One problem cause by Religion

Post Reply New Topic

How is that evil? Are you quite sure Pharaoh would have preferred to repent?

He wasn't given free will. He was influenced by a supposedly omnipotent force.

You can't go into a casino, stop the roulette wheel and place the ball where you want and then say "are you quite sure it wouldn't have ended there anyway?".

What exactly was he repenting anyway? Breaking eccentric rules that have unnatural consequences?

Doesn't that seem somewhat.... corrupt? A corruption of nature.

I don't have to know all counterfactuals to say that based upon the evidence God promoted an evil act for the purposes of hurting the doer of that act, because that is what happened from a straightforward interpretation of the matter, including evidence from other verses about this matter.

No, the Pharaoh was only given what he needed to try to do what he wanted. He eventually changed his mind and relented but never repented, then he changed his mind back and relented on his relent and went out to bring the Hebrews back ... and he was ultimately destroyed during that quest.

A literal reading of Scripture in English can offer a glimpse at all of that, but a literal reading of Scripture in English does not convey all big-picture details well. As I had mentioned some time back, I still strongly defend your personal right to hold any opinion of your choosing, but you have yet to come even close to proving your mere opinion or judgement that God is corrupt!

Last edited by leejosepho on 12 Nov 2009, 9:16 pm, edited 2 times in total.

If the issue is whether this world is the greatest world, then this goes back to premise 6.


Our own lens on the world has very little to do with the ethical issue of gratuitous evil. Gratuitous evil is also INCREDIBLY simple. It is evil beyond what is required. Most theodicies deny the existence of gratuitous evil, simply because once gratuitous evil is admitted to exist, usually the theist has already lost the case.


No, standard theology tends to maintain the notion that God is good. Some people actually even see the notion of godhood as requiring that God actually be good.

Also, no, this isn't about whether we are above or below God. This is about whether God is good. That's all. This isn't an atheistic or theistic premise.

I say "defined" because I am criticizing an idea. If this was about God, then I would say "God is good". But, either way, this does not really tend to stand in the way of the basic logic.

In any case, how do you propose to evaluate the idea of God's existence? From a practical standpoint, we need to evaluate that, or at *least* some theologies relating to this. So, we may be able to say that some notions of God are impossible, others are unlikely, and some things that could be called "God" could be logically possible(like Deism), while perhaps others undoubtedly exist(like if we say that God is the universe, or some such). I suppose I have moved somewhat away from my completely epistemically nihilistic position at some point.


So, wait, your reasoning as to why human nature had to be the way it was is a game-theoretic argument based upon naturalistic evolution and the presupposition that we started off in a basic state of barbarism? I don't think that deals with the logical possibility that humanity could have evolved differently in all sorts of ways. That logical possibility is quite relevant when assessing the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good deity, such as the one traditionally posited.

Heck, invoking the environment also seems irrelevant, because that too could have been different.

Now, you might consider this issue of other possible worlds completely speculative,(which is why I have *kept* on saying that premise 6 is really more questionable) however, honestly, I think it is apparent to most people that a world that is better than this world can be conceived, and therefore is logically possible. If you disagree, let's point out that most theists believe that a place known as heaven exists. The only way to say that this world can exist without including gratuitous evil, when heaven is also possible(which is true if heaven exists) is to say that this world is necessary for some end. And if this world is necessary for some end then that opens a question as to what end, however, that is a possibility that does not seem to make sense to me.




I don't think my argument was analytically unfair at all. I actually think that you are grasping at straws to attack the premises that you did.


Personal experiences may make an identity, but this does not necessitate extremely terrible experiences. And even the more experiential of us would likely balk from putting themselves into something traumatic.

I have proved that the christian god is corrupt by human standards(which are the only standards, because god could only communicate to us in the language we made ourselves).

You are adding things to the bible, " the Pharaoh was only given what he needed to try to do what he wanted" is not in the bible. The bible says god hardened the pharoah's heart, this can be taken to mean he made the pharoah more callous or he literally physically hardened the pharoah's heart which would be an act of grievous bodily harm.

To forcefully alter someone's personality is to take away their free will, god altered the pharoah's disposition in such a way as to get the outcome he desired to the detriment of the pharoah.

But I might drop this and go for the more simple way to prove that god is a liar.

