Oh good grief. Football isn't about pain. People hate it when players are injured. And to compare the roughness of a football game to real suffering or pain is ignorance. You've human, so you've known real pain of some sort. I can't believe you can be so trite about it.

And sure, give the credit to "evolution." Evolution is just a substitute creator. It's a not-God that can explain aspects of reality. Sure, you can give a logical framework to it, but so can a Christian give a logical framework to their belief system.

But at least you concede that a sense of fairness is basic to human nature. I'm not sure how it is evolutionary useful for us to always feel that reality doesn't measure up, though.

Really dipplayer? Go ahead and give me a logical framework to your belief system.

Read Thomas Aquinas. He'll give you all of it you can stand. LOL

It's not basic to human nature. It's an evolved trait. If it was basic we'd have always had it. There is no such thing as "human nature".

"Football isn't about pain."

Yes it is. People cheer when big hits are made against opposing players. They laugh at opposing players injuries. They ridicule their own players for not being "tough" enough to play through pain. This is why there is a massive cover-up of the permanent brain damage football does to human beings, which leads to things like Jovan Belcher, which we didn't even cause people to cancel the damn game, that's how little we care about pain & suffering as it relates to sports.

"And to compare the roughness of a football game to real suffering or pain is ignorance. You've human, so you've known real pain of some sort. "

I can't believe you're so flippant about the fact that large numbers of human beings destroy their bodies and shorten their lifespans *for our entertainment*, and don't even recognize it as real pain.

"Evolution is just a substitute creator. "

It's not a 'creator', there is no teleology to it.

"but he is not flesh and.therefore his creation is not an act or a process but more that his will desires it and.it happens. "

If his "will" desires it then that leads to a couple of problems.

1) why would an omnipotent being have desires?

and 2)

There had to be a change which took place between when god did not desire X to happen and and when god did desire it to happen. There was a change in will which caused the event to occur. You can not have cause & effect without change. It's a logical impossibility.

"Let’s say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I’ll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth.

Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years. Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2,000 years ago, thinks “That’s enough of that. It’s time to intervene,” and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East.

Don’t let’s appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let’s go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can’t be believed by a thinking person."


Long story short, because of dietary advice from a talking snake, you get to have your large intestine ripped out.

It continually amuses me how self-deceptive people can be. Thank God for every good act, and handwave everything bad away with a "Its because of the fall", or "God works in mysterious ways".

I'm not one of those atheists who wishes he could believe. I'm one that is quite happy that its complete and utter horseshit, because its one of the more sick ideas our civilization has produced.

I find it funny that in order to get around the problem of gratuitous suffering, Christians like Semck & co have to resort to the crudest kind of utilitarianism, a kind of thinking they usually chide their opponents for when it comes to thinks like stem cell research or abortion. But the Christian utilitarianism is on a truly breathtaking scale, and belies the notion that the "individual" matters at all in their ideology. The individual is less than nothing, which is the only way they can claim that god has "good reasons" to allow for gratuitous suffering, because it leads to some kind of 'greater good' (which they won't describe).

putin,

"No, it's a logical impossibility. In order to affect change something must exist at Time A and Time B. Time A being before the change and Time B after the change. Also, in order to affect change the Changer also must change otherwise nothing takes place. "

Well, this is a lot of assertions -- the sort of thing I'm used to getting from the less impressive sort of creationist, who think you can make up metaphysical laws left, right, and center and everybody will just accept them.

To effect change, you merely have to be the cause of the change. I can watch Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and be sure that Hitchcock effected just about everything happening on the screen, yet Hitchcock is dead, and never existed on film or in film-time in the first place.

Certainly, time as we know it is an aspect of our universe, but there is nothing incoherent in the idea of causes outside time (even many modern physicists, a group you probably respect more, discuss such things without feeling embarrassment). Indeed, if one views spacetime as an entirety, there is nothing incoherent about composing or causing it as a whole.

To say that "A changed X," the following should be true:

a) X changes.
b) The change depends causally on A.
c) It was not (metaphysically) necessary for A to change X.

That is all.

