Philosophy

>day of the fucking rope
There's always for you to shitpost, you greasy neckbeard.

God wants us to experience a minuscule amount of pain in earthly life in order to allow us to conceive the infinite good that eternity will give us.

If we had nothing negative to which we could compare heaven with, it would provoke such happiness and nourishment.

this butt blasted over what he calls an imaginary friend

Premise 2 is wrong.

Why do you define suffering as bad? Lots of people chose to suffer and enjoy it. I do, when I run marathons.

It seems you haven't thought this through. Tell us, when you define something as 'bad', what precisely do you mean by 'bad'? I want the definition you use, not merely an example of something you might define as bad. Surely you don't judge things to be 'good' or 'bad' without knowing what you mean?

Moreover, if we accept the hypothetical prepositions that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, then it must follow that God knows better than you or I in what good and bad consist. Consequently, if God, being all-powerful, causes things to happen in the world that we perceive as bad, then it can only be our perception or definition of 'bad' that is mistaken and in fact bad, because we are not all-knowing, and he is.

define all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing

>All good
This is a dubious aspect of most theistic gods.
>Premise 2
This premise is the most dubious premise when you consider actual theologies. For instance, I think it's in Jeremiah where it says God will mold the actions of disobedient and evil people to his own will like a potter molds clay. This sounds like a God who does not outright prohibit suffering or evil yet molds it into a perfect will.

>Taking stories literally instead of figuratively, still after 1500 years.

wouldn't *

So in your view, famine and cancer are in fact good things because God hasn't eradicated them?

>Premise 2: Somone who is all-good would do everything he could do to stop suffering
God gave humans free will and they ran away from him, which is why they suffer. Its without God that hell is.

There's a few reasons why god might do this, one being that he has overriding goals for mankind such as free will. The idea is that god creates purely for the joy of creation and he wants us to love him, but we can't actually love him unless we're given the choice to reject him. Without the ability to do evil we would just be robots.

Another possible reason for god to allow evil to exist might be that it allows a certain good to spring from it that might otherwise not exist, or in other words, it might be better to allow some evil to exist because a greater good will come of it. If we all lived in padded rooms our entire lives we could never get hurt but we could also never really live a fulfilling life. It's the same idea here.

You might ask why god doesn't limit the amount of evil or suffering that exists, but evil in this sense is a relative concept. If the greatest evil that existed in the world was a stubbed toe, and we had no real concept of the sort of evils that actually exist in our world, we would still be wondering why god allows stubbed toes. It only really makes sense to limit evil entirely or not at all.

so he's not omnipotent then

not him, but no. ops second premise is implicitly "an all good-being would do everything to stop *all* suffering". that user showed that there exists some (non-bad) suffering that an all-good being would not stop. so the second premise is false.

Why? How does that strips it from Him?

Yes. The world is perfectly just.

if humans have radical freedom such that they can introduce suffering and evil into the world, then God lacks the power to prevent it
if God has the power to prevent it and abstains, then he is not all-good

Suffering is actually kinda good if you think about it.

How is a 5 year old kid being diagnosed with leukemia just? What did they do to deserve it?

read Hume's dialogues, brainlet

Existence is futile without suffering desu

You're assuming that God would not have good reasons for allowing evil to exist. See

>So in your view, famine and cancer are in fact good things because God hasn't eradicated them?

I think they are neither good nor bad but indifferent. Good and bad lies only in our perceptions, thoughts, opinions, and consequent choices, all that is outside your choice is morally indifferent. We have complete control over our own perceptions, thoughts, opinions and consequent choices, and thus our good and our bad are entirely in our own choice.

