long winded fool

Very clever. I'm not trying to explain "omnimax." The context of the thread is "if God, then..." which is often a very effective form of argument to show contradictions. Since God is supposed to be omnimax, my argument accepts this as an axiom as does the one given in this thread to show the apparent contradiction, even though an omnimax God has not been proven. To refute an "if God, then..." argument such as the one presented here, I don't need to first prove "God." Maybe there's no such thing as "omnimax," but if there were, then nothing at all could possibly exist outside of this power. I don't know how free will could coexist with omnimax, but if it also did, as both are assumed by this thread in the context of "if God, then," in the sense that the idea of God that we're using comes from the biblical description which claims these things are the case, then the argument follows.

Stephen T-B

LWF - I wouldn’t even attempt the task you’ve set yourself.
Samuel Johnson boasted of taking the hardest side in any argument, being the most demanding intellectual challenge.
So, as we say in Leeds, “Bon chance, mon brave!”

Llyricist

How many times are you going to try to reformulate this discussion LWF? (Rocket powered goalposts indeed)

A reminder, from the OP:
Now I have been waiting patiently for you to address my objections, a) to your loving father analogy, allowing daughter to learn from mistakes, wherein the consequences of the mistake laid out above may or may not be suffered by the one making the mistake (in fact NOT according to your interpretation of scripture). and b) The apparent relative difficulty in being able to actualize the moral choiceTM for good being contradictory to the alleged goodness of God.

Dr Rick

Yeah, we know. You're trying to refute the PoE with the free-will defense by posting a string of unsubstatiated assertions interspersed with stories about your daughter.

It would be an understatement to say that it hasn't been much of a success. You provide convincing evidence that you love your daughter, but nothing that refutes the PoE.

True, but at some point you do have to actually address the "if, then" part.

long winded fool

Why? My conclusion is "if, then." I never have to prove A, I just have to prove my conclusion that if A, then B. I agree to disagree with you that I haven't proven this because that's all I can do without a specific reference to exactly where you feel my argument is flawed and how or why I might have come to a false conclusion. It's fine that you feel it's generally flawed and I suppose it's mildly impressive that you can loosely sum up my argument without going into too much detail to avoid a straw man, but you won't convince me or any other honest person one way or the other unless you can explain why without assuring me that you don't need to spell it out because anyone who's smart would understand.

Dr Rick

Your "ifs" amount to: "Let's assume god can't do everything possible, and let's assume that everything god can't do is logically impossible." You define omnimax in a circular way that essentialy says "whatever god does, that's a characteristic of omnimax."

That's swell, but it's not the PoE. The PoE defines omnimax and applies that defintion to god, not the other way around. You are not arguing the PoE when you start with "ifs" that you just made-up

Your flaw is that you start with a set of assertions and an analogy about your daughter that are not part of the PoE, then claim that you have "logically" refuted the PoE.

Your entire argument is a strawman. It does not address the PoE

I have never said or implied anything of the sort.

How could you know what it would take to convince an honest person?

long winded fool

Now it's circular is it? Because God can't be omnimax and fail to be omnimax? You've failed to explain yourself in a rational way. If you have to cram my argument into one that you've refuted or seen refuted before, then you know you have a strawman. You can't go back to an atheistic reference and pick an argument you think is most similar to mine and use the provided refutation. You should address my argument and all it entails if you want to get anywhere in this thread. I've given clear explanations of where each of my premises and analogies come from. You simply state that I haven't five pages later. "You haven't refuted the PoE... You have assertions that arent 'part of the PoE,'" (whatever that means. I.E. 'You've used assertions I've never seen used before in the PoE argument and can't address because they represent a logically sound analogy which results in a different conclusion than the one I'm used to.') These are not explanations. These are the assertions on this thread. I think I have refuted the PoE. Show me I haven't. Don't tell me I haven't. Prove me wrong. Don't declare I'm wrong because I argue against something you ferverently believe in and expect a pat on the back for your reasoning ability.

I appreciate those that have addressed my own argument as critically as I have theirs. It's nice to know that there are other open-minded and intellectually confident atheists who post here.

Dr Rick

I can't take that much credit for seeing how ridiculous your whole arguement is; it's quite obvious:

Originally posted by Llyricist "...round and round YOU go, this is circular...

HUH??? This is irrelevent...This is an awful lot of words for a bald assertion, you are certainly living up to your nick name .

Assertions assertions assertions..."

