He means by Nietzsche’s descriptors, God is separate from human decision, but that if we use conventional Revealed Truth’s description of God, God becomes more like a person that makes personal decisions.

I cataloged that there are two primary religious conventions about God, based upon Revealed Truth. God is either the enabler of human free will or he is the Decider, and we but his subjects. Many Christian denominations combine some of both, like Black Liberation Theology, but mostly Christianity prefers the free will template and Islam overall prefers the other one.

I agree that if we use the Revealed Truth of Mohammed, God would be evil, because God would be like a responsible human being, responsible for all. But that is ONLY true if you use the Mohammedan dogma, or something else similar to it like Calvinist predestination. If you use a different Revealed Truth, like Judaism, then it all comes apart, now doesn’t it.

A tsunami exists. The absence of a tsunami does not exist. They didn’t say a tsunami is good or evil. So why do you think this disproves anything either of em said in the video? They aren’t connected, except by your claim that they are connected, as I would state it.

The original logic, as I said before, was that evil and good exists and God created everything. Thus God created evil, by the fact that evil exists. Thus anyone that creates evil must be evil, thus God is evil.

The logic is broken by the annihilation of the existence of evil. Although that’s not necessarily the only point you can annihilate the original claim.

Now you say a tsunami is evil. That God created a tsunami. Well, you see, a tsunami isn’t evil, nor are the consequences of a tsunami evil. Thus your entire logic claim shatters. Far from disproving anything originally said, you simply repeat the original mistake.

Whether you believe God is evil or not, is immaterial in my view. It doesn’t bias the situation either way. The logic of the matter stands by itself. It is either true or not, demonstrable or not. If you cannot demonstrate by the rules of logic that God is evil, then why even claim it is so in the first place.

As before, the key problem with the original claim is that evil exists. Evil does not exist as its own physical entity, was the correct argument. Now you say the correct argument is wrong, because you claim a tsunami is evil? First you need to prove that evil exists. And by what reason does a tsunami make evil into existence? We’re missing a whole heck load here in terms of the logical structure for argument and claim.

However, in this context, using the conventional idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God, the fact of a tsunami’s occurrence is a choice on the part of that God.

Are you under the mistaken impression that God has free will, like human beings? Consider quantum mechanics. That, if anything, describes ‘God’s Choices’. Unlike a human being, God is not limited in his choices to good or evil, to evil or lesser evil. Is God evil because he chooses to have every version of reality exist all at once, including the good and bad versions? Is that evil, is that just

The question isn’t really about why God ‘chooses anything’. The question is why you define a tsunami as evil. Prove that, and then we can get to God’s choices. But if you are not able to demonstrate that that is true, that a tsunami is evil or even its effects evil, then what does it matter what comes afterwards. When it is demonstrated that evil has no independent existence, that it is simply the absence of what does exist, then it shatters the logical chain that had based itself around that foundation. No foundation, no building. No steel supports, skyscrapers fall in on themselves, or fall over in the worst case scenario.

If we would say that a human who made that same choice — that is, to allow a tsunami to occur, killing thousands, when one has the power to prevent it — was “evil”, then we’d have to say God “is evil”. This, as I say, is fun, and seeing der Herr Professor get his comeuppance from a kid is cool, but I don’t think his argument survives the counterexample.

What’s fun about assuming God is omnipotent and omniscient, and then saying a limited, fallible, ignorant human can make God evil by creating a tsunami? It may be fun in the aspect of playing God, and assuming one knows what one is doing, but it isn’t necessarily so. Since humans are fallible, they can never supplant what is omnipotent or omniscient. There’s no other way for it to work.

But let’s say I assume certain things are true that you have not yet demonstrated as true. Then what? A human being drops a nuke on Hiroshima. Is that God’s fault or the human’s fault? If God is omnipotent, and thus evil for creating evil, that would by necessity absolve the moral responsibility of those that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it would also absolve Islamic terrorists, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and all criminals and enemies of humanity from judgment. “God is Evil”, he created these things. Human beings are not responsible, you see. Islamics, after all, always say inshallah, if God wills it. If it doesn’t happen, God didn’t will it. Of course, in reality, it didn’t happen because humans didn’t want to make it happen.

