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You forgot the actual Epicurean belief. God(s) exist but they don’t give a fuuuuuuuuuck.
Epicurus was the first deist.
Really more an atheist.
Don’t forget that not long before him Socrates was murdered by the state on the charge of impiety.
Plato in Timeaus refuses to even entertain a rejection of intelligent design “because it’s impious.”
By the time of Lucretius, Epicureanism is very much rejecting intelligent design but does so while acknowledging the existence of the gods, despite having effectively completely removed them from the picture.
It may have been too dangerous to outright say what was on their minds, but the Epicurean cosmology does not depend on the existence of gods at all, and you even see things like eventually Epicurus’s name becoming synonymous with atheism in Judea.
He is probably best described as a closeted atheist at a time when being one openly was still too dangerous.
wouldn’t that be more like an agnostic than an atheist?
since atheist believes that gods don’t exist
since atheist believes that gods don’t exist
This is a common misconception.
Theist is someone who believes God(s) exist(s).
An atheist is someone who does not believe God exists. They don’t need to have a positive belief of nonexistence of God.
Much like how a gnostic is someone who believes there is knowledge of the topic.
And an agnostic is someone who believes either they don’t have that knowledge or that the knowledge doesn’t exist.
So you could be an agnostic atheist (“I don’t know and I don’t believe either way in the absence of knowledge”) or an agnostic atheist (“I don’t know but I believe anyways”) or a gnostic atheist (“I know that they don’t and because I know I don’t believe”) or a gnostic theist (“I know they do and I believe because I know”).
Epicurus would have been an Agnostic atheist if we were categorizing. They ended up right about so much because they were so committed to not ruling anything out. They even propose that there might be different rules for different versions of parallel universes (they thought both time and matter were infinite so there were infinite worlds). It’s entirely plausible he would have argued for both the existence and nonexistence of gods in different variations of existence given how committed they were to this notion of not ruling anything out.
But it’s pretty clear from the collection of his beliefs that the notion of a god as either creator or overseer of this universe was not actively believed in outside of the lip service that essentially “yeah, sure, there’s gods in between the fabric of existence, but not in it.”
The Epicurean philosophy itself was very focused on the idea that the very notion of gods was making everyone sick, and that they offered their ‘cure’ for people to stop giving a crap about what gods might think or do.
Your second one is a typo “I don’t know but I believe” should be an agnostic thiest.
Thanks for the heads up! Fixed
I see, I have no more knowledge to improve this conversation, but thanks for sharing
Based on the anecdote of Socrates and the Pythia, that makes you one of the wisest people in this conversation.
It may have been too dangerous to outright say what was on their minds,
That alone has held back a lot of progres throughout the centuries.
It still does today, too.
“God works in mysterious ways”
The cope that always comes across when I hear this is intesne
imo every religion ever is a cope. All of those elaborate ideas about supernatural beings and alternate planes of existence to somehow cope with the fact that one day the good man, and the evil man, will both die and rot just the same.
It feels incredibly unjust for good men to die the same way evil men do, and for a lot of people that’s too much to handle. We as humans have such a strong sense of “fairness” that we attempted to structure our entire society around the idea of justice for all, and so by comparison nature feels cruel and unfair, you can either learn to live with that, or tell yourself really really hard that it’s not the end :) after they die the good man will be happy! and the evil man will get the punishment he deserves!
now layer that with milenia of different ideas about what qualifies you as “good” and “evil” and you’ve got religion.
This is my personal opinion, and honestly I don’t mind nor care how the other person deals with their existential dread, as long as they aren’t bigots about their way of coping.
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If there is a ‘god’ then they are a fucking asshole.
“If there is a god, he must ask me forgiveness.”
-Scrawled on the walls of a Nazi concentration camp cell
All religion is not about logic or reason, rather it is about identity. You can join a club for scale model trains, and you can join it for the only reason that you want to and because you enjoy it. You then identify as a member of the train club. It becomes part of your identity.
Religion is similar except it adds a dogma and doctrine that defines your entire world view. To lose this world view is to lose your identity. People would rather die than lose their identity because psychologically one’s identity is synonymous with their life.
The only way a person will lose religion is if they have decided for themself that it’s time for change. Much like an addict, it a personal identity change. You have to say to yourself, I am no longer an alcoholic or I am no longer a Mormon. There is no amount of convincing, rationality, evidence or influence that can change a person until they are ready and willing. It’s transformative and traumatic. You just have to accept those who are lost to it.