Why should we address a strawman, we were discussing the PoE, not lwfs daughter.

By the way, look at the responses you've been getting on this thread; talk about getting nowhere:

Originally posted by Llyricist
"How many times are you going to try to reformulate this discussion LWF? (Rocket powered goalposts indeed)

...Nowhere in your post did you address the problem of the consequences not being connected to a mistake, or rather someone suffering the consequences of someone else's mistake. from whence does the learning come in the example I spelled out?

I must admit scombrid covered this quite clearly in his post but you managed to gloss right over it and not address it at all."

Wow, Llyrist sure looks convinced, huh?

Originally posted by scombrid
"This analogy fails when the subject has not received advice or has recieved wrong advice without knowing it and when consequences are unnattached to the action...Your model asserts that Muslims flying planes into buildings know The Truth™ about heaven/hell/Christ/right way to treat others but are willfully disregarding god's orders. You say that disobeying god is following your earthly desires. Their killing themselves in god's name is hardly what I'd call an earthly desire...He's impotent to stop it. Or he's not there."

Hey, another convert for lwf!

You appear to be alone in that belief. After clearly showing us that you are not discussing the PoE, but rather your own idiosyncratic argument with your own set of unaccepted premises, how could you claim to have refuted the PoE?

The PoE was restated for you many times, as was your failure to refute it with the free-will defense:

"The deductive PoE:

1) A all-good God would destroy evil.
2) An all-powerful God could destroy evil.
3) An all-knowing God would know how to destroy evil
4) Evil is not destroyed.
5) Therefore, there cannot possibly be such a all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful God."

Here's one of your many strawman responses:

You refuse to address the PoE even as you claim to have refuted it!

Simply amazing.


Originally posted by Llyricist:
"Ahhh yes, the old "move the goal posts right on off the field of coherence and reality and declare victory" gambit LOL"



You're seriously deluding yourself if you think the dismissive responses to your drivel somehow convey any respect for it.

long winded fool

You state this yet you still say I don't address the PoE in my argument! You're grasping at straws. If you've really forgotten my position, my argument is that # 1 is false. Why would an all-good God destroy evil if the possibility of evil (or "not good") is necessary for free choice, and the existence of free choice is necessary for God to be all-good? (I.E. not a "cosmic rapist") My argument accepts numbers 2, 3, and 4. It cannot accept the conclusion (5) because one of the premises (1) is false. The analogy about my imaginary daughter was meant to show how suffering can be "inflicted" in the sense of refusing to prevent it from occuring without compromising an all-loving or an all-powerful nature, which was assumed to be impossible in the op. Because free will requires value, and since free choices must have different consequences, "worse" and "better" must exist. Worse=evil, Better=good. God can't eliminate worse without eliminating free will anymore than God can eliminate human beings without eliminating human culture. It can't be done and God is still omnipotent. Our words have prerequisites for meaning. Take away the prerequisite and you take away the meaning of a word. God can't "make us freely choose good" without undermining the all-good premise by revoking free will and becoming a God who forces Himself on His children. The Problem of Evil is solved by the existence of free will. I'm sorry if you think this defense can easily be refuted. Until you prove it rather than assert it, my argument stands.

Llyricist

You have yet to demonstrate that the possibility of evil is necessary for free choice except in your fantasy world where "turning away from God" is somehow equal to or the cause of suffering. In other words, there is no reason to believe that God couldn't allow free choice to choose him or not without allowing us to commit heinous acts on eachother or allowing our environment to commit heinous acts on us.

YOUR equating choosing God or not with the presence of suffering is an entirely unsupported assertion. One that a gave you before and still refuted your argument by the way.
I guess if you are referring to your construction of choice as choosing God or turning away from God, you MAY have a point. BUT There is no reason to suggest that it would have been bad of him to create us to be unable to choose anything but his way. So this is nothing more than an assertion supported only by the human analogy of the slave owner, which is not valid owing to the fact that the slave owner cannot create his slaves to Want to serve him, while an omnimax God could.

AND referring back to the op, and your interpretation of "God's way" the consequences are perfectly inverted to the "goodness" of the choices, i.e. the one's doing wrong suffer NO consequences, while the ones who may have chosen correctly suffer ALL the consequences.... so you failed again.

The rest you are just confusing things by asserting the PoE suggests God should intervene NOW after things are already screwed up. While in fact the PoE suggests that things shouldn't have ever become this way in the first place.....DUH.