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That's the difference between me and your god.
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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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The question of suffering is the one question that all of theological history has yet to have a satisfying answer for. The book of Hiob itself concludes this question with faith being something you decide to have despite suffering, not because there is any good reason for it.
I am not saying it is the only hole to poke at theism, but it is THE hole to poke at.
If suffering is part of gods plan and requires deformed children to be born and immediately die, then someone like Stalin, Mao and Hitler were possibly more helpful in furthering gods plan than any good Christian believer ever will be. They certainly had a larger impact on society, laws, culture, etc. Than mother Theresa.
This should lead to the conclusion that believers should embrace evil doers (whom they're supposed to forgive anyway) even more than those that do good, as they are still pushing gods plan.
So all their percieved enemies and lost sheep are really agents of their very own God doing his bidding more successfully than they ever will.
Though, that argument implies that the only plan god has is death for deformed children. If everything is or could be part of god's plan, then you could be as useful as Hitler or everyone else by simply being you and doing nothing.
The more fundamental question to answer is "how would you completely stop suffering?", which I find impossible without taking away everyone's free will.
What if eradicating suffering means that everyone has to go through equal amount of pain and hardship? Would that stop everyone from complaining or would it make everyone complain? What if preventing a greater suffering requires a lesser, necessary suffering? Would that stop people from complaining about it? What if everyone has to take the consequence of one man's fault in order not to make him suffer?
I think the only way suffering would truly stop is if everyone shared the same goal and had no ability for independent thought.
Free will can't exist in a world of an omnipotent and omniscient god, so that is not a good excuse because Christians by default can't have a free will.
It's not a philosophical argument around or about suffering in general. The problem of Theodicy is directly in relation to having an omnipotent and entirely good god while also having incredibly amounts of suffering in the world, which are pretty much mutually exclusive. If god is all good and all powerful, how can suffering be a thing, basically.
That's the theological question around suffering.
The free will argument enters into it somewhat, but doesn't resolve or answer suffering caused by things entirely unrelated to actions freely chosen by people, hence the "deformed child dying" example.
Could you elaborate on how an entirely good god is mutually exclusive?
Omnipotence still have its limitations. For example, can a god create an immovable object? Which doesn't make sense because the question itself is contradictory. So that begs the question, is it even possible to be entirely good while still being totally authoritarian and eugenics?
On a side note, I'm not even sure what you're implying as the good option here. The child dying, the child growing up and having to suffer their entire life with deformity, or being eugenics? All of them sounds awful if I had to choose
Theodicy issue assumes that omnipotence is absolute, as it is attributed to god. But it's simply the same. If you have any limitation to the power, i. e. not being able to prevent deformed babies that are unfit for survival due to no fault of anyone's actions, then god isn't omnipotent and thus isn't god. Just another way of approaching the same goal of having an unmovable object created.
If god were both omnipotent and all good, as ascribed by scripture, they wouldn't allow a child with birthdefects to come into existence in the first place. The child would simply be healthy and any negatives in their lives would be consequences of their actions, rather than genetic problems or environmental factors beyond their or humanity's control.
Otherwise god is not all good or not omnipotent. And if they aren't one of those things, how are they god at all? That's the basic premise.
Theodicy doesn't necessarily assume that omnipotence is absolute in the sense that a god can do anything including a logically impossible task, but merely the ability to do anything logically possible.
Should omnipotentence include the ability to create a square circle? A married bachelor? Triangle with four sides? A number that is both even and odd?
It seems that you're taking it in what Thomasson calls a neutral sense as opposed to a sortal sense, which is meaningless for asking questions. For example, if I asked if there was anything in the fridge and you said it was empty. It'd be weird if I looked over and said "umm, excuse me? you said the fridge was empty but it's actually full of air!", because it was implied that I was asking about anything to eat instead of literally anything.
And if we just ignore the fact that you support eugenics, where would you draw the line between healthy and "deformed"? Is deformity not driven in part by genetic mutation and therefore natural part of evolution? Aren't we all result of a series of advantageous deformity? What if two deformed parents decides to have a baby even though doctors have warned them that the baby is definitely going to be deformed as well?
I think you are getting the wrong result out of that argument here. Because if omnipotence can't exist, and any limitations would mean that it can't, then the Christian (or any monotheist) god can't exist, and that effectively ends any reason for further discussion on that particular subject because the foundation of that religion has been removed.
Anything else would merely be thought games on fictional premises.
Not on the scale of 3 others you mentioned, but Teresa was all about suffering. You don't even have to read Hitchens (although I highly recommend it). Just open her Wiki for a quick summary of how much of a piece of shit human being she was.
Which, again, makes her probably a great agent of god in his never ending campaign to further his plan ™ by throwing shitty, evil people at humanity.