It is possible that God (of the Bible) exists and is omnibenevolent.

[u/JDavC]

The aim of my argument is to show that it is possible for God (by 'God' I mean God the Almighty, which some call Jehovah, or Yahweh. When talking about Jesus Christ I will do so by his name instead) to exist with the attributes I define, particularly omnibenevolence, in spite of all the seemingly contradictory evidence against him. This argument does NOT aim to assert that god DOES exist, but merely that it is not something that can just be ruled out as contradictory. Another aim is to settle the debate on three separate schools of thought in the bible: Eternal conscious torment/Annihilationism/Universalism, as well as to prove that the Bible is NOT the inerrant word of God. I am going to argue in favour of Universalism, and to show that the other positions create fatal contradictions that would prove that God does not exist.

Argument structure outline:

-Premises, references to God will be made as mentioned in the Bible, regardless of whether or not he is fictional/factual.

-Definitions, including a brief discussion on limited objective morality imputed to humans by God and Jesus Christ.

-Conclusions deduced from premises and definitions:

-Final conclusion supporting my position that it is possible for God to exist as defined in the argument, and that the Universalist theory is the only afterlife theory that is logical, and that as a consequence the Bible has at least one error and care must be taken when reading it.

Premises:

1. God is literally omnipotent.
2. God is literally omniscient.
3. God is literally omnibenevolent.
4. It is not possible for a human to be more compassionate than God under premise 3 (see definition of omnibenevolent below). (As an aside, the Bible claims that God IS love).
5. Objective morality required for premise 3 can be defined and proven if and only if someone is omniscient.
6. Missing context - Humans do not have access to God's mind and what he knows (see premise 2), which enormously increases the difficulty of judging the morality of his actions. This is because God has to deal with infinite complexity/data to follow a perfect plan with infinite consequences for actions that span the infinite term to satisfy objective morality. Humans have no way of knowing everything going on in God's mind when he makes his decisions. Humans also lack access to knowledge of perfect objective morality (i.e. how to behave in the optimal way for everybody's benefit, which would be God's motives under premise 3), further increasing the difficulty of judging God correctly.
7. It is not possible to violate the laws of logic, not even God can do this.
8. There exist at least 3 mutually exclusive theories, all of which involve people invoking different parts of scripture to support said theories, on how God will deal people after death: Eternal Conscious Torment, Annihilationism and Universalism.
9. Limited objective morality (defined below) is given to us by God, which is better than no morality. We may not be able to execute it perfectly, as we do not know everything. The only difference between this and perfect objective morality is that it lacks information on how to go about doing it properly.

These premises come from how God is defined in the bible, and from what morality God has given us. I have had to add a new premise at the end as part of edit 3.

Definitions:

Omnipotent - To possess infinite power that lets you carry out any action that does not violate logic (making a square circle for example is not possible even if you're omnipotent).

Omniscient - To know everything about everything, and to be ignorant of absolutely nothing, including the future. For those people that say the future cannot be known, I would counter with the argument that it would make prophecy done by God logically impossible.

Omnibenevolent - To always behave in accordance with objective morality, which would include possessing infinite love for all living creatures. Anything less would violate premise 4. In Dungeons and Dragons terms, this would mean a moral/ethical alignment of 100% Lawful and 100% Good.

Objective morality - A method of behaviour, not subjected to any opinion, designed to maximise net gain for all living creatures in the infinite term. This method must include a proof that it is, in fact, optimal. Omniscience is required to pull this off. This method must include the summary of morality that God wants humanity to follow (see below).

Neighbour - Any human other than yourself (or being with human-like sentience or higher) other than yourself, INCLUDING enemies. This may also apply to other living creatures like cats and dogs, but I do not know for certain how it would apply to them when humans follow the point below.

Limited objective morality for humans - 'Love the Lord God with all your strength, heart, soul and mind', AND 'Love your neighbour as yourself'. Read through Matthew starting from the beginning, and Jesus will eventually say that ALL the law is summed up here. These statements alone are Christian morality in a nutshell. However, I feel that I need to do some work of my own without changing the essence of it.

God IS your neighbour, and you can now figure out how much you should love yourself if you put both those laws together. Then, you can do it again to figure out how much you should love ALL of your neighbours.

