Zagorath

First, you’ll note that I started this conversation by conceding free will and concentrating my discussion of evil on evils that are not performed by humans, but by the planet itself, or by fundamental biology.

But as for “the concept of life as a test”…why is something supposedly omniscient performing a test? It should already know the result of said test, thus making the test itself irrelevant. That’s what omniscience is.

If there is no evil how can there be good?

Easy. You take the world as it is right now…and then remove the evil things. Evil is a metaphysical concept. We often use analogies of light and dark, but it doesn’t literally work that way.

Yeah, the average person gets a pass on this sort of thing because I generally assume they haven’t thought much about it. But it’s particularly galling when biblical scholars do it.

I saw one biblical scholar whose schtick was debunking things evangelicals believe about the bible. He would happily admit it’s written by a collection of authors over a long period of time, who were doing so not literally but in rhetorical styles popular in their day. Things like that.

Once, I saw him describe how the early Israelites did not believe in the three omnis. They may not have even believed in a monotheistic god, but it was certainly not omniscient and omnibenevolent. Then he went on to say that despite that—despite the fact that the authors of the religious text and the society that invented this god not believing in three omnis—he nevertheless did believe god was omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Wtf?

But why is that all good? Why couldn’t he have earth be good?

What shits me is Christians (and Jews and Muslims, but it’s mainly Christians who do this) who just handwave away the problem of evil. Like fine, I can accept that some evils might arise as a result of human decisions and free will. Things like wars and genocides are done by people. It’s difficult to swallow even that much with the idea of a god who supposedly knows all, is capable of doing anything, and is “all good”, but fine, maybe free will ultimately supplants all that.

But what I absolutely cannot accept is any claim that tries to square the idea of a god with the triple-omnis with the fact that natural disasters happen. That children die of cancer. You try telling the parents of a child slowly dying of a painful incurable disease that someone could fix it if they wanted, and they completely know about it, but that they won’t. And then try telling them that person is “all good”. See how they react.

I find religious people who believe in the three omnis after having given it any amount of serious consideration to be absolutely disgusting and immoral people.

My take is that there is no free will, but that this fact is irrelevant and we’re all better off just behaving as though we do.

Yeah…they cross-posted. It literally uses the same URL and the automatic cross-post detection picked it up.