That’s a phrase that I heard recently, and I think that it’s from some famous philosopher, but uhm…
I don’t know how to debunk it.
I’m doing my best to believe without thinking too much about that.
Some days it gets hard tho, so I’d like to hear you guys’ take on it.
I’m doing my best to believe without thinking too much about that.
The fact that so many people unironically feel this way is bone-chilling. Wild that you’d just say it out loud.
hi, maybe consider reading this:
Who’s doing the evil: humans or the devil? If God allows human free will, then evil is always a possibility. The devil is limited to influence humans or be allowed to possess someone to act directly.
Why can’t God create reality such that free will is possible without evil? He is omnipotent, so there’s nothing stopping him, right?
There are plenty of evils that are partly our wholly beyond human free will. Floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, drought, blight, pandemics, plague, infestations, fires, genetic diseases, etc. Those aren’t man’s doing. Whether God, the Devil, or something else entirely, the problem still stands.
It presumes that the devil is an actual person rather than a story telling device and an amalgamation of some unrelated ideas throughout scripture and other faiths.
you’re trying to apply logic to something intrinsically illogical. if you value logic and enough that this is a major hangup, now’s a good time to start distancing yourself from the church. I was the same way many years ago, but I cannot even put into words how much better my life is without a religious affiliation. going to church does not make you inherently godly. use the time you would have spent at church to help enact actual change in your community.
I was raised in the south, got curious about religion, and being the south… Yeah, so attended a Lutheran church, and was formally asked to leave for asking too many questions that required logic.
I was about 6. So, yeah.
So, what you’re saying is that the Book of Job disproves the divinity of a god?
This idea rests on the notion that the human ideas of good and evil are universal, and apply to a god. Why should that be the case? What if god has decided that murder is good, and will reward everyone that commits murder with a spot in heaven?
still doesn’t address acts of God that kill and hurt so many (earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.), nor things God would have created and is responsible for like the existence of and harm from parasites, diseases, hereditary conditions, etc.
“there’s no evil on alpha centauri”
evil isn’t an objective reality, it’s a construct based on human observations.
There is no god. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can move on with your life.
I don’t really see the point of barging into a conversation intended for people of a certain group just to say that they’re all wrong. Sure, an outsider’s perspective may be useful but you’re even replying to the topic question
Present your proof
They don’t have to present proof to something without proof. The burden of proof lies with those who seek to prove the existence. Present your proof.
The burden of proof does lie on the one that made the statement… But also absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.
There’s a pretty famous thought experiment called the magic tea pot
I believe there’s a magic tea pot, it’s so small we can’t detect it floating out in space. It controls the universe, it communicates in secret to me and tells me its will.
Would you accept “the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence as absence” about that?
What about an invisible t-Rex that no one can detect but that definitely controls the weather.
I can assert made up things all day. And if I make my claims impossible to falsify, that is there’s no way for you to prove them false, that shouldn’t elevate them to somehow being more true, or more worth people treating with any amount of respect because they can’t disprove it.
I’m making the claim, there’s an invisible t-Rex that is undetectable by any instrument, there’s a magic tea pot floating around Jupiter far too tiny to spot on any telescope. To anyone listening to those claims they don’t need any evidence at all to dismiss them, I need to bring forth some proof that these things exist.
And even if I could convince, without proof, millions of people that these things exist. Every time a child recovered from an illness we gave praise the tea pot. Every time a team won a football game they directed they gaze towards Jupiter and uttered a blessing unto the teapot. Before every wedding people left out a snack for the t-Rex in hopes of securing fine weather.
The fact that I’ve convinced many people of the tea pot and t-rex, the fact that they assign many events to them, none of that undoes the original burden of proof.
I cannot definitively prove that the teapot doesn’t exist.
Now, I also do not see any proof that the teapot is benevolent or responsible for the functioning of the universe in any way. That just doesn’t seem very likely to me. I’m gonna go ahead and live my life as though the teapot does not exist, even though it very well might. I’m comfortable enough in my assumption that the teapot is irrelevant to me that I don’t think I need evidence of its absence. That doesn’t make the teapot’s existence any more “true”.