Maybe God is studying ethics, and we are his show and tell assignment.
Or we’re in a microverse powering his spaceship.
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You’re just being silly now
To nibble further at the arguments for God: free will is absurd.
If god is all knowing and all powerful, then when he created the universe, he would know exactly what happened from the first moment until the last. Like setting up an extremely complex arrangement of dominoes.
So how could he give people free will? Maybe he created some kind of special domino that sometimes falls leftward and sometimes falls rightward, so now it has “free will”. Ok, but isn’t that just randomness? God’s great innovation is just chance?
No, one might argue, free will isn’t chance, it’s more complex than that, a person makes decisions based on their moral principles, their life experience, etc. Well where did they get their principles? What circumstances created their life experience? Conditions don’t appear out of nowhere. We get our DNA from somewhere. Either God controls the starting conditions and knows where they lead, or he covered his eyes and threw some dice. In either case we can say “yes, I have free will” in the sense that we do what we want, but the origins of our decisions are either predetermined or subject to chaos/chance.
You see, shit like this is why I think some of the Eastern philosophers like Xunzi hit the mark on what “God” is: God is not a sentient being, God does not have a conscious mind like we do, God simply is.
Of course, those people didn’t call this higher being the God, they called it “Heaven”, but I think it’s really referring to the natural flow of the world, something that is not controlled by us. Maybe the closest equivalent to this concept in the non-Eastern world is “Luck” – people rarely assign “being lucky” to the actions of <insert deity here>, it simply happens by the flow of this world, it is not the action of an all-knowing, all-powerful deity. But like I said, it’s merely the closest approximation of the Heaven concept I can think of.
The side effect coming out of this revelation is that, you can’t blame the Heaven for your own misfortunes. The Heaven is not a sentient being after all!
This is always bizarre because “evil exists” is taken as a given and I don’t think it does. Evil is just a judgment call made by humans about the intentional and uncoerced actions of other humans; nothing less volitional than that can be argued as evil.
You can simply replace evil with suffering, or ig a christian context might say sin? The point is the paradox is a structure, if any choice of word makes it work, then it works.
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whoa
relevant username!
Objectivity can by your own logic be subjective as it is a judgment about a concept made by the condition of general consensus. Have fun word smithing your way out of any conceptual discomfort or useful conveyance of thought related to the human condition.
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Evil is just a judgment call made by humans about the intentional and uncoerced actions of other humans
Cancer is not an intentional and uncoerced action of other humans.
Earthquakes and tsunamis are not intentional and uncoerced actions of other humans.
If an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god existed, there would be no justification for these.
This guide lacks the branch where people’s sense of good and evil differs from the God’s one.
So wait the argument is that yes, by human definition, God is evil, but that he thinks all the atrocities in the world are totally awesome? That doesn’t make him less evil
More like, on the scale of mortal vs god, the things that are important to us either aren’t important to god(s) or may be so insignificant to be actually imperceptible.
As a thought experiment, say you get an ant farm. You care for these ants, provide them food and light, and generally want to see them succeed and scurry around and do their little ant things. One of the ants gets ant-cancer and dies. You have no idea that it happened. Some of the eggs don’t hatch. You notice this, but can’t really do anything about it. So on, and so forth. Now - think about every single other ant you’ve passed by or even stepped on without even noticing during your last day outside the house. And think about what those ants might think of you, if they could.
Now an argument that a god is omniscient and all powerful would slip through the cracks of this because an omniscient god WOULD know that one of their ants had ant-cancer and an all-powerful one would be able to fix it. But the sheer difference in breadth of existence between mortal and god may mean that such small things are beneath their attention. Or maybe he really does see all things at all times simultaneously down to minute detail. We don’t know. It is fundamentally unknowable to mortals. Our scales of ethics are incomparable.
We also don’t know if the ethical alignment of a god leans toward balance rather than good. It would make sense, in a way, if it did. Things that seem evil to us are in fact evil, but necessary in pursuit of greater harmony. Or in fact even necessary to the very function of the universe from a metaphysical perspective. If we assume the existence of a god for this argument it leads to having to assume an awful lot more things that we can’t really prove or test one way or the other. But one thing that seems pretty self evident is that the specific workings of a god are fundamentally unknowable to mortals specifically because we are not gods. We don’t have a perspective in which we can observe it so any argument made in any direction about it is pretty much purely conjecture by necessity.