@ghug,

you: "Second, you're ignoring the point that Jamie's medical condition is in no way accomplishing any good for anyone."

me: "And you are begging a question."

you: "I fail to see how. Jamie asked why God would allow him to suffer. You claimed that God allows people to suffer for some greater good. I ask what good Jamie's suffering accomplishes, and you ignore my argument repeatedly."

You fail to see how? By stating that his suffering helps nobody in any way, you are already concluding that it does not. The most that the above description warrants is the accusation that I have not established that it does help somebody, not the conclusion that it does not.

"I'm accusing your religion of being entirely founded on circular reasoning. "

Oh OK. I guess we should have a conversation about the foundation of my religion sometime then, shouldn't we?

Of course, this isn't that discussion, and this whole line of argument is a giant red herring. Let's review this discussion, shall we?

1) Jamie asks religious people how, _in their view, assuming their view of God_, his suffering could be allowed.

2) Like others in the thread, I answered. Note that answering this question does not require me to provide a whit of argument or evidence for the existence of God. In fact, far from that, it requires me to already assume God exists, and then discuss how He might work and why. Nowhere was I ever asked by OP to explain my reasons for believing in God or do anything other than assume His existence. Probably unsurprisingly, my reasons for believing in God have little to do with the problem of evil, which is a problem that arises ONCE you believe in God for other reasons.

3) You (despite being specifically disinvited in the OP as an unbeliever) then saw fit to offer an argument AGAINST the existence/coherence of God.

4) I pointed out that your argument failed to establish its conclusion because it made an unwarranted assumption. Let's call this assumption (or the proposition it asserts) p, for future reference. (I've defined it above).

5) I was then accused of circular reasoning for asserting not-p, and for assuming God exists based on not-p.

Well guess what. My belief in not-p is a _consequence_ of my belief in God, not a cause, and that belief is founded on completely other reasons that I have never brought up in this thread. And why have I not brought them up? Because they're not freaking relevant, that's why. The whole question asked me to assume my belief already, not to justify it, and then you and putin come in looking for an existence-of-God argument and accusing me of circular reasoning for correctly answering the question I was asked.

To summarize:

a) Your argument, which was a positive argument for a given conclusion which you offered spontaneously, fails because it assumes p.
b) My belief in not-p is a _conclusion_ based on my belief in God, itself based on other arguments which I have not brought up, and will not bring up in this thread, as it was specified as to be assumed. In particular, I have engaged in no circular reasoning, or indeed, in any other form of fallacy.

This was all much more thorough than I really wanted to be, but it has become clear that spelling things out in excessive detail is necessary.

@putin again,

"No actually I am not. I am not arguing about comprehensibility or physical impossibility. I'm talking about logical impossibility. How about actually addressing the argument rather than distorting it. Christians like to make themselves out to be great logicians when actually they're terrible at it."

The "argument" I was responding to was this:

"You're perfectly willing to assert god's ability to transcend logical possibility in all other scenarios when it is convenient for you. "

I had just asked for specification of what "other scenarios" you might mean. As you might notice, it's kind of hard to respond to this accusation when they're left generic. Unsurprisingly, instead I get another sneering attack.

"I love it. You make this absurd bar for atheistic arguments, and all you have is "god exists and is good""

See generally my discussion with ghug about red herrings above. My belief in God was never at issue in this thread. That's a very time consuming discussion that I don't have time for. I might enage in such a conversation again once the debates get posted, in the discussion following that, but right now, I'm busy enough just with this one.

But _I don't have to_ justify my belief in God to answer the question, "Given that you believe in God, explain why you think He does X." ghug had every freedom NOT to offer an argument _against_ the existence of God, just as I'm not offering one FOR his existence. But he chose to offer one, and to offer a bad one. That's why I get to hold him to a standard, while there is no standard to hold me to, because I haven't offered an argument.

"There is no evidence for this 'possible explanation', as you yourself have aptly demonstrated by ducking the point over & over again."

I gave several examples, actually. I guess you didn't read them?

