Cool Guides

How do you know?

It was a test

I don't know if I misunderstood you, but "making millions of people suffer horribly and needlessly for no fault of their own might just be the most ethical thing there is, you never know, so let's not draw any conclusions about God allowing that to happen." just seems like a rather unconvincing line of thought to me. It's essentially just saying "God is always right, accept that"

I guess god just gave us the moral understanding that his (in)actions are insanely immoral to test our unquestioned loyalty to him, or he just likes a little trolling. Or maybe he just doesn't exist...

An all-knowing, all-encomposing God may have an understanding that we as mortals are incapable of understanding or perceiving.

That being could make us understand.

If you skip the "evil" part and just start talking about "things that are bad for us humans" it's still true though. Sure, maybe child cancer is somehow moral or good from the perspective of an immortal entity, but in this case this entity is obviously operating on a basis that is completely detached from what's meaningful to us. Our lives, our suffering, our hardship - obviously none of all this is relevant enough to a potential god to do anything about it. Or he would, but can't. Hence the Epicurean paradox.

One answer I've heard from religious people is that life after death will make up for it all. But that doesn't make sense either. If heaven/paradise/whatever puts life into such small perspective that our suffering doesn't matter, then our lives truly don't mean anything. It's just a feelgood way of saying god couldn't care less about child cancer - because in the grand scheme of things it's irrelevant anyway.

To us humans, our lives aren't meaningless. Child cancer isn't irrelevant. We care about what's happening in this life and to the people we care about. How could a god be of any relevance to us if our understanding of importance, of value, of good and bad, is so meaningless to them? Why would we ever construct and celebrate organized religion around something so detached from ourselves? The answer is: We wouldn't.

Either god is relevant to our lives or he isn't. Reality tells us: He isn't. Prayers don't work, hardship isn't helped, suffering isn't stopped. Thought through to it's inevitable conclusion the Epicurean paradox is logical proof that god as humans used to think about him doesn't exist, and if something of the sorts exists, it's entirely irrelevant to us.

I think the fundamental issue with this is that it presumes that our understanding of morality is perfect.

By that measure, all religions have the fundamental issue of presuming that they have any actual knowledge or understanding of their god(s).

"Uhhh mysterious ways is why children get cancer"

This is a copout and you're a silly little guy

Agreed.

Evil is also a subjective concept, the same action can be perceived as good or evil depending on the understood context.

When you allow action on the subjective experience of life aka free will, you also allow evil to emerge from those actions as those interaction collide with the subjective experience of others.

That's the thing, it seems too simplistic, though probably is a good start towards something, better understanding I suppose.

Like all planar squares must be rectangles, but curved square nonplanar washers exist... and those neither disprove nor prove the existence of a God (or Gods, or any spiritual beings at all)?:-P

The devil as they say is in the details, like what exactly is evil, in order to go from mere wordplay to true philosophical understanding. imho at least.

Sounds like he was worshipping a mid tier god. At least it’s better than those waste of space reasonably powerful ones.

And that is why religion is effectively meaningless. We have invented a being full of contradictions, much like ourselves, but declared [it|whatever] perfect besides that. The answer to the paradox is that there is no God.

People should learn to strive for good without the threat of eternal punishment from a being of their invention, otherwise those individuals were never good to begin with, and their imaginary all powerful, all knowing and judgemental god would punish them regardless.

The existence of those paradoxes could also mean that omnipotence in itself is simply impossible.

Being unbound by logic / information theory would make it impossible to reason about anything at all

Good advocate. Anyway, "God not stopping evil, maybe he don’t because it go against free will" - That enters the loop at the bottom. Could God create a universe where free will exists, but evil does not exist? If yes, then why didn't He? If He could not create such a universe, then he's not all powerful and/or not all loving and good.

"About the not loving, he promises a perfect infinity world after all of this" - Then why do we have to go through this initial, temporary and imperfect part?

Literally advocating for the devil.

Honestly that's probably the only way out of the problem of evil.

That said you are on a path of ethical relativism, and from a practical standpoint it's fucked up beyond belief.

Also so much of religion is founded on the good/ evil dynamic that if this was removed, everything else would crumble.

But if Satan is all powerful then God is not, as God could not hold power over Satan.