@Mrs_deWinter
@feddit.orgYou’re arguing the process of plate tectonics is ontologically wicked.
Not at all. You're still fighting a strawman. The existence of volcanoes and cancer isn't evil. If it was however consciously created by an omnipotent and omniscient being, that would be evil. The paradox doesn't relate to our reality itself, only to the claim of said characteristics in a god in relation to said reality. You still seem confused about that part.
But this sounds like Perdition. Absolutely nightmarish. An eternal hellscape I would wish to escape at any cost.
If you truly cannot a reality with less suffering than ours you are truly unimaginative, mate. Or completely ignorant to the suffering that exists in this world. Or maybe both.
But it is also perfectly possible that all of this exists without a Singular Perfect Entity at its origin.
Right, which is why this is the most obvious answer to the Epicurean paradox: This singular perfect entity doesn't exist. Congratulation, you've now arrived at the same conclusion as Epicurus 2.5 thousand years ago.
Then why would god create our minds and logic in the first place? Seems like he'd be setting us up for failure if he gives us tools to determine the truth which in turn seem to disprove his existence. Also not something you'd expect from an all-loving deity.
You’re discounting enormous processes that provide enormous benefits over the order of millennia to marginal discomforts experienced by tiny minorities over the course of months. Why stop at volcanoes and cancer? We could claim that teeth are evil. We could claim that fire and salt are evil. We could claim that emotions are evil.
If you're seriously arguing that there is no unavoidable suffering in this world you're very ignorant towards your fellow human beings. An omnipotent god could create a world without volcanoes and without sickness. Yet he didn't. You're sill not understanding even the starting point of the Epicurean paradox if you don't get that.
With the conclusion that such a deity does not deserve to be worshiped, presumably because an immensely powerful but flawed being is not worthy of reciprocal love and devotion. But that’s not an argument against God, its an argument against Parents.
Again, you're misunderstanding the conversation. It's not about judgment or whining, it's not about arguing if it's okay for god to be how he is, it's not about any conclusions from gods nature to anything. It's a logical thinking exercise about the premises of the abrahamic idea of god's characteristics and whether they make sense or not.
If the premises are: god is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, the existence of human suffering creates a paradox. (And if you're unsure why just look at the guide above.) What you're saying has nothing to do with that. You don't resolve the paradox by insulting those who find it interesting to think about, you're disqualifying from the conversation. If you believe in a god without those characteristics the Epicurean paradox says nothing about your faith at all.
Hardly convoluted.
While you're arguing about all the parts of human suffering that can easily be attributed to humans, other forms of suffering exist as well. Think volcanoes. Think cancer. You're not making a good argument if you're conveniently forgetting that not all suffering has to do with our free will at all.
At the point, you’re not arguing against the existence of a deity. You’re arguing against the existence of Buddy Jesus and the big smiling sun baby from Teletubbies.
I think you're misunderstanding the Epicurean paradox. It specifically argues against a very specific idea of god with the characteristics of being omnipotent, omniscient and all-loving at the same time. Call him "buddy jesus" if you will (some call him "God"), but that's exactly the thought exercise we're talking about here. No one is arguing against deities in general. The term is way too broad to have a single conversation about every potential divine entity anyway.
Suffering without purpose. And that’s where things get sticky. Because the argument from Evil needs to assume the recipients of suffering are innocent and undeserving. Otherwise it’s not evil, just karma.
There's plenty of undeserved suffering in our world, I don't think we have to debate that. Either evil is the consequence of our free will in some convoluted way - then the same will be true in the afterlife - or a paradise without suffering is possible - then an all-loving and omnipotent god would have been able to create just that. It simply disproves the idea that our suffering was somehow unavoidable to an all-powerful god, because that doesn't make sense withing the ideological framework of the abrahamic religions. It must be avoidable. Otherwise paradise would be unthinkable.
You're describing part of the paradox: religion promises relief from suffering based on certain characteristics of god (in this case: all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving), while suffering continues. The nature of the promise and the nature of our reality don't seem compatible. That's what the Epicurean paradox is about. Obviously something can't be right about the promise that god loves you, has exact knowledge of what must be done and is literally omnipotent. Because evidently he doesn't follow through with it.
I don't know how exactly other religions promise to alleviate suffering. Maybe those create their own paradoxes, who knows. We'd have to look at the actual claims of those religions. The Epicurean paradox very specifically criticises the idea of god as proposed by the abrahamic religions and in my opinion does so very convincingly.
So children getting cancer? That’s clearly god’s will, and is therefore good.
This answer to the Epicurean paradox is nothing but semantics. Let's just rephrase the question:
--> No. It creates a paradox. So, using human words and human concepts, god cannot possibly be all three things. Therefore, by human standards, we cannot expect love, omniscience, and omnipotence from him. That's all the paradox proves.
It's not a "gotcha" to claim that there might be other standards, which are meaningless to us, but somehow mean something equivalent than the concepts we already have words for. Those foreign concepts have obviously nothing to do with what we humans call power, knowledge, and love. They don't mean anything and there's literally no way to fill them with meaning either, since they are by definition independent of human concepts.
Claiming that god is something, but this something cannot be understood, is in all consequence an empty claim without any meaning. Easy to make, but at the end of the day says and proves nothing.
There are many good arguments against God. This is not one of them.
It’s a slightly more complicated version of whether God can create a rock so big he cannot lift it.
It's a very good argument against god, and your second statement is a great addition to it. Omnipotence in itself is impossible, as proven by the rock paradox. An omnipotent being can therefore not exist.
Your free will idea however has a very easy counter argument: If free will is the problem, then god has nothing to offer us - since in the afterlife the same rules would apply. Either a world without suffering is possible, or it isn't. Since the afterlife isn't known to work by taking away our free will, suffering would therefore continue to prevail there as well. If the idea of an afterlife must be possible (as seen in most organized religions) than the idea of a world without suffering must be possible, without taking away something so valuable as our freedom.
Asking: “how can you let things like this happen?” “This seems to be against what I understand your nature to be?” “How can you be who you say you are and allow this?” is very different from saying, “You are wrong and I hate you for it.”.
The Epicurean paradox asks neither. It asks: Wait a minute - if what I think to know about you makes no sense given my reality, how can what I know about you be true?
God isn’t my god. He isn’t whatever I want him to be, if that were the case, I would never find myself in conflict with him. He is what he is. He is I AM.
If god is indeed compatible with even the worst realities imaginable, what reason do we have to believe in him in the first place? His existence (or non existence) doesn't seem to make any difference then. Of course I understand that if you simply believe he exists nothing will ever convince you otherwise (and I wouldn't want to convince you either), but coming from my perspective (someone who once was christian, is today atheist) this means that god has no explanatory value whatsoever. Even if he existed, I wouldn't have to (and indeed don't) care for him. Even if he existed, his idea of what's wrong and what's right apparently has nothing to do with what I think. He could just as well be an immortal alien on mars counting the grains of sand, because that's what he deems good, and he'd be equally relevant to me. If we cannot know anything about him, there's no reason to assume anything either. Then he is, in all effect, nothing.
From a religious perspective: Sure, logic will never disprove your faith, I get that. But in any other case, unless we start the thinking exercise on the premise that god exists, all the logical indicators point to the opposite.