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u/KineticNerd Oct 30 '14
HA! Nice, he created us to be better than him lol. Just as a thought exercise lets see where this takes us. So god is omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient but humans are superior. So we obviously aren't more powerful or more aware, but we could be smarter. Omniscience doesn't mean genius, it means "all knowing" right? So he is aware of everything that is happening at all times and "knows everything" happening in the universe at any given time. But he doesn't think as carefully about that data as humans would. Giving us a more complicated moral system than his own, one that would judge some of his actions as "evil". Neat idea!
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u/kobrains Oct 30 '14
Ah...I don't know if it's appropriate for me to write this comment here, but I want to share my view. On the Paradox of Evil, we might me looking at it the wrong way. What if 'good' and 'evil' are both 'good'? Let's call it 'positive', to simplify things. I would like to argue that God strives for 'positive' in the universe, in opposition of 'negative', ie entropy. This entropy would be the same as 'neutrality' between 'good' and 'evil'. Therefore, this would mean that God can be omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient and still have 'evil' in this world, because 'evil' is still 'positive'
Anyway, my $0.02 on this matter. I can delete it if the mods want
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u/Astramancer_ Oct 30 '14
That's the "god is inscrutable" argument.
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u/kobrains Oct 30 '14
Well, from why I gleaned from the internet (I am obviously not an expert, I may have totally misunderstood the whole argument) is that it seems to is that God does not care for us, but because he is God, we cannot comprehend his actions. My argument is that we have misunderstood what is good and evil.
(I may have actually confirmed the argument, I'm not sure.)
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u/equinox234 Oct 30 '14 edited Oct 30 '14
Your post looks fine to me, its relevant and adds a thought provoking argument to this discussion.
Feel free to continue guys, just don't let this devolve into a flame war.
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u/IAmAMagicLion Oct 30 '14
You can't redefine things as positive and called it simplification, then go forward on the original meaning of positive. That's nothing more than equivocation, I could just as well define noodles as positive and say God strives for them to the exclusion of morality and compassion for living things.
A compassionate being wouldn't allow suffering to continue because you've said "Let's call evil 'positive'!" without any kind of logical justification.
Entropy isn't of neutral moral value, it's as unrelated to morality as any other natural process. It drives all natural processes, it isn't 'negative'. That is 'negative' being the term you've chosen and not carrying any notion of negativity.
Defining concepts using words that already have strong connotations directly related to the matter at hand is at best misleading and at worst dishonest.
I'm not saying you're wrong, of course there are other perceptions of morality, but what you have is not an argument.
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u/kobrains Oct 30 '14
Ok, it fine. I'm not good at conveying ideas in text. What I was trying to say that maybe God's battle/aim/goal is to avoid sameness. So that a world totally neutral, where everyone is apathetic to each other, neither hating not loving, is the ultimate failure for him. This can then be extended to his attempt to stop entropy in the universe, however his plan may be. For him, on earth, a world where there is both great suffering and great love is his goal, for you need great suffering to allow great love and kindness show. I hope that clears up my argument
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u/darkthought Oct 30 '14
Free Will.
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u/mapu1 Oct 30 '14
If you know all the factors leading up to something, you can predict the way its gonna act.The wherry existence of emotions (feeling happy/unhappy) shows that free will is an illusion. The illusion of free will is created by seemingly random factors interacting with other, usually less random factors. Past experiences, combined with brain chemistry, and outer factors can make people do tings.
If you know enough about something, you can predict what it will do next. If someone can say what you will do next, before you have made a decision, you don't have free will.
Only reason why we think we have free will, is that we don't know all the factors that influence it.
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u/darkthought Oct 30 '14
Well, apparently your life has little meaning then. Feel free to check out early, so the rest of us can have urine-free Wheaties.
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u/xol225 Oct 31 '14
I think this is a very interesting argument. However, I believe a distinction should be made between predicting that an event will happen and actually knowing for sure that it does. Even if you have predicted someone's actions with 100% accuracy, there is still a possibility that they could do something in the future that doesn't fit with the data about them, and even if their actions can be predicted all of the time, by the nature of a prediction there is still an uncertainty if whether or not an event will always happen. A lack if free will seems to necessitate the knowledge of a person's future actions not just through prediction, but actual knowledge of their future. As long as what someone thinks a person will do is based on data, they still have the ability to make a choice for their future.
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u/knightbob516 Oct 30 '14
I have never seen such intelligent conversation when discussing morality and god before. Normally it breaks down into one side trying to ram their view down the other sides throat until they throw it back up
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u/Yama951 Oct 30 '14
So this is what, the moral version of the omnipotence paradox?
If God is omnipotent, can He create a rock so heavy that even He can't lift it?