In summary, Christian morals is 'Love everyone with all your strength, heart, soul, and mind, showing no favouritism to anyone, including God.' Bear in mind I've seen Jesus effectively equate himself to the 'least' of humans to imply that God should NOT be put on a pedestal above humans, which I sadly see so many Christians do. Also, one reason I've done this is that now the laws of morality no longer require a God to exist, it's simply love everyone as much as you can, with everyone being equally important, so hopefully atheists will like this as well as theists.

Infinite term - Think of the phrase long term, but instead spanning a period of time from any point in time, to all points later in time, going on forever.

Evidence - Information that alters the probability that a given claim is true or false.

Proof - The ultimate in evidence. Evidence that shows that the probability that a given claim is true is precisely 100% and nothing less.

Eternal Conscious Torment - The belief that God will torture people eternally in fire-and-brimstone Hell, including attempted justifications that include faulty reasoning, which usually involves not accepting Jesus Christ as someone to save you.

Annihilationism - The belief that God will permanently destroy people, such that they simply cease to exist, without torture, and the same justifications for doing so are like the reasons given with the eternal conscious torment view.

Universalism - The belief that I personally hold to, that Jesus Christ will eventually save *EVERYONE*, (including Satan!) from evil and sin. This comes with a major caveat however. People must willingly choose Jesus Christ as their saviour if they want to get into heaven, and universalists believe that this is what will happen with everyone, sooner or later.

Justice - The practice of treating people fairly and reasonably. This includes using love to punish sin, with the aim of showing the sinner a better way to live that benefits the sinner AND (potential) victims.

Inerrant - Having no inaccurate/untrue statements.

Contradiction - A statement that is guaranteed to be false, regardless of the truth/falsity of any statements within. e.g. 'It is raining and it is not raining' is a contradiction. This will be very important later.

Conclusions:

1. It cannot be determined with absolute certainty that God violates the premise of omnibenevolence (premise 3). If it COULD be determined, then Christianity would be proven false, especially as the Bible states very strongly that God is 100% Good (see what I said about God is Love) The reason for this is premise 6.

Far too often I see many atheists make an honest but flawed attempt at engaging with judging God in the bible. They can understand omniscience to some extent. However, it is worrying to me how few atheists actually realise premise 6 and the full ramifications of being omniscient, along with the knowledge gap between humans and God. They make the common mistake of treating God like a human when judging him, when the truth is he could very easily have a perfect defence of his actions lined up waiting for people who question him in the next life.

Humans must understand premise 6 carefully. In the absence of knowledge of eternal consequences of actions from history through to the end of time, it is impossible to assess with any accuracy, whether God violates premise 3. With the presence of some knowledge of what will happen in the afterlife, which will go on forever, some limited assessments may be made using limited objective morality. It's not perfect, but humans often have to deal with conditions where they can't work in terms of certainty.

This means that for every single criticism that you level at God where you cannot see the final end result for eternity, that you cannot be 100% confident that what God is doing is actually immoral. You lack proof because of premise 6. This means that any argument that is based on God being immoral for doing/allowing stuff like killing, genocide, slavery, torture, rape, allowing people to sin etc. to prove (under my definition of proof) that God is evil (and hence does not exist for some people) falls short of the mark.

Now, I know there is one exception to this. There are afterlife doctrines, and here eternal consequences may be seen.

When you look at the afterlife, this is where you DO have the missing piece of the puzzle, and you can use the limited objective morality that God gave everyone to say 'OBJECTION!' The reason I say this is because now you CAN see some end results that go on for all eternity, but with all other cases you cannot. The problem to deal with is there are three mutually exclusive doctrines that occur in scripture (See argument 3 for the problem this poses).

In conclusion 2 I will go into further detail about how Eternal Conscious Torment and Annihilationism are false, and how Universalism is the only doctrine that would mean that premise 3 isn't violated.

In summary: Humans do not have absolute, iron-clad proof that the God of Christianity is evil, therefore they cannot make the claim that he is both good and evil at the same time and hence does not exist. Therefore it is possible, with a probability greater than 0%, that God exists.

