 |
|  |
 |
|
Ben Kenobi
|
 |
McGregornobi!
Oct 2002 time: 21:37
|
|
quote:
If "good" and "evil" can only be used in absolute terms, then they're worthless
|
One needs a plumb line. When you say that Hitler has some redeeming features, you must first have some idea of the good in order to compare Hitler up to this standard. The same is with everybody else. Rather than being useless, good and evil are only meaningful in the absolute sense.
quote:
I'm wondering why you follow God's moral code instead of Satan's moral code if both of these moral codes are completely arbitrary.
|
First of all, I don't believe they are arbitrary, that the evil must come from the good. The evil exists in rebellion from the good, and not independent thereof.
Secondly, I believe that God is eternal, and has a good nature, than it makes sense that I ought to follow him.
However, you are right. How do I know that it is God who is asking certain things? Well, I haven't been commanded directly by God to do anything other than what I have seen in Scriptures.
But supposing I did, I would have to compare what I was told with everything else I already know about God.
|
|
|  |
 |
|
Ben Kenobi
|
 |
McGregornobi!
Oct 2002 time: 21:37
|
|
quote:
So He can do evil, He just perpetually chooses not to?
|
Yes. That's the only way to reconcile his omnipotence with everything else.
quote:
Yes, because even with perfect foresight, and even with perfect knowledge of good and evil, the perfectly raised child would still encounter moral dilemmas that had no perfect solution.
|
Ah, not quite that far.
First of all, we cannot have a perfect knowledge of good and evil. This is the point I was trying to make. Even if you have a perfect upbringing, you would still feel guilty because you would have fallen short at some point. It is more than just the environment, we cannot make things the way we know that they ought to be.
Secondly, just because we cannot achieve a perfect solution to a moral problem, does not mean that one does not exist. Nor just because we cannot see a perfect solution, means that there is not one that exists.
However, you are right, that we are in some cases prevented from the perfect solution because of the fallen world in which we live.
|
|
|  |
 |
|
Aeson
|
 |
orangesoda
Nov 2001 time: 22:37
|
|
quote: Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
So given a perfect upbringing, one would not feel guilty? |
Depends on what you mean by perfect upbringing. Also, whether you include being perfectly healthy, as biological makeup was part of my statement and certainly is part of the equation.
The point you missed though is that what your upbringing was doesn't matter. Guilt comes from doing or thinking things which you have been taught are wrong. Doesn't matter if the source of those values is your parents, beliefs, experiences, or whatever.
quote: Which comes from suffering. Just because there can be guilt improperly placed, that does not come from God, does not rule out the existence of guilt that comes from God. |
I wasn't making any such statement. If there is a God, he certainly could be giving us values. Whether He exists or not is entirely irrellevent to the question I was answering though.
The question was how to describe guilt without using God, and I gave an answer along with an example of guilt that I knew (most) believers wouldn't attribute to God.
|
|
|  |
 |
|
Agathon
|
 |
Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002 time: 00:37
|
|
There are various reasons why people think that the supernatural is required to ground morality.
Some people think that the only possibility for morality to be universally binding on everyone is for there to exist "moral facts" which are part of the world in the same way that physical properties and objects are part of the world. Given that these purported moral facts do not seem to be detectable by empirical means, one must posit some supernatural cause of value in the world.
Of course the existence of values can be explained in physical terms; they just cannot be justified. For example, we could explain the existence of altruism among human beings by means of evolutionary psychology, but that does not give anyone a reason to behave altruistically. One could just as easily level this accusation at the God theory, but the proponents of the God theory would reply that God is omnipotent and can just make it so that values are binding on all people.
What these people are afraid of is that if God does not exist, then "everything is permitted". This translates to: "if there are no objective moral facts, then there is no reason other than prudence (which doesn't really work) for people to behave morally.
I don't think you have to buy into this distinction because the assumption that underlies it is dubious. This is that everything that is not an objective fact, independent of the human mind, is subjective and/or relative and cannot provide a binding reason to anyone. But why do we have to believe that moral language is descriptive of the world or has to be, in order to be binding on everyone? The later Wittgenstein argued that there are many "language games" which are not descriptive of the world, but which have definite rules that are binding on all creatures that participate in them. There's nothing weird about this – language has a similar status and nobody worries about that. Mathematics is probably the same too, and yet no one denies that there can be right and wrong in the mathematical sciences.
