A cool guide to Epicurean paradox

Fun fact, if you arrive at this conclusion as an 8 year old in Sunday school at your ultra fundamentalist Baptist Church and proceed to tell the teacher, you get yelled at and spanked by the teacher and your parents! Ask me how I know.

I think the fundamental issue with this is that it presumes that our understanding of morality is perfect. If an all-knowing, all-powerful God acted contrary to our understanding of morality, or allowed something to happen contrary to our understanding of morality it would make sense for us to perceive that as undermining our understanding of God, making him imperfect. An all-knowing, all-encomposing God may have an understanding that we as mortals are incapable of understanding or perceiving.

It presumes to know a perfect morality while also arguing that morality can be subjective. It doesn't make sense, just like an irrational belief in a God. I think the best way to go about this is to allow people to believe how they want and stop trying to convince people one way another about their beliefs. People get to believe differently and that is not wrong.

Edit: holy shit those reddit comments are full of /r/iamverysmart material lmfao

What's the definition of "all powerful"? Would an all-powerful being need to be able to draw a square without it being a rectangle? Or to build a house without walls?

If the answer is "no", then I'd argue that the left most arrow/conclusion is logically wrong/misplaced/invalid. Assuming that "free will" is not possible without "evil".

One day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you'll agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half submerged log.

As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen. Mother and children dining upon mother and children.

And that is when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.

-Sir Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

there is a non terminating loop in this diagram and that is where god is mic drop

I had a conversation that ended up like this with someone who was genuinely trying to convert me to Christianity once. He eventually argued that god doesn't need to be all powerful to be worshipped, since he is at least extremely powerful.

This presupposes that "evil" exists as a universal concept that a god is bound, versus a god that exists outside of concepts of morality.

Seem confusing?

That's right - because anything that's made up and subject to interpretation IS!

One of the funniest things humanity has done is to invent the concept of God as a super entity and then reduce him/them/it to their level.

Why would a super entity be bound by "love" which only humans understand ? Why would "it" have the concept of "evil", something that humans invented out of fear.

As a species we just need to accept we are just stupid.

"why can't god create a boulder so heavy that even the can't carry it?" even as a child trying to trick god with basic paradoxes sounded funny to me.

Kind of falls apart if rejecting the idea of objective good and evil and interpreting the parable of the fruit of knowledge in Eden as the inheritance of a relative knowledge of good and evil for oneself which inherently makes any shared consensus utopia an impossibility.

In general, we have very bizarre constraints on what we imagine for the divine, such as it always being a dominant personality.

Is God allowed to be a sub? Where's the world religion built around that idea?

What about the notion that the variety of life is not a test for us to pass/fail, but more like a Rorsarch test where it allows us to determine for ourselves what is good or not?

Yes, antiquated inflexible ideas don't hold up well to scrutiny. But adopting those as the only idea to contrast with equally inflexible consideration just seems like a waste of time for everyone involved, no?

Maybe Satan is also all-powerful, and each time they fight it's a coin toss. Unstoppable force meets unmovable object.

Assuming that Christianity is even slightly based in fact and that entities like God and Satan actually exist.

I once heard omnipotent doesn't mean they can overturn logic itself, which seems a little unintuitve to me, but hey why not.

Just being the devil advocate here: I disagree with the "destroy Satan" part, Satan isn't the definition of evil, he is only the HR department that deal with the evil people, and the part of God not stopping evil, maybe he don't because it go against free will? About the not loving, he promises a perfect infinity world after all of this, after a few centuries of perfection you don't care/remember I guess

evil exists -> no

I have never before encountered an "aC" dating system. A quick google shows the dates to line up with BC, but it's still new.

What if an almighty God created the universe without evil, but with free-will, and then one angel decided to challange the way God rules, so that God has to let him rules to show everyone whose way of rule is the best?

Simply killing that angel would not answer the challenge, on the contrary, killing that angel would demonstrate that God is a dictator.

Pasted from a reply to another user.

There are many good arguments against God. This is not one of them.

It's a slightly more complicated version of whether God can create a rock so big he cannot lift it. Can God create a universe where I simultaneously have freewill and also don't have the ability to do anything outside his will (evil)? Can 0 equal 1? The answer to that question isn't yes/no, it's that the question is invalid. Freewill does not equal non-freewill. It'll confuse some unprepared Sunday School teacher, but that's it.

What if I disagree with the premise?

There is a few problems with this diagram:

1. Why should God want only the good? What is the paradox of God wanted to do whatever it want with its creation? The all-powerful, all-knowing God would have create Satan and wanted that he did all bad things he did.
2. Why should the test be to let God know about us? It could be about letting us know about ourself.

Also the branch that are not yes/no does not cover all possibility. Therefore, this is not a paradox but rather an incomplet thought. I know that much from UML.

I don't know much about history but didn't Epicure lived at a time where people believe their was multiple gods? Why is it not mentioned in the scheme? Did he believe that there was only one god?

Fuck I all I want "ai" for is to filter out these stupid fucking posts that I see all the time from whatever screen I am viewing

Wdyat about the answer that unsong gives to this? Which is roughly "God creates all unique universes that are on net good. This world has evil but is still on net good.".

Evil is a privation of Good.

Are you 16 and this is deep?

We know paradoxes exist in the real world. Therefore proving that the existence of God is paradoxical does not prove that God doesn't exist. It simply proves that God is paradoxical. Which most people knew already.