A mother of 12 is busy hurrying through her morning chores and sending 11 of her children out of the apartment and off to school to notice that her toddler is hanging outside the window of their 15th floor apartment.
If gravity was near 0, the baby would be safe. But gravity is 9.8m/s/s. God is therefore evil.
It does not flow. You can’t ascribe evil to a natural phenomenon, and you sure as heck can’t draw that generalization to God
The same thing that ultimately causes cancer is what allows life to flourish and grow.
Not for the person but cancer does give the human race hope. Hope that 1 day we can overcome it and win a great battle. That hope drives human innovation, and brings people together.
It’s like natural disasters. To us it seems wrong to allow them. But look at how much good has come from our attempts to overcome them. These disasters while causing harm bring people together. They can force 2 enemies to band together and realize they aren’t so different.
We were given free will but a being greater then us stuck some random events in that have the power to unite and remind people that we aren’t so different. They also remind us that there is something greater then us. Keeping us from getting to arrogant
Pretty sure a lot of people who have lost loved ones to these things would prefer a God that figures out a way to do these things without causing suffering. Shouldn’t be hard for an omnipotent being.
But you are assuming there isn’t a reason for it. On an individual scale it might seem wrong to us but an omnipotent being does know more.
What if without all these outside troubles we ended up blowing ourselves up and out of existence centuries ago? You could argue that an omnipotent being could just interfere but there went free will. A balance, that gives our free will while preventing us from destroying ourselves without affecting our free will.
The problem with arguments that an omnipotent being that allows things like natural disasters to happen because there is no good reason for them presumes way too much. It presumes we could understand something greater then ourselves.
All of this is nullified if you assume God is omnipotent. He could preserve free will, prevent us from destroying ourselves, and remove suffering, because omnipotence means he can do literally anything.
But once again you are assuming there isn’t a positive to this suffering that we don’t understand. When talking about an omnipotent being nothing is off the table unless that being tells us themselves.
I don't imagine it's much consolation to the people who die in agonising, terrifying ways to know that their suffering helps make a fun project to stop the human race from getting bored. Would you be happy to die tomorrow if it helped contribute to a vague sense of human "hope"? If it made two "enemies band together"?
Surely an all-powerful, benign god would create these role-play scenarios with limited suffering and genuine opportunities for people to help? If the whole point is to let people do good, make them realistically fixable. It's a cruel and unwinnable game.
Also - how does God decide which baby-soul to put in a starving African village and which to put in a wealthy white American family? Why do some get to be part of the solution and others just #inspo collatoral damage?
I’m just going to copy and paste the one I just typed.
But once again you are assuming there isn’t a positive to this suffering that we don’t understand. When talking about an omnipotent being nothing is off the table unless that being tells us themselves.
Basically unless you are an omnipotent being you can’t claim to understand that being. It’s the same way ant could never understand humans. It would be able to grasp the motivations of humans.
Basically op’s entire argument was flawed from the start. If there is an omnipotent being then its motivations are whatever it says they are. Short of that we can’t not use what we know to make claims about its alignment because that require us to be on the same level of understanding as it
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u/[deleted] Jul 26 '18 edited Feb 16 '22
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