Good question. To me, it is the good and beautiful.
Happiness is, like everything else human, biological. You feel happy when you feel acomplished or safe, and the opposite when you experience loss or failure. I am still new to here so I don’t know what’s what but I do know that, for me, god doesn’t exist because it goes agaisnt every other thing i know is true about the laws of physics but for the purpose of this discussion il try to ignore my own bias.
The bible has many examples in which a story requires innocent people to suffer through difficulty in order to learn a lesson or prove themselves or otherwise to teach others. Il assume anyone reading this has read at least some of the bible before my opinion. In these stories happiness is irrelevent to gods plan. Happiness is subjective and to that extent, god can surely bend his understanding to match each indivudials perception of hapiness whilst also maintaining his own sense of morals but it seems to me, to be an impossiuble task. Impossible in the sense of contradictions rather than being difficult.
A question one could ask in order to answer this question is why would god require suffering? The answer is obvious to most, it is to teach but when someone asks why a child has to die of cancer the whole entire thing falls apart for me. There is no lesson important enough to teach a family in my opinion.
Send me your MasterCard number and I will send you His GPSS coordinates. (Just kidding.)
God is everywhere that He chooses to be.
God’s existence is not created. God exist, so all else can exist.
Why do you say that they are just empty claims? What credible evidence from experience or perception are you asking for? Give me your reason for saying the claim makes no sense.
"In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Do you mean this word? What is your word for your God?
The existence I am talking about is the existence of all things. The tool, materials, and methods God used for creation is His power.
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Then He created light and water. Eventually He created ice cubes and apples.
What substantial and real answers for beautiful and good things are you asking for? I have been repeating my questions to you because you keep evading my questions.
Do you mean beautiful and good things?
Why are beautiful and good things different for different people?
It is the beautiful and good to me also.
So are you from the religious missionary trying to recruit more members, and ask for donations? (just kidding too)
I will leave you to it. We had enough discussions. Good luck.
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Maybe they aren’t different in the end.
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It’s an ancient trope, (God, Good, Beautiful). If anyone has an issue they’re welcome to travel back in time and meet the point man/woman.
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There’s a further inconsistency with Christian doctrine, viz., why would an omniscient, perfectly benevolent, and omnipotent being create beings knowing that many of the one’s he created were going to spend eternity in hell (much more suffering). Also, the typical free will answer isn’t an answer, since God presumably would know, being omniscient, who would reject and who would accept the core beliefs of Christianity. This idea doesn’t fit with the idea that God is love.
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I’m sorry I’ve taken so long to answer.
I had in mind the revolutionary movements around the 18th century.
Modern Biblical criticism (as opposed to pre-Modern criticism) is the use of critical analysis to understand and explain the Bible without appealing to the supernatural. During the eighteenth century, when it began as historical-biblical criticism, it was based on two distinguishing characteristics: (1) the scientific concern to avoid dogma and bias by applying a neutral, non-sectarian, reason-based judgment to the study of the Bible, and (2) the belief that the reconstruction of the historical events behind the texts, as well as the history of how the texts themselves developed, would lead to a correct understanding of the Bible.
Wikipedia - Biblical criticism
See also Wikipedia - Natural Theology
I know that Wikipedia is not always quite right. But it is readily available and, for the most part, fairly reliable.
But it is complicated by the fact that the people in ancient times recognized that the pronoucements of oracles and prophets were not always transparent in their meaning. So there was a widespread practice of interpreting the words of gods allegorically. Indeed, Jesus’ use of parables seems to have been built on that practice.
Note that atheism is not a necessary consequence of these changes - it certainly was not meant to be. This, in my view, reinforces the view that the concept of a God is not like the concepts of unicorns or rhinoceros, but the keystone of a different view of the world in the light of different ethical priorities.
But, in the light of the methodological changes I’ve pointed to, it was gradually recognized that interpretation of such pronouncements needed to recognize the historical context - not only of the original pronouncement, but of the interpretation, which was being sought hundreds or thousands of years later in very different circumstances. This meant that the intentions of the original author were no longer a litmus test for the truth; relevance and applicability in current circumstances became much more important. The catch was that no interpretation could be stipulated as final and permanent.
Does that help?
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It was right to broach the issue of consistency in theology. The OOO-God is a 5-sided \triangle or a married bachelor. Like many of the real problems we face day to day, this is for Einstein to solve. We can at least try with whatever means at our disposal nonetheless.
And the opposition is yet to play the Ace up his sleeve viz. Agrippa’s trilemma. Philosophers have swept this particular wicked problem under the rug or rather hurriedly shoved the corpus into the trunk hoping no one will notice. This puzzle is also for future Einsteins. With the amazing reproductive rates we have, I’m 100\% certain one of our arrows will land on the bullseye. 
However, logicians have been very resourceful, developing systems like paraconsistent logic and dialetheism. Theists with consistency issues are in good hands, the OOO-God quite comfortable in the world where p \wedge \neg p is true.
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Two quotations from SEP article on Dialetheism
as clearly as anything like this can be shown, that it is coherent to maintain that some sentences can be true and false at the same time. … [A]nd that perhaps is a radical conclusion, and a major advance in our understanding of the issues. (Parsons 1990)
Dialetheism is the view that some contradictions are true.