Do you agree that jesus is god, according to the bible? <-ignore, doesn't matter now.

Here's another good one for god falling short of human values (which matters... because you are human... I assume you are not an AI.)

-- Leviticus 27:3-7

Last edited by TheOddGoat on 12 Nov 2009, 11:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Actually, that question is unnecessary. I am assuming we are only looking at the christian god and only with the bible.

The writing in the bible is inspired by god.

Leviticus 11:20-23 speaks of four-legged insects, including grasshoppers.

Insects, by definition, have 6 legs.

The number of legs an insect has is not specialist knowledge, anyone can see how many legs an insect has at a glance.

The author of leviticus was either aware of grasshoppers and would know they have 6 legs or was directly inspired by god to say they have 4.

Because it was known by god, the author or both that insects have 6 legs, Leviticus 11:20-23 is a deliberate lie.

By god's own standards in the ten commandments, bearing false witness is a sin.

God either bears false witness by influencing, or otherwise telling directly(inspiring something is just an alternative to communicating with language), the author to claim that insects have 4 legs.

God sins.

God is corrupt by his own standards.

Here are some points for god being an imperfect inspiration and therfore bearing false witness that he is perfect:

In Genesis 1, Adam is created after other animals; In Genesis 2, he appears before animals.

Matthew 1:16 and Luke 3:23 differ over Jesus's lineage.

Mark 14:72 differs from Matthew 26:74-75, Luke 22:60-61, and John 18:27 about how many times the cock crowed.

2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1 differ over who incited David to take a census.

1 Samuel 17:23,50 and 2 Samuel 21:19 disagree about who killed Goliath.

1 Samuel 31:4-5 and 2 Samuel 1:5-10 differ over Saul's death.

The four Gospels differ about many details of Christ's death and resurrection (Barker 1990). For example, Matthew 27:37, Mark 15:26, Luke 23:38, and John 19:19 have different inscriptions on the cross.

Matthew 27:5-8 differs with Acts 1:18-19 about Judas's death.

Genesis 9:3 and Leviticus 11:4 differ about what is proper to eat.

Romans 3:20-28 and James 2:24 differ over faith versus deeds.

Exodus 20:5, Numbers 14:18, and Deuteronomy 5:9 disagree with Ezekiel 18:4,19-20 and John 9:3 about sins being inherited.

Omnipotent beings cannot contradict themselves.

God wrote the bible indirectly through divine inspiration.

The bible contradicts itself.

God contradicts himself.

God is not omnipotent.

Well, the term in Hebrew tends to mean to strengthen. The issue is that promoting a man to do evil is not good. If you gave me a gun that I needed to try to do what I want, and I want to shoot somebody, you are aiding me in my attempt to kill somebody.

The notion of grievous bodily harm would never come up with the term used in Exodus.


There is nothing said about force. However, God did alter Pharaoh's disposition in a manner that seems detrimental to the Pharaoh. After all, it seems in this situation, it would have been better for Pharaoh to have had weak will, and so to give up on the matter.

You most certainly have not! You have only proved you happen to merely *believe* He is corrupt, and you have yet to even begin to approach the matter of "human standards". What might you suggest those to be? Your feelings? Mine? And remember, feelings almost always push facts aside.

Human standards are any standards held by any human.

If one human finds god to be corrupt by their standards then god is corrupt because he is not perfect by all accounts when he claims he does.

Hypocrisy is a human idea that is negative and denotes corruption.

I have provided plenty of examples of the christian god's hypocrisy.

Standards aren't feelings.

You seem to assume we can do anything beyond believe things, but when you have anything beyond "I think, therefore I am" there is always cartesian doubt.

I have provided almost 50 different arguments(some are compounded) that god is corrupt if you count the videos of NSC, would you please logically refute at least 5 and make your own arguments that god is -not- corrupt? Ag has shown me a bunch of mistakes I have made and seems to have similar views to me, you have an opposing view so should be able to prove your own view and logically refute my arguments. You will also have to provide evidence, because that is one of your own criteria even though we are dealing with things that are purely hypothetical. The christian god is assumed to be real, the bible is assumed to really have been inspired by him as it claims(because otherwise we cannot comment on this specific god, but only on the concept of god which is a whole different argument.).

It can be said that it is only your belief that I only believe god is corrupt.