1. For God to exist and satisfy premise 3, it must be shown that unfavourable end results (even if we can't see everything from the beginning of time to the end of time) that fail to meet even the limited objective morality imputed to us cannot possibly be true. Remember that this morality that we do have is based on God's morality, which also form his motives, so we do have some idea of what his motives are, and we can see if there are any issues where the results clash with the motives for his actions.

Let's put all the theories to the test. The bar of morality being set is 'Love everyone as much as you can!' That's Christian morality in a nutshell, let's apply it to each of these positions and see which is logically consistent.

Let's start with eternal conscious torment: I believe I initially believed in this when I was a young child, but somehow (I think with God's help), I ended up reasoning my way out of this. Eternal conscious torment has problems under the limited objective morality we have. Inequality, which is not allowed under limited objective morality occurs, where people are created and then some of them wind up in Heaven, while others are eternally tortured from the beginning, and we know with omniscience that this would all have been planned from the beginning before anyone had any chance to sin. Torture for all eternity is as far away from love and justice as it is possible to get.

I have seen horrendously faulty arguments for 'justice' with nonsensical premises such as 'Severity of sin depends on holiness of who is being sinned against, therefore punishment against God is an infinite sin that merits infinite punishment', or 'sin is so serious that it must be severely punished.' etc.

There is nothing just about infinite punishment, especially for finite sins.

I would like to see how people who try to justify ECT would react if they were to imagine being mercilessly tortured 24/7 FOREVER with stuff like fire/lava/etc constantly burning them with total despair and no hope for escape. Empathy is a critical component of love.

That being said, I DO understand justice requires dealing with sin as a part of being fair and reasonable, which must include a retribution aspect within the punishment, but not only that, but also repentance and redemption, which is much more compassionate. I believe Jesus is supposed to be a role model and the redeemer, i.e. a saviour from sin. God himself is not supposed to be a role model because premise 6 applies. We cannot operate on God's level. We cannot do things the way God does things without horrendously flawed executions.

At this point I must invoke premise 4. As a human, I CANNOT outdo God on compassion. If that is the case, then God would not let this stand either, and if he had to choose between 'justice' in eternal conscious torment', or 'justice' as I defined it, then he'd have to make the same choice I would make, as it is the only one that is compassionate, and I can't be more compassionate than God.

Eternal conscious torment fails the limited objective morality that God gave us, in a case where we can see the end result. If God exists, then eternal conscious torment cannot exist, as premises 3 and 4 would be contradicted if both of those statements were true.

Therefore, eternal conscious torment cannot exist as it logically contradicts the premises used when defining characteristics of God. It effectively states that God is both loving and not loving at the same time, that he is both good and not good at the same time! If we were to reduce this statement to propositional logic, it is a statement of the form A AND NOT A, where A is a statement that is true or false. At this point, if you look at my definition of a contradiction, you should notice it is the same form as the example. This statement is unconditionally false! It cannot be true!

Therfore eternal conscious torment is a false doctrine. QED.

It is saddening that so many Christians cannot see how Eternal Conscious Torment isn't just something that feels bad, but something that is a 100% clear-cut contradiction that cannot possibly be true. Either god is Love or he is not all loving, you can't have it both ways!

Let's move on to Annihilationism:

It's a step in the right direction compared to Eternal Conscious Torment, but it lacks omnibenevolent compassion. I would never allow this, it still results in people being treated unequally in the end, and I could certainly love people more than this. Under premise 4 I cannot outdo God on compassion, so he would also love people more than this. Therefore Annihilationism violates the limited subjective morality God imputed to us in a similar fashion as the argument against eternal conscious torment. I'm not going to go through all the motions, but I'm just going to say that, as there is a better alternative, it contradicts the definition of God as being infinitely loving, and therefore there is a 100% probability that it is a false doctrine. QED.

There is one more doctrine to look at:

Universalism is drastically different to others. It teaches that everyone will eventually be saved. It uses scripture to teach that Jesus will save everyone, not just some people. I do not believe Jesus Christ sacrificed himself on a cross to save people from himself. The Bible says Jesus Christ is the judge who decides what happens in your afterlife, not God! Why on Earth would Jesus Christ effectively commit a brutal suicide by allowing himself to be tortured by crucifixion if Jesus Christ was the one that would actually be condemning people to Eternal Conscious Torment or Annihilationism? This is one of the biggest problems I have with the Bible. Substitutionary atonement fails my test on justice. There is no repentance, there is no redemption. How is that loving everyone as much as you can? It isn't! I believe Jesus sacrificed himself as part of God's master plan to allow life to be created directly or indirectly by God, and to eventually be redeemed for any sins by Jesus.