Thus, the conventional Christian view of God is one based upon free will. The Islamic and more fundamentalist view of God is that he is responsible for all, and we are responsible only for submission and obedience.

but I don’t think his argument survives the counterexample.

Well yes, I did understand that as your original intention. And I hope I have restated my position on that particular aspect in clear enough terms as well.

In fact, I’d go with Nietzsche, and say the Higher Being is beyond mere human goodness and wickedness (that’d make a book title), so it’s really a category error to make the argument at all.

However, in this context, using the conventional idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God, the fact of a tsunami’s occurrence is a choice on the part of that God. If we would say that a human who made that same choice — that is, to allow a tsunami to occur, killing thousands, when one has the power to prevent it — was “evil”, then we’d have to say God “is evil”. This, as I say, is fun, and seeing der Herr Professor get his comeuppance from a kid is cool, but I don’t think his argument survives the counterexample.”

I’m not sure how you can claim that it’s a category error to hold God to a human standard of good and wickedness in one breath, then say in the next that “we’d have to say God ‘is evil’” because we’ve just compared him to a human who allowed a tsunami to occur. Which is it?

Perhaps it’s only my personal discrimination, but as I understand it, “evil” is a moral judgment. “bad” is a judgment of how a particular event or outcome affects us.

If I don’t win the lottery, is that evil? no…it’s bad. If someone steals my winning lottery ticket before I can claim it…_that’s_ evil! as well as bad!

When bad things happen to us, we often make a judgment that it’s due to an evil action on the part of someone/something. That’s because we feel a need to blame – we have a hard time accepting that we’re just simply not in control of some things. Or that there are thing that are out of the control of _anybody_. That’s a scary thought. But it’s a fact nevertheless.

Many of the environmentalists are unable to accept that, and assume that we _are_ in control of the climate, and therefore if the climate does bad things to people, we bear responsibility for evil actions or inactions, as the case may be.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/

You need to read the original letter between the two bloggers to get the context of the discussion.

This has already been expressed, better than I can, but since I’ve never been one to keep my opinion’s to myself, here goes.
To my simple mind, the nature or existence of evil is one of Athiesm’s weakest arguments.
By the way, the argument that God is evil since he must be the author of evil doesn’t argue for the existence of God, only that an evil God is not worthy of worship.
No matter how constructed, a moral framework sans God, must inevitably become authoritarian, since the Athiest has merely traded God as moral arbiter for some other arbiter and there have always been a surplus of tyrants willing to fill the void.
Since the Athiest has trouble coming up with a consistent moral framework, their best argument is to cast God as arbitrary or uncaring or evil.
Hence the tsunami argument. Since the Athiest also rejects free will, every bad event must be caused by God.
The Bible is clear that God sustains the world, and were God to remove his presence, the world would cease to exist, but that is not the same as saying that it rained last night because God made a conscious decision for it to rain. It rained because God created a world with physical laws that operate consistently. God can certainly intervene and contradict those laws (called miracles), but he isn’t obligated to at every instance. The Bible says the rain falls on the just and the unjust.
In the case of the tsunami, humans have chosen to live in places that are subject to the effects of volcanic activity. They would be better served to live in a higher elevation not subject to these forces, but have expressed their free will and live in the tsunami’s path.
While God certainly could have created a world where humans live entirely within God’s will (where acting oustside it would not even be considered), that would be a different world than the one he created.
It seems to me trying to force God to always act in my best interest while I myself often act outside of my own best interests is childish. That’s more akin to having a personal genie.
CS Lewis has made the case why pain must exist in his book “The Problem with Pain”, but what about suffering? I don’t know the full answer to that, but what if life had purpose greater than the mere avoidance of pain and maximization of pleasure?
The Bible lays out three attributes to be sought by Christians, but I think they appy to everyone. Those three are Faith, Hope and Charity (Love). These are certainly three attributes that will make our lives fulfilling, regardless of our circumstances.

A tsunami and the lack of a tsunami are opposites.