But corruption is only something that we believe to be a legitimate concept.

You can't actually even prove that your physical body exists so its kind of ridiculous to criticise something for being a belief.

How does god know he's omniscient?

It can't be because he is omniscient because that is circular logic.

The god of the bible can only believe that he is omniscient.

By your logic, this would prove that the god of the bible is not omniscient.



Feelings have nothing to do with any of this.

A human set of standards is a set of standards held by a human.

I hold a set of standards.

I am a human.

God falls short of my standards.

God falls short of human standards.

I already assumed you would feel and believe that human standards don't matter, but that only means that that argument is corrupt based on your human standards. It only takes god falling short of one person's idiosyncratic standards to be corrupt by human standards because human standards are not constant. People have opposing standards and therefore it is impossible for god to not be corrupt by human standards.

So I provided you with some arguments that god is either corrupt be his own standards, or if he does not consider himself corrupt by his own standards then he is a hypocrite and therefore corrupt by definition.

Ridiculous!

Its likely close to being as good as it can be a) with given natural dynamics and b) our inherent genetic frailties. Tweek either of those and you have a different story.



Beyond what's required for what exactly? To answer that is to give one's own subjective evaluation. That's why this doesn't work.



They might be making a wise choice - either by accident in the process of cowering from hard questions or, in other cases, just by knowing just what it is that they don't or can't know.



The 11 point rubric you had though, to your last point here, reached an extremely general conclusion - God doesn't exist. Not a theists god, not a deists god - no god. That could have just been a miscommunication in that sense you may have meant the Abrahamic God, 10 still runs into huge problems though when we take something thats ours - likely ours in entirety - such as religions, use our philosophy to measure what God can and can't be, and then clipping off its existence by breaking our own models. If God exists then God exists, if God doesn't exist then God doesn't exist - either case is completely independent of what it is we think or what kind of crude philosophical models that we build and trash on our own. That's why I said that to believe God's existence is some how affected by what we believe of him is to ultimately claim that God is a projection of our own minds, if he's a projection of our own minds - we made him.




AG, your a phenomenally smart guy - I have loads of respect for you, but I think your killing your ability to think when you start breaking philosophy and thought into something like pre-scripted chess moves. This destroys great minds the way music theory can destroy great musicians if they start falling back on it too heavily.





Congrats - you just sealed #6, I know you took it as a premise but this is why its barely possible to argue that a better world couldn't exist.

Going back to what I was saying about evolution being a flat force though - given this environment, the earth's environment, as it is and has been - for us simply to evolve differently would have little difference as we for the most part likely would have just adapted worse and had to correct later. Evolution is about maximizing efficiency, an efficiency that sculpts itself in reaction, very particularly, to the needs of the environment. A better world could have been made by tweaking the natural dynamics, perhaps what we needed as nutrients, perhaps what we needed to do in order to procreate (though two-gender procreation by definition invokes evolution), even more powerfully he could have built the genetic code to be something that we could change more readily through our own actions and merits. Being staked down to our genes actually causes most of the evil, much like genetics can cause psychopathy and all kinds of other fun things.




I think we're in complete agreement that a better world could exist, I just think that it would be one that was engineered to work differently rather than one where random chance here had taken a different turn.



We're exploring that exact concept as it is - we both agree that evil exists, I'm not sure if we'll ever fully know what's gratuitous and what isn't from a big picture perspective (we all have our own take on this - I absolutely hate seeing evil done to others, makes me want to go to work on the person administering that pain - still I can't take my sentiments as the basis of the universe).

God could have technically rendered evil nonexistent, as in if we had lets say come about as a form of life that didn't need resources of a type that needed to be fought over or didn't have genes that made procreation essentially a survival of the fittest and a constant need to accumulate and out-achieve the next person for the sake of it; one could argue that a world like that, where we lived blissfully, we wouldn't learn a thing. We may never have learned to speak. We may never have developed legends, may never have developed music, may never have developed art - seemingly that's the tragedy of how stimulus seems to work. True, we could have just had it planted in us, in a perfect world, though I suppose that it would seem quite unnatural as we would wonder why we had something in us that seemingly served no purpose.





