Metaphysical paradox

Okay, so you all know by now that I am a non-theist, or "atheist." I always get roped into philosophical debates with my brother-in-law, and I managed to stump him using a line of basic reasoning. One of my problems with Religion, besides the scientific hurtles, is the basic logical inconsistencies.

It is said that God is the Aplha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. Now in the scientific corner, Newton's first law of motion states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. So, both scientifically and Biblically we are now on the same page. Now, the common belief is that God is pure and is the source of all that is virtuous and good. My question is; where did evil come from? According to Genesis all that is manifest is solely from the divine creator, so God had to create evil, which in it's self is essentially evil. Now going back to Newton, cause I love mixing two things as compatible as science and religion, the force that would be known as evil had to already have been presnent in some state within God himself. He was the only thing in existence pre-universe, hence everything is a direct result of the force called God.

Please do not be disrespectful or ignorant, I am simply stating a fundemental problem within Biblical texts.

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...uh the post is up there...

If evil didn't exist, how would we know what was good?

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Ah! Now we're getting somewhere. Better question; How can God be Good, if there is no objective view of morality, pre-universe anyway? I mean, I'm pretty sure that God, in and of himself, would think he was infallible. So, God isn't as "perfect," as is believed, objectively anyway.

Which brings me to another question; is God's will good, or is it good because God will's it? I mean if God decreed that all followers must disembowel non-believers, would that be quantified as a good act because it was ordered by God?

Filmfreak, if there is a god (which there isn't!) but if there was.. IF there was.. You'd be it.. Cause you speak the ultimate truth lol.

God has never left any physical evidence of his existence on earth.
None of Jesus' "miracles" left any physical evidence either.
God has never spoken to modern man, for example by taking over all the television stations and broadcasting a rational message to everyone.
The resurrected Jesus has never appeared to anyone.
The Bible we have is provably incorrect and is obviously the work of primitive men rather than God.
When we analyze prayer with statistics, we find no evidence that God is "answering prayers."
Huge, amazing atrocities like the Holocaust and AIDS occur without any response from God. I guess he isn't such a good lad after all?

And so on…

Evil is not necessarily a thing; it can be described as the absence of a thing; the absence of good.

Regardless, the problem of evil is probably among the oldest and most-discussed theological concepts, and the answer is quite simple: free will. God does not need to create evil for it to exist, God merely needs to decide that the importance of giving beings control over their own lives outweighs even the terrible things they may choose to do with them.

Like what? If God turns water into wine, the "physical evidence" would be wine. You have no way of determining if they left physical evidence, because you have no way of identifying it.

Not to mention that requiring physical evidence to prove the existence of a metaphysical fact is completely circular.

People claim to have been spoken to all the time. I don't know if I believe them, but again, you seem to be asking for evidence that you'd have no way of identifying to being with.

Regarding The Bible; let's not confuse the issue of God with the issue of Jesus, because one, philosophically speaking, encompasses the other. If you want to make an argument, by all means, make one, but a string of broad declarations isn't really advancing the discussion.

...which demonstrates only that God does not answer most (or possibly any) prayers. That's completely apart from whether or not God exists, and any view of prayer which views it only as a way to get things is a very narrow one.

As I stated above, this is easily explained by the concept of free will, and it doesn't take long to realize the pointlessness of any existence without it.

Free will, by the by, is not an osbscure concept. If one is really out looking for the truth of such things, or pondering them with any seriousness (as opposed to looking for validation), they'd be hard-pressed not to have run into it.

There seems something a bit cheeky in letting God off on having 'created' evil. He is known as the 'Creator' of universe after all, is he not?

More importantly though, even if he is just tolerating manifestations of evil for free will purposes, what are we to make of circumstances where we have no influence or choice? What happens when it's not an apple dangling in front of someone, but a tsunami hitting them on the head? I've never heard a satisfactory 'God is benevolent' response to that kind of thing. Answers seem to range from 'oh they were all evil', to Job-like tests-of-faith, to the marvellously blithe 'Oh, they're all in heaven now, so that's alright'.