>"Do you therefore likewise, being sensible of this, inspect the faculties you have, and after taking a view of them, say, " Bring on me now, O' Jupiter, what difficulty thou wilt, for I have faculties granted me by thee, and abilities by which I may acquire honour and ornament to myself."—No; but you sit trembling, for fear this or that should happen; and lamenting, and mourning, and groaning at what doth happen; and then you accuse the gods. For what is the consequence of such a meanspiritedness, but impiety? and yet God hath not only granted us these faculties, by which we may bear every event without being depressed or broken by it; but, like a good prince, and a true father, hath rendered them incapable of restraint, compulsion, or hindrance, and entirely dependent on our own pleasure: nor hath he reserved a power, even to himself, of hindering or restraining them. Having these things free, and your own, will you make no use of them, nor consider what you have received, nor from whom? but sit groaning and lamenting, some of you, blind to him who gave them, and not acknowledging your benefactor; and others, basely turning yourselves to complaints and accusations of God? yet I undertake to show you that you have qualifications and occasions for greatness of soul, and a manly spirit; but what occasions you have to find fault, and complain, do you show me." - Epictetus

Theists always claim that God doesn't want to violate free will, but do they ever explain how the non-violation of free will is a virtue in itself? Would you be opposed to being sent directly to paradise right now even if it were done without your consent?

surely a truly omnipotent and omniscient being could create a world competent devoid of evil, and surely a truly omnibenevolent being would do so

what kind of perfect being has to balance accounts and make pragmatic trade-offs to maximize value?

*completely devoid

This argument is probably the best one the atheists have. It's not an original argument, but it's still very good. There hasn't been an emotionally satisfying answer made to this argument yet. But here's what Aquinas puts in the Summa:

>As Augustine says: "Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil." This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.

In the Bible there's this idea that some things are better if they're lost and then found. Like in the parable of the prodigal son. The father threw a party because his son had abandoned him, but then had eventually come back asking for forgiveness. The prodigal son's brother was mad because he never had a party thrown for him even though he never abandoned his father. There was no reason to throw a party for someone that never became a better person, because he was always a good person. So, I guess it's kinda like this in Christianity. Because mankind deserved death, it's all the more greater that they eventually get eternal life.

You have yet to define what exactly you mean when you say 'good' and 'evil' as I asked here

I explained in my post. If God's objective is to create creatures that love him, then free will is a necessity. Without free will we're robots, and robots are incapable of loving anything.

I can't respond to you if you refuse to read what I wrote.

Also freewill is a necessity to being in the image of God

I'm not OP
although, if that's your stance on 'good' and 'evil' I don't see why you don't just give up on language and argument altogether, since you admit you know so little about your own concepts

reading =/= assenting to
I am disputing your argument

You know, I was going write exactly what I wrote in my first post which addressed the point you brought up but I changed my mind. You're not willing to have a conversion.

So God can't eliminate evil without violating free will? Surely I can help someone without violating their free will?

Man, apologists always fall back on this fucking line of argument.
>God knows better than we do, we don't know anything, so shut the fuck up.
Like, the human conception of "good" is the only one we have to work with. If you claim that God is all-good then you're talking about the human conception of good, even if it doesn't admit of conceptual analysis, and you're just lapsing into meaninglessness if you claim that God's good is completely separate and inscrutable.

good and evil cancel each other out on the balance sheet of life heehee

good requires evil just like credit requires debt

everything cancels out and god takes a little deduction for the operating expenses

But you're isolating suffering from its context. You run a marathon and suffer physical pain but you get benefits like a sense of achievement. If you thought absolutely nothing good would come of it and you had a choice, you wouldn't have done it.

That kind of suffering is fine, when you choose to undergo it for a greater good, and people do get a sense if accomplishment from overcoming suffering. But the problem of suffering is about pointless suffering, which absolutely does exist and some people just have shittier lives and less opportunities for choice than others, which contradicts the idea that this world was specifically planned as the world that provides the best opportunity for everyone's spiritual growth.

The classic example is natural disasters, a father who's entire family dies in an earthquake is going to be in serious mental pain. What's he getting out of it? E didn't choose ir deserve it. And yes, I'm purposefully making it similar to Job, becuase Job provides two conflicting and very un-Christian answers to the problem.

It's not that it's a violation of free will. The question is why eliminate some evils and not all?

I think it's important to note that there can be free will and no evil. It's possible for everyone to just happen to choose not to ever sin.

Where did I admit yo knowing 'so little'? I don't claim to know much, but I do know exactly what I mean when I call anything 'good' or 'bad' and have developed what I believe to be a universally applicable logically consistent system for measuring both.

Why do you discuss 'good' and 'bad' without even attempting to define or even understand the nature of either? Are you in the habit of authoritatively talking about things which you you know absolutely nothing about?