I don't call it analytically unfair, just sloppy. I'm just arguing that it goes from the objective in the first half to the subjective/qualitative in the second half. If it stayed fully objective and ended up with 'God does not exist' - it would have had a lot more weight. Interchanging the subjective and objective though makes it add up to little more than a clever play on words. I doubt that was your intent, just that I see that as the end result of adding these two things: 'gratuitous evil' and 'man defines God'. The later especially, once that argued the first 5 points are rendered completely meaningless.



We're still in subjective territory - gratuitous as compared to what? Are we still trying to talk about experience or 'toughening' up strictly in the sense of this earthly life or perhaps a much broader time line? If eighty years is really a couple minutes floating in eternity the scope completely changes.

Well, depending on what rules you are willing to accept. Frankly, there is no reason why God couldn't prevent genetic disorders from ever emerging or anything like that. I think you are arbitrarily limiting what an omnipotent and all knowing being could do, as perpetual miracles are possible, and there is almost no reason to suspect that they would pose real problems. Additionally, natural dynamics and our genetic frailties could be altered as well(I suppose by the latter you mean human nature).

I mean, yes, if we posit that *everything* is exactly the same as the current world, then the current world is likely both the best and worst possible world out of the set we are given. But, it doesn't take a huge imagination to suppose that all sorts of things could be different.


Beyond what is required for a greater good. That isn't a subjective evaluation if morality is supposed as objective.


They *are* making a wise choice, because if there is unjustified evil, then theodicy basically fails as to justify God and to justify evil coexisting, one must argue that all evils that exist are justified.


Everybody who talks about God usually means the Abrahamic God. Within Western society, only the Abrahamic and the Christian God usually reach our attention. And within philosophy, the majority of philosophers within the analytic tradition that are theists tend to be Christians or influenced by that notion of God.

Umm... if unicorns exist, then unicorns exist, and if unicorns don't exist then they don't. We create models so that way we can explore ideas. Many people do accept the notion of a God that must be good though, because God is often connected to the Abrahamic notion, God is also often connected to the Anselmian idea of a greatest possible being. A God who is the greatest possible being must also be a God who is good, because it is better to be good than indifferent or evil.

Basically, it seems to me that you don't accept any exploration about the existence of God unless it automatically leads to agnosticism. Either that, or you are a reductionist who still somehow dislikes the problem of evil. I would guess the latter.


I have to agree and disagree with you here. There are trade-offs. It could be that I am trading off conceptual exploratory capability for greater rigor, and this is possible as focusing on the skill set to kill ideas could weaken the skill set needed to create them. However, in this case, I think that you are probably stifling your mind.

I could be wrong here, but I am killing a possibility due to my ability to see an open field. You are keeping a possibility alive because you seem to have problems seeing all of the other possibilities.

Well, techstepgenr8tion, you seem to be ignoring the possibilities of different stable evolutionary paths. Just because the world works right at one point doesn't mean that it couldn't work right in another manner. Not only that, but once again, I have to say that we are invoking the idea of God. An all-powerful, all-knowing being should open up all logical possibilities.


I don't see the difference as even that significant. For centuries most people believed that the world had been created. Evolutionary perspectives tend to be newer historically speaking.


I can understand the perspective that we won't ever fully know what is gratuitious and what isn't, but this is mostly handled from the possible worlds perspective. In any case, you are right, in as much as some theists have argued that it is difficult to argue when evil is gratuitous, however, I am cynical towards the overuse of that if only because I am not sure that the point of any argument is an absolute proof. Absolute proofs about what can and cannot exist are basically impossible, one can only show that based upon current knowledge, one should believe certain things. For example, I might argue that one should believe in evolution or that one should not believe in giant chickens but in either case I could be utterly and entirely wrong about the truth of what I am advocating no matter how good my reasons are.


Neither of your objections seems very problematic. Gratuitous evil seems to be what we are left with if better worlds are possible. We might have to qualify what makes a world better, but if our world is sub-optimal then some of the evil we have is just a waste.

Think of it like a portfolio, evil happens to be high risk stocks. Well, if we have a lot of risk, but a lower return than the market rate, then it seems that we should either reduce our risk, or increase our high return stocks. But in any case, we can say that our portfolio has "too much risk". In the case of earth, we have a lot of evil, but less good compared to the optimal rate, so we either have to reduce our evil, or increase our good, but in either case it makes sense to say our world has "gratuitous evil". That is a very very rough sketch, but I don't think I commit any foul when I think of things this way.