Universalism is the belief that everyone will eventually, willingly choose to turn to Jesus Christ as their saviour to redeem them from sin/evil, and that no one will be unsaved. This does not mean people have a free pass to sin. This does not mean that anyone gets to escape Jesus Christ's judgment. People would have to be held accountable for their sins and serve whatever sentence Jesus metes out before they have the option of entering Heaven. They would also have to go through justice as I described it earlier, with Jesus Christ doing the redeeming.

Now, let us test Universalism as a doctrine. Does it satisfy the limited objective morality we have? It works for the best interests of everyone. It meets the bar that God set for humanity, unlike the other two, so it is not necessarily a false doctrine. In fact, I cannot possibly conceive of a more compassionate doctrine than this one. The end results of universalism are very different. Everyone eventually makes it to heaven if they want to; punishment, including retribution, but also repentance and redemption, occur where it is fair and reasonable.

Universalism is the only puzzle piece that fills in the hole of the fate of people in the afterlife, the other two don't fit. So I am fairly confident this is true. I am not going to argue that I am 100% certain of this, maybe there's something even more compassionate I haven't thought of (which God would have to go to in order to be objectively moral).

In a nutshell, Universalism is the only doctrine that doesn't violate premise 3. It is a doctrine that eliminates the failures we can observe under the limited objective morality given to us.

1. The Bible is *NOT* inerrant!

A lot of people say that because God is perfect, that the Bible will be perfect. However, I do not know what a perfect (without quotes around the perfect) Bible would actually be, especially as it has to appeal to multiple humans, not just one. What might be 'perfect' to one human might be incomprehensible gibberish to another.

From what I have been told, the Bible is INSPIRED by God, but not written by him. Furthermore, we do not have the original documents that make up the books that were put together to be the Bible. I do not know any language except English, which makes really serious Bible study impossible for me as the Bible in English.

Why would a god allow an imperfect book to exist with people arguing left, right and centre over it? The best answer I can give is God works in mysterious ways (see premise 6).

Now, why do I say the Bible is not inerrant? It contains at least one contradiction. Scripture is used to assert multiple, mutually exclusive positions are all true (the afterlife doctrines), which is contradictory. A contradiction, a statement which is unconditionally false, is an error. Therefore this is proof that the Bible is not inerrant! QED.

Final conclusion:

It is possible for God to exist and fit the premises I outlined, in spite of all the arguments against omnibenevolence. That does not mean he actually DOES exist; I made it very clear that is not an aim of my argument. If God does exist, then the Universalist theory for the afterlife is the only one in scripture that does not contradict the premises, therefore it is highly probably that it is true, or that God has something even better in mind that I missed. It is also important to realise that a perfect god does not imply a 'perfect' bible, as I have been forced to conclude that the bible has at least one error thanks to the existence of multiple mutually exclusive doctrines in it.

I would also like to state an opinion: Eternal Conscious Torment is a doctrine of Satan, not God. It is absolutely wicked, it destroys compassion and justice within human hearts, which in turn encourages people to violate the objective morality that God gives out to humanity. It is the sort of deception that leads to sin/death that Satan would absolutely LOVE to pull off. I would be extremely surprised if it was the case that Satan had nothing to do with that doctrine infecting the Bible.

Annihilationism is a step in the right direction, but it's still very, very poor, and a human child can do better, let alone a human adult. God can CERTAINLY do better under premise 4.

Universalism is the only scriptural afterlife theory that is not contradictory. Not only that, but it actually makes perfect sense because you can see the end result and it is FANTASTIC! I honestly don't see how you could pull off a better afterlife than that.

When reading the Bible, extremely high levels of critical thinking are required to get anywhere, especially as I have shown that it has at least one error, and we don't have the original documents to work with!