>Like, the human conception of "good" is the only one we have to work with

Explain this conception of 'good' by precisely defining it as you understand it.

Why do you discuss 'good' and 'bad' without even attempting to define or even understand the nature of either? Are you also in the habit of authoritatively talking about things which you you know absolutely nothing about?

God allows suffering because we suck
premise 2 is false

>minuscule amount of pain

Tell that to starving children, rape victims, tortured prisoners, etc.

Not saying OP's argument is perfect, but it can't be explained away by vale of soul making reasoning like "We suffer so that we'll be better" when there is real suffering that is either fatal or pointless.

>I do know exactly what I mean when I call anything 'good' or 'bad' and have developed what I believe to be a universally applicable logically consistent system for measuring both
Care to describe it?

>Why do you discuss 'good' and 'bad' without even attempting to define or even understand the nature of either?
Because I'm not a Platonist and I have an inkling how language works, and, hint, it's not a static structure of words and their definitions. Forcing a definition upon the word "good" invariably fails to capture its usage, and its usage is the key to its meaning, which need not be exhaustively explicable with other words, much less a sentence or two.

The idea is that Pleroma is Pleroma not by contractual exemption from corruption, but by its immanent Goodness and Truth which can be endlessly refracted into all manners of incarnation without being destroyed.

>Tell that to starving children, rape victims, tortured prisoners, etc.
Do you have reading disability or something? The reason for all the suffering is because people run away from God.

think of what a shitty useless person you'd be if you had never suffered

wait, nm you're already shitty

>anthropomorphizing god

You purport to understand how language works, and yet can't write a simple definition for a word you use multiple times every day? Excuse me if I don't believe you. I think you've never so much as considered the question before in your entire life, and have always used the word under the assumption that you knew what you meant when you used it. You have just now realised how ignorant you were, and are now looking for excuses for your negligence.

Seeing as you are demonstrably irrational I don't think posting my definition will do any good: you want to turn the spotlight away from your own ignorance and instead focus the argument on my definition, which you will attempt to pick apart irrespective of it's merit. I'll post it anyhow in the small chance that you might derive some kind of benefit from it - I hope the question I have asked has benefitted you also

.To put my definition simply, the 'good' of any thing is proportional to how well it fulfills it's function, or if you prefer, by how much of it's definitive qualities it possesses.

Yeah, this is where the argument really sticks in the case of Christianity specifically. If heaven is pure paradise, there's no evil there. But evil is a necessary consequence of free will. So people in heaven can't have free will and are automatons, which kind of fucks up the whole soul-consciousness-freewill thing. Or if they do have free will they can commit evil and heaven has suffering. Or, they have free will but are purified so they never choose evil, but then why couldn't God make the world with that kind of free will from the start?

The Christian answer is that the world is in a fallen state, traditionally due to Adam and Eve's transgression (original sin). This necessitates the plan of salvation whereby people live a mortal life in which they spiritually grow, and those who accept God (Jesus, after c.33AD) return to Him in the afterlife. However, this opens a whole other can of worms, like Adam and Eve never existing (and no, genetic Adam and genetic Eve don't fit the bill, they exist due to other Y-chromosome and mitochondrial lineages dying out, they weren't a single couple that spawned the entire human race). Also, you still have the problem of not creating humans in a purified state in the first place, because Adam and Eve could choose to sin.

>You purport to understand how language works, and yet can't write a simple definition for a word you use multiple times every day?
My understanding of language goes against the adequacy of "simple definition" for actually providing the meaning of a word, which was the point I made in the post you're responding to. Think about how you learned to use words, and think about how you do use them in the contexts you use them in. Is this really something that you think is adequately captured by an isolated sentence?

>how well it fulfills it's function, or if you prefer, by how much of it's definitive qualities it possesses.
So, Aristotle's conception of virtue, essentially? Don't you have to assume a completely teleological and essentialist view of nature for that? I can see why we disagree on language.

>So people in heaven can't have free will and are automatons

Who says that? The angels were in heaven and then chose to reject God, becoming the demons.

God never meant for our world to be perfect after the fall. Man would enjoy earthly related things and forget God's kingdom.