I also don't see "man defines God" to be a real issue either. One, man *does* define the set of beings whom we can call "God", as we obviously cannot call a garbage man to be God and still make sense of the word, can we? No, of course not. Secondly, a large number of theists do accept the basic definitions of God I was using. Thirdly, any theoretical model I create will be one I define. Obviously I can't have a metaphysical hypothesis where I do not define my terms.


Gratuitous compared to a situation that has either more good, or less evil.

If we don't go with what we know, then what's the point of talking about what we're talking about? We have to have something with more depth than a skeptical hypothesis, like brains in vats, in order to meaningfully make sense of an idea. Could we say that there are a lot of years? Sure, but how many years would you give to get over a Fritzl family kind of situation? What would it take for something like that to be seen as "good". Perhaps this is a failure of my imagination, but I really can't think of much that can make this kind of thing right, and I don't see much reason to exhaustively look over all of the possibilities, given that they are infinite, so long as (to allude to a statistical term) my small sample size seems to say "no way".

The take I have is less that he can't do miracles but more that he's clearly not a fan of them (if he exists). The genetic frailties are what cause the human condition though, yes, not just that but the state of pretty much anything living in this world that isn't vegetation.



Evolution is somewhat strapped to the environment though. One could argue I'd suppose that a slight shift one way or another is possible but it is small - the concept of God having designed life in an altogether different way yields a much more potent resulting alternate (I guess I don't have a problem with alternate worlds, just that I think of them as models rather than the now being a titanic bubble-ring blowing off alternate spheres).



I think we're in agreement that this is an earthbound concept, just that we have different conclusions on how much that means.



I would agree that your proof, if held against an Abrahamic God, at least highlights rather strange behavior - mainly that the Abrahamic God taken in that literal sense is a heaven/hell God. I've really come to the conclusion that the degree of not only evil in this world but huge lack of free will and predestination makes a God of hell, fire, and brimstone (or one who'll for some odd reason insult your intelligence with "I'm not sending you to hell - you sent yourself) very unlikely. That runs into a lot of problems when dealing with the concept that God loves us so much that he 'counted every hair on our heads', he'd have to pick a head of time who he was willing to give at least 80 - 90% odds of losing based on where and when he set them down as well as what kind of heredity he housed them in.



Yes, I'd have to argue that drawing such absolutes in the kind of reality that we live in yields very clouded/murky results. To me though, as well as the issue of theodicy, makes me dwell on the exterior more as in its difficult to glean much more than what we already know regarding the interior.



I don't frown on it, just that I do believe that even our best efforts are built on sand. I think that's actually great reason for neither theists nor atheists to be militant about their opinions, it turns me off in a huge way to extremes on both sides. I do believe that reality is far more complicated than what's being proposed by either side of the argument right now, I don't argue that its absolutely unknowable so give up - I think we're still battling to find ourselves and our meaning as a race, this idea of God/no God is somewhat heated and pivotal but I think as each side realizes that they have less and less ground it means that not only will the quality of the arguments from both sides increase exponentially over time but we'll gain more knowledge about ourselves as a race in the process. In the end though, I really don't believe the living will ever have an answer short of such a theistic positive as a huge divine revelation (which is a concept that I tend to be very skeptical of).



I tend to think that proofs are far more verbal where as there are much more visual processes to be had as well. I think being more visual and following more of a visual tract helps me to arrange ideas more hierarchically or circumscribe them in terms of their level of primacy.



I'm definitely assembling what I have in a much more intuitive/free-associative manner. That might bog me down, your right, if I'm going for sheer steam power to plow in one direction or another, I think I've spent a lot of time though looking up, down, and 360 degrees around myself to figure out what direction I even wanted to head in - it is an expensive process but its been very reserved and accuracy oriented.

I'm not saying my way is better, you could intersect the same final point I do, I think that just being different people means that we'll have different resources and methods to bring to the table. I think the only time it becomes a challenge in the here and now is if really good posts bounce off of you, or me for that matter.