Of course one might reply that there can be no reason external to the game that can be given to anyone in order to make them accept the rules of the game or start playing it. But this ignores the fact that everyone apart from some of the mentally ill and very young children already play the morality language game. There is broad agreement among participants about what the rules are and quibbling only where the rules seem to break down. One might as well ask what grounds we have for making subject/predicate assertions, or what grounds we have for believing in logic. The answer is that we can't help it and people that pretend that they don't understand the game are simply liars.
|
|
|  |
 |
|
Agathon
|
 |
Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002 time: 00:37
|
|
Yes, Laz, but their conviction is that grounding morality in human attitudes isn't sufficient to make it binding on everyone – in the sense that everyone has to accept moral reasons.
But our evolutionary history is such that we just do accept moral reasons for much the same reasons we feel pain – although the two are not equivalent. Human beings that live in communities possessed altruistic adaptations that allowed them to flourish. It can be proved that radical selfishness is not an evolutionary stable strategy. On the other hand, it is also a fact that absolute altruism doesn't work very well either. Add to this the immense cultural structures such as religions, that are built over our natural endowment and we have the present situation.
Of course it is possible to try to live completely selfishly, but this is in practice very hard to do. Even mobsters have a code of loyalty, although it is to each other rather than society. Nietzsche is right that someone who could overcome his natural endowment and completely disown his moral beliefs and feelings would not be a human being, but a member of some new species. Even the most despicable tyrants construct some sort of moral justification for what they are doing – the Nazis are a prime example. By doing so, these people are implicitly engaging in the moral language game.
But how do we refute them? Well, we do what we always do: we give them moral reasons to change their mind. Sometimes these don't work, but that makes them no different from all sorts of other reasons we give people – such failures do not, as some think, invalidate the practice of reason giving, or necessarily impugn its objectivity. The idea of completely self-validating reasons that no person could ever deny goes back to Plato and is one of his reasons for positing the Forms, since he conceives of these as entities, which if cognized, remove all possibility of doubt.
|
|
|  |
 |
|
Berzerker
|
 |
topeka, kansas,USA
May 1999 time: 23:37
|
|
Ben - quote: 1. Is it possible to have evil without a concept of a moral absolute? |
Nope.
quote: 2. Suppose we do accept the presupposition that there is an absolute concept of good and evil. Then we get to the second half of Speer's claim, that given a moral absolute, is it possible to do so without religion? |
Yup, you exist, therefore you belong to yourself. The person who would murder you is taking what does not belong to him, he is taking what belongs to you.
quote: Anything that is good has to come from outside of ourselves, in fact, it cannot exist in nature. Everything here is flawed to some extent. |
Then that which created nature is flawed so some other standard is needed.
quote: So if it doesn't come from nature, and it does not come from ourselves, then what else is left to be the origin of the good? |
It does come from us, the intelligence to arrive at moral judgements.
quote: It would have to be something that does not change, since morality would not change, and would have to be universal, since this morality would also be universal. |
Agreed, a standard is required. But what standard should be used? There is only one that passes the test - ~universal desires or sentiments. We can conclude that murder is immoral because we agree it is immoral. But based on what? Property, you own yourself. The problem is many people will base morality on their personal tastes and will only cite the will of the majority when the majority agrees with them. But is the majority good enough to define morality? Nope, there are plenty of examples of majorities engaging in blatantly immoral behavior. The standard must be more stringent... How about a large majority, ~%75 of the people? No, still not good enough. The standard requires ~universality, we must ~all agree.
quote: That puts you in a tight bind. What could exist outside of nature, yet is both eternal, and universal? |
Certainly not religion, just look at the diversity and the evil committed by the religious. How about "God"? How does one know what God wants? A book? Hardly, not without some serious proof this God inspired or authored the entire text. And then how do we know if this God is good to begin with? Logic must be used, compare what this God wants with the universal standard mentioned above.
quote: I think to answer this question, religion gives you the best answer. |
Show us a religion that embraces universal desires and you will have only shown 2 paths to the same destination, one religious, the other not...
quote: Suppose that God cannot command that which is evil, because good is an essential part of his nature. This claim has two fronts. First of all, this means that God is the origin of the good. The good is not arbitrary, nor does it change, since God is both unchanging and fixed. Secondly, this means that God cannot act outside of his nature, and thus, will not command things that are evil. |
And yet evil exists within creation.
quote: This is a rather deep point, the origin of evil, so I'll try my best. First of all, you are right. If God is the origin of all things, and he is omnipotent, then you are left with the question of how to reconcile the good in his nature with the fact that evil exists in the world.
