OK, Eran, now you are playing a different game entirely, the free will defense, i.e. "God gave us the benefits of free will but free will also necessarily has attendant evil."
Well,
1. I wonder how this reconciles with your admitted picture of a spiritual endgame where we become "like God," i.e. sinless? So... we still have free will but we don't commit sins? Imagine that!
Ignore that if you like... that was just a jab, here's the main argument:
2. Well, it's the same objection as to Erik earlier. If God can't see the future, I'll be darned if this God isn't growing more pathetic by the second
If he can... free will is obviously an illusion. God (or his apologists) can't make Hitler take responsibility for the Holocaust if God imagined two worlds, one in which the Holocaust happened, one in which it didn't, and called the first one into existence. Clearly, God either failed to foresee the Holocaust, or deliberately chose that it would happen.
3. Now, that doesn't mean God is indefensible, it only means that you are implicitly arguing that God chose to create a world with the Holocaust because he saw that in all other possible worlds he could create, even worse things would happen. As you can see, the question of free will is a sideshow here, what you are
once again arguing is the
logical necessity of evil, the second (Plantingan) prong of the dilemma I talked about a page ago.
4. If you can present a more convincing argument than Plantinga's that evil is necessary, by all means I want to hear it
3. What do you consider worship to be, and how does one become worthy of it? If God could not have prevented the Holocaust without creating bigger problems, is He thus not worthy of worship for allowing it to happen?
Well, rephrase: is God praiseworthy? If I were in God's seat, I wouldn't want the Holocaust to happen. So, either God chose to create this world because he is less of a good guy than I am (in which case, to paraphrase the Soup Nazi, "no worship for you!") or because he can't create a better one (logical necessity of evil argument).
It all comes down to whether you can show that any created world must logically contain some amount of evil.
Erik said:
Ooooh, now I realize what the problem is! We've been talking about completely different faiths, which like America and England's separation by a common language, are separated by a common name, "Christianity"! I explained which one I refer to above; the POE is aimed at the world faith of "people who ascribe various qualities perceived as contradictory to their deity", while your arguments are about the world faith of "people who are professional theophilosophers", which is why it's difficult for you to get a serious response. Certainly I'm not in that category. I'm a self-admittedly juvenile poster on an Internet forum for a computer game, me.
It's fun to not argue seriously now, but weren't you arguing seriously earlier? :
Erik said:
Once you remove the logic-transcending omnipotence in favor of ultimate power, the PoE seems to collapse quite simply - a benevolent, all-powerful God is in the process of removing evil, and He isn't finished yet.
I certainly believe that you are coming at this problem from a theophilosophical standpoint, instead of an apologetics standpoint like CH and Eran are (I don't use the word "apologetics" disparagingly, guys
).
Debt of existence!
(Still not serious.)
Unfortunately quite serious with some Christians I've met, which is why arrogant atheists (such as I used to be
) often make the comparison between religion and Stockholm Syndrome.
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