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[+] -7 points 2 months ago (33 children)

I’ve never understood the hype surrounding this pseudo-dilemma in atheist circles. The answer is actually quite simple: being all-powerful doesn’t mean being capable of doing impossible things. If your definition of omnipotence includes the ability to do the impossible, then, as a Christian, I have no problem saying that God is not omnipotent, but that is merely a matter of wordplay.

There are many valid criticisms of religion and even of theism, but this one has never really made sense to me.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Well, the christian's claim is that god created the world as it is, in 6 days, and that each day he checked what he did and that he saw it was good. And so he not only created pain for innocent baby animals, but he also validated it as good. May is it onavoidable, but we are still able to regret it. Is our moral highes than god's moral? Or are we wrong and should we train ourself to feel joy at the idea of a new born baby mouse tortured by a cat who may (or not) eat it after his play (when the baby mouse died)?

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  • [+] -6 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Even if you take that myth literally, which I don't, he says things are good before the Fall, then before “pain for innocent baby animals”.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    But is him the creator of the world we live in? Or is someone else the origine of this pain?

    The fall is to punish humans because their ancestor many generations ago acted wrong... But why are innocent baby animals punished for that? Or have their ancestors sinned too?

    I am sorry, but it is hard for me to see here any kind of justice. How do you define evil in a way to distinguish it from the god?

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (15 children)

    I'll break it down like this. Is all suffering necessary? Like do infants really need to get leukemia to achieve God's grand plan? Does he have the power to achieve his goal without giving infants leukemia?

    It boils down to the fact that either he is not able to, and therefore not all powerful, or he is and chooses to give babies cancer anyway, and therefore not all good.

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  • [+] -8 points 2 months ago* (14 children)

    You seem to think that God is a micromanager which decide everything. It's not the Biblical God. This is explained by the myth of creation (yes it's a myth, but it's not because it's not historical that it's not meaningful). Evil and suffering wasn't in God's plan. What was in God's plan, was freedom for the Creation, which is not possible without an alternative: follow God's will, or not. The Creation chose to try an other way, and God cried. But he respected the choice.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago (9 children)

    Evil and suffering wasn't in God's plan

    Did God create the universe? Did he know evil and suffering would occur before he created the universe? Could he have created the universe another way?

    If the answer to all 3 is yes, everything must be according to his plan. If the answer to any is no, you have to get rid of either all-knowing or all-powerful.

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  • [+] -7 points 2 months ago (8 children)

    I say no to the last one. But that doesn't mean he's not all-powerful in the proper sense of the word, because he can't do impossible things.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago* (7 children)

    I guess my next question would be why would it be impossible? I'll accept that he can't do logically impossible things, like make a square circle, but the idea that he could have made changes to nature is not logically impossible.

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  • [+] -8 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    He can change nature. But not in a way that would preserve freedom and make nature obey all his wishes at the same time. That is the squared circle.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    I'm not talking about obeying his wishes, I'm talking about unnecessary suffering. Could he make a world with free will and no baby cancer?

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  • [+] -7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

    His wish is for the creation to be free of suffering. If he forced that, there wouldn't be freedom. And by freedom I'm not speaking about human agency, but the metaphysical capacity of the cosmos to be something God doesn't want.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    metaphysical capacity of the cosmos to be something God doesn't want

    Either God created that capacity (literally nothing can exist if he does not will it), or there are higher metaphysical concepts than God.

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  • [–] -3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    I wouldn't call logic a metaphysical concept. But yes, God can't go against it.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    metaphysical capacity of the cosmos to be something God doesn't want.

    I mean that. So God is constrained by something other than logic.

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  • [–] -3 points 2 months ago

    No, this metaphysical capacity is the universe's, not God's. Freedom is the human form of a cosmological reality : the capacity not to be what God wants. God is the one who created the word that way, because he wanted a universe he doesn't control. Because if the universe can't not love God, then it can't love it. Love must be free.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    which is not possible without an alternative

    Oh? So he's not omnipotent then?

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  • [–] -5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    I'll cite myself one message higher:

    If your definition of omnipotence includes the ability to do the impossible, then, as a Christian, I have no problem saying that God is not omnipotent, but that is merely a matter of wordplay.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    The passive-aggressive "as per my last email" doesn't magically make that bs make sense. You do understand that, right?

    Omnipotence is defined as "unlimited power". god can't do X -> god is not omnipotent. Extremely simple stuff if you're not an apologist.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago* (5 children)

    Of course. All the answers are simple, in such a way that it's easy to show how they're all really bad arguments. Such as "Well it's simple really, one of the three main characteristics of god, that literally everyone knows, just isn't true when inconvenient to my position."

    Hence the "hype" - it's pretty useful to have an argument that, no matter what people try to argue, immediately has to result in something stupidly obviously illogical, something that contradicts one or more lore points, some cop out bs, bad faith argumentation, or everything all at once.

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  • [–] -5 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    I explicitly said that there were good criticisms of religion and theism, so please read messages to the end before answering. Atheists, both friends and strangers, asked me very hard questions, and I'm thankful to them for that, because these hard questions made me grow. It's just that this one is not one of them.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago* (3 children)

    I explicitly said that there were good criticisms of religion and theism, so please read messages to the end before answering.