You are right that God cannot create that which is evil, but rather, the explanation is that evil emerges from the world. In giving us free will, he allows us the freedom to love, as well as to reject God. In rejecting God, we seek that which is evil in itself, since we must find something to replace God. This takes a variety of forms, all of which we would label evil, or destructive.
What would be the alternative? I don't think having a free will can be separated from the possibility of evil. In fact, the evil we see can be said as proof that we have free will, that we can turn away from God if we choose. |
First, I reject the notion that free will allows evil. If we have free will, then behavior that violates the free will of a victim violates what "God" gave us. That's like saying God gave us life, therefore murder is allowed. But if what you say is true, then how can God be good? It's a cop-out to blame evil on the created and not on the creator. If your brand new car keeps breaking down, we don't blame the car, we blame the manufacturer...
|
|
|  |
 |
|
Urban Ranger
|
|
Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic
|
|
quote: Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
Suppose that God cannot command that which is evil, because good is an essential part of his nature. This claim has two fronts. First of all, this means that God is the origin of the good. The good is not arbitrary, nor does it change, since God is both unchanging and fixed. Secondly, this means that God cannot act outside of his nature, and thus, will not command things that are evil. |
There are some major problems with this.
First of all, if God is both unchanging and fixed, he cannot be omnipotent. Likewise, if God cannot act outside of his "nature", God is not omnipotent. In fact, if God has a fixed nature, God cannot be infinite.
Another point is, if Evil did not originate with God, it must be just as eternal and powerful as God. Since supposedly nothing came before God and all was His creation. Thus, for Evil to be uncreated, it would have to exist alongside with God. Furthermore, since God is good but He could not have destroyed Evil, Evil have to be just as powerful as He is. IOW, omnipotent.
|
|
|  |
 |
|
loinburger
|
 |
Sweet Sauce Jones
Jul 1999 time: 00:37
|
|
quote: Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
CS Lewis uses your arguments here against Dualism, since how could we tell which was the evil God, and which one was the good God? |
If "good" and "evil" are arbitrary terms invented by these gods, then there is no possible way. However, if the concepts of "good" and "evil" exist independently of these gods, then we can independently verify that one god is good (or, at least, that one god is more good than another). So, in order for this argument to defeat dualism, we'd need to presuppose that humans cannot differentiate between, e.g., benevolence and malice, without being explicity told by some outside force "this is benevolence, and this is malice."
quote: That's the one question that I'm looking at, is can something be evil without something good existing first? If not, then that would seem to imply that the good must come first. |
An alternative implication is that good an evil cannot exist without each other. Look at it this way -- in the set of integers, there are positive and negative numbers (we'll ignore '0,' because it unnecessarily complicates things). However, in the set of natural numbers, there is no such distinction between positive and negative numbers (again, ignoring '0') -- it is meaningless to say that the natural numbers are all "positive" unless you are considering numbers outside of the set of natural numbers, namely, the integers. Similarly, it is meaningless to call something "fast" if there isn't a concept of "slow," it's meaningless to call something "large" if there isn't a concept of "small," it's meaningless to call something "good" if there isn't a concept of "evil," etc.
In other words, this is a bifurcation fallacy -- neither concept/force/whatever had to come first.
quote: A distinction without a difference? I frankly see the two as one and the same. |
Then the idea of a law being written on our hearts is unnecessary -- the law might as well not exist.
quote: Thus, it makes sense that he would give us a conscience, even if we need to relearn what we have known from the beginning. |
The point is that a conscience given us by a creator is equivalent to lessons learned from adults/peers/etc. if we need to relearn everything in our consciences anyway. The morality == religion argument doesn't apply.
quote: When you say that Hitler has some redeeming features, you must first have some idea of the good in order to compare Hitler up to this standard. |
Not at all. I can say that one runner is faster than another runner without having some absolute concept of what the "fastest" runner would be, similarly, I can say that Hitler was more evil than Mother Theresa without having some absolute concept of what the "most good" or "most evil" person would be.
quote: Secondly, I believe that God is eternal, and has a good nature, than it makes sense that I ought to follow him. |
But in order to worship God because he has a good nature, you must first have already accepted God's claim that he has a good nature. You're left with following God based on the amoral belief that he is eternal, and assuming that he must therefore have a good nature because you've already agreed to accept his definitions of "good" and "evil."
quote: First of all, we cannot have a perfect knowledge of good and evil. |
Why not? You said that I'd have everything with which to raise a child, and that includes instruction that would bestow a perfect knowledge of good and evil.
quote: Secondly, just because we cannot achieve a perfect solution to a moral problem, does not mean that one does not exist. |
True, but there are bound to be moral problems for which no perfect solution exists, unless you were to change the definition of "perfect" to mean "most satisfactory."