Don't like to push the point normally, coz the concept of a benevolent God seems to inspire some of religion's more positive aspects, but it does seem a bit of a deal-breaker to me. I struggle to tuck natural disasters / diseases into the category of 'ineffable acts of a cheeky chappy who's looking out for us in the end'.

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If you can't prove it, it's not officially known to exist. End of story
If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound even if nobody can hear it? Yes it does, but that can be proven scientifically.

Things do get murkier here, but let's delve deeply into the question (which I certainly admit is a good one ):

There are some explanations which are possible, but which I don't believe. For example, the idea that our own actions over time have somehow contributed to the existence of natural disasters, making even tsunamis the result of free will, albeit indirectly.

Anyway, onto things I might actually believe. I have to wonder how we could know whether or not even natural disasters don't serve a greater good that we're unaware of. Forest fires, we've learned, are a necessary part of the forest's cycle. Might even tsunamis serve an important ecological purpose which we've yet to grasp? Perhaps they're just the same sorts of trade-offs, writ much larger, of course, that exist on a smaller scale in front of us every day.

One thing that intrigues me is that everything you're saying could apply to anything short of perfection. I mean, is it evidence against God that we can't fly, or heal ourselves like Wolverine? I'm not sure why a God must create a perfectly innocuous world devoid of any peril whatsoever to qualify as benevolent. If there were no tsunamis or earthquakes or disease, we might be having this same discussion, only someone would cite pimples as evidence of God's non-existence (or indifference to our teenage woes), and it would be, fundamentally, nearly the same argument.

But the most important point, I think, is that all this also presupposes that a benevolent God's first and highest priority would be to shield us from any kind of pain. I'm not convinced of this. One need look no further than most parenting philosophies to see to see that such a principle would do a terrible job of raising a child. The child never can comprehend why they can't have what they want, or why they can't run out into the street, or why they need to slow down, or what possible purpose a spanking could serve to make them better people, but it does. In the long-run, it serves a greater purpose, and if there is an afterlife, it's no stretch to suggest that this world might bear some strong similarities to the idea of childhood.

I realize that these sorts of ideas will not offer much comfort to anyone who has suffered a great loss, and I doubt I'd be any different if and when something terrible befalls me. But that doesn't mean it isn't true, either.

You're describing the scientific method which, by definition, has nothing to say about the possibility of things which are unobservable, or exist outside of the physical. If it did, it would cease to be scientific.

That's what this comes down to: you're asking for physical proof of something which is not physical. That's circular.

Now, you can choose to only believe in the physical and observable (and it would seem that this is what you've done), but that decision is an arbitrary one.

Who are we to say what is evil and what is not?

Evil is only what our societys have told us what is bad.

eg. Homophobia in the western world is looked upon as bad and almost evil.
In Iran, being gay is illegal.

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Well by that definition I could claim to be god, and nobody can ever say I'm not.

When you saw that, unless you are a scientologist you probaly thought "what a stupid far out there relgion".

Sceintology cops alot of crap, but i realised something today, all other relgiouse followings (except athiests) are just as far out there as sciontology.

Think about it, Christianity is about some dude in the sky who created everything one day and then impregnated a random chick with out having sex with her. This chick then had a kid who had magic powers and could walk on water and turn water into wine. One day, the kid of the virgin got killed and then turned into a zombie who wanderd the earth for ever.

When you think about it, all relgions sound boderline retarded (not just scientology) yet we for some reason beleve in them.

Deep down i know alot of followers of these relgions have doubt.

Well, first off, there's a difference between "nobody can ever say I'm not" and "nobody can ever prove I'm not." Anyone could say it (and they would). They could also force you to define what you mean by "God," and in order to not get talked into a corner, you'd probably have to define it in a very weird way that wouldn't fit most people's conceptions of the word.

But yeah, technically, you can claim ridiculous things and nobody can prove otherwise with science. That's kind of my point, and that's what you're advocating when you advocate the scientific method as the sole means of determining truth. It's defined as much by what it can't comment on as it is by what it can.

The fact remains: asking for physical proof of something which claims to be non-physical is circular and paradoxical. It's not an argument against the existence of God, it's simply you standing up and declaring that you've decided not to believe in anything you can't observe.