Wut?
You keep repeating that the “scale of ethics” is incomparable but flip flop between “theyre not omnicient or omnipotent”… “but maybe they are”
And what does “balance” have to do with ethical behaviour without you begging the question.
“If we assume the existence of god, we have to assume a lot of other things too” and…???
Ultimately you spent a lot of time stating the cop-out argument of “its beyond us mere mortals”. To which I can fairly respond… no.
To which I can fairly respond… no.
You can’t, though. Or, well, you can say it all you want but that doesn’t make it true. I’m pretty certain that cats and dogs and bugs also think they’ve got humans figured out and I guarantee you they definitely, definitely don’t, because it’s physiologically impossible for them to understand. They’re just not equipped for it. Just like mortals wouldn’t be equipped to understand the perspective of an immortal, all-encompassing being, it’s impossible for you to accurately place yourself in that perspective.
The ant farm thing was a little hamfisted but I think the analogy still stands for the purpose I introduced it for.
And what does “balance” have to do with ethical behaviour without you begging the question.
It is a possible explanation for the existence of evil. As in, the post we’re arguing in the comments of right now. Nowhere in there did I ever say “this is the way things are”, only “this is a possible explanation for a question we cannot definitively answer”.
If we assume the existence of god, we have to assume a lot of other things too" and…???
Please explain what part of that doesn’t make sense.
This is all theoretical anyway, if a god existed your understanding of them would be limited to whatever they decide you’re able to understand of them anyway, so the argument is largely academic regardless of feelings or underlying truth. The point I was trying to make here is that the difference in the sheer scale of existence between a mortal and a god is such that we may be as ants to them. We possibly could not understand them no matter how hard we try - we’re just not biologically equipped for it - and some things that we consider important may be so unimportant as to never even get noticed by a god. But none of this is provable or even falsifiable so it’s all a thought experiment anyway.
Ants are a bad example though as ants lack the physical capabilities to feel emotions, they don’t have self awareness and may not even be able to feel pain. Also we didn’t create ants and their properties.
It’s an analogy, not an example. We are significantly further from a theoretical, all powerful, all knowing god than we are from ants. The scale of sentience from “inanimate object” to “all powerful god” is likely to have us mistaken for inanimate object. So the analogy serves its purpose, but of course the specifics are different.
The analogy is not good then. If we are talking about the Christian god, it is specifically told that he created humans and their properties. That is equivalent to us creating our own species of ants through genetic manipulation. Ants that feel pain and sorrow, plan for the future, form meaningful bonds with each other, make art and so on. Then we also (on purpose !) make it so some of them are depressed enough to kill themselves because they can’t take the pain anymore. Make some die of cancer in a week-long, painful battle.
No ethics commission would ever let that experiment pass. Either god has nothing to do with the christian one or doesn’t exist.
The problem my agnostic ass meets with good ol’ Epi is the disingenuousness inherent in assuming “Godly” rationale to “human logic” semantics. My dude, people can’t agree on human meaning and I’m supposed to make assumptions on God?
Why test if It knows the result of the test?
Geez Epic Manster, I know they didn’t have spring mattresses in your day but the mattress factory also knows the result my mattress should have gotten at testing but tested it anyways…because the testing provides the necessary shape.
I still maintain my agnosticism and keep my two extremes whenever I don’t feel like just being sure it’s all bullshit anyways:
If God exists, it doesn’t care for our suffering for reasons wholly beyond us (like a greater suffering of its own and why not, it’s shit all the way down).
God exists, cares, is a bit sad, but we’re all fucking mattresses where the cosmos is gonna poke, prod, and simulate fucking atop of us until we reach the appropriate factory required settings.
I already had coffee tho, so the middle atheist ground is in effect; none of it real, nothing matters except trying to not be total cockwaffles so everyone else can enjoy their nihilism too.
The problem my agnostic ass meets with good ol’ Epi is the disingenuousness inherent in assuming “Godly” rationale to “human logic” semantics. My dude, people can’t agree on human meaning and I’m supposed to make assumptions on God?
I think the idea here is that this deity being perfect would give some sort of absolute underpinning to the universe, having been designed by an intelligent mind. If it’s made in this systemic way, even if we don’t currently comprehend it properly, given enough time, we should be able to figure out at least some of the rules, providing insight into the nature of things and the mind of the universe’s creator.
