Truth Seeker — Truth Seeker

In "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" William Blake asserts that heaven and hell are flip sides of the same coin. Heaven is Apollonian; hell Dionysian. Perhaps "good" is not possible without evil Creating a world in which there is evil (or in which there is potentially evil) may be (from God's perspective) the only way to create a world in which the good can be valued. If everything was good, the word "good" would lose all meaning -- it would just be whatever is.

Also, we don't know how death feels to sentient beings. They are all dead, and can't tell us.

Whining that God failed to create a perfect world -- from your perspective -- ignores how wonderful the creation is.

"3When I behold Your heavens,
the work of Your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which You have set in place—
what is man that You are mindful of him,
or the son of man that You care for him?"

Is it really fair to say that the moon and the stars are not good enough to suit your fancy? "Man was born to trouble, as the sparks fly upwards." Oh, well. Life is wonderful anyhow.

:up:

:100: :100: Amen!

Amen! :fire:

Omnipotence constrained by logic is not a defect; it is definitional.

The traditional understanding of omnipotence excludes logical contradictions - no “square circles,” no “married bachelors,” and no mutually incompatible states of the world. — Truth Seeker

Funny - I recently discussed this in a different thread. There used to be a poster out here - Bartricks - who maintained that omnipotence meant that God could violate the laws of logic and create a 4 sided triangle. I cannot rule this out, but since us mere mortals are limited to 3 sided triangles I can agree to this.

Other than that - while I agree that omnipotence & omniscience necessarily rule out omni-benevolence, it seems to me that there are stronger (and simpler) arguments - based on the plain language definitions of the words.

Consider what is implied by this fanciful word omniscience. If you google the definition of omniscience you’ll get something along these lines - “the state of having total knowledge, the quality of knowing everything.” I take this definition at face value - everything means everything - there is nothing unknown. An omniscient entity knows the exact location and status of every last atom in the universe, every sub-atomic particle, every time a particle / anti-particle pair pops in and out of existence, etc. And not only that, our hypothetical omniscient entity knows the past history of these atoms, particles, etc - AND - the omniscient entity also knows the future state of same said particles.

They know every fact.
They know what course of action is best, all things considered. — Truth Seeker

What is “best”? Assuming that such an omniscient entity exists (again assuming for the moment that the phrase “omniscient entity exists” has some actual semantic meaning) we cannot possibly fathom what might motivate such entity. It is as if an amoeba were to try to predict the winner of next year’s World Cup. The nature of such an entity is beyond our comprehension. To assign the human character trait of benevolence to such an entity makes no rational sense. At best this appears to be some sort of category error.

So there is no need to postulate multiple omniscience entities to make your point, one is sufficient.

And we haven’t even mentioned omnipotence here. Omnipotence has it’s own set the definitional contradictions.

I am convinced that the Biblical God is imaginary and evil . . . He is evil because of his many evil words and actions in the Bible. — Truth Seeker

We’re in agreement here - at least re the OT God. The Skeptics Bible is an especially useful reference tool.

Hyperbole abounds in religious texts. Odin is called "all seeing" -- but we know he relies on those two ravens to bring him the news. The hyperbole of the Old Testament is based on competition between different tribal gods. "All-powerful" or "all-knowing" may just imply a comparison, rather than an accurate description.

Here's Tennyson's take on "knowing":

"Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower-but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, all in all,
I should know what God and man is."

Of course the rhyme of "crannies" with "man is" is magnificent. But what does it even mean to "understand... all in all"? Does the creator of a thing "understand it all in all"? Did Tennyson understand his poem "all in all"? Or are there many interpretations and understandings?

If such a thing as omniscience is possible, then it is infinite and beyond human comprehension. Therefore, God's actions are impossible to judge, given our imperfect knowledge. The Christian must take His "benevolence" on faith, believing that if we knew the motives and results (if we had perfect knowledge) all would be clarified.

Your response is philosophically coherent only because it abandons the very moral framework classical theism usually wants to keep. That’s the key point.
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You explicitly state that for God:
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apply only analogically, not literally. Once that concession is made, the problem of evil is not solved - it is declared inapplicable. That is not a resolution; it is an exemption.