Nobody believes the 𝑝 ∧¬𝑝 is true in the sense that it applies to all propositions. Some people think that many of the classic paradoxes, such as the liar or Russell’s paradox are both true and false.
You have some work to do to demonstrate that “God exists” or “God is the source of my happiness” are both true and false - and a good deal more to explain to believers why they should believe that.
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Hello, Sam.
A few years back I presented Lewis’s paper on the topic, which asks the further question, what are we to make of folk who think hell is entirely moral? What are we to decide concerning their ethical opinions?
Shall we say, it wasn’t well received in some circles.
Those who do not believe in god, when they die, will be cast into eternal torment.
This is a punishment out of all proportion with the offence.
Christians hold that the person who inflicts this unjust punishment - God - is worthy of worship.
So what is one to make of the moral character of folk who hold someone who tortures folk unjustly in the highest esteem?
If you made the acquaintance of someone who thought highly of a person who tortured dogs as a hobby, would you befriend them? Ought you associate with them?
This argument come up towards the end of the podcast The Many Worlds of David Lewis. I was unaware that Lewis had written on such topics.
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No probs. Replies could take time if needing some thoughts or reflections on it. 
Anyhow thanks for your reply. Much appreciated.
Yes, good point. My point was that in the material logic, the premises must be fully verified and proved statements with evidence that no one can deny.
But it is still interesting to think about who created God, where does God come from, why on earth did God create humans, and why did he kicked out humans from Eden etc etc in the Bible.
To start with, the questions like who created God, and what is the name of God, where does he reside etc etc would be good topics for discussions.
We would like to see more realistic, compelling and rational elucidations and elaborations, rather than the old cliche answers that we used to hear in the Sunday sermons.
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Reflecting back on this, we should note the following:
I answer that, Nothing should be denied the blessed that belongs to the perfection of their beatitude. Now everything is known the more for being compared with its contrary, because when contraries are placed beside one another they become more conspicuous. Wherefore in order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned.
( SUMMA THEOLOGIAE: The relations of the saints towards the damned (Supplementum, Q. 94) )
A stance that might now be considered ethically questionable.
We might question the assessment of “happiness” here.
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Here’s my concluding post from that thread:
Folk have a misguided view of the effectiveness of punishment.
Evidence shows that being certain that they will be caught has a much higher deterrent force than the severity of the punishment.
Studies of the effectiveness of the death penalty show that it has no effect on crime rates. It’s ineffective.
High emotional arousal, drug use, and simple desperation commonly override fear of punishment.
Recidivism has been shown to be reduced by providing social supports and rehabilitation.
All god need do is demonstrate that He is watching; he doesn’t need to torture folk.
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Christians usually reply with “God’s thoughts are not our thoughts…,” or something similar. It’s a self-sealing argument. It’s amazing how often this fallacy shows up.
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I agree with this but the different logics I mentioned are contradiction-tolerant i.e. in these logics p \wedge \neg p evaluates to true. May I remind you that the trivialization of truth is prevented by rejecting another deduction rule, viz disjunction introduction.
I only have to deal with the charge of inconsistency in Christian theology. I switch from classical logic (allergic to contradictions) to nonclassical logic (contradictions permitted).
My proof that God exists because happiness is real hasn’t gone down well with others and you it seems, but I’ve tried different tacks like, Augustine’s conception of evil, the fact that God created Eden, my own idea of dyads e.g. (red, bull) and (rain, wet) etc.. There’s also GregW’s argument that depends on the ancient trope, (God, Good, Beautiful). Don’t God and good and God and beautiful go togther? Doesn’t pleasure go with good and beautiful? Doesn’t happiness go with pleasure?
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@Banno first off thanks for the links and sharing your thoughts on the matter. You speak from facts: It is indeed true that the specter of hell/capital punishment is inadequate as a means to deter the morally-challenged, and you also provide reasons (emotions overriding bon sens, drugs in the bloodstream, and desperation) why that is the case. Moreover infinite punishment for finite offenses seems out of whack. It just dawned on me that humans know better on that score; the human justice system is fairer than God’s in this regard.
However your argument regarding the tahafut (incoherent) nature of God falls flat within contradiction-tolerant logics like paraconsistent logic and dialetheism. I’m tempted to cite Godel’s incompleteness theorems, deep facts about mathematics qua mathematics, as clear demonstration of how useful contradictions can be; you’re aware, of course, that Godel uses a liar derived sentence viz. the Godel sentence in his proof.
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This is a weak use of Godel. Your post is mixing together incompleteness, self-reference, contradiction, and paraconsistency as if they naturally support one another. They don’t.
Godel’s incompleteness theorems do not show that contradictions are useful. They show that any sufficiently strong, effectively axiomatized, consistent formal system cannot prove every arithmetical truth expressed within. The point depends on consistency, or at least on related consistency assumptions. So Godel is not demonstrating the fruitfulness of contradiction; he is showing a limit that arises within formal systems that are trying to avoid contradiction.
The Godel sentence is also not simply the liar paradox. It is liar-like in structure because it involves self-reference, but it doesn’t say, “This sentence is false.” It says, roughly, “This sentence is not provable in this system.” That is a crucial difference. The result is not a contradiction. The result is that, assuming the system is consistent, the Godel sentence is not provable within the system. If the system is sound, then the sentence is true but unprovable in that system.
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