theophilus

Congratulations; I don't use the FWD.
Your inference is incorrect; God's judgement is the consequence of personal sin.
I don't have to reconcile it with omnibenevolence - you have to prove a standard of benevolence to which God is accountable and by which he fails.

theophilus

This is simply nonesense. First, we're in no position to judge God in any respect; we are finite, he is infinite. Second, he has made himself known and his "goodness" is perfectly consistent with what he has revealed. It is only because you want to make a distinction between his "goodness" and his purpose that you end up confused. God is not divided as you are; his attributes, his purpose, and his workings are all completely integrated and are a perfect expression of his being.

Wyrdsmyth

Au contraire, friend theophilus. What else is in that post? Look closely. I provided two quotes by you, which juxtaposed as their are, should provide some cognitive dissonance in anything smarter than a baboon... after all, you contradicted yourself. Is the world perfect or does it need to be restored to perfection? If the first, it doesn't need to be 'restored' to anything, as it is perfect now. If the latter, then it is not perfect now. Simple, even for a theopithicus like you. In theory.

Yes... Perhaps it's just you.

Ranting? Okay, so I'm no George Gershwin. Still, I thought it was fairly entertaining for an off-the-cuff little ditty.

And I asked: What is your criteria to distinguish between a contradiction and an "apparent contradiction"? Which you never answered. What is the criteria?

theophilus

I keep waiting for you to say something substantial and you keep dissappointing me.

Goober

theophilus,

You have already told me the purpose of the universe - "The purpose was for God's glory". Remember saying that? Why should I have to be omniscent to understand what grants glory? The creation of a universe that contains many poorly designed objects does not grant glory to its creator, yet you think that the universe is perfect for the task it was created for, as already stated. The creation of a universe in which beings suffer and are unhappy does not grant glory if it is within the creators power to reduce this happiness. If imperfections in the universe were fixed, it would make god look like a better designer and hence be better at providing glory to god. But imperfections exist, so it is not perfect at providing glory.

Another false analogy. They law is clearly set out and easily available to anyone, which is why there are no excuses for breaking it. Evidence for god is totally lacking.

Yes, and all I said was that I hoped you didn't use FWD. Let me get this straight though before I continue: you think god is not omnibenevolant, right?

Wyz_sub10

Just to be clear then, god wanted sin?

I agree with this, but it creates much conflict (which was why I previously refered to behavioural expectations). If everything is as planned, then why banish Adam and Eve? If that too was part of the plan, why do we supposedly still carry that sin?

There is no doubt that evey alleged event from the bible can be explained away by saying "god wanted it that way" but that raises a host of questions. By this logic, any way I behave is the way god wants it, so why is my behaviour (anyone's behaviour) ever an issue? Consequences are meaningless in terms of choice if everything occurs as god intends.

I say "nonesense" because it is not consistent with the Christian concept of prayer or forgiveness. For reasones noted above, if everything is part of a plan, than no one is at fault, as it is all part of a plan.

The accountability, to be honest, doesn't even have to reside with god (if, as you imply, he is watching everything unravel in perfection).

The issues, then, go back to the biblical writers and the theologicans centuries afterward for, apparently, getting their signals crossed with reagrds to free will, responsibility and sin.

I'm sorry but this is really just "double speak". The use of the word "ordained" is simply meant to remove accountability from god.

I believe this was pointed out elsewhere, and I think this concept represents the chief problem with this line of reasoning - like a mafia boss who says "take care of him" then claims uninvolvement, and even outright innocence, when his henchman has a guy whacked.

The Romans can hardly be held accountable (in fact, should be praised) for carrying out god's ordained plan.

Jobar

WyrdSmyth, remember rule (2)- "You will not post material that is knowingly defamatory, illegal, abusive, threatening, harassing, or racially offensive. "

I admit I laughed at your comments about theophilus, but no more insults direct, even in fun, OK?

bd-from-kg

theophilus:

From your last response it seems pretty clear that you don’t understand the point of my argument at all. I’m not trying to “judge” God, to “evaluate” His purposes, or show that He is anything but perfectly good. Nor am I questioning your position that to say that something is “good” means nothing more nor less than that it is in accord with His purposes. I’m simply pointing out what this position entails.

If the only thing that distinguishes His purposes from other possible purposes is that they are His purposes, we can forget about trying to figure out anything whatsoever about His purposes based on the fact that they’re good. The statement “God’s purposes are good” becomes a tautology, which means that it contains no information.

More importantly, we can also forget about trying to figure the truth about anything whatsoever based on God’s word (even if we are actually in possession of His word). The problem is that in order to derive any information from what God says we would have to know a priori either that (i) God wouldn’t lie to us because lying is wrong, or that (ii) lying would be incompatible with His purposes. [Note: Here I’m using “lie” as shorthand for “deliberately mislead us an any way”.] But we cannot know a priori that it is wrong for God to lie unless we know a priori that God doesn’t lie, and how can we possibly know a priori that God doesn’t lie? (In fact, we don’t even know this a posteriori: the Bible never says that God never lies; on the contrary, it states clearly that God does lie.)