We cannot know that reason is perfect, yet it is the best such tool that we have. Language too has it's limits, but that does not prevent us from using it to the best of our ability. Please explain your understanding of language to me, and how this understanding prevents you from defining words but not from using them.

>Is this really something that you think is adequately captured by an isolated sentence?

I didn't say adequately, I said 'to put it simply'. It's my view that language has inherent limits, and that in describing intangible things it can only really circumscribe them, and not truly reach the thing itself. That, however, is not an excuse for me not to do the best that I can to develop a functional definition in terms that I can understand.

I haven't read Aristotle, but I have read bits of Plato and most of Epictetus, and developed my understanding based on my reading of them.

Have you seriously not heard of theodicy before?

It's just one possible explanation for reconciling the Christian ideas of free will and heaven, nobody necessarily believes it. I mentioned the other alternatives, seems like you skipped over those. So, another one is that free will exists in heaven and people can choose to do evil in heaven (like the traditional Lucifer story), but that means heaven isn't a paradise and has suffering just like Earth, which is not the Christian view of heaven at all.

As an aside, the fallen angels story is essentially Christian folklore cobbled together from bits of the Bible and apocryphal writings. The idea of a war in heaven is in Revelation, but it explicitly happens during the end times, and is pretty ambiguous about how it goes down (like all of Revelation). There is also the star if the morning being cast down in Isaiah, but in its context it's obviously about the Assyrian Empire, with star of the morning being a title of the Assyrian emperor, being physically destroyed (cast down).

Sometimes maybe suffering is good for you though.

What? Do you mean those who suffer do so because they run from god?

maybe heaven is free from all these worldly things you think we would need there. I guess I would say heaven in just being in eternal love. Or you can just read Socrates and his idea that he could just think forever.

I don't you understand what heaven is to Christians. It's not some material paradise like living on a beach and relaxing all day. Heaven is merely a term that describes being in the presence of God. We see willful evil as the rejection of God, so if you choose to do evil you're choosing to not be in the presence of God, so you're no longer in heaven. There's no contradiction between free will and heaven.

That doesn't answer the question, why did God create a universe of worldly things in the first place, why not make it eternal love or pure thought from the beginning?

And I've already said why I'm not satisfied by the fall from grace explanation for this.

> impling you get to define what good is

But if you can choose to reject the presence of God while you're in it (due to free will), you can lose the state of grace after getting to heaven, which goes against all Christian theology. If you can't lose that state of grace in heaven, why not have everyone born into God's presence, and forget the physical world? Like I said, the fall doesn't answer this because Adam and Eve were created in a state where they could choose to lose grace (unlike in heaven). Of course the theological reason is that people need to go through suffering to spiritually grow, but that's only necessary due to Adam and Eve's sin, which begs a lot of questions because they were in God's presence (He was walking in the Garden) yet chose to sin and were punished, but being in God's presence in heaven means you won't sin, so why not start it off like that?

Because we came from caveman. I mean you can hate the stories we've told from our beginning but it's how we got to this point and make sense of the world. If you want to throw it out just be wary of diving in an abyss (you might not come out). Jesus is a symbol if you don't believe it historically (the symbol of being killed though innocent and good). Maybe free will is just a habit and that habit can turn into excellence; I assume your shitposting shows that your just like a girl in your fear of abandonment and really just want to be useless on this planet.

I'm talking about the orthodox Christian views of heaven and free will, your post seems to be about the social utility of Christian symbolism, which is not what we're discussing.

I think the Gnostics are right and he's not all-powerful. He can't, so to speak, make 2 + 2 equal 5. There may be something in the very structure of the universe which makes suffering inevitable for living creatures.

You're assuming that being in heaven is like being in time, where a follows b which follows c. The creator of time can't be bound by it so God will have to outside of time. And outside of time it everything that happens or will happen would be experienced at the same moment for eternity. Everyone in heaven chooses freely to accept God and if they were ever weren't they wouldn't be in heaven.

This story of the fall of angels explains this while condescending in a sense because it places the story in time, as is the story of Adam and Eve.

Morality is a human construct, and is not the same for all cultures. Also an all good person would know what suffering is "good" in some cases. For example, without suffering there is no contrast to good, and there is no real reason to live if everything is good continually.

How about you try something more rational next time.