But yes, I was clear then, and throughout, that we can't exhaustively list them. I'm sorry the answer doesn't satisfy you, but it's the answer. We can't understand everything. Who knew.

The arguent, therefore, that such greater good exists is the same as the argument that God exists. I merely pointed this out, starting at that hypothesis, as requested.

"One would think if these 'greater goods' outweighed these horrible negatives there would be plenty of examples of such greater goods. "

We can but speculate, as I've made clear again and again. If you want me to keep speculating, of course, I can do so ad nauseum. Maybe you wouldn't have existed at all but for pain -- maybe it causally led to your birth somehow. Maybe God really wanted you to exist, and there was no other way to have you -- the putin that would have existed via any other pathway just wouldn't have been the same, wouldn't have had the passion, have had the enthusiasm for justice and the hatred of abuse. Maybe He'll bring it all a glorious end where you'll finally be satisfied and appreciate the justice you see in a more joyful way than you could ever possibly have experienced if you hadn't seen injustice.

Maybe he really values the understanding that comes from really groping in confusion (and perhaps we will too). Maybe he knows that joy without prior pain would always have been shallow, a kind of kindergarten without real understanding. Maybe love can only reach its fullest when the possibility of loss has been felt.

I. don't. know. Obviously though I could go on like this all night.

"Anyway, how do small children dying in an earthquake in Haiti lead to some kind of good that is dependent on that suffering occurring? "

I don't know. And I don't know if good comes from that event specifically, or just from this being the kind of world where that event occurs. If enough good flows from the latter, then indirectly, it flows from the former.

"Your argument is a tautology. Your argument is there are sufficient reasons for pain and evil because god exists and is good. But the whole problem is that pain & evil call into question whether god is either good or exists."

See above.

I completely get that in a vacuum, this would be completely unconvincing. But the question was a narrow one, to believers, how we deal with this specific issue. Philosophical arguments for the existence of god probably weren't what jamie had in mind. And if they were, then I'm truly sorry. Those are extremely time consuming to work through on a forum at the best of times. I do them periodically, and Jamie and everybody else can make their judgments then. I'm quite aware of what judgment you've made on the matter so far. Very well. But it's a separate question, and as I raised no argument in _this thread_, you can't accuse me of tautology and unwarranted assumptions in the argument I didn't make. When I do choose to make an argument, you can rest assured it will be carefully checked.

I feel I've answered jamie's question to the best of my ability at this point. If he has a follow up, I'll try to answer it. If you or ghug have something new to say that does not involve critiquing arguments I never even offered, I'll do my best to address that too, but it may be a day or two.

putin,

Your last post was actually on point and new, so I'll go ahead and address it now. It's an interesting point, and requires subtlety and actual interest in reaching understanding to resolve. I'll go ahead and throw it out there anyway.

Under the Christian world view, nothing _bad_ will happen to anybody non-voluntarily that they do not deserve. Therefore, individual justice of the most rigid and exacting type is adhered to in every single thing that happened. (I say "non-voluntarily," because Christ did volunteer to have something bad happen to Him that He didn't deserve).

The people in this painful universe have all sinned, and according to Christian doctrine, do deserve punishment and death. There is no utilitarianism in the treatment of any individual: only justice or mercy -- that is, only what they deserve, or something better than they deserve.

On the other hand, when asking the question about whether the universe as a whole is good and merited creation, certainly it makes sense to discuss whether it (with all its rigid justice) is a net good. It is there, not in the treatment of individuals, that something analogous to utilitarianism might be detected. If the just-and-merciful universe is a net good, then creating it is a net good. But no universe with injustice would/could have been created by God at all. It would be as contrary to His nature as something outright illogical.

The Christian critique of utilitarianism, where it exists, is driven by the fact that utilitarian reasoning is sometimes used to do something actually wrong / unjust to a specific individual. A wrong/unjust act can not be justified by appeals to the greater good. So it's quite key, as rallinator's original post and others have pointed out, that everything that happens to sinful humans in this world is, in fact, justified (from the point of view of God their judge -- not from the point of view of the fellow human creature who may be wrongly inflicting it on them).

