I'm familiar with this quote. The fact that someone famous or even smart said the same thing doesn't circumvent the presumption inherent in the repeated suggestion that if God has the power to do something in a way we imagine He should, that He is obligated to prove it by doing that thing in exactly the way we would have Him do it.
Actually, no. It's plainly and bluntly putting out that God has a massive character flaw: He can't be all loving if the very basic characteristics of an all loving person are violated by his very inaction. In the same way that you can't keep calling me a good person if I create a thousand rapists and unleash them upon the world, then stand by and watch as they go about raping people and ruining lives.
You can't be a good person if you are the originator of all evil, by virtue of creating all things, and stand by and do nothing while evil flourishes. If governments were to operate under this same principle, we'd have no police officers, no firefighters--arsonists and murderers could go about their day unimpeded, because we might violate their free will by stopping them or punishing them for going through with their actions.
Do you see? God cannot simultaneously be
all loving, and the creator of
all things, and be
all knowing, and then stand by and watch evil happen. That is a fatal character design flaw, and in any story, that'd be considered a plot hole. He's the one who created the arsonist who lit the house on fire.
He's already created evil, he's already done horribly terribly wrong things. Therefore, God, by virtue of his
own actions, repeatedly recorded in the Bible, is not a good character. He drowned the entire planet for not loving him enough.
The flaw in that analogy—I may have presumed too much familiarity with the doctrine I'm defending—is that no human being is purely a victim. We are all sinful even though sin harm us all. So we are all both victim and perpetrator. If any human being could be perfectly innocent, Jesus wouldn't have gone to the Cross. He prayed in the garden of Gethsemane that, if there were any other way to save humanity, God the Father would let Him skip going to the cross. If anyone of us mortals could, by God's perfect standard, "live a peaceable" life, God wouldn't have taken the action He already did. Religion as we know it would arguably not exist, as good humans would always automatically find their way to God, and their sinlessness would make them immortal anyway(death being a product of sin and Jesus only dying voluntarily by acting as a substitute for every person who'd ever accept it).
This doesn't make any sense. I'm not sure how children dying of cancer are perpetrators... Should they have not been born with cancer? It also strikes another flaw in the all loving arc of the character: He created an impossible test in the Garden of Eden that was predestined to fail (when you have literally infinite time to fail, by statistical odds, you have a 100% chance of failure at some point), then punished all of his creation with human flaws and suffering and evil... Then he drowned the entire planet for the suffering and evil he created, started over, and somehow, his perfect creations remained horribly imperfect. So with Jesus, he created a second impossible test, because the creatures
he designed personally, which he knows are
absolutely fallible and will at some point in their lives sin no matter how miniscule it may be or how apologetic they may be about it afterwards, must somehow live perfect lives.
He
literally goes "live a perfect life or I'll torture this random jewish son I have to death."
This violates the "all loving" character trait so hard that it starts to make one's head spin. Especially when God decided that the only way he could forgive all of the creations
he created to be flawed for their flaws, was to take his only mortal son...
And brutally murder him. Consider this is the character that is supposed to know everything, and be all powerful, so... Why does he have to resort to murder to get things done? Especially since he loves his creations, wouldn't it just make... Infinitely more sense to, like, send a patch out to every human brain? If you respond with "that'd violate free will", well, he already did. Several times. Like that incident where he literally
murdered everyone on the planet for not loving him enough. Pretty much the entirety of the old testament, really. Samson & Delilah is rife with examples of god apparently not giving a shit about anyone's free will. Jonah too. Moses, even. I'm pretty sure god didn't care about the free will of the peoples living in Sodom & Gomorrah.
I'm not sure if you've read my earlier posts so I'll quickly restate that, since I'm not a believer, I tend to view this as a character dissection. I'm going off of what I can read from the Biblical text. If we're going into the realm of "I feel God is X", I can't fight that, and I don't think it'd be particularly right for me to do so either. I'm arguing purely from what I can derive from the text.
Not to nitpick, but I can't ignore some of the loaded language in that argument. I'm not defending a God who does things "for no reason" and "pointless[ly]" I give the reasons and points I believe in. If they don't satisfy you, that's fine. If you view the God I do describe, as sadistic, it is your right, but don't expect me to defend a different god framed as the same one.
God does intervene. Some people recover. Some people survive things they should have likely died from. Close calls and reversals happen all around us. Part of the experience of faith is deciding if we'll acknowledge those as evidence of God or dismiss them, somehow having the gall to be upset that they don't happen more often despite our ingratitude for the ones that do happen.
Also, this was critical for me when deciding if I'd be a Christian or not: A big part of how one perceives God has to do with how much value one assigns to this current, temporary life. It is a precious thing, and yet, its priority in Christian doctrine is presented as secondary and in service to preparation for the unending one to follow. Now, if one, even professing Christianity, is dismissive or unconvinced of the priority of the afterlife, it all sort of falls apart. Even the Apostles said, "If Christ has not risen from the dead, then we are to be pitied above all men." It's true. If all the stuff about eternal life and getting to meet and spend time with God face to face, no more mysteries and all that, is false, then Christianity is a pointless waste of time. If death, for the believer experiencing it, isn't reduced to a doorway to something that will surpass anything in this life, then letting us experience TEMPORARY suffering is horrible.