Firstly, my rebuttal of the OP made no mention of this: my rebuttal was that God cannot create a being that is omnipotent which was the crux of your argument. Secondly, God is goodness itself; and this is not analogical predication. In classical theism, God is goodness from which all else flows univocally.

However, thirdly, you are right that a lot of what we attribute to God is analogical in classical theism (such as being an intellect, will, powerful, etc.); but this doesn’t exempt God from moral responsibility. When I say God is pure intellect itself thinking, that is analogical predication; but in no way suggests that God is not an intellect. Your argument here hinges on the idea that if we know something analogically that is not in any way related to the analogy made; and this is contradictory to the idea of an analogy. An analogy is a similarity between two things. God being an intellect analogically means that there is something chiefly similar between Himself as a Person and us as persons (and this is why we are ‘made in the image of God’). Your rejoinder here is to say that because it is analogical we cannot say God is an intellect in any similar way to intellects we see in His creation; but that is to say that we cannot analogically predicate anything to God which was presupposed as true at the onset.

To answer each one-by-one:

responsibility

God is responsible for His actions because His is absolutely free and a substance of a rational nature (viz., a person); but He never does anything immoral to hold Him accountable for (for reasons I already described).

Again, remember the difference between liberty of indifference vs. for excellence.

permission

I am assuming you meant ‘permissibility’ here: permission implies some other authoritative person that permits one’s actions, whereas permissibility is about whether one in principle is permitted to do something (despite there being a person giving permission or not). Either way, in more mainstream classical theism, God can will lesser goods (unlike my view); and so He does have leeway to do morally permissible acts which are not the best acts. In my view, God always chooses what is best; so morally permissibility does not exist for God, and this is why I would view moral permissibility as a product of limited ethics (viz., we have the difference between supererogatoriness and permissibility on earth because we have a limited understanding of ethics and limited power to uphold it). I don’t think this damages God’s perfection: if you had perfect power and knowledge of what is good, then you would be obliged to do the best—not some lesser good.

Justificiation

I am not sure what you mean here: justification for what?

* praise God as morally good in the same sense we mean “good,”

Yes we can and many have. Goodness is the equality of a thing’s essence and esse; and when we say we speak of God as ‘good’ analogically to His creation, we just mean that His creations are not perfectly good—they come at a lesser degree of goodness because they are not absolutely self-united. God is goodness itself in classical theism.

Again, by arguing that analogical knowledge severes our knowledge of the thing being analogically understood; you are denying that analogical knowledge is valid.

* say God is just, loving, or omnibenevolent in any ordinary moral sense,

Again, yes we can. Justice is the treatment of something relative to what it is owed; and God has be creatively just and restoratively just. He is just in His creation powers, because He is a being of pure power—of creation abilities—and is purely actual; so He must be fully realized at being a creator and this entails that He cannot fail at creating thing’s properly to what He wills to create. Moreover, what He wills to create must be perfect because, again, He has to choose what is best (which is a creation ordered perfectly to Himself).

He is just in restoration because what is perfectly good is His initial creation so it must follow that (1) restoring each being back to that proper ordering is best when any being falls and (2) He must treat the being relative to its dignity since that is relative to its nature as a part of that perfectly ordered creation.

* appeal to God as a moral exemplar.

You cannot step outside morality to escape moral critique and then step back inside to make moral claims.

Classical theism does not ‘step out’ of morality to resolve the problem of evil: it shifts the focus from goodness being supervenient (like the monetary value of a diamond) to natural (like the shape of a diamond) and notes, correctly, that God is the perfect embodiment of what is good because His essence and existence are absolutely identical.

* God’s perception just is what is best,

(emphasis added)

No, this is not what I said.

1. God has perfect knowledge of what is good.
2. God wills what He perceives as best.
3. Since God’s knowledge of what is best is perfect, what He perceives as best is best.
4. Therefore, what God wills is always what is best.

God’s perception of what is best is not the standard of what is best: His perfect knowledge of what is best, which is Himself, and the nature of an intellect entails that what He perceives as best will always align perfectly with what is best.

That is not an evaluative claim - it’s a tautology.