I said free will (and somethings we might fight until the end with our will) is habit. I also said that heaven is just an idea or story. You pick at Christian ethos but can't see the logic of it's utility for people that grew up in it and how it's just frames to see the world; much like Islam or Judaism. You are in control (this is real life) is only thing they want you to understand.

>Somone who is all-good would do everything he could do to stop suffering
Wrong. Plenty of suffering is good.

Is that a question of power? We can change axioms and give new meanings to things. It might be called lying most of the time, and the ability is solely attributed to Satan.

So many retards ITT, Veeky Forums is a pathetic board. OP your argument is ridiculous and it has been refuted a long time ago. What is an all-powerful being? It is a being that can do everything that is logically possible (Aquinas). Therefore God cannot, for example, change the fact that 2+2=4. God is perfectly good, which means that he wants to create the best possible world. A world with free beings is better than a world without free beings and freedom of will neccessarily implies the presence of evil. Being perfectly good, God has created free beings and therefore He *allows* evil but does not conduct it; free creatures are responsible for their actions. On top of that, everything evil could be understood as to allow a greater good that would otherwise be impossible (just think of Judas and Christ). It is as simple as that. Just read Leibniz you retarded pseuds.

That doesn't follow at all. Because God told us he is omnibenevolent, it is impossible for humans to be mistaken about what good is? What?

Exactly. There are challenges in theodicy, but this poorly constructed syllogism is not one of them.

Just read Hume you retarded pseud.

That would be a good answer if not for the Christian idea of the end times, which definitely take place at a certain temporal time (Matt 24:36). Heaven doesn't exist for eternity or outside time, because an apocalyptic scenario happens on Earth, the dead are resurrected (1 Thess 4:16). Heaven is a temporary paradise until the second coming, in Revelation it's even remade along with the Earth (Rev 21:1)

It also begs the question: if everyone who was ever saved and everyone who will be saved are in heaven eternally, how can they ever be on Earth? How does a soul leave a body at a certain temporal moment, but then is in heaven eternally? Additionally, how do pre-Christ souls work in that regard, it would mean the harrowing of hell couldn't happen because that event occurs after Jesus is crucified which requires the passing of time in the afterlife, or at least a link to time on Earth.

I should add that this is not to say suffering and Evil are necessary in any way. They are not. In and of themselves, as redeeming means, as counterweights of the Cosmos, as integral parts of the Eschatological blueprint, and every which way in between - they are completely worthless. As is all refraction of God. All creation, incarnation, manifestation, all existence - actual, potential, ideal - all of it is a shadow that collapses under its own futility and falsehood.

The point being that absolute immanence is maintained even in the absolute freedom of that which is immanent to stray from its own immanence.

And this is not monstrous to you? You don't have to bring Gnostic considerations into this. It's very frightening by itself. A person who would actually do that to their own children would be shunned by almost all denominations.

The problem of evil is not seen as a good attack against the possibility of a god since Plantinga's defense: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Plantinga's_free_will_defense

Not sure if it's really monstrous. Parents punish their children or even let them hurt themselves so they can learn a lesson... So I'm not sure the comparison works here.

You have just proven that there is no all-good(in your morality) God.

You're conflating heaven as how we defined it here (being in the presence of God) with the scriptural heaven which as I mention earlier is a condescension of the truth. The truths of scripture are related as stories placed within time so people can come to understand them which is why it's not useful to look to scripture for evidence of whether or not heaven is eternal. We can reason that heaven is eternal because the creator of time cannot be bound by it. The creator of a TV show can't be a character within the TV show itself. The creator of an Iphone can't be an Iphone itself.

I don't know how to answer your questions about people entering eternity. People are currently in time, and they'll leave time. It seems simple to me. I don't see why God leaving and entering time as he wills would cause a problem.

Too many assumptions, like people who believe in God. How are you defining "good"?

They pollute /pol/

I'm a Christian but I reject the first premise.

I'm not very popular at my local church

this is in essence what epicurus's riddle asks;
"Is God willing to stop suffering, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able to stop suffering but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil.
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him god?"

Good and bad are human concepts that God is above.

Nope, God IS good. God is not above good.

>Believing any fairy tales after the industrial revolution.

your definition of god is inadequate.

Explain. I don't know how it is wrong.