Interesting stuff though.

"Evolution is just a substitute creator. It's a not-God that can explain aspects of reality."

Some people are just 'too clever' on this forum. This guy is so smart I can't understand wtf he is talking about. Either that or a severe case of substance abuse.

So you admit to having a substance abuse problem Nigee?

Crisps, that is my drug of choice. I'm sure I wouldn't be 22 stone if I wasn't addicted to crisps, but forgive me I'm not trying to de-rail this thread which is fascinating.

http://memegenerator.net/instance/31258107

Jesus, when did semck turn into Obi?

First, I was not disinvited, I was just not specifically asked for an opinion. When opinions turned into an argument, as they so often do on the forum, I joined in. Please stop trying to lower my credibility by implying that I have no right to say anything in this instance.

Second, my argument is most certainly not a positive argument, it is a negative argument against a belief in an omnicient, omnipotent, benevolent God. I then accused the justification you had for arguing against my argument, namely your belief in God, in being circular reasoning and therefore invalid. Instead of actually responding to my argument, you proceeded to make a faulty logical analysis of the situation and then dismiss it because it didn't directly pertain to the original question.

Third, you continue to accuse me of begging the question, arguing that because my mind is made up, I shouldn't be allowed to make a point. I am *arguing* that there is no positive consequence of Jamie's illness, as I believe Jamie was in his original post, and you are ignoring that argument and shouting fallacy because you don't seem to have an answer. This would be like me accusing you of begging the question every time you made an argument about god.

Nevertheless, I will ask you again. Are there any positive consequences of Jamie's illness? What greater good is it serving to attain?

Your argument is a positive argument. It reasons from premises to a conclusion (the non-existence or incoherence of God). My negative response has no conclusion -- it merely points out that your argument is inadequate to establish its claim as it has illicit assumptions. It does not conclude God does exist; it does not conclude anything, except that your argument is flawed.

Let's try this one more time:

John: I guess old man Elkins isn't rich. He drives a beater.
Mary: Well, I guess. Although he may just be a miser, or like the car. He might still be rich.
John: Do you have any evidence that he's rich or a miser?
Mary: Well, no.
John: Well, your argument is unsupported then. You're using circular reasoning.

Do you see the problem with John's argument? If so, then you see the problem with your argument as well.

Everything else in your post I've already addressed. (Well, this too actually). Oh, except -- I wasn't trying to "lower your credibility." I was really just emphasizing that this was a side issue and there was no expectation for me to have addressed it. But I see it could have come off that way, so sorry.

(Let me hasten to add that with the above example, I am not suggesting that there is no evidence of God's goodness or justice. I outlined some in my initial post. I could outline more. I'm just providing a parallel to highlight the structure of our discussion).

My argument serves to show that your, argument, namely that God exists, is flawed. Your attempts to refute it as a logically flawed statement are well constructed and convincing sounding, but that does not make them true. A more accurate analogy would be this:
John: There is an advanced civilization living on the surface of Mars.
Mary: No there isn't, we have extensive photographs of the surface from probes and rovers that suggest otherwise.
John: You assume that humans have the ability to process light as visual stimulus, those pictures prove nothing.

Your analogy fails in that the initial conclusion John draws is much weaker than that of Epicurus and thus requires a logical leap, oddly similar to a belief in a God. You're also failing to see that I'm accusing Christianity of being a belief founded on circular reasoning, not saying that your argument in this case is circular.

You still haven't explained how Jamie's illness is benefiting anyone, as far as I can tell. If I have missed something, please repost it instead of claiming that you've answered it without providing any evidence.

"My argument serves to show that your, argument, namely that God exists, is flawed."

Apparently you did not read the extensive response I posted to you earlier (10:05 PM PST) where I explained that I had nowhere in this thread argued that God did exist, but had assumed it as a given, much as the question asked me to. I also explained that I don't have time right now to get into that (very extensive) issue.

Given that I offered no such argument, it might also be considered miraculous that my argument has a flaw. Does that count as an argument for God?