A tautology is when something is logically necessarily true (viz., in a truth table, every value is ‘T’ all the way down); and that is not true of what I said. I was tying knowledge of goodness with perception of goodness (in an intellect). God is by His nature perfectly good merely because His nature is such that He is absolutely simple; because, again, goodness is just absolute unity in classical theism.

You are thinking of this like a non-classicalist akin to a Protestant: something outside of God must be the standard of what is moral or God just is the Arbiter of morality (viz.,the euthyphro dilemma), but classical theism doesn’t fall prey to this—that’s a false dilemma.

Besides, you have not proven that God exists and created the universe we exist in.

I don’t need to do that: your OP argued that God should have created being omnipotent; and that is impossible.

If a world with less involuntary suffering and greater flourishing was metaphysically possible, and if God necessarily actualizes the best, then the existence of massive suffering requires explanation.

There is no excess suffering in the world. Again, this bottoms out at the idea that you think that it is metaphysically possible for God to have created a better world of which you think would involve less suffering on earth; and I am pointing out that all you have demonstrated is that you can conceive of such a world but not that it is metaphysically possible.

This is the classic and vague new atheist technique to say that there’s pointless suffering in the world and that this means we aren’t in the best possible totality of creation; and from a classical theistic perspective there is no pointless suffering in the world nor is this world the totality of creation.

Of course, classical theists have their own arguments to get to such a God existing, and I can dive into those if you would like, but I do not need to demonstrate God exists to negate your OP.

* childhood cancer,
* extreme congenital pain,
* moral ignorance leading to eternal consequences (on many theologies),

are not tragic features of reality but necessary components of the optimal order.

Exactly. Allowing evil, at least in some stages and areas of creation, is necessary for higher goods; such as, to use on of your examples, the possibility of childhood cancer in order to have predictable natural laws and free will to love what is good.

If there were no possibility of childhood cancer, then we would all be robots without any free will to love what is good or evil. That’s the ‘better’ world you are arguing for here.

That is a very heavy metaphysical cost.

Sure, I agree: at face value, it seems like a hard pill to swallow and, for the record, I am not saying that objections relying on the problem of evil are all baseless or without merit. Yours, though, tried to posit that omnipotence is a feature God can create limited beings with; and that is not coherent.

* God has no deliberative alternatives,

God has deliberation: He has free will and in an absolute sense. What I was saying is that He always freely chooses what is best upon deliberation.

* God’s act is necessary and automatic given His nature.

No. The Trinity unfolds necessarily from His nature, but He has free will to choose. My point was that, in God and uniquely in God, necessity and freedom ‘run right up onto each other’ as He necessarily freely chooses the best. He does not necessarily choose what is best; and He does not merely freely choose what is best. We do, by analogy, have the ability to freely choose what is best but in a limited way because we will only choose it if our knowledge of what is best is sufficient. So we do not necessarily always choose what is actually best despite always choosing what we perceive as best.

Reframing divine freedom as FFE rather than FOI doesn’t help here.
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If a being lacks alternative possibilities, cannot refrain, cannot revise, then it does not meaningfully choose in the sense required for moral praise or blame - regardless of how perfect its internal state is.

This is exactly why I noted the difference between FFE and FOI that you glossed over. You just implicitly conflated them by arguing that one is not truly free if they cannot choose otherwise from options; which is FOI, and my point was that classical theism rejects FOI. I don’t think freedom fundamentally consists in being able to have done otherwise nor to choose from options. If you take the FOI view as you did in the above, then God is absolutely unfree; whereas in FFE He is absolutely free.

You conclude that: even if God has no freedom, He is still perfectly good.

No I did not: God is absolutely free because He is in the best state of being most conducive to His flourishing as an intellect. Again, FFE.

At that point, “perfect goodness” is no longer a moral claim

Agathology is not morality. Likewise, classical theism is tying agathology, morality, and God’s nature together in a coherent and beautiful way that avoids these issues you are having given that you are implicitly thinking of moral properties (metaethically) as if moral non-naturalism is true; and until you break out of that you will not be able to contend with classical theism properly—these objections you have made will continue to plague your mind.

Ecurb, there are several serious problems with this line of thought, and they’re not just emotional objections - they’re conceptual ones.

