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A VERY INTERESTING CONVERSATION (between an atheist professor and a christian student)

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  • SnowBunnySmangerSnowBunnySmanger Posts: 277
    Bad arguments on both sides

    good looks on that link janklow
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  • lighthearted26lighthearted26 Posts: 933
    Most atheists I know have other reasons for being one other than the usual "why is there evil and devastation in the world" there's so many arguments you can make against that weak ass argument the professor had.
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  • wharwhar Posts: 226
    lighthearted26 wrote: »
    Most atheists I know have other reasons for being one other than the usual "why is there evil and devastation in the world" there's so many arguments you can make against that weak ass argument the professor had.

    I would be interested in hearing them. The central problem of evil directly lead to my conversion to atheism. The problem as it appears to me is straight-forward. God is defined as a being all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving.This leads to the paradox that this God exists and 500,000 children, mostly in Africa, die each year due to malaria. This God can trivially help these children, loves them as his own children, but lets them die.

    To resolve this paradox I can assume God acts mysteriously, however God is all-powerful. If he has a hidden agenda he can achieve that agenda without killing children. To say otherwise means God is not all-powerful.

    Perhaps I can argue that God has dominion over us and anything he does is right. This reduces God to a psychopath that kills children by the boatload then demands we worship him. I must drop the all-loving trait assigned to God and accept that this entity is inherently evil.

    If I eliminate God from the equation everything I sees starts to make sense. Malaria kills people according to the rules of nature no supernatural being is needed. It strikes people in Africa and equatorial areas because the species that causes malaria thrives there. With god I am left with contradictions while without God the worst I have are unanswered questions.

    chi-guyOceanic
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  • janklowjanklow Posts: 4,262
    SnowBunnySmanger wrote: »
    good looks on that link janklow
    Snopes does what they can
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  • lighthearted26lighthearted26 Posts: 933
    @whar well one argument is that god creates a world where shit just happens based on the nature of the world itself. Lets say you slip on some ice and break your leg. God didn't set out to make sure you broke your leg on April 23, 2012 at 4:00pm. He just created a world where people exist, ice exist, and if a person happens to walk on it they might slip.
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  • wharwhar Posts: 226
    lighthearted26 wrote: »
    @whar well one argument is that god creates a world where shit just happens based on the nature of the world itself. Lets say you slip on some ice and break your leg. God didn't set out to make sure you broke your leg on April 23, 2012 at 4:00pm. He just created a world where people exist, ice exist, and if a person happens to walk on it they might slip.

    God is the creator of that world's nature. If by the nature of that world millions of children die each year from disease and famine they fall by God's hand.

    If a God has the traits all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving a paradox arises. Since God is all-powerful and all-knowing any world this god creates is exactly the way he wants it. Since God has the power to create any possible universe then he could have trivially created one where I did not slip and fall on ice on April 23, 2012 at 4:00pm.

    It is not lost on me either that you moved from the wholesale slaughter of innocent children to something rather trivial like a broken leg. Your argument makes a certain sense for the small events that touch our lives like a broken leg but when we examine the world in total it simply fails. 10,000 dead in an earthquake, 200,000 dead in a tidal wave, 5,000,000 dead dues to a disease. When you look at slaughter on this scale it becomes quite clear that there can not be a personal god that loves but murders us on such scales.
    chi-guyVIBE
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  • lighthearted26lighthearted26 Posts: 933
    Yea it doesn't account for the amount of evil and devastation in the world. But there's also the free will defense saying for us to have free will evil must exist. If god did away with evil, then a person wouldn't be able to kill or rape because they wouldn't have the free will to do so. You can't have conditional free will "you can do what you want unless its evil"

    There's also natural evil like tsunamis and hurricanes which I think can be explained by my previous statement about the nature of the world itself. We have certain laws like gravity, not being able to walk on water, etc. Without this, the world would be a scary place. I might walk outside and fall through the concrete or something So god chose to create a world with these natural laws and because of the specific nature of our world, things just happen like tornados and floods.
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  • Oceanic Oceanic Posts: 5,227
    God gave the angels free will and no evil exists, allegedly, in heaven. For God, free will and natural law without the possibility of evil would be possible.
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  • lighthearted26lighthearted26 Posts: 933
    Yea in heaven but how can you have free will on earth without evil? That would mean everyone would be naturally good right? So god creates a world where everyone is good and kind?
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  • wharwhar Posts: 226
    1. God created the universe. He could have created any possible universe but chose this one.
    2. God loves us
    3. The universe God created kills us by the 10s of thousands

    Your argument simply states he did it. It ignores the central paradox. If God loves us why did he create a universe that is so dangerous to us? Free will works for the evil we do each other but that pales in comparison to the random evil the world inflicts.

    Once one realizes God can not be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, in fact he can be none of these things, it is easy to see how rational the world is without him. Your own posts lighthearted26 acknowledge this impossibility of these traits belonging to God.

    "Yea in heaven but how can you have free will on earth without evil?" - God is all-powerful he can trivially achieve this.

    The basic rules and laws of the physical world lead to the straightforward conclusion that a all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God is an impossibility. If a God does he mus be a god of the deists, a sort of removed prime-mover.
    chi-guyVIBEOceanic
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  • lighthearted26lighthearted26 Posts: 933
    God does things beyond our understanding lol. That's the last argument I got. But you should check out the "argument from evil". Its a good read. Just Google it.
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