The question of evil is a good one to ask. Personally, I think that evil exists because without evil, what makes the good, good? If you don’t have anything to contrast to then you’re just left with a gray area of moral actions that is neither good nor bad. Without things like disease, how do we appreciate good health? Without poverty, how do we appreciate wealth? Evil, and anything that is unfortunate, exists so that the good parts in life are just that much better.
...[h]e create[d] evil so you can recognize what it good. Without evil, what is good? Do good things become great things and not as good things become the new evil? There has to be something to contrast.First, I'd like to point out something like a perhaps-unintentional pun which seems to have arisen in your first sentence: "...evil is a good one to ask." I've heard this argument before, in many different forms, that evil is a necessary component to the human understanding of good. Without appreciating the terrible parts of life, the cancer and AIDS and starvation, you wonder how humans could appreciate the good. This argument is a dangerous one to present for a great many reasons, foremost among them your unintentional assertion that "good" and "evil" are relative terms - good as merely the absence of good. Why is this dangerous, you ask? It seems perfectly reasonable that god could have created "good" things and evil sprang up as a direct result of that, and therefore god is not directly responsible for the creation of evil on Earth. It is essential, however, to understand that good and evil are two sides to the same coin, and that in a theocentric worldview god would be directly responsible for everything, up to and including the indirect fruits of other inventions. God himself is solely responsible for this sort of logical dichotomy in the first place, and - since god is infinitely powerful and created absolutely everything, - could have easily created a world where neither good nor evil necessitates the other. To say that god accidentally or indirectly created evil by creating good would place limits on god's infinite power and infinite foresight.
I’m actually unsure of how to word my argument; it’s awkward going from thought to actually explaining it on paper for this one. I’d have to say that God created free will as a gift. I know that sounds a little cheesy, but think about it. You have the freedom to do whatever you want, whether it is against God or not. Maybe God gave free will with the intent that people would recognize that he has granted them that privilege and to do anything other than good would just be a slap in the face. Maybe it has something to do with the next point that you bring up, predetermined fate.This and your next refutation are very similar in nature, and so I will respond to each simultaneously rather than in kind.
I think the fact that God has granted us free will gives people the ability to choose their own fate. The best way that I can describe this is a train track. I can choose whatever train track I want, I have been given the free will to do so, but when I choose that track and I go down it, that fate is sealed. I can choose to go down the track of killing, but that would lead to other things and ultimately, my not so pleasant after life. But lets say that I choose a track that isn’t as extreme but is pretty bad, one like dealing drugs. I can choose to go down that track that leads to something bad, but at the same time I can turn that around. I can choose to get off at the nearest stop and take a different track to the fate that I so choose. My high school band teacher always told us that you can always be used as a bad example and I completely agree. Maybe you screwed up, but now the entire band (or community) knows what not to do. This would also go back to why God has created evil...Free will as a "gift" is another common argument, a concept within which many Christians seem to find great deal of both solace and comfort. First, I'll refute the assertion of free will as "gift," then explain why free will is completely nonexistent and therefore beyond worrying about. God giving humans free will as a gift is like a parent giving his child a live grenade for Christmas. Yeah, it could be kind of cool to show your little schoolmate friends the weapon of war your super-cool parents trusted you with, but in the end it's a completely irresponsible and irrational gift-giving decision which represents either wanton disregard or malignant intentions regarding their child's wellbeing and safety. Free will seems a terribly dangerous gift because it allows god's beloved subjects to choose into eternal damnation. Here, have free will. It's a gift you can do whatever you want with, including doom the fate of your everliving soul to an eternity of suffering. You're welcome! What kind of all-loving and all-forgiving god would give humans the utilities to defy him and thereby lock themselves into this miserable fate? Why would a parent give their child a hand grenade which could kill them at any moment? Plain and simple, they wouldn't, and neither would the Christian god.
Secondly, I didn't actually need to pen any of that because free will cannot, and does not, exist (of course I believe that humans have the faculties to determine their own courses of action, but here I'm speaking of "free will" as a construct of Christian theology). You offer the "train track" analogy, a classic of Christian apologetics, as a method to reconcile two mutually-exclusive yet commonly-accepted theological concepts, free will and god's infinite knowledge of everything, including events in the future. Before you choose the "train track"course of your life, god knows which one you're going to pick. He knows millennia ahead of time which specific tracks you're going to be presented with. And, as for changing train tracks later in life, please understand that this isn't altering your chosen train track - chosen for you by god, not by you at the beginning of your decision-making life, - it is instead merely continuing your train track over which you have no control. If you reform your life after decades of drug dealing, you're not changing god's expectations for your life, you're meeting them. God knew those changes would come, because such events were predetermined by god's all-knowledge of the future. In short, you can either have an all-loving god who "gifts" humans free will, or you can have an all-knowing one who can determine your future life for you. You cannot have both.