Thus, if God happened to have the purpose of torturing everyone mercilessly for eternity after they die, then it would be good to torture everyone mercilessly for all eternity. And you can’t say that this couldn’t be one of His purposes because it would be wicked, because if it were one of His purposes it wouldn’t be wicked. Similarly, if His purpose were served by misleading us about the ultimate nature of things, including His purposes, it would be perfectly good for Him to mislead us about the ultimate nature of things, including His purposes. If it accorded with His purposes to tell us that rape, pillage and plunder are bad things when in fact they represent the most virtuous, exemplary behavior imaginable, then it would be good for Him to tell us these things even though they’re false. If it accorded with His purposes to tell us that only those who choose to follow Jesus will enjoy eternal bliss when in fact Jesus’ followers will be the only ones to suffer eternal torment, then it would be good for Him to do so. In fact, we have no way of knowing that all of this is not exactly what He’s doing.

So your claim that “God has given us sufficient knowledge to understand and respond to his will” is completely wrong; God might have told us what His “will” is, but we have no rational basis for believing Him.

But while we can infer nothing about God’s purposes from what He tells us (since we have no way of knowing whether His purposes are best served by His telling us truth or falsehoods), we might still be able to infer something about them from looking at the world itself. If, as you claim, this world is that one which best fulfills His (perfectly moral) purposes, then we can glean something about those purposes by considering what purposes might plausibly be fulfilled better by this world than by any other possible one. Of course this approach is unlikely to tell us what God’s purposes are, but it allows us to make a number of negative inferences – i.e., inferences about what his purposes are not (or at least that certain purposes must have a pretty low priority).

I gave several examples of the kinds of things that can be inferred about God’s purposes in this way. Your objections were all to the effect: “So what? Who are you to judge God’s purposes?” But that misses the point. The inferences regarding God’s purposes were not intended to cast doubt on His “goodness”, but rather to cast doubt on whether our conception of “goodness” bears any significant relationship to His. For example, the fact that this world is clearly grossly unjust by human standards tells us that justice as humans understand the term is not high on God’s priority list. Perhaps justice as God understands it is high on His list, but that’s the point: for this to be true, God’s conception of “justice” must be fundamentally different from ours. Similarly, from the fact that knowledge and understanding are in woefully short supply in this world we can infer that providing us with knowledge and understanding must not be one of God’s purposes – or if it is, it must have a very low priority. It’s perfectly true, as you say, that we can’t fault God for this, but it’s equally true that we humans put a high value on knowledge and understanding; we consider them to be very good things indeed. Again, from the prevalence of misery in this world we can infer that human happiness (at least in this world) is not one of God’s main concerns, whereas it is certainly a major human concern – in fact, we tend to judge how “good” a person is very largely by how much he contributes, on net balance, to human happiness.

You disputed this:

But in the first place this is inconsistent with everything you said before. If there’s every reason to suppose that God’s understanding of “goodness” is similar to ours, how can you justify statements like:

If the human understanding of “goodness” is similar to God’s, the answer to all of these questions is obvious: we can judge by our standards with the assurance that we won’t be going far wrong in doing so since they’re reasonably close to God’s standards. True, this isn’t an infallible standard, but it’s a reasonable standard.

Similarly, when I commented that a being whose entire purpose in creating the universe was to bring glory to himself wouldn’t be called “good” by human standards, your response was,

Assuming that this remark was intended to be “on point”, the only possible interpretation is that what we humans call “good” is irrelevant since it has little or nothing to do with what God calls “good”. Or in other words, that judging God’s (alleged) acts by human standards is fundamentally misguided. But how can it be fundamentally misguided if His standards are similar to ours? If I have a bar that I know is about a foot long, even if have no other information about how long a “foot” is, I can estimate how many feet long something is by using that bar. Similarly, if human standards are a pretty good approximation to God’s standards, I can judge with reasonable accuracy whether something is good or bad by God’s standards by judging it according to human standards.

You can’t have it both ways. Either human standards of “goodness” are reasonably close to God’s standards or they aren’t. If they are, we are in a position to judge how things measure up to God’s standards – not perfectly, but reasonably well. In particular, a desire to glorify oneself is very far from being a virtue or even an admirable quality by human standards, so if these standards are reasonably similar to God’s it’s not an admirable quality by God’s standards either. Similarly, if making (or allowing) everyone after Adam to be born unimaginably depraved and debased because of Adam’s sin is cruel and unjust by human standards, it’s cruel and unjust by God’s standards unless His standards are monumentally different from human standards.

Second, your claim that we can be sure that our concept of “goodness” resembles God’s merely because we have a concept of “goodness” is just absurd. The idea that the fact that we have a concept demonstrates that it accurately reflects objective reality is really too silly to be worthy of discussion. Are you seriously going to argue that the fact that we have a conception of “witches” shows that there must be real witches, and that they must match our conception of them pretty well? Does the fact that nearly all humans at one time conceived of the earth as flat, and of the sun as a relatively small orb that circled around the Earth, demonstrate that these conceptions were reasonably accurate?