[quote]
|
|
|  |
 |
|
Elok
|
 |
Land of Ramen Dragons
Mar 2003 time: 00:37
|
|
Oooooo-kay....
First point: We ain't manicheans, or at least I'm not. Good and Evil are not equal and opposite forces in balance. Evil exists only as a defiance of good. It is essentially nothingness, and needs no creator.
Second point: What is morality if not a religious concept? Secular theories of good state a morality that works for social cohesion or some other goal. But if that is the case, morality is not really an independent concept, just a description of the means to another end. If morals have only a sociological end, that end dictates the means; a new sociological premise yields a new morality. A sense of ethics that exists independent of any other motive, good for goodness' sake, is essentially an inanimate God, followed without question or reason. But sociobabble dressed as morality, where good and evil are steps towards a desired outcome, can be possessed by anyone.
Third: Every system needs limits to exist as a system. Witness the stupid "can god make a rock he can't lift" question. That classic basically means, "can god turn the laws of physics upside down and erase all meaning in the universe?" Similarly, God could destroy evil, but in doing so would circumvent the individual will that makes human existence worthwhile. The system would be broken and fixed all at once.
Fourth: God can act outside his nature, but chooses not to because he is not stupid. The root concept here is that good and evil are fairly obvious to an unconfused mind. God didn't give us free will so we would have an opportunity to sin any more than he gave us thumbs so we could poke each others' eyes out with them. Sin is a testament to the ingenuity of a spiteful mind-one which yearns to break the system purely for the sake of thereby making the system its own.
Well, that's what I think. Ben seems to be phrasing theology rather robotically, so I can sorta see UR's point in response...
|
|
|  |
 |
|
Ben Kenobi
|
 |
McGregornobi!
Oct 2002 time: 21:37
|
|
I have to go, but I will be back later to reply to all the comments.
I have time for one.
quote:
Certainly not religion, just look at the diversity and the evil committed by the religious.
|
Ah, but this begs the question. Suppose that people, because they are flawed cannot put religion into proper practice? Then we would expect precisely this when people try, that they still get things wrong and mess things up. This is what is known as the human nature of the church, in that it is composed of human beings.
However, this says nothing about the divine nature of the church, which does not change. There are some really good debates as to what precisely constitutes the divine nature of the church, but that will be for later.
quote:
How about "God"? How does one know what God wants?
|
Through those to whom God has spoken, and our own conscience.
quote:
A book? Hardly, not without some serious proof this God inspired or authored the entire text.
|
Very true. And I would argue that Christianity offers both an inspired text and the testimony of God.
quote:
And then how do we know if this God is good to begin with? Logic must be used, compare what this God wants with the universal standard mentioned above.
|
True. Which returns us to the resurrection. If Christ died and rose from the dead, then he must be God, and we ought to believe what he said. If he did not, then he is not god, but rather an agent of the devil sent to decieve people.
There is no middle ground, of a great moral teacher, for Christ did not claim to be one, but rather, claimed to be God himself.
|
|
|  |
 |
|
Ben Kenobi
|
 |
McGregornobi!
Oct 2002 time: 21:37
|
|
quote:
First of all, if God is both unchanging and fixed, he cannot be omnipotent. Likewise, if God cannot act outside of his "nature", God is not omnipotent. In fact, if God has a fixed nature, God cannot be infinite.
|
So I was mistaken. I have time for two.
Second point has been dealt with in response to Loin's question.
God chooses to act according to his nature, ergo he is still omnipotent, yet true to his nature.
For the first point, he can be unchanging and fixed, yet he is omnipotent. The opposite to your point is true. Remember entropy? Unless something is omnipotent, then it must decay. Ergo, something that is omnipotent, and only something that is omnipotent, could remain stable for eternity.
For the third point - God can have a fixed nature, and can be infinite, since he is omnipresent. Now, this does not mean that he is in everything, in the sense that a table or a tree is God, but rather, that he exists apart from nature, but is present everywhere.
|
|
|  |
 |
|
Ramo
|
 |
Austin, Texas, USA
Oct 1999 time: 23:37
|
|
Morality is a prescription for social interactions. It defines certain social interactions as either beneficial, or malevolent. While religion can offer a prescription for social interaction, it certainly isn't necessary.