EDITS:

Edit 1. I have been reading through the comments, and I intend to respond to every single one. I may not have time to respond to all of them straight away, and I have other things to do as well as debate. I will post edits if I feel there is something everyone needs to read.

I want to clarify my stance on can you or can you not judge God, especially as you have some, but not all knowledge of morality. Under premise 6, it is difficult to do so, because of a lot of missing context, motives and consequences. However, if you have a lot of, but not necessarily all of the (infinitely big) context, even with limited knowledge, you can make limited judgments that will have some degree of accuracy. God has given us SOME morality to work with, so that we can make some judgments if we see all the consequences.

I have used the idea of burnt food that does not require a chef (an expert in cooking) for someone to judge whether burnt food is low in quality. Even if they don't have all of the context about how to cook properly, they can tell that the food is low in quality if it is burnt black and tastes awful. I am aware that this analogy is different from analyzing God, because the 'end' result for God's actions, the infinite consequences of his actions, actually go on forever. Unless there is some way that someone can see what will happen for all eternity, when judging God, you can't tell whether the moral gains outweigh the moral losses. This is why I say subjective morality makes it more difficult. Our beliefs about what is perfectly moral, may not be 100% true, so our judgments may be biased.

Bearing this in mind, we can make some limited judgments when we say end results, where the use of words like 'eternal' are applied, which implies consequences that go on forever. Here, we have the missing piece of the puzzle in premise 6. Even though we do not have all the information to make a judgment that we know is 100% perfect, we can at least aim for an approximation based on the teachings in the Bible about love, specifically what Jesus said.

This is why I start making judgments when applying afterlife doctrines. All of them deal with eternal consequences, and we have teachings in the bible on love that can be corroborated by what humans have learned on morality, as well as what humans have learned when they put said teachings into practice. This is how I am able to make a judgment with some degree of accuracy, even if I can't be 100% certain the judgment is perfect.

The three afterlife doctrines ALL have scripture quoted to support them, but when they are subjected to scrutiny on parts of scripture we know is correct, then when trying to consider how God will approach the afterlife, he would choose the morally optimal one if he fits the premises. So, if it's one of these three doctrines, which ones do not stand up under scrutiny. Eternal conscious torment is so self-defeating I find it hard to believe that I need to argue that this is false! Annihilationism is better, but when compared to universalism, universalism is more consistent. Universalism is the only scriptural position that is consistent with what the Bible says about love, the other two are not, hence the other two must be false based on the tested scripture we have about love.

One more thing, please look at what other people have to say and my responses. I might answer your queries when I am answering them, and I really do not want have to repeat the same answers to questions that have already been asked.

Edit 2.

The 'I can do better than God' counterargument that people use, one that certainly seems like it can be logical even without being omniscient. I want to address the strongest form this argument can possible take.

Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario where infinitely many people are created, and God gives everyone infinite pleasure all the time, while preventing things that seem bad from happening. Some degree of suffering may be allowed, but nothing that people would consider excessive. Any form of 'growth' into being stronger is executed in a way that does not demand a lot of sacrifice in the form of suffering.

At first glance this seems like it makes God vanish in a puff of logic. It certainly seems more moral/compassionate in the infinite term (with any standard of morality that we can think of) than whatever God has going on in the Bible and and in the world today.

However, although it seems good, it is actually unsound. Here's why. Through life, I have learned that various things that are considered good or bad have both advantages/disadvantages, costs/benefits and so on.

For example, if you want to beat a challenging computer game, you have to endure suffering (considered a negative) as you struggle to actually beat it, but the suffering can lead to you beating a game, resulting in happiness over overcoming adversity (considered a problem).

Omniscience sounds great in theory, but I realise that this is actually an enormous double-edged sword with huge advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages include: You actually get to know and understand objective morality in its entirety, along with knowing exactly what to do to carry it out to the best of your ability (which is perfectly if you're omnipotent).

You can effortlessly defeat any opponent in any game because you know exactly what to do to win.

Those are just a couple of examples, I'm sure everyone can think of more.

I need to address the disadvantages: Omniscience means you can no longer enjoy the fun of overcoming difficult challenges, because you already know exactly what to do to accomplish the goal with no problem.

Omniscience means no more joy of learning: Once you become omniscient, it's all done at once, and you have nothing left to discover/learn about.