"Your analogy fails in that the initial conclusion John draws is much weaker than that of Epicurus and thus requires a logical leap,"

I don't really know what this means. "Initial conclusion is weaker and thus requires a logical leap"? First, I don't know what "initial conclusion" is. You mean his first one, that the guy is poor? Assuming that's what you mean -- weaker conclusions require less of a leap, not more of a leap, in general (of course, in sound arguments, they should require no leap, but to the extent that strength corresponds to leapiness, stronger conclusion = bigger leap).

So I really think I'm just missing what this point is supposed to be. Possibly it has something to do with your confused belief that I've offered an argument for the existence of God.

"You're also failing to see that I'm accusing Christianity of being a belief founded on circular reasoning, not saying that your argument in this case is circular."

Maybe. But in that case, your claim is kind of irrelevant and (as pointed out above) should never have been brought up.

Now (changing direction slightly) I'm going to give you a pretty technical explanation of why your/Epicurus' argument fails, and my refutation succeeds, OK? I don't mean my refutation succeeds in the sense of, "It proves God," I just mean it defeats Epicurus' argument.

The key is this. As you've more or less acknowledged now (contradict me if that's wrong), Epicurus' argument is defeated if you start with a belief in God. _But Epicurus' argument is a reductio ad absurdum_, a proof by contradiction. This form of argument begins with assuming the thing to be disproved (that there's a good God), and deriving a contradiction. Yet we see that if you start with the assumption that God exists and is good, you get a perfectly good defeater to Epicurus' attempted contradiction, and the whole argument therefore fails.

Now, this can be fixed by assuming one additional thing, which I've called p -- the nonexistence of goods, logically dependent on the existence of evils and sufficient to outweigh them. The above analysis rests on the fact that belief in God entails belief in not-p from the outset (for exactly these reasons actually). But you might try to fix Epicurus' argument by _assuming_ p.

Why is this bad? Well, the appeal of Epicurus' argument in the first place is its simplicity and basis on logic. It assumes only a single empirical fact -- there is evil -- and the rest purports to be pure logic. Once you find out it also needs p, it becomes much worse, because p is actually inscrutable. We don't understand the space of all possible worlds, or no all events and their consequences, and the good and evil that follow from them, so we can't really know p for sure in the best of cases.

Therefore, Epicurus' argument fails. Anybody who believes in God (presumably for some sort of reasons, not circular logic) will presumably accept not-p, and so the reductio will fail, since one of its hypotheses will be negated.

"You still haven't explained how Jamie's illness is benefiting anyone, as far as I can tell. If I have missed something, please repost it instead of claiming that you've answered it without providing any evidence. "

I'm not going to repost, lest I be accused once more of being obi (sorry obi -- you know we love you on some level -- right?), but check out the 10:05 post, starting at "We can speculate." That's just the last of several times I addressed this issue (not with respect to Jamie specifically).

Incidentally, I have a quick question for the atheists on the thread. Please don't overreact or assume how much I'm going to read into your answers. Just answer the question and give me your reasoning. You can blow up at me later if you feel I misuse your answer. :-)

We probably now have the technology -- if we wanted to use it -- to wipe out all intelligent life on earth, at least with a few decades of planning. Obviously I'm thinking mostly of nukes, but if it makes a difference to your answer, you can assume that we have come up with a way to do it that is much less painful than nukes. This is at least theoretically conceivable, given the properties of certain poisons, the effects of certain types (Nitrogen) of asphyxiation, etc., or you might just posit something sufficiently instantaneous, perhaps due to the energy release, that there would not even be time for the brain to register pain.

Under these hypotheses -- are we morally obliged to destroy the earth to prevent further pain? You might say, "No, because that's murder," but it wouldn't have to be. We could ALL agree to do it, in theory, making it a mass suicide, an act of unselfishness toward later generations. I'll be interested to hear responses.

