trestres said:
sapphi_snake said:
GameOver22 said:
To respond to that argument, God's omniscience and omnipotence do not need to be denied. Someone could just give the free-will defense. They could argue that the very act of giving people free-will counts as a good action because it allows for a greater level of moral goodness in the world. If people are not responsible for their own actions, its difficult to understand how we can hold them accountable for their actions or ascribe moral worth to their actions. To take a point from Leibniz, its about making the greatest possible world, and the greatest possible world requires free-will.
As far as the main point, I don't think many religious scholars would argue that God is not responsible for creating the world in the way that he did. It was a free choice he made, and he made a world that allows for human's to have free-will. Because he is the cause of the universe, there is a connection between how he designed the universe and the possible actions humans can make (good and bad). However, the existence of the evil resulting from human actions does not count against God's goodness given that free-will is good. Once again, the point is making the best possible world and not actually making the world with the least amount of suffering or evil. I think we can both imagine a world where no one suffers because God controls every action of the individual's inhabiting the world. I would argue that saying this is a good world in itself is inaccruate (the goodness would lie in God and his decisions-not the world itself).
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Free will is pointless when the puropose is to follow someone else's will. It basically makes free will a burden rather than a gift. God is evil, because he tortures people by giving them free will, only to the demand that they submit to him and become peons.
He's not benevolent, he wants to "own us", just as Delio Said.He doesn't allow people to be free, because people live under the constant threat that disobedience will lead them to eternal suffering in hell. And these rules that need to be obeyed aren't all rational, made to protect humans, but many of them are irrational whims (the ration behind them is "because I say so"), power games which have the purpose to destroy individuality, freedom of thought and eventually even free will.
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You speak of the Christian God as if it were the only possible God, therefore your arguement only works against him.
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True, but I was actually talking about Christianity in my original post. I also think sapphi was justified in making the assumption given the topic of the thread and the debates taking place.
You do bring up a good point though. The questions of free-will, God's goodness, and the existence of evil are only relevant to theistic or religious conceptions of God. Deistic conceptions of God are going to be outside these criticisms, for the most part. Point being, atheists can't disprove God by showing how free-will, God's goodness, and the existence of evil are incompatible. If they could show the incompatibility, they would only show that theistic conceptions of God are inaccurate.