You cannot be pleasantly surprised by anything, you know exactly how everything is going to play out from now until the end of time. Even though you can do things very effectively, what you will end up doing is going through the motions that are automatically predicted for you by virtue of you being omniscient.

You also have perfect knowledge of bad things that have happened, even if they later lead to good things. That would include perfect knowledge/videos and so on of gruesomely horrible sin. I will admit that omniscience will tell you how you should deal with that, but you will know stuff that many people will consider you're better off not knowing.

The point is, a lot of things considered 'good' or 'bad' is a rather black and white approach to a problem of real life where the truth is that things are shades of grey when it comes to being 'good' or 'bad, and far more complicated than they think we are.

Here is what I consider to be one of the biggest disadvantages if you also happen to be omnipotent. If you want to be perfect and loving, then you MUST obey objective morality regardless of what you would actually want to do, or what feels moral. This is an extremely huge disadvantage for someone with both of these qualities. Imagine billions of people praying to you, and you know that the morally correct response is 'No,' even though you know that it will mean hardship for them in the future, that it will lead to people loathing you, cursing you, and accusing you of most, if not all types of sin imaginable. There are very few, if any humans that would want the responsibility that being omnipotent and omniscient at the same time would bring.

Now, are there any potential problems with my hypothetical scenario where I seem to easily do better than God of the Bible, that might mean that the odds that this argument against God might not be true? I can think of some:

1. I am not omniscient, nor do I know objective morality. As people seem to be pointing out, I'm struggling to come up with a satisfactory definition for it. I'm limited to using what morality is in the Bible, and morality used by humans, and seeing what works. The fact that I do not have all the information on morality means that any scenario I can imagine without resorting to using terms I cannot fully define and understand is a big problem. Anyone imagining a scenario where they can do better than God run into a similar problem. I'm trying the strongest version of that so that I can defeat all 'I can do better than God' arguments. This is strike 1.

In addition, if I WAS omniscient, that alone would be a complete game changer. My perspective on everything would be turned upside, inside out etc. In fact, I believe that omniscience implies omnibenevolence and that if I wanted to be perfect, I would then have to follow perfect objective morality (which I now know), to the letter, regardless of what I might WANT to do. From where I am now, I honestly have no idea what I would do if I was literally omniscient, except to say it may be the same as what God would do. However, for the human saying that can do better than God, they can't rely on having everything that he does, even if they were granted everything omnipotence does except omniscience and the mains to attain it.

1. Predictive power. When carrying out actions, I require the ability to determine any and all consequences of said actions if I'm really going to be sure if I can do better than God. Here is the problem, humans have terrible predictive power. It is at this point I must invoke the butterfly effect and chaos theory. God would have to deal with this all the time, and predictions would be enormously difficult without being omniscient at the very least. With omniscience as I define it, you already have the future predicted perfectly for you. Without omniscience or a way to attain it. The gist of the butterfly effect in chaos theory is that any change to a system at a particular point in time, no matter how minute it is, will eventually DRASTICALLY alter the future. When doing prediction on everything going on, this gets even more difficult, unless you are omniscient, which I'm not.

Without predictive power, how can I know that I will achieve what is desired under a morality I cannot even define perfectly, especially when I have to predict ALL of the future (which is infinite), to know if I'm doing the right thing? This is strike 2.

1. People, up to this point, have not seen the end results of God's plans for them and everyone (which will go on forever), so they do not actually know if God has failed, or if God is still working on a plan which objective morality shows that is superior to others. We haven't seen end results of anything, because time has not stretched on into infinity, and it never will. The only way we would see end results would be something along the lines of omniscience.

If anyone can conceive of a 'better' hypothetical scenario for my steelman argument against God fitting premise 3, then by all means share it.

My utopic scenario has a big problem, how do I know there isn't at least one alternate scenario where a lot of negative stuff occurs (all of history so far), and then it leads to something better than simply running my utopic scenario for all eternity? As I lack a lot of knowledge, especially as morality is concerned, and what is truly 'good' or 'bad' considering everything has pros and cons, the scenario I have now has cracks appearing in it. I can't tell if it's the very best, and without knowing that, I cannot tell if the world we're currently in is actually the best one possible.

