Llyricist

He does, he has said as much.

Dr Rick

The environment in Turkey last month where a dormitory collapsed on top of over 100 children from the behavour of an earthquake

Llyricist

Even if this were true (which I am not granting), they don't have any control of their children's inate intellectual capacity, which was rather the whole thrust of my post.

long winded fool

If every possible action must always result in not-B, then B doesn't exist. If free will is the choice between A and B, and B doesn't exist, then free will doesn't exist. To mask it by saying the choice could be between A or not-B does not imply free will can still exist if B must exist in order for the possibility of the choice of B to exist.

It is false to say that "If he's omnibenevolent... he'll have made her heart perfectly." If His goal is for humans to love and if this corresponds to an omnibenevolent nature, and if love can't exist without free will, and if free will can't exist without the possibility of different consequences, (i.e. not all A) then consequences different from 100% Good must be a possible choice of the creation that is to be capable of love, and this must be the course of action of an omnibenevolent creator. Omnibenevolence does not logically equate to absolute perfection in the created thing. Imperfection is a required possibility (and therefore must exist in some state: past, present, or future) for love to exist by human understanding.

This is by implication the same as saying that it's God's fault that we have free will. If free will must exist for love to exist, then it is God's fault that love exists. We can't have free will without choice. Choice can't exist if everything must always be 100% Good (God) and no one can possibly choose anything different than 100% Good (God) at any given time, therefore it would be impossible to not choose God, therefore humans would be slaves and not capable of true love, therefore I would assume that God would then not be omnibenevolent if nothing that is less than 100% Good ever existed or could ever exist.

It depends a lot upon whether or not you foresaw that this would happen, didn't want it to happen, and had the power to stop it from happening.

If you are not omnimax, then the answer is no.

*Sigh* Are you even reading my posts? I did foresee it. You have just thrown my premises right out the window and said "If my premises were the case instead of the ones you used which match the biblical premises of God, then I'd be right." The analogy is clearly stated. I knew that if she dated the jerk she'd suffer, I didn't want her to suffer, I had the power to keep her from suffering by physically preventing her from dating the jerk, I refused to use this power. I told her what to do and allowed her to choose. Have I now abandoned her? These questions are all answered, you guys seem to just be ignoring them.

So if someone expects god to do just a little bit more, like say, put up big billboards overnite in every neighboorhood that announce his advice for the day, how exactly is that "necessarily" wanting a decision to be made for that person?

"God could convince me if he really wanted to." I answered this clearly. You don't want to be convinced. You want to be made to believe. "Give me something that I cannot possibly doubt." Following this line of thought to its logical conclusion, you are saying "Make me believe whether I want to or not." It doesn't matter if you still want other people to have free will, you are asking to have yours suspended so that you aren't responsible for making a choice. You really do want the decision to be made for you so you don't have to suffer from making mistakes. Learning can't exist without mistakes. You are the daughter telling the father what He should have said to her as advice after the jerk dumped her. She is essentially saying: "Now that I understand what you meant after the fact, you should have made me listen in the first place and sheltered my from my mistake." The father could have forced her to listen, but he didn't. He allowed her to make the mistake exist. Did he abandon her? Has he compromised his love for her by allowing her to compromise her love for him?

Dr Rick

Those are really big ifs...

You start with premises that are unqualified, so of course they deserve to be discarded unless you provide some reason that they shouldn't. Some direct biblical reference, some observable entity, something is necessary to allow us to make assumptions. Assumptions are not just ideas we make up. Start with faulty assumptions, and the arguement won't work.

If that's not the case, then for now on, let's assume for the sake of argument that I'm always right and that you are always wrong.

Your assumptions boil down to nothing more than: "Let's assume that the omnimax god is not omnimax..."

long winded fool

LOL. This isn't even a strawman since my argument rests on the assumption that God is omnimax. How can you even say this? Did you really think that was an even remotely accurate summary of my premises when you wrote it? Once again you conveniently ignore the large part of my post so that you can change the argument with an easily refutable and unexplained strawman summary and then refute it.

If you think "omnimax God" is an unqualified assumption then that's fine, however if there were the omnimax God described in the bible, then the argument follows logically. Evil/suffering/less-than-perfectness would coexist with omnibenevolence without contradiction.

Dr Rick

The argument you make is for a god that can't allow free-will without the possibility of evil, can't impart all the knowledge he wants humans to have, and is analogous to a father trying to raise a daughter. That's not the omnimax god of the Bible; it's your strawman argument.

You qualify him with so many arbitrary limits that he is not omnimax.

If it did, you wouldn't have to keep repeating how your argument follows logically.

That's not a conclusion, it's an assertion until you provide a proof. Telling those reading your posts that they aren't reading your posts is not a particularly persuasive argument, nor are your father/daughter viginettes unless you want to assert that you are omnimax yourself.

Dr Rick

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.

Hume inquired about God, "Is He willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"

Of course, it's logically possible that a God must allow evil to obtain some other goal, but whatever that goal is must then logically be contingent upon allowing evil.

Quote:

...It doesn't matter if you still want other people to have free will, you are asking to have yours suspended so that you aren't responsible for making a choice...

Simply saying "free-will" is not a logical proof, nor is shifting terms, or infering what someone else wants; a logical proof would be one that clearly delineates the premises and conclusions, much like it was done above with the PoE.

For the free will defense to work, it must be shown how it would be logically impossible for free will to exist without allowing evil, and that has not been done. We can say we can't imagine free will as possible without choices for evil, but lack of imagination is not a logical proof.

Without a clear delineation of premises, analogies fail......since the premises behind them that might allow us to draw a comparison are unknown

Is the father omnimax? Are we comparing the father to a god who has limits like a human father? An omnimax god would care about the jerk; does the father? Does the daughter have to date the jerk to learn? Why can't the father let the daughter learn some other way?

Without clearly stated premises, there's no basis for comparison. It's not enough to just say that they are analagous, so there's no rational reason to accept this analogy as illustrative of the PoE and the free-will defense.

Last, the free-will defense must address natural evil--evil resulting from natural processes such as earthquakes, floods and diseases that have nothing to do with free-will. Is free will logically contingent upon floods?

long winded fool

I proceed from the assumption that an omnimax God can't do anything that could compromise His omnimax nature. The fact that He can't do these certain things doesn't compromise His omnimax nature, it in fact supports it. He can do anything except fail to be omnimax.

Stephen T-B

The pinkness of the Invisible Pink Unicorn is in direct proportion to her Invisibility; the more invisible she is, the greater becomes her pinkness until it achieves a level which out pinks every pink thing in the universe.
At this point she is so completely invisible that she doesn’t even have the ability to detect her own presence and therefore has no idea where she is, or how pink she has become.
To avoid this dilemma, she maintains a constant degree of invisibility (known as the CDI) which gives her a lighter shade of pink, and although we cannot say for certain if it is, in fact, lighter or darker (on account of her being invisible) logic tells us that this is the case.
We refer to this as the CDI Pinkness Equivalence, a known fact which has a direct parallel with the known fact of god’s omnimaxity.