First, appealing to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is poetic, not explanatory. Blake was doing symbolic myth-making, not moral metaphysics. Saying “good and evil are flip sides of the same coin” is a metaphor. It does not establish that evil is necessary for good, only that humans often conceptualise value contrastively. That’s a psychological claim, not a moral or ontological one.

Second, the idea that “good would lose meaning if evil didn’t exist” confuses semantic contrast with moral necessity. We can meaningfully distinguish:

* pleasure without agony,
* health without disease,
* learning without trauma,
* love without abuse.

Parents don’t need to burn their children to teach warmth has value. A world with better states does not require horrific states to be intelligible. Contrast can be supplied by degrees of good, not by atrocities.

Third, claiming that “we don’t know how death feels to sentient beings” is evasive. We know quite a lot about dying: panic, suffocation, pain, terror, neurological distress. The fact that the dead cannot report afterward is irrelevant. If someone tortured a person to death and then said, “Well, they can’t complain now,” we would rightly call that monstrous. Ignorance after the fact does not erase suffering during the process.

Fourth, aesthetic deflection - “look at the moon and the stars” - is a category error. Natural beauty does not morally offset unnecessary suffering. A breathtaking sunset does not justify childhood leukemia, parasitic blinding diseases, or animals being eaten alive. This isn’t “whining”; it’s basic moral accounting.

Fifth, the “from God’s perspective” move quietly abandons omnibenevolence. If goodness only makes sense from God’s inscrutable viewpoint, then it is no longer meaningfully good in any sense we recognise. At that point, “God is good” becomes empty praise - indistinguishable from “God does whatever God does.”

Finally, quoting “Man was born to trouble” simply restates the problem. It doesn’t solve it. Saying “oh well” in the face of mass, involuntary suffering isn’t wisdom; it’s resignation dressed up as spirituality.

Life can contain wonder and be morally indictable. Recognising beauty does not require us to excuse cruelty baked into the system. If a being could reduce extreme suffering without losing anything of value and chose not to, we would not call that being good - no matter how pretty the night sky is.

That’s not arrogance. That’s ethical consistency. Please remember that at least 99.9% of all the species to exist so far on Earth are already extinct, and every second is full of suffering, injustice, and death for sentient biological beings who never asked for existence. I wish I had never existed in a world like this.

EricH, you’re right about several things, but a few moves here deserve pushback.

First, on omnipotence and logic:
I agree that “omnipotence constrained by logic” isn’t a defect; it’s the only definition that avoids incoherence. A being that can create square circles hasn’t transcended logic - it has destroyed meaning. At that point, words like power, creation, or existence stop referring to anything intelligible. So yes: logical constraint isn’t a limit on power; it’s a precondition for talking about power at all.

Second, your treatment of omniscience is mostly sound:

They know every fact.
They know what course of action is best, all things considered.

Exactly. And this is where the move to “we can’t fathom what motivates such an entity” quietly undercuts classical theism rather than rescuing it.

If “best” is so alien that it no longer tracks anything like wellbeing, harm reduction, fairness, or flourishing, then calling the entity benevolent becomes vacuous. You’re right: assigning human moral traits to a being whose motivations are radically inscrutable is a category error. But that cuts both ways: either benevolence means something recognisable, in which case massive preventable suffering is a problem, or benevolence means something utterly opaque, in which case saying “God is benevolent” conveys no moral information at all. You can’t keep the praise while discarding the content.

Third, you say omnipotence and omniscience “necessarily rule out omnibenevolence.” I disagree. They don’t logically rule it out, but they make omnibenevolence empirically implausible given the world we observe, unless one retreats into mystery so deep that moral language collapses.

That’s not a contradiction - it’s a reductio.

Finally, on the Biblical God: yes, judging a character by their recorded words and actions is basic moral reasoning. If a human ruler ordered genocide, endorsed slavery, and punished thought-crime, we wouldn’t excuse it by saying “his ways are higher.” Applying a different moral standard just because the agent is labeled “God” is special pleading.

Tools like The Skeptics Annotated Bible are useful precisely because they strip away the devotional framing and force the text to answer to ordinary ethical scrutiny - the same scrutiny we apply everywhere else.

So, overall: we agree more than we disagree. But once you admit that “benevolence” either has human-recognisable meaning or none at all, the classical omni-triad doesn’t merely wobble - it dissolves.