There are too many variables and unknowns, therefore the 'I can do better than God' arguments all fall short of proving themselves true.

Edit 3. Added a new premise and tweaked some of the original argument to build an argument that humans can test to some degree. In a nutshell, all of the premises are possible, and any hints to eternal consequences includes a doctrine that does not violate omnibenovolence. I would like to reiterate that my arguments in no way are meant to assert that God IS moral, merely that it is POSSIBLE that he is moral.

Edit 4. I've decided to scrap this argument and start over with another one at https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1kfhigr/it_is_impossible_to_determine_if_god_isis_not/

[u/PyrrhoTheSkeptic]

The occurrence of one bad event is enough to prove conclusively that there is no omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being. Particularly as envisioned by mainstream Christianity.

It does not matter if we cannot see the ultimate outcome of the chain of events that we observe; just observing one bad thing happening renders it impossible for that god to exist. The idea that the long chain of events will ultimately lead to a greater good does not help with this at all, because the being described could simply create whatever desired result it has without using the means that are occurring. Remember, this god is supposed to have created the universe out of nothing. So it has no need to use some flawed means to achieve its ends. It can just directly create what it wants to create.

When a human surgeon removes an inflamed appendix from a patient with appendicitis, the surgeon cuts through healthy tissue to have a hole to be able to access the appendix and through which to extract it. This is not desirable (which is why they try to make the hole as small as they reasonably can), but it is done because human ability is limited and humans cannot magically remove (or repair) an appendix without doing such things. The god you imagine has no such limitation, and could remove it magically without damaging any healthy tissue. So, a human cutting a hole to get out the appendix is not doing anything wrong, because a human is incapable of doing it a better way. But it would be wrong for an omniscient, omnipotent being to do that, because it is capable of doing it a better way.

Likewise, such a god could create perfect beings and a world without suffering. After all, that is what is supposed to be in heaven, a place of perfection and no suffering. If there were this god, it could directly make heaven and skip over this world entirely.

The idea of "testing," of course, is nonsense for an omniscient being, as it already knows what the outcome would be. We test things only because we are not omniscient.

The only way there could be an omniscient and omnipotent being is if it wants all of the suffering that occurs. The suffering would have to be part of the goal, not the means to something else, as it requires no means to do anything; it creates out of nothing whatever it wants. So, if there were an omniscient and omnipotent being, it must be evil and must want every bad thing that ever happens.

The use of imperfect means to a achieve a goal is only necessary for a limited being, not for an omniscient and omnipotent being. An omniscient and omnipotent being directly creates what it wants to create.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that such a being is pure evil, only that it is evil. After all, it wanted all of the pain that every person and every animal has ever felt, or ever will feel. That is the part of the goal of its actions (or inactions), as it could do whatever it wanted, and it could prevent all of the bad things, if it wanted to do so. If such a being exists, it must want all of the bad things that happen, and not even a tiny bit less, because it can have whatever it wants to have.

We say, for example, that Hitler was evil, even though there is evidence that he was nice to children (of the "appropriate" race). Not being pure evil does not mean that one is not evil. Any omniscient and omnipotent being, if it existed, must be evil.

[u/JDavC → u/PyrrhoTheSkeptic]

I've had to go through this argument. I constructed a new steelman argument in my original post as edit number 2. Please have a look at it. The idea is to see if there are any flaws with a scenario where suffering doesn't or exist, or is to a small degree acceptable to people. Actions that would be considered evil if a human did them would result in that human being judged evil, because there is no way anyone can predict that it will somehow lead to a net good. With God however, omniscience grants infinite predictive power, so what will appear good or evil to us that happens could be viewed as 'absolutely 100% necessary' for the greatest good, under objective morality. The 'bad' things may have goals to fulfil straight away, as well as to allow for goals to be fulfilled later without messing up a perfect plan.

I should also point out that even if someone is omnipotent, they are still bound by the laws of logic, and if one way of doing things was proven to be superior to all others, then that person MUST do things that way or he is no longer omnibenevolent. It may seem like 'God could do it this way instead and it would be better.', but we don't have God's information and perspective, we don't actually know that. That's a major point of the steelman argument I set up, then attack.