Again, though, I have to call into question: How can you tell where god intervenes? Why does god only intervene for certain people? Why is it always vague miracles that could just as easily be explained as lucky draw or statistical anomaly? Does god love certain people more than other people? Why? "God works in mysterious ways" violates free will, just as a reminder.
As for the last paragraph, yeah no I'm not arguing with you about that. If there is a God, and if he does work in mysterious ways, then I am absolutely acknowledging the fact that I would be completely unable to understand him. He's so far beyond me that I'm basically an ant staring up at humans building massive structure as far as the eye can see, turning to my friend, and going "why must they pour concrete and murder us?!" I'm just an ant. I don't know what the fuck humans do or why the fuck they do it. The same applies as a human attempting to ascertain the motivations of a deity, or the methods of a deity. The Bible is also comprised of multiple books written by multiple men over the course of a few hundred years, translated multiple times, compiled into a single work by the Catholic Church at conventions like the Council of Nicea... And, it's quite possible, that God had a coherent message that would have made total sense, but thanks to human editing over the course of 2,000+ years, it no longer does.
However, speaking as a non-believer, speaking as a skeptic, I'm examining what little evidence I do have--his book. And his book depicts the tale of an insanely jealous man in the sky who has schizophrenic episodes in which murders people. A lot. Often painfully. When he could probably use a thousand different other methods than murder to get his point across. To creations he is supposed to love. Completely, and absolutely.
I'll elaborate on MY argument—not your reframing. Did Hitler love humanity? Was Hitler perfect?
No, but the reason I make the comparison to Hitler is because both are imperfect, jealous, and vindictive, to the level of orchestrating
mass genocide because people wouldn't do what they told them to do... No offense. I really don't mean to offend.
Without even getting into the contrast between the Christian God's relationship with the Jews and Hitler's, this reframing is absurd. If I did believe in the god you describe, I wouldn't worship him either.
Aye, which is why I typically separate the Biblical God with one's personal God. Anyone who follows the Bible to the letter would quickly turn into a rabid bloodthirsty maniac who slaughters people for working on sundays or wearing mixed cloth, or not paying the tax man his due--all of which I won't insult your intelligence by implying you would ever consider righteous or ethical. Keep in mind that when I question the god of the book, I'm not questioning you.
And sidestepping the emotionally charged condemnations of god-neither-one-of-us believes-in, combining accountability and the absence of free will, whether in theistic or purely humanistic context, makes no sense. Why would humans get angry at people for bad behavior when no one can help themself?
Because people can help themselves generally? Unless they have a crippling mental disorder. It's why we consider, say, school shootings, to be
tragedies--we
failed to stop something terrible. Even if there was no way for any human to know and stop the tragedy from occurring, we'll still generally feel pretty badly about it. When we do awful things and hurt each other, we often apologize and depending on the severity of the event, offer reparations--even in the course of this giant blob of semi-coherent rambling I'm posting to you, I'm repeatedly appealing to your better nature. Because I know this topic is very personal for you, you sincerely believe, and I don't want to offend or upset, but in some ways I feel it may be unavoidable in order for me to properly express my opinions.
It's... Empathy. We're flawed, certainly, but what makes life unique and special is that we're forced to be held accountable for our actions explicitly because we presume we have free will. It's also why most modern courts of law have special kinds of punishments for crimes committed under duress or because of a mental disorder.
If, there is a deity, and
if, he created everything and knows everything, this strips us of our free will. We're nothing more than a simulation or a dream that a vastly superior entity cooked up. This devalues our actions, this inevitably means that, if a rapist rapes or a murderer murders, it's because they were
destined to do that. They were created by a God who
knew they would end up committing those actions, who did it anyway.
If I drop a spider and an ant in the same bin, I shouldn't be surprised the next morning if the ant was eaten by the spider, and I would be directly responsible for the death of the ant. To imply that a deity should be absolved of the responsibility for his creations, who do exactly as he created them to do, makes little sense.
Also, remember that my previous posts refer to a God who gives, values, and won't revoke free will. If we're discussing other beliefs too, that's fine. But I would appreciate it if you might avoid casting things I say that I don't believe as though they were things that I do.
As said above, if we're speaking of a personal god, or who you feel god is: I won't argue that. I can't argue that, it's not right for me to argue that. If we're talking of the Biblical god however, he repeatedly violates free will, so many times, and on such a grand scale as resulting in the deaths of hundreds or even thousands, it makes little sense. I also have to wonder...
God does intervene. Some people recover. Some people survive things they should have likely died from.
How can a god respect free will, if he
openly interferes in the lives of individual people, whether for good
or for ill? If he interferes in the lives of any one particular person, why not more? Why only that one person? This only seems to imply a god who gives arbitrary and random value to certain persons for little coherent reasoning beyond schizophrenia.
That's easy. I don't believe in a deterministic universe. "Mysterious ways" doesn't equal determinism though anyway.
If God made and knows everything forever: Then everything we do is something god already knows we'll do, meaning that our free will is just as much of an illusion as that of video game characters going through a cutscene. If you look closely, you can see the puppet strings.
For me, religion is about pursuit of truth. If there's an argument that can shatter my faith, I should hear it, lest I continue wasting time in delusion.
I appreciate it. I hope you see that I meant no harm in inquiry, repudiation, and discussion. As part of good faith, I'll let you have the last word in this discussion if you would like.