I know they didn’t have spring mattresses in your day but the mattress factory also knows the result my mattress should have gotten at testing but tested it anyways…because the testing provides the necessary shape.
The mattress factory isn’t claiming their process is infallible, though, and they have QC exactly because they admit this and don’t want a factory defect to get out to customers. That’s a big difference from the omnipotent, omniscient deity being spoken of in the paradox here.
God having different morals makes a lot of sense. If you’re a super being that knows most people are going to end up eternally in a pleasurable afterlife at the end of the day, what’s a little temporary suffering while we meet?
Just saying, going to work isn’t so bad when I know I get to go home, maybe a grab a pizza with the money I earned on the way back.
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I actually don’t know, it was something I was just throwing out there.
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I already had coffee tho, so the middle atheist ground is in effect; none of it [is] real, nothing matters except trying to not be total cockwaffles so everyone else can enjoy their nihilism too.
This might just be the most British summation of my own beliefs I’ve ever read.
The bad execution of the flow chart was bothering me enough to create a cleaner version.
The solution I have heard before that I thought was the most interesting would add another arrow to the “Then why didn’t he?” box at the bottom:
Because he wants his creation to be more like him.
He’s just a lonely guy. He made the angels but they’re so boring and predictable. They all kowtow to him and have no capacity for evil (except for that one time). Humans have the capacity for both good and evil, they don’t constantly feel his presence, and they’re so much more interesting! They make choices that are neither directly in support of or opposition to himself. Most of the time, their decisions have nothing to do with him at all!
Humans have the capacity to be more like God than any of his other creations.
That would fall under the “then God is not good/not all loving”. You described it as if it were a privilege, but the capacity of evil causes indescribable suffering to us and to innocent beings such as small children and animals. If God lets all of this happen just because he wants some replicas of himself or because he thinks it is such a gift to be like him despite it, he’s an egotistical god.
Also, if he gets bored of pure goodness, blissfulness, and perfection, then it was never pure goodness, blissfulness, and perfection for him. Those things, by definition, provide eternal satisfaction. So he either never created that (evil branch again) or he cannot achieve those states even if we wanted to. If he cannot achieve those states even if he wanted to, if he lacks enjoyment and entertainment and has to spice his creation from time to time, then he’s not all powerful.
Also, many people argue the necessity of evil as a requisite for freedom. If God needs to allow evil so we can be free, then he’s bound to that rule (and/or others): not all powerful.
[slow, earnest clap]
If humans aren’t predictable to this god, then that god isn’t all-knowing.
Would they have been predictable had they never been created? Is conceptualizing an entire universe the same as actually creating the entire universe so it can play out?
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Is there actually “free will” without evil?
why not? you can choose to eat a banana or an apple, both perfectly non evil
I will die on a hill that says a banana is more good than an apple.
Making the apple relatively more evil on the scale from good to evil.
Others may prefer an apple. But I guess that is their free will to choose so 😉
I mean there was that whole ‘garden of eden’ thing with the apples…
Wasn’t the forbidden fruit in the garden of eden originally a fig or date or olive or something? It was changed to apple in the later translations. Something like that .
I thought it was a pomegranate
I’m allergic to bananas. But I’m pretty wicked so this tracks.
The free will is more about choosing to follow god or not. So if everything god does is good and everything they want you to do is good, you have no choice but to do those things. So you live in a perfect world but are a puppet.
An all-powerful god wouldn’t be affected by such logic. They could have changed the rules to allow for free will without evil.
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You have proof there is no God?
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By your logic, I could say there is no gravity, just an infinite number of invisible angles pushing things down.
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You asserted that there was no God.
You’re unable to prove your claim.
Now you’re resorting to an ad hominem attack.
You have a right to say you don’t believe in God, but no way to prove it.
And here’s a list of ad hominem attacks, so you can improve your logic.
Six hours later: resorts to ad hominem attacks when he can’t defend his argument. The hypocrisy is off the scales!
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Didn’t Epicurus live before Christianity was a thing?
In my quick searching, I can’t find much info on it. It seems that he made it in response to the idea that there were Greek gods that were concerned with humanity’s wellbeing and actively took a positive part in our existence. His ideas don’t apply to one religion or even try to say that there is no god, rather he is just saying that the gods are too busy / unconcerned with humanity’s wellbeing which was not the common view of the period.