    See, this is exactly the bad faith argumentation and copout bullshit that I was literally just talking about.

    "Please refrain from insinuating that just because you find the argument too difficult, I didn't read it" blah blah etc, see how easy that was and didn't address any of the actual questions? Real obvious stuff.

    Atheists, both friends and strangers, asked me very hard questions, and I’m thankful to them for that, because these hard questions made me grow. It’s just that this one is not one of them.

    Maybe it could be, if you had the time, balls and intellectual honesty to engage with it

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  • [–] -4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    You can't make strawmen and cry when people don't engage to them.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    It's pretty funny, this tone you're taking just because you're on the Shit Arguments side. Which you evidently know, or you'd be able to come up with better stuff.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago*

    The answer is actually quite simple: being all-powerful doesn’t mean being capable of doing impossible things. If your definition of omnipotence includes the ability to do the impossible, then, as a Christian, I have no problem saying that God is not omnipotent

    Well, yeah, if you simply believe different things, then criticisms of the beliefs you don't hold aren't a problem.

    Now, I'd wager that out of the ~2.25 billion Christians, about 2 billion of them would be at best skeptical that you qualify as a Christian at all and essentially all of them would vehemently disagree with you, but they disagree with each other about nearly everything too, so you aren't exactly objectively wrong to call yourself a Christian.

    However, that doesn't make others wrong to level these criticisms at the vast majority of Christians who do believe that "through God, all things are possible" literally means all things, even things that are otherwise contradictory.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    If your god is not all powerful, then your religion lied to you about what your god even is.

    According to your lore, his will is our reality - he isn't bound by the laws of our universe, he made them. So he didn't just allow evil and suffering to exist, he actively put it here. Why worship a being so full of hate?

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  • [–] -5 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    No, according to my lore, the world escaped God's will. That's like the first pages of the Bible. That's the meaning of the Fall's myth.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    ...and which defining pillar of your god are you going to rugpull to rationalize the world being able to escape god's will?

    Every explanation for this shit is him situationally not being all powerful, all knowing, or all good.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    It depends on how you define the words. Is omnipotence the capacity to do absolutely everything? Then yes, God is not omnipotent. But no philosopher or theologian ever defined omnipotence like that. Using that against Christianity is a strawman. Omnipotence, clearly defined is the capacity to do anything possible. So God can't make a squared circle but he's still omnipotent. He can't create a universe where everything follows his will and still is free at the same time, but he's still omnipotent.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Impossible according to what? The laws of the universe that god made? Couldn't he just as easily have made different laws?

    And why is the capability to commit evil always a defining characteristic of free will? We also cannot breathe underwater, fly, or lift a freight train with our god-given anatomy, so do we actually have free will?

    Compare it to our own legal system: you have free will to choose what you want for dinner tonight, right? Loads of restaurants with loads of entrees, grocery stores stocked with whatever you need to cook up your creation: the combination of options is unfathomably vast. Free, right? ...but wait, according to the law, you're not allowed to cannibalize your neighbor's 4 year old kid, so I guess that makes you a mindless drone cuz if evil isn't on the menu then neither is free will.

    So let's put that restriction back in god's court: he doesn't need to enforce his law, he just wills it and so it is: you still have the unfathomably huge number of non-evil options, but this time cannibalism is actually impossible: you are literally incapable of committing or even considering it because divine intervention will not let you - do you have free will?

    Our freedom exists within the constraints of some system. Both legal and divine. There are loads of things we aren't free to do - the capacity to commit evil taken away from us would be a drop in the ocean.

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  • [–] -3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Impossible according to what?

    Logic. Logic precedes the Creation.

    And why is the capability to commit evil always a defining characteristic of free will?

    Because freedom is not absolute, one is always free in relation to something. Since God is love, freedom in relation to God is necessarily the freedom not to love and therefore, the freedom to do evil.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    Logic. Logic precedes the Creation.

    Logic according to what? What makes you believe logic predates creation? If you're citing genesis, you might want to reread it: it's vague as fuck and certainly doesn't address the (non)existence of logic prior to creation.

    Kinda sounds like you're making shit up, in which case you might want to review revelations too, which instructs not to do that or sky daddy will give you that eternal spanking.

    Because freedom is not absolute

    Yeah no shit, that's half the point of my last post, the other half being why it's so important to you for evil to be part of that freedom, which...

    Since God is love, freedom in relation to God is necessarily the freedom not to love and therefore, the freedom to do evil.

    Speaking of logic, that's flawed as fuck. The absence of love is not synonymous with the presence of evil. The absence of love is just the absence of love. All the people, critters, things in your life that you've paid no mind to? That's absence of love. They mean nothing to you - and that's fine. The presence of love? Your friends, family... I don't need to elaborate here do I? But evil? Hopefully this is something you've never been compelled to do - causing suffering for its own sake. That's not fine... and the universe we're stuck in is absolutely stuffed with it.

    So again, why does free will - even specifically in the context of freedom from love - have to include evil?

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