As for the question of an absolute morality, religion makes no difference (unless all intelligent beings are magically forced to think a certain way about social interactions, and when they claim otherwise, they must be lying or something - but then that contradicts ideas of freewill prominent in most religions). There's no reason to say that an ultrapowerful being as automatically offering the "correct" morality, anymore than it makes sense to say that Hitler automatically offers the "correct" morality, for the concept of a "correct" morality isn't well defined. For what does it mean for one morality to be more "correct" than another? Morality is an abstract logical structure, so is not determined by anything but one's imagination. There's no absolute discrimination between any two.
|
|
|  |
 |
|
Elok
|
 |
Land of Ramen Dragons
Mar 2003 time: 00:37
|
|
Loin: There's no "justification," it's a purely abstract statement to explain the "flaw" perceived by UR. I'm talking in hypotheticals, yes, but I'm following the precedent. He said evil would need a creator, I said it wouldn't and why. What kind of justification are you looking for though?
As for the second part, you misunderstand. This probably isn't a good time for me to clarify (first saturday of the month, couple glasses of homemade wine, I'm pretty spaced), but I'm saying that the idea of "Good" and "Evil" as independent qualities, not just aspects of a greater concern, is innately theistic/deistic. If you follow good as a means to this or that, you are not following the conventional notion of "good" at all, but following whatever it is a means to by your reckoning. Whole different animal.
Whereas something that should be done, "just because," is like a god that can't change its mind. Well, it's not supposed to, since it's an absolute truth. In practice, it seems secular morality revolves around various factors such as mood, horniness, and prejudices about the people involved, just as much as any theistic morals only without the scriptural backbone. The guidance of a secular moralist is the conscience, which is a little voice inside your head telling you what you ought to do, not to be confused with envy, rage, indolence, spite, greed, hunger and lust, which also take the form of little voices in your head telling you what you ought to do. Anyway, the point is, an individual can clearly tell what's right and wrong without being told by some bishop. The voices of other men with ulterior motives are just subjective delusions, totally different from the objective discernment of those "in the know." Or something like that. I never did understand how the whole system works.
|
|
|  |
 |
|
Boris Godunov
|
 |
Portland, OR
Aug 2001 time: 00:37
|
|
quote: Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
If Christ died and rose from the dead, then he must be God |
Why? Jewish myth has others, not god, who died and rose from the dead. Why should Christ be special, in that light?
quote: If he did not, then he is not god, but rather an agent of the devil sent to decieve people. |
Or all the resurrection claptrap was made up later to make him appear divine, and in truth he never pretended to be more than a moral teacher. That's your middle ground right there.
The flaw in that statement is also a presupposition of the existence of the devil in the first place. He could have just been mentally deranged, or a chronic liar, too. The possibilities far exceed an either/or.
|
|
|  |
 |
|
loinburger
|
 |
Sweet Sauce Jones
Jul 1999 time: 00:37
|
|
quote: Originally posted by Elok
What kind of justification are you looking for though? |
Any kind of a justification. Both you and Ben have (paraphrasing) said that evil can only be created as a perversion of good, but you haven't said why you believe that this is so. One possible justification would be to say "I believe that God is good, and that God created the universe, therefore good came before evil," but you couldn't then turn around to use the claim that good preceded evil to justify the claim that God must therefore be entirely good, which, after all, is sort of what I'm asking you to do. The point is that if morality is non-arbitrary then you ought to be able to come up with some non-arbitrary means of justifying your adherence to God's morality, but then this would imply that someone who is non-religious could independently verify that one moral code is superior/inferior to another (which defeats the morality == religion claim). If morality is arbitrarily determined by God, then I'm wondering why you follow one arbitrary set of rules instead of some other arbitrary set of rules. Ben seemed to be arguing that good must precede evil and that God's arbitrary moral code must therefore be superior to all other moral codes by virtue of the claim that God preceded everything else, but he didn't justify the claim that good must precede evil, and neither did you.
quote: but I'm saying that the idea of "Good" and "Evil" as independent qualities, not just aspects of a greater concern, is innately theistic/deistic. If you follow good as a means to this or that, you are not following the conventional notion of "good" at all, but following whatever it is a means to by your reckoning. Whole different animal. |
I agree that the idea of "good" and "evil" as independent forces or entities or whatever is innately theistic/deistic, but I don't see this as being true for the idea of "good" and "evil" as being independent qualities. Theism certainly isn't needed to differentiate between benevolence and malice, and "benevolent intentions" and "malicious intentions" are essentially synonymous with "good intentions" and "evil intentions" respectively. In other words, religion isn't needed for somebody to be benevolent or to recognize benovolence, hence religion isn't a requirement for moral behavior or moral comprehension or whatever have you.
|
|
|  |
 |
|
Urban Ranger
|
|
Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic
|
|
quote: Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
Second point has been dealt with in response to Loin's question.