Sounds more like he’s deist or agnostic rather than what the guide implies.
I don’t think it’s that God couldn’t create a universe without evil, it’s just there’s a process for making us good AND retaining our freewill.
So he’s letting us help to create a universe without evil…
Evil is necessary in this process, but evil is really just God “occluded” - Satan is in this sense working for and with God in this process of teaching humans about good, hence the line “God works in mysterious ways”… We don’t know the process, which is why it’s faith-based.
It’s like yes, your parents could give you a lifetime of pocket money all at once, but they’re not going to because you have to learn patience, self-discipline, and saving up for the things you want (or can afford). You have to make choices in that process to learn about those things.
Humans are temporal… God is not.
So for God, God created a world without evil in which humans have freewill… It’s already been done, instantly for God.
But we don’t live on the same temporal plain.
Claiming God can’t do it, is like being the kid asking for ALL the pocket money at once. Parents could do that, but they’re letting time and your own temptation teach you the lessons.
That’s part of the mysterious ways. But in faith, outside of time, and with the right beliefs and choices, a world without evil where people in your life still have freewill already exists… It’s up to you to live there in it, in time.
…and you may end up living there anyways.
assuming you’re right, he either can’t or doesn’t want to create that world without human suffering. Remains either evil or not all powerful.
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You’re assuming that the creation of suffering is evil when God does it - however it could be that if heaven exists as a place in the future where everyone’s all good with what happened…
…then it might not be evil when God does it, it might only be evil when humans do it (because we’re not capable of doing it in a way that’s consciously creating heaven (where everyones okay with what happened) as a result… We can’t arrange souls like God can. We can’t live or operate outside of, or beyond time like God can.
…also, not that anyone asked, but personally - I’m an atheist. I’m just seeing how far these arguments can go with provisos like heaven, God as a time lord, and souls/at-birth soul agreements.
Oh, also God can patch up or fix up, or factor in suffering humans create, because being able to predict that something is going to happen isn’t the same as causing it. Eg. I know the sun is going to rise each day up until an expected sun-death… Even if humanity creates the ability to make the sun rise, it doesn’t mean the sun is currently controlled by us. Yet it’s still predictable.
Still, the (theoretical) fact remains that god knows about the suffering and lets it happen. Whatever the goal is, if he’s omnipotent he should be able to reach it without having suffering. If he can’t, he isn’t omnipotent. If he doesn’t want to, he’s not good.
He mentioned before that maybe the process for making humans good and retaining free will necessarily requires evil to exist. It’s possible that by definition, suffering must exist, not that God couldn’t do it. Kinda like how, by definition, you can’t make a four sided triangle; it’s not that God wouldn’t be powerful enough to do that, it’s that a triangle requires three sides by definition. Maybe the incorporation of free will requires suffering, even suffering not caused by the choices people make?
A four sided triangle is a verbal misconstruct, because we chose those names to represent different objects - nothing to do with what god can or can’t do. They could make all of us believe that four-sided polygons are called triangles, which fulfills the requirement you propose. On the other hand, free will can’t “require” suffering, because a requirement would mean there is a rule god can’t break, which would mean they are not omnipotent.
But it could be suffering is by nature what allows us to enjoy good. You can’t have a human if the human doesn’t know not good, because how would you enjoy what you can’t appreciate? The rat utopia experiment kinda shows what happens when you introduce a biological being evolved for stressors to a perfect environment. And humans may already be going through something similar but not as bad in developed countries (the lower birth rates, increased depression, etc) as what happened to the rats in the rat utopia.
So essentially what you’re proposing is not allowing humanity to exist, and that it’s a good thing.
It’s not an invalid argument, but do consider some might consider that in itself evil, which brings us to the biggest real question: defining “evil”.
An omnipotent god could alter nature in a way that makes us able to enjoy good without needing to suffer. If they can’t, they’re not omnipotent. If they don’t want to, they’re letting us suffer unnecessarily, and they’re not good.
I’m not denying they could do that if they’re omnipotent.
I’m saying that what you’re suggesting is the extermination of humanity as is, and that some would consider that evil.
By that logic, you could say that eliminating cancer is exterminating humanity as is, and thus evil.
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Well, it’s fun if anything :). Nobody actually believes in god for rational reasons.
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