who accidentally created us and doesn't even know we are here.
Sure, there are systems like that, Buddhism for example, where the ultimate metaphysical principle is non-personal chaos. And it fails right at the outset because chaos does not create order or meaning. If a worldview has an anti-normative principle as a foundation, then normativity existing easily refutes it.
Always worth reminding people that the original big bang theory was posited by a Catholic Priest. So, science and religion don't have to be separate.
Yeah, universities came from Rome and the Byzantine empire. Catholics are responsible for "modern science". The Bible itself is what accelerated the development of the printing press. A ton of famous scientists were mystics or religious, well, it's a huge topic.
Patterns from mystical practices definitely overlap with the rest of reality and can be useful in science. But science and religion have different goals. Science does not work beyond the scope of the scientific method, so it cannot answer metaphysical questions by definition.