Good point, but I have to ask; if everything has just existed forever, how did it get here? Yes, I know about the Big Bang, but who says that God’s hand couldn’t have pushed that along? Also if the Big Bang has put everything we know into place, what created what was before the Big Bang took place? I guess I’m just confused because I can’t see how something can just pop into existence without some greater being creating it. I can look at the computer that I’m typing this and know for a fact that what I’m using didn’t just come into existence, it was made, which brings up the next point that you made.As for your first sentence, you answer your own question: it didn't "get there," it's always existed. If you take issue with some perceived logical inconsistency in that explanation, I'd point out that I could pose your selfsame question about god. Nothing "pop[ped] into existence" without a god, matter and energy have always existed. The Big Bang eventually leads to an inevitable Big Crunch, when the dark energy forcing the universe to expand either runs out or dissipates significantly and the matter of the entire universe collapses back in on itself over billions of years back to a hyper-dense ball of matter and potential energy about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. This tiny mass, comprised of all the matter and energy in existence, will eventually become unstable and again explode into another universe in another Big Bang, a universe whose physical laws and properties might be completely different or similar to our own in inconceivable ways. It is unknowable how many times this cycle has happened before or how many times it will happen again after our current universe ends.
Going back to what I was saying before, I can look at my computer, my TV, a building, and know that it didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. I don’t need to see my computer being made to know that it was I don’t need to meet the maker of my computer to know that someone made it. God gives us signs through miracles big and small; you don’t have to physically see him to know he’s there. God isn’t going to email you, he won’t call you on the phone, and he’s not going to stop by to chat over a cup of coffee. And really, the fact that God doesn’t care if you discover him goes back to free will. I also don’t understand why you would go to say that he is an “omnipotent trickster”. He has made something (life) that no one can seem to grasp the meaning to. People have been trying to figure out the meaning of life for a very long time. I don’t understand quantum physics but am I going to just say that it’s far too complicated for most people to understand and that Einstein was just some “omnipotent trickster” looking to fool us all?Yes, you can observe manmade physical objects and understand that they were either crafted or manufactured by humans. You can observe a painting and guess at a painter, et cetera - another favorite argument of Christian theologians for centuries. I would argue that you can guess that each painting has a painter and each sentence an author because such relationships are part of your experience and frame of reference. As for the universe, there are no other known or observable universes you can compare ours to - there is no frame of reference. Therefore, it could very well be that the universe is wholly unlike any painting in that it required no creator and has always existed.
As for god stopping by for a cup of coffee, I understand this pretty well. My only point with that particular argument in my original post was that it's unreasonable for him to expect people like myself, whom he himself is responsible for creating and whom he knows everything about, to accept his existence on faith rather than evidence. I don't accept anything on faith, why would I make an exception for god? Additionally, your ignorance regarding quantum physics is completely irrelevant to the argument you're trying to make, since quantum physics is possible to be understood in human terms and god is not. A better example would be that you are unable to understand magic but you don't think J.K. Rowling an "omnipotent trickster," since both magic and god are outside the realm of human comprehension - and I would argue that this is because neither exists.
The only thing that truly bothered me was your ignorance to capitalize the word “god”. While I don’t believe in the god Zeus, I still capitalize his name “Zeus,” I don’t capitalize god in that sense because that isn’t his name. I know for a fact that you know this and it is offensive to see you ignore it.Yes, I understand that "god" is considered the proper name of the Christian god, but - as you've doubtless noticed over the course of this post, - I refuse to capitalize it. "God" is not a name, it is a classification, and to blur its definition as such is to force a belief down my throat. This decision is not intended to be offensive, and I apologize if I've frustrated you again, but it's instead a failure to subscribe to the subversive syntax Christian hegemony have forced upon the English language. In naming their chosen deity simply "god," the traditional neutral term for a supernatural being, they have forced those discussing Christian theology to accept their god as the only, or at least best, deity around. If I called Masoni Raves About "Blog," and forced everyone else to capitalize it as such, I would be forcing a form of respect out of people who have no respect for my blog whatsoever, which is hegemonic and unfair. Furthermore, the actual name for the Christian deity is "Yahweh," which is actually a proper name. I mean no disrespect to Christians who decide to capitalize his name and all his modifiers (His, Him, et cetera), but rather have personally decided not to submit myself to a Christianization of language.
I look forward to your thoughts. M.