No more obligated than we are to kill anyone right now to prevent further pain on their part. Even if everyone currently living consented to the act, that would say nothing toward the consent of later generations. Whether or not their consent matters is different altogether, but at a minimum it seems odd to purport to do something for a class of hypothetical persons that definitionally don't yet exist and thus cannot give consent. You'd have to assume they consent to it, and... well... I'm not sure how you do that.

semck is correct that it was not my intention to start a thread about whether god exists or not, but to ask those who believe in god how they respond to my situation.

I do have a further question for semck (and other Christians) which is fundamental to why I cannot get my head around Christianity:

semck: "The people in this painful universe have all sinned, and according to Christian doctrine, do deserve punishment"

What was my sin, please? I know what Adam and Eve's sin was, but what sin did I commit? I wasn't present in the garden of Eden. My free will did not cause me to accept an apple from a snake. It wasn't my choice. It wasn't my act. How is it my sin?

I'm not a believer (although I sometimes wish I was) but I know what I would believe if I was, if that makes any sense.

The greatest gift God gave us is freedom. The freedom to think, to make choices, to live our lives as we see fit in an unpredictable universe. The trouble is freedom cannot exist in a fair world. Imagine a game of Diplomacy in which you start off knowing that as long as you play your best game you will win. It would be as boring as hell. The game is only really worth playing because there is luck, surprise, and random unfairness. We know what we must do to maximise our chances of success, but we also know that sometimes shit happens no matter what, and sometimes the idiot in the corner manages to fluke a victory despite being in no way deserving. And yet it is games like this that we love.

Life is much the same.

Of course that doesn't help in the least when you're Austria and your neighbours all decide to fight you from the get go. In this game we have faith that there will be other games and that luck will mostly even out in the end. In life I would love to have faith that God will even things out in the end. Not in this world (as that clearly doesn't happen) but perhaps the next, whatever that may be. Sadly that's were my faith fails to establish itself and I don't believe a word of it.

It would be nice to believe that God occasionally intervenes in this life, but aside from the comfort of prayer it seems not. It would also be nice if the makers of the bags kept to the same design once you've finally figured out a way of making them near comfortable, or that St Marks hospital was easier to get to, but again no. Life remains reassuringly and steadfastly unfair.

Jamie, the answer you will get is that everyone sins. Nobody is perfect.

But that doesn't matter. I continue to say that it's beside the point. The correct question to the problem of evil and pain is not "why?" The correct question is "How do I react?"

And by "correct" I mean the only question that we can actually answer and do anything about.

God actually doesn't exist does he, like Santa Claus. I don't want to be the bearer of unhappy news but lots of people claim they have a god, what nonsense are they filling your heads with at school nowadays.
Next thing you'll be telling me there are missionaries in Africa right now telling the locals that there is no link between unprotected sex and aids...... is that a form of genocide?

@Jamie,
I read the OP. I don't know about the religious things, but I just want to wish you all the best in the challenges you are facing.

Religion explains itself through religion. Science explains itself through science. If I believe in a God and he motivates all my decisions in life, then he's as real in my world as anything else. If I don't, then he doesn't exist for me. The only absolute truth is that there are no absolute truths; the human brain is powerful enough to create its own reality however it sees fit and works to justify that reality. As soon as I bought into this concept, it became very easy to accept not only the world as I see it, but also the world that all different types of people create in their mind.

It's not about anyone being right. We all just perceive things differently. The biggest issue with religion is when it is forced on people unable or unwilling to see that religion as being true. Then people die.

And still no one apart from semck has really attempted to answer my question in any detail. Thanks to redhouse for the kind thoughts though.

Jamie -- Why did this happen to you...in the light of God existing? The question is if there is a great and all-powerful God that knows everything, why did He make me broken? I'll give you a blunt and brutal answer: Before you were sick, I suspect you spent your life not only not believing and not obeying God, but you actively worked against Him at times. God, being in all places at all times, knew this. You deserved a hell of a lot worse.

There - that's your blunt, honest answer. You cant' spend a lifetime punching God in the nose and then get pissed at HIM when he rips your colon out. (I say that with all compassion for your situation...for which - just saying - God has none on this present earth, becuase He follows it up with, "But you can have perfection for eternity if you just..." and then the debate commences....)