I provided a coherent response, but I might as well be talking to the wall. Face it, you’re an evangelical atheist, Banno, the only reason you deign to respond to any threads on religion, is to demonstrate that you think it’s all bunkum. We know that.
The problem here is the concept of omnipotentence, the three omni’s. Really you should be addressing it to Aquinas and the Catholic theologisers who came up with them.
Also necessary to have some idea of what they mean, which you’re unlikely to get if your only reason for considering them is to debunk.
That doesn’t follow. Please explain why that is the case.
My interest is in the logic of the arguments.
The idea of a benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient being appears inconsistent wiht suffering.
Your response was rhetorical, it didn’t address the issue.
Treating evil as a privation implies that an omniscient being could not remove the privation. Why?
How do we understand a landslide or an earthquake a privation?
And so on. There’s a string of objections.
But of course you are under no obligation to respond.
Of course it did, and it was not ‘rhetorical’, it is based on sources and arguments, none of which you addresses. You’re putting forward a shallow and immature argument - ‘if God is good, how can there be suffering?’ - as if this is some kind of master argument. It simply isn’t that. Religions, all of them, have always had to address the problem of suffering.
If anyone is ‘engaging in rhetorics’ here, it’s you. Your entire schtick since I made that first post, has more or less amounted to baiting.
As I said, earthquakes and other natural calamaties are an inevitable consequence of the geological and natural forces which caused the earth to exist. Demanding that the earth ‘should be such’ that no calamities should occur betrays a juvenile understanding of the ‘problem of evil’. Exactly as per my OP on the previous forum, ‘The Hotel Manager Indictment’.
No such demand was made.
I’m simple drawing your attention to the discrepancy between there being an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent being and the way things are.
The evidence seems to falsify the theory.
I did address your privation explanation. How is an earthquake a privation? How was COVID a privation?
@Punshhh You seem not to be convinced by your own fairly good argument. Yes, that fig that supposedly gave you heavenly pleasure \implies God exists. Your mathematics however is not up to the mark. How did you go from finding the perfect fig has a 1:100 odds to probability that God exists is 100:1? The fig is simply 1 instance of happiness; it is the happiness that points to God. It’s like saying the odds of encountering an iFona is 1:100 and so the probability that Appy Inc exists is 100:1.
Still, congratulations, for finding God in a fig.
@Wayfarer That’s an interesting POV.
The logic in PoS is crystal clear. An omniscient being would know about suffering, an omnibenevolent being would want to end suffering, an omnipotent being can end suffering, and yet … @Banno … there is suffering. It’s like, I know there’s beer in my fridge, and I want to drink beer, and I can drink beer and yet I’m not drinking beer. Isn’t that weird?
And, why are we in this world? If God exists, heaven exists.
I appreciate the Buddhist angle, summed up in, There is suffering (in life). Nirvana \equiv Salvation. We want to exit samsara/we want to enter heaven. The Buddha’s compass is pointing in the same direction as Jesus’.
The topic of discussion though is that happiness in the world \implies God exists. As Hume asked, “whence cometh evil?”, I ask, “whence cometh good?” St. Augustine’s understanding of evil as an absence is just what’s needed. Good is a presence.
No. It falsifies your interpretation.
You’re also assuming you know what these terms mean. It might be a matter or projecting your expectations on to them.
‘If God was as I think he should be, then everything would be as I want it to be.’
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And you accuse me of dodging.
‘If God was as I think he should be, then everything would be as I want it to be.’
I haven’t suggested anything of the sort.
I am pointing to the incoherence of evil in a world in which there is supposedly a beneficent god.
Your response was to suggest evil is a privation. I pointed out that it is difficult to see how natural calamities are privations. This is only one of a series of objections to the privation account of evil. Another, in line with your supposing that we should understand the terms in use, is that it treats evil as a substance. Pain, cruelty, and suffering appear real; not a mere absence. It is something present, not absent. And so on.
Your reply looks to be wishful thinking on your part. Again. Even if evil is privation, God still designed a world where privation occurs
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I quoted Schopenhauer, ‘even in genuine and correctly understood Christianity, our existence is regarded as the result of a liability or a misstep.’ In the Neoplatonic tradition, finitude — lived existence — is itself privation. To be a creature is to be lacking, is to be subject to death, old age, illness, and the threat of loss . The whole created order is, in a precise sense, a graduated privation of divine fullness. Which, of course, makes no sense to the secular mind, as there is nothing beyond this existence - which is why from that perspective, God can only be regarded as at best an inept manager. So, without any faith in redemption, then evil is just evil, and the only means of amelioration is to combat it with whatever means at our disposal.
And what kind of world could that be, if not a figment of your own imagination, the longing for something that cannot be?
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In Buddhist cultures, Nirvāṇa is often equated with heaven. But in the actual teaching, Nirvāṇa is not heaven. Buddhist cultures believe in heavens and hells (many of each) in which beings are reborn according to karma. Beings are said to dwell in those realms for ‘aeons of kalpas’ — and Indian cosmology operates with quite realistic time-scales, where ‘aeons of kalpas’ are calculated in the hundreds of millions of years. But Nirvāṇa is understood outside of all of those realms of existence.
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Happiness is one of the animal emotions. Good and evil are the value of human actions on other humans or situations.
They have little to do with existence of God.
If you think they do (maybe you are using your own definitions or some other definitions on those terms?), you need to elaborate more with evidence of your arguments on why they are linked.
The Greeks believed that the Gods could not be heroic because they were immortal. Perhaps an omniscient God values heroism. Without suffering the virtues of heroism, courage, and fortitude would be logically impossible. There could be no adventure. Perhaps an omni God values these virtues. Perhaps we humans do, too, in which case we must admit the value of suffering.
Interesting remarks. Happiness is also a human emotion. Correct, good and evil have something to do with human actions.
I don’t understand “They have little do with existence of God”. Why?
As for using my own definitions, nope, haven’t done that. I do concede though that if “good” is defined as a rotten apple and “bad” as a rotten apple, things could get quite murky.
Human is a type of animals.
The following inferences don’t make sense at all.
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I was happy because my books arrived earlier than due date, therefore God exists?
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It was good that he agreed ceasefire, therefore God exists?
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It was evil that he said such a thing in public, therefore God doesn’t exist?
That’s debatable.
Your happiness \implies God exists. The specific scenario doesn’t matter. There are rare exceptions of course.
Isn’t peace a good thing? Imagine heaven.
Possible. I don’t deny the PoS.