The best logical argument I can make for tragedies is the need for perspective. If nothing but good things happened all the time then we’d take them for granted and nothing would ever seem to change or be different, just boring and perfectly fine all the time.
This seems great now, since we live with so much tragedy in our current lives, but perhaps we’d still question a reality where nothing bad ever happens if it’s all we’ve ever known?
Right so some kid has to starve to death that way we regular folks enjoy sunsets?
We have the geological record. We know that there has been about 500 million years that life capable of feeling pain has been in existence. So 500 million years of life starving, getting eaten, getting cancer, being broken randomly, being deformed, and being infected all happened just for us to be not bored?
It gets worse, somehow, when you think of humanity alone. There have been about 100 billion humans who all existed before the development of first civilizations. They were just as human as me or you.
- 33% of adult women died giving birth or immediately afterwards for their first and only child.
- Approximately 50% of those children died before age 10
- about 50% as a whole died from being murdered, a rate so high it easily makes us the most bloodthirsty mammal objectively ranked.
- For a twenty thousand year period 16 out of 17 males didn’t reproduce. Castration might have been invented then but no one knows for sure.
Now these humans loved their partners and children as much as we do. I want you to think about that. Imagine half of your children dying imagine knowing sex could lead to your wife dying imagine knowing that murder was the single leading cause of death.
For anyone who claims this argument I ask them to imagine having to explain to a 100 billion people one by one that what happened to them was needed so our 21st asses don’t get jaded about a world too nice.
I know there’s a fancy name for these arguments but I dont recall them.
I mean that flow chart fails to disprove god through the circular discussion on free-will. If you want to argue logic in the discussion about if God cannot create a world with free-will but also without evil then he is not all powerful. But those ideas are opposed to each other. No matter the amount of power, making evil non-existent takes away a component of free-will. Could a creation god create a world that does not have a god? The question is paradoxical.
Not a defense of faith but a disapproval of this particular argument against it.
Isn’t that an argument against an all powerful God though? That if God were all powerful, that they can do literally anything, that they could create a world such that there was free will and no evil.
If God cannot create such a world then God cannot be all powerful. Just because we cannot imagine what that world would look like wouldn’t limit an all powerful God from creating it.
Then they can go the “god is not literally all powerful as he can’t do logical conflicting things together”, when then asked why, either because he is “only” maximally powerful and to obey logic. Or because he would have to destroy logic for that and it would break any concept like good or evil and his creation would lose all good as well and free will becomes absurd too because there is literally no logic, so how would a person use their will?
I mean that’s just as bad faith of an argument as a Christian saying “it’s God’s will.” You can’t argue against nonsense and illogical concepts because they will hit you with more nonsense. But if an argument can be made logically, that’s when it is time to meet it with more logic. If evil exists, and is also not a creation, but a facet of life, then to remove all opportunity to choose evil, destroys the idea of free will. Turn the argument on its head. “If God were all powerful, he could create a world with free will and also no good.” That doesn’t even make sense. If there is no good there is no evil. There is no longer a choice in the matter.
At that point you have to think about things like free will and good and evil as what they are, human inventions of the mind. I know people of faith who understand the difference between inventions of man and what they believe are creations of God. It’s silly to say God invented the car I drive. It’s also silly to say God invented math or philosophy or science. Only the real fanatical types will argue that way. Instead most people, when they boil it down, will come to understand good and evil are human ideas. For the faithful, I think the smart ones will be able to determine that if we invented those ideas, they don’t exist because God made them exist, but because humans chose to invent them with their free will.
I think I’m going to stop defending the Christians now lol. They are capable of their own arguments. As bad as they usually are…
Logical explanation:
“Don’t you know there ain’t no devil, it’s just god when he’s drunk.” - Tom Waits
This comment assumes that someone other than God has the moral authority to define evil. If God doesn’t define evil, then who does? If I say what God does is wrong and therefore evil, what am I really saying? Aren’t I judging God? I dont even have the authority to judge other men, let alone God. If I had the authority to judge God, then between the two of us, which one of us is really God?
God knew men would eat of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Thus, giving man the ability to judge good and evil.
According to scholar Nathan French, the term likely means “the knowledge for administering reward and punishment,” suggesting that the knowledge forbidden by Yahweh and yet acquired by the humans in Genesis 2–3 is the wisdom for wielding ultimate power.
Ok, the death of the 2 year old child is part of the cosmic plan and will serve for the moral growth of the parents (who cares about the dead kid). But what about all the menial inconveniences that annoy us day after day, soon to be forgotten, the vast majority of which will never serve as a lesson to anyone? I could have made a better job than God at this Creator of the Universe shit.
For a nice read on the logic of free will, written by logician Raymund Smullyan, here’s ‘is God a taoist?’:
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTaoist.html
The argument of the cosmic plan is the reasons are beyond human understanding
The child that died slowly and painfully from a horrible disease, died for a reason. God willfully did/allowed it, but for a reason we just are unable to understand. So to a thiest this meme doesn’t make sense.
Mind you I don’t believe in this stuff but these kind of jabs are just preaching to the athiest choir.