I’m not making the claim that I think God is evil. (And I’d argue with the translation of böse as “evil” in any case: it doesn’t have the same weight in German, I’d make it “wicked” here.) In fact, I’d go with Nietzsche, and say the Higher Being is beyond mere human goodness and wickedness (that’d make a book title), so it’s really a category error to make the argument at all.

However, in this context, using the conventional idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God, the fact of a tsunami’s occurrence is a choice on the part of that God. If we would say that a human who made that same choice — that is, to allow a tsunami to occur, killing thousands, when one has the power to prevent it — was “evil”, then we’d have to say God “is evil”. This, as I say, is fun, and seeing der Herr Professor get his comeuppance from a kid is cool, but I don’t think his argument survives the counterexample.

Why Thank You, Klinger. You made my day.

The tautology is invalid in this circumstance. It is also untrue that the logic used by the mythical genius child in the video utilizes such a tautology.

The counterargument is to ask if then a tsunami that kills tens of thousands only exists because God’s love is not present in people.

The counterargument to your counterargument is that nobody has claimed an opposite to a tsunami exists that can be considered good and Godly. Good and evil are opposites. Light and darkness are opposites.

The premise shown here is that one exists, while the other is simply a human abstract conception of the absence. We give a word, an idea, to the absence and call it evil, while we call what exists, good. But existence is not the definition of good, and non-existence is not the definition of evil. That’s because the epistemology behind good and evil requires free will to exist.

If you can prove that people suffer because they do not have God’s love, then you can utilize your argument in a logic chain. Until then, you’re stuck with things as they exist now. And things as they exist now, God doesn’t need tsunamis to punish people or kill them. Human mistakes and fallibility take care of that matter quite well by themselves.

If God is capable of miracles like creating a tsunami to smite the ungodly. Then he must also be capable of miracles to reward the faithful or even unfaithful. That’d be an argument to be in God’s good graces, not an argument that God is evil. It is also a fallacious argument, because not everyone in the region affected should be deserving of the same fate meted out to others. So God would either have to give individual protection to certain people or have wordly agents, like the US military, aid those that do not deserve. Since God is omniscience, he should know who exactly he is punishing. And a tsunami is rather indiscriminate in its destruction.

If we try to get back to the original logic that God is evil because he creates evil, we can now procede to the counter-argument, that evil does not exist but rather is the absence of the good. You can’t then, now, say that a tsunami is evil, that God caused it to smite the unGodly or unloved. You have no proof of that. No proof whatsoever. So we can deal with the logic or illogic of the strain, but the proof doesn’t exist. It’s speculation. We can only follow the chain of supposition and deductive reasoning to its logical conclusion ,but there would be no reality to back it up with inferenced data.

Is God supposed to remove everything that human beings find diffuclt to deal with? Is God to make us immortal, immune to disease, war, and in fighting? That would require that we be made slaves, wards of the slave, cradle to grave welfare care. Total control of our decisions would result in no war, no suffering, and no evil. It also would result in no good. That’s the prototypical metaphysics if you use the logic of “God Created Evil”.

Evil can only ever be defined as the absence of something. In my case, it can be defined as the absence of free will or the intentional destruction of free will in people. Thus how can God be said to create evil, when what he created is free will and it is the evil who wishes to destroy that free will?

Perhaps the reason why Satan wishes to tempt people, using their own free will, to sin and damnation via Faustian contracts is because he wishes to disprove God’s intended goal, which requires humanity be invested with free will. Perhaps Satan wishes for a more controlled and orderly universe where there is no free will, only predestination on the whim of the All Elite, archangels, or of the omnipotent and omniscient God.

God created the physical mechanisms by which atoms and molecules act. The rules by which things happened, action and reaction. If this freedom of existence then results in a tsunami, that’s not bad or evil. A tsunami doesn’t take away free will. It only changes reality. There’s nothing wrong with changing reality, except and unless you try to change reality so that agents do not have free will.

In our modern political culture, Global Warming cultists say that they know what the will of Gaia, Earth, is. THey claim to know what will or will not happen, and will institute controls on others for the stated purpose of recovering Mother Gaia. How do you think they know what the will of Gaia is? And even if they did, would they have the right to try to confiscate the will of others in the process?

I registered just so I could tell you that I loved that explanation. Very nice! =P