If God must be omniscient, God doesn't exist
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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Yeah, not tracking the meme, but we can articulate paradoxes with things like the Christian god, which basically just pitches their own lore against itself.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurean_paradox
While obviously unsatisfying the resolution to the Epicurean paradox is that evil serves a good purpose that is unknown to us but known to God.
Like a child screaming when a cut is disinfected by a parent. The pain is incomprehensible to a small child. So we too are "small spiritual children", and the grotesque pain of the world serves as some sort of refining process that is incomprehensible to us.
Or so the thinking goes..
Disagree - that implies God is all knowing and all good, but not all powerful. If he was all powerful, he wouldn't need to resort to using evil at all, even it's just a tool to accomplish good.
If he was all three, the child wouldn't be cut in the first place.
That very much depends on what "good" is
We can't come to the debate with our Western humanist ideas as assumptions as that's very much begging the question. We are bound to conclude god is a contradiction if we start with a value hierarchy that's independent of god. Because that is, out the gate, inconsistent with what god even claims to be.
"god" is not just a cosmic dictator is a rather temporal position of great power (and therefore judged the way we judge a boss). The theological claim is that god defines reality itself. And must therefore necessarily be at the root of value hierarchies. "Goodness" in that view really is defined as "gods will and purposes" and nothing else. As to take any other view first necessitates conceiving of an existence independent of god, which necessarily involves setting oneself up as an independent judge of values and sets one on a course to conclude what one has assumed.
Hypothetically then, if one enters into that "god" reality, then the concept that evil is used to achieve the greatest good (and this is not capricious or wasteful but rather ideal) becomes consistent.
As you say, one can conceive that infinite power would surely find a way to avoid pain, but that assumes that pain does not, in some way, achieve the goodness of god's greater will
And that is Epicurus' assumption- that the greatest good is achieved in minimising pain. Whereas the theological view is that there may be something integral and fundamental in reality itself (that is, god's being) wherein the suffering of pain is necessary in order for us to achieve the greatest end according to god's purposes. Be that transformed into a "child of god" or made more similar to god ot to have ones soul "refined" in some sense ready for a future existence.
That's a solid assumption though: the claims that define 'god' come from the religion, not from the supposed being itself; it isn't necessary to speculate at the possibility of some theological grand plan that isn't established by the religion's own lore. Choosing to unnecessarily make someone suffer / experience pain is pretty core to the concept of evil. If it's integral to reality or some shit, then the being that made that reality either doesn't care (not all good) or it's unable to whip up an alternative (not all powerful). Every single attempt to explain away the Epicurian paradox just moves the goalposts from the point currently in the spotlight in a way that opens up one of the other two.