As to how I “explain” the existence of this conception, I don’t see that this poses any particular problem: it’s not hard to think of reasons why it would have been survival-enhancing. But since we’re talking about the internal irrationality of theism, let’s consider one other possibility: we have it because God gave it to us - not because it’s a true or accurate conception; that it “corresponds to reality” in some sense; but rather because it suited God’s purposes to give us this false conception of “goodness”.

Finally, you argue that we know that our conception of goodness is accurate because we have God's word that we are made "in his image." Unfortunately (even if we accept that we really have God’s word on this; that it’s not a pleasant fantasy dreamed up by some ignorant desert nomads) it’s not at all clear in what sense we are supposed to be made in His image. How do you know that this means that we resemble God in this sense rather than some other? After all, the natural interpretation of this phrase would be that, like God, we have one nose and mouth, two eyes, ears, arms and legs, etc. Or, if the resemblance is more “spiritual”, perhaps it means that we are good in just the same way that God is good. In any case, at best we have only God’s word that we are made in His image, and as we’ve already seen this is worthless unless we have independent knowledge that God tells us the truth.

I also pointed out that we know nothing of God’s standards for Godly goodness – that is, what the “objectively correct” criteria are for judging God’s behavior. You replied:

Now in a sense (according to your theory) it’s meaningless to ask what the “standards” are for God’s behavior. But in another sense it’s not. We can ask what principles God’s behavior in fact conforms to, and whether these principles are reasonably compatible with human standards of “right conduct”. Clearly, to the extent that we know anything about His behavior and purposes we are perfectly capable of making rational judgments about this.

And it seems to me that the fact that God is infinite is irrelevant here. If an infinite being were to decree that it is morally wrong to torture innocent children gratuitously and if it were also to create an infinite number of innocent children for the sole purpose of torturing them gratuitously, could we not judge that this being was not perfectly good?

Also, so far as I can see God has not “made Himself known” in this particular respect. In fact, so far as I know the only time this subject is even broached in the Bible is at the end of the Book of Job, when Job asks God to justify His treatment of him. God’s reply, in essence, is that a mere mortal like Job has no business asking such questions and no right to expect an answer if he does. That may be a perfectly good answer, but it hardly qualifies as “making Himself known”.

You claim that we “know” God’s purpose. but the only description of it that you’re willing to offer is that it is to glorify Himself. This is no description at all. It’s as if I were to ask you what your purpose is in going into town today and you were to answer “to satisfy my desires”. This answers may be correct as far as it goes, but it doesn’t convey any information. It could apply to almost any motive or goal. What I really wanted to know was what desires you expect to satisfy by going into town. Similarly, saying that God’s purpose is to glorify Himself tells us nothing unless we know what sorts of things He considers to be “glorifying”. Without this information, this kind of answer is meaningless.

So God has not “made Himself known” in any meaningful sense. We have no idea what His purposes are (other than that He considers His “glory” to be increased or enhanced by fulfilling them), and we have no idea what principles (if any) guide His actions. For example, does He consider that the end justifies the means, or are there certain means that He will not use as a matter of principle?

Finally, on your theory (according to which “good” means “whatever God approves of”) of course God’s “goodness” is perfectly consistent with what He has revealed about Himself: how could it be otherwise? But if you mean to say that what we know of God’s acts is consistent with human conceptions of goodness, I can only say that this is monumentally, breathtakingly false. The Bible is filled, from one end to the other, with accounts of actions and statements by God that are utterly incompatible with human conceptions of “goodness”. The nature of the universe is radically incompatible with its having been created by a being that could remotely be described as “good” according to human standards. This has been my point (and the point of this thread) from the beginning. Perhaps God is “good” in some sense, but truth in advertising demands that theists make it clear, when they say that God is “good”, that what they mean by calling God “good” is radically different from what humans ordinarily mean when they say that something is “good”.

Jobar

bd-from-kg:
You can’t have it both ways. Either human standards of “goodness” are reasonably close to God’s standards or they aren’t. If they are, we are in a position to judge how things measure up to God’s standards – not perfectly, but reasonably well. In particular, a desire to glorify oneself is very far from being a virtue or even an admirable quality by human standards, so if these standards are reasonably similar to God’s it’s not an admirable quality by God’s standards either. Similarly, if making (or allowing) everyone after Adam to be born unimaginably depraved and debased because of Adam’s sin is cruel and unjust by human standards, it’s cruel and unjust by God’s standards unless His standards are monumentally different from human standards.

I think this one paragraph is an inescapeable argument for strong atheism concerning the Biblical God.

bd- :notworthy

Wyrdsmyth

Yes, I suppose I did break the rules.

Theophilus, I'm sorry I called you a theopithicus and made the baboon reference. That was an ad hominem fallacy on my part, and if I hurt your feelings, I apologize.

Sometimes, I just can't help myself.