I myself am an atheist in that I choose to only believe things that I can prove.
That same logic you just laid out applies to the thousands of magical deities that man has invented over the years.
There’s no evidence I can point to to say that Odin hasn’t blessed a particularly good day. But Odin is just some thought that some human person had at some point, no more worth my concern than the teapot.
If you accept that line of reasoning then belief almost always boils down to a much softer version of “well ok, not any one man made god in particular, but you can’t disprove the idea of some higher power”
And really that is just a question of the supernatural. Is there something that exists outside of nature. Is there some force we can encounter that we could never define as part of the universe we exist in but yet still feel its effect.
Some would argue that feeling that force to begin with would make it part of nature. I am open to the idea, the universe is stranger than we can imagine, but we’ve never encountered such a phenomenon. Even things that seemed fantastical and unexplainable at first, fire, electricity, the double split experiment, all can be understood and explained.
Humanity’s story has been one of encountering new things and explaining how they work, what they are, why they exist. Every best part of the human journey has come from some form of being confused and trying to understand. So if the question is, are there things we will encounter in the universe which we can’t understand, I think there little value and presuming the answer to be “yes” as all it could do is discourage the person meant to discover it.
I think your final point is very good in that scientific discovery relies on people questioning assumptions and attempting to verify or debunk them. We “encountered” fire, gravity, and electricity - I don’t think we’ve invented them as anthropomorphic characters the same way we’ve invented gods. Ultimately, I do not think it’s possible to find evidence of absence for God in a way that will satisfy others due to the very nature of the concept of God. I also think Pascal’s wager has enough merit to it that one should try to live a moral life, but not enough that it demands piety to any one tradition.
I myself am an atheist in that I choose to only believe things that I can prove.
That’s not true, you can’t prove your mother loves you but I’m sure you believe she does
The burden of evidence is on the claimant, do you not know how this works?
Apparently most of you in the thread don’t
Their proof is lack of evidence.
God killed millions of people. Satan killed like? 12?
There are a lot of contradictions in Christianity.
They aren’t worth dwelling on if you want to remain a Christian.
God’s goal is not our perfect comfort, but our transformation. To say that ‘God should stop evil from happening’ neglects the entire truth of the Old Testament and Gospel.
To become the beings He knows us to be come, we MUST struggle, because it is ONLY in struggle that we learn if we are compassionate or selfish, brave or cowardly.
Struggle exists because we lacked faith, not because God enjoys seeing us suffer.
A universe without struggle is a universe without growth, and that is not what He envisioned.
So we struggle, and are mortal, and earn our bread by the sweat of our brow.
You won’t be able to debunk it. Logic does not apply to faith. It’s like dividing by zero. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. Trying to apply logic to matters of faith is a fools errand.
There is another option Mr Epicure forgot to add: God can and wants to destroy evil, but has a good reason not to.
I’m not 100% certain what that good reason is yet. The instant removal of all evil from the planet and all ability to perform evil will constitute pretty irrefutable evidence of his existence to even the most determined doubter so maybe that’s got something to do with it.
That is part of the paradox. Could god have created a universe where that good reason to not destroy evil didn’t exist? If no, then he is not all-powerfull.
Isn’t that the core principle of monotheism, that one God does everything, both good and evil?
Sure, but monotheism still has to be internally consistent, and labeling it (“monotheism”) doesn’t address the inconsistency.
If anything it just means that benevolent and omnipotent monotheism is intrinsically inconsistent.
Yeah, the point is that God is not “allowing” the devil to do evil. If Christianity is truly monotheistic, then the devil is a creation of God, just like anything else. There is no independent being. So yes, like the title says, he is an accomplice.
I struggle with the fact that god created Lucifer who was his right hand man, he then rebelled and God just banished him from heaven, didn’t strip his powers, didn’t kill him. Then he created earth and just let the devil do whatever he wanted? God is all knowing and I get the idea of letting humans have free will but just letting the devil roam around and do whatever seems odd. I dont think we brought ain into the qorld God did aonce he created everything in heaven and earth. I also struggle with us humans (we all) suffer the consequences of one action from two people thousands of years ago.