I tend to think that we can take things here *very* empirically, I tend not to take that as a problem though I do condone constantly probing things like say evolution or computer science or physics, etc., to see whether we really have the full story and if not - what more is there. Historical sciences are at much more of a challenge as they tend to be built on speculative models that are forensic rather than retestable, but should - say - scientists find that mutation is purely degenerative; there we go, the Darwinian sense of evolution would be shot. I won't say that I have full faith in either evolution or ID but, regardless of each, evolutionary psychology still holds an amazing amount of explanatory power about us and the human condition. I think its because of that last point however that I find it very difficult not to see us as roped and chained to our genes, our behaviors, our capacities, our reactions - pretty much any optimal behavior is defined by our limits and our needs and it seems somewhat true whether we can show that the first cell was able to vary its DNA rather quickly without any help or whether its shown impossible and we find that we would have needed an intelligent designer.




I can sympathize with that outlook but, again, I'm not sure how much it means.



We may well be on a journey to do that ourselves. Regardless of what we think of the 20th century our world has been becoming drastically more humane - outside of the larger mass atrocities. That much seems like its constantly propelling itself forward. I would think that, unless the United States, Britain, and Australia were utterly swallowed by political absurdity that other currently third world countries will be there soon enough and eventually would be able to hold the torch on their own. A thousand years from now I'd imagine we'll still have evil but, as long as progress remains uninterrupted, it would be a much diminished force.

It is funny though, how far we've come from our roots.



I think that's exactly why I've looked at reality first, looked at the human condition, and filled out my sense of God from what's around me rather than trying to figure out too many of the doctrinal tangles provided compliments of the New Testament, Old Testament, Quran, etc. - all of the above seem like something of a distraction right now, perhaps in another twenty years I may change my mind and be reading it in an entirely different way but I can rest assure that I would be doing so from a much different angle than anyone that I know.




I think that's just it. Most theists are using holy books, most atheists are using materialist outlooks on reality and using straight-jacket literal interpretation of the holy books, I haven't scrapped the holy books entirely but my outlook is that the earth and its algorithms should be infallible in describing who made it, therefor my tendency is to look from the non-revelatory/pragmatic world around me and use that to work backward in terms of understanding God. That of course puts God at the very top of the pendulum, not meaning that I'm absolutely certain that I'll never turn full-blooded atheist if compelling enough arguments come my way, just that I interpret the natural world from the standpoint of "God more likely than not exists" which may put me in a rather unusual bracket - I never thought so but I could be wrong on that.

Most of our moral failings likely have very little to do with predators, as a lot of them are matters of internal stability in human societies and exploitation within these societies.


Well, we are working with models no matter what we do. I mean, of course, our map cannot be mistaken for the territory, but certainly a well-developed map gives us the ability to criticize the maps of other people, and ask them "why do you think there's a mountain there?".


Perhaps, I've gotten skeptical to my skepticism.


Well, ok. Cool. I obviously cannot bring to mind what every single person will call God. However, I can criticize the main views as I see them.


I meant former. I often mix these things up(not literally, but I'll think one thing and say another). Sorry about the confusion there.

Reality has enough complexity no matter what we posit. Anyone who sticks to their commonsensical view of the world has probably not gone out and seen and heard enough things.


Ah... I am not sure if I would describe myself as a visual thinker. I think I work from concepts, not words, and then try to fit the words to the concepts later. I dunno... I am not sure if I used to be more visual, but some things are so jarring that words cannot be put on them.


I am less focused upon accuracy so much as conceptual powerfulness, and I am often willing to recognize that I focus less upon staying still and reworking ideas so much as continually testing them.


Yeah... everyone has different thinking styles, and it is hard to get them all to mesh together. Some people are very analytical, others are very mystical, a third party is very pragmatic, a fourth may be empirical, another is very skeptical, etc.


Well, I am not surprised if the amount of wrongdoing in the world will decrease. I doubt it is just a matter of virtue or any some such though.


I don't think I tend to use "straight-jacket literal interpretations" of holy books, but rather try to handle them relatively well. Even in the earlier argument, I was just endorsing a position held to by one of the major existing Christian theological groups.

Honestly, I don't care so much. I find good reason to be cynical to the existence of such a being, as I don't see the world as particularly designed, I see an abundance of evil, I don't think such a being answers any questions and generally brings up more problems, and I generally don't see much reason to search for a being who doesn't seem to care. Not only that, but I am distrusting of religious intuition that people are drawn to anyway.

Unless their deity happens to be female.

ruveyn