I'd say the difference in source text is pretty massive; The Bible, whatever you think of it, is an historical record of the time and isn't exactly akin to something written a few decades ago (or whenever it was, precisely). And not to quibble, but Christians don't believe that Jesus is wandering the Earth, either. Nor would they choose the word "zombie" to describe the resurrection.

Phrasing, in other words, can make a big difference; the "dude in the sky" thing, for another example, is really a conception of popular culture, as is the idea of the Devil as being a guy with a mustache in a scaly red jumpsuit. The difference between Christianity and Scientology (one of them, at least), is that you don't have to caricaturize or re-word Scientology to make it sound ridiculous; it does that on it's own.

You're spot on Yoda. But for the sake of argument. In your opinion what proof is there that there is a god? I mean there are gasses that don't smell, can't be seen or otherwise be identified with our human senses. But science can. So I'm curious. How can anyone claim something to exist when they can't prove it? Sorry if I'm getting repetitive, it's just not logical to my way of thinking. It's not how I perceive the world. Gee, if there was proof of flying pigs in space I'd believe it no matter how ludacris it sounds.

<e>Time for example.. Does time exist? It's an invention of man.. Can we prove time exists? I guess not. Same with god. Only time we can measure, thus people believe in it. So far nobody has managed to gauge the presence of any god. If you can't identify it, you can't measure it. Time is made up, thus we can measure it. Too my best knowledge god is to, yet we can't measure "it's" presence..

Gee im getting dizzy just thinking of it lol.

Oo, sweet, that's even further out there than the Gaia theories (All they need to do is mix in chaos theory and they could blame it all on bad butterfly breeders or something )

For sure, but how would that effect the apparent nullification of free will engendered by mass deaths? (And there is still a question of why a perfect God would see the need for checks and balances of such an apparently destructive order).

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To be fair, i think the "everyone's now in heaven & hell" argument is a fair enough get-out clause for a theist when it comes to natural disasters (It just gets scant traction with atheists/agnostics ). It also fits with the 'tough love' God you describe, in many ways. (I would question where the chance for redemption goes in such a mass wipeout though. Might not some of 'the bad' have been working their karmic way to a better state of being at the time the lights got put out en masse etc?)

A tougher problem is the disease & deprivation end of free-will limitation i feel (including that which follows natural disasters). The tough-love idea still works in many ways, but it does feel a bit 'armchair'. It's very easy to praise Job-like stoicism in the face of suffering etc from a distance, but as you suggest, something else to live through it.

The 'hardest question' though surely has to be young kids born with severely limiting and/or painful conditions. Are they partially 'avatars of suffering' from which we are expected to learn? What of their limited options for free will, their slanted starting point of less capability for evil combined with increased excuses for wishing it (given their tormented life). That is very tough love indeed - from the perspective of the individual, & again on the broader scale of why God has chosen a world that works along such lines, where such lessons are necessary at all.

Nah, not sure i buy this sub-perfect argument. We have an existing scale that suggests God can make healthy humans, but chooses not too in some cases, or allows virulent diseases & apparently arbitrary conditions to strike them regardless of the morality of their actions (or so it often seems - and would you argue otherwise? Are those hit by brain cancer evil? Do malarial mosquitoes seek out the ethically unsound? Would be a stretch to argue that way no? )

That is true, as just telling the story of scientology sounds pretty far out there (anyone see that South Park episode), but regardless, Christianity and what ever other religion all have an extremly low chance of being true, regardless of which one sounds more far out there.

I'll just say that sometimes you feel like you've met the love of your life, then he leaves you, then you turn against God and go atheist (fabulously), then you check your e-mail and see that a new man has written to you (two hours after you got dumped, and messages from single men don't happen everyday), it turns out he's even more fabulous than the guy you thought was the love of your life, you wait for him to return from South Dakota and then you go out, then he nevers leaves your house, then he's outside fixing your car, etc. etc.

Is this proof of God at work?

Regardless, the absence of good is still derived from the central point of origin, God. This means that there has to be an inherent lack of goodness within the Almighty himself.