God chooses to act according to his nature, ergo he is still omnipotent, yet true to his nature. |
You have no way of telling if God chooses to act according to his "nature," this is simply BAMing.
quote: Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
For the first point, he can be unchanging and fixed, yet he is omnipotent. The opposite to your point is true. Remember entropy? Unless something is omnipotent, then it must decay. Ergo, something that is omnipotent, and only something that is omnipotent, could remain stable for eternity. |
First of all, you have again misinterpreted the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It does not say everything must decay. It simply says that the usuable energy in a closed system decreases over time. A number of things certainly don't decay, noticably elementary particles.
Secondly, just because something is omnipotent does not mean it's eternal, these are different concepts.
Thirdly, you have not provided a counterpoint.
quote: Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
For the third point - God can have a fixed nature, and can be infinite, since he is omnipresent. Now, this does not mean that he is in everything, in the sense that a table or a tree is God, but rather, that he exists apart from nature, but is present everywhere. |
I don't see how being omnipresent anchors God's nature. It simply means YHWH is everywhere.
|
|
|  |
 |
|
Urban Ranger
|
|
Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic
|
|
quote: Originally posted by Elok
First point: We ain't manicheans, or at least I'm not. Good and Evil are not equal and opposite forces in balance. Evil exists only as a defiance of good. It is essentially nothingness, and needs no creator. |

of course Evil is nothingness, it is just an abstract concept. So is Good. You can't point at an object and say, "This is Good." However, concepts still must come from somewhere. Just like democracy and communism.
quote: Originally posted by Elok
Second point: What is morality if not a religious concept? |
Morality (or ethics, if you prefer) is about ought-to's and ought-not-to's. It does not needed to be define in terms of religion.
quote: Originally posted by Elok
Secular theories of good state a morality that works for social cohesion or some other goal. But if that is the case, morality is not really an independent concept, just a description of the means to another end. |
How is that different from religious morality? The only difference is the goal has changed to "pleasing your god(s)."
quote: Originally posted by Elok
A sense of ethics that exists independent of any other motive, good for goodness' sake, is essentially an inanimate God, followed without question or reason. |
As Aggie pointed out, evolutionary psychology seems to be the origin of ethics. Simply put, humans can only survive in groups - we are just mediocre individually and makes good cat food.
quote: Originally posted by Elok
Third: Every system needs limits to exist as a system. Witness the stupid "can god make a rock he can't lift" question. That classic basically means, "can god turn the laws of physics upside down and erase all meaning in the universe?" |
Not true at all. It is a simple illustration of the inherent illogic of concepts such as "omnipotent" that they create internal contradictions.
Surely you agree that an omnipotent being can ignore the laws of physics, yes?
quote: Originally posted by Elok
Similarly, God could destroy evil, but in doing so would circumvent the individual will that makes human existence worthwhile. The system would be broken and fixed all at once. |
You are simply redefining what "makes human existence worthwhile."
Another thing is Evil does not only exist in our minds. There is such a thing called Natural Evil. For example, a volcanic eruption can kill hundreds and cause pain and suffering to tens of thousands.
quote: Originally posted by Elok
Fourth: God can act outside his nature, but chooses not to because he is not stupid. |
Appealing to the unknown isn't a very good argument.
quote: Originally posted by Elok
The root concept here is that good and evil are fairly obvious to an unconfused mind. God didn't give us free will so we would have an opportunity to sin any more than he gave us thumbs so we could poke each others' eyes out with them. |
Again, we don't have freewill if YHWH is omniscient. We have been through this many times.
quote: Originally posted by Elok
Sin is a testament to the ingenuity of a spiteful mind-one which yearns to break the system purely for the sake of thereby making the system its own. |
Is sin the same as evil? It seems not.
|
|
|  |
All times are GMT. The time now is 05:37. Apolyton Time is 00:37. |
top of page
|
| archivepost |
|
Forum Rules:
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
|
HTML code is ON
vB code is ON
Smilies are ON
[IMG] code is ON
|
|
|
|
|
|