One problem cause by Religion

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I like Dawkins take on this when he complains about young kids being described as for example christian or muslim, when in fact they should be described as kids of christian or muslim parents

If the god is omnipotent it can do anything it wishes.

If the god is omniscient it knows everything and therefore knows the outcome of its actions.

If it created everything and knew that it had set the world up, like dominos, to contain so many bad things it is the god's fault.

This is why the free will defense doesn't work to explain evil in christianity because the christian god already knew exactly what actions people would take -based on how the god set up the world-.

No, He still could not contradict Himself or any of His laws ... such as in making a one-ended stick or a rock too big for Him to move or a human being without a mind/will of its own.



Sure, and just as I know my grandchildren are going to occasionally fall and get hurt while playing in the yard and on the stuff I have placed there for them.



So then, you would say it is my fault when any or all of my grandchildren get hurt while playing in my yard?



Wrong. Even a good parent does not child-proof a house to the extent that a child never has an opportunity to need to learn obedience and good judgement.

If he can't contradict himself he is limited and therefore not omnipotent. Or are you saying there is no such thing as omnipotence and therefore the christian god doesn't exist because nothing can have the property of omnipotence?

The rest is strawman. You don't (I hope) -deliberately- put out things that are guaranteed to mutilate your grandchildren?

Lets say you put beartraps in your garden, blindfold your grandchildren and then place them in the middle, if they don't move an explosive implanted inside them goes off, if they do move they ae torn apart by beartraps. You are responsible for this, no? You created a situation, knowing that a bad outcome was guaranteed and you had no need to make the situation, right?

Let's amplify this to god level:
God created everything and knew how everything would happen - he is therefore responsible for the holocaust. He made everything in such a way that the holocaust couldn't not happen and he was fully aware of this. He should be viewed with worse favour than Hitler if he exists.

One, most definitions of omnipotence exclude nonsense, which means that contradictions still cannot be done. Secondly, being unable to do something isn't necessarily a matter of power but also of character. If I am so honest that I can never tell a lie, that says nothing about my power/ability, which is the subject of omnipotence, but rather it just says things about my character, as my power is not lacking, only my will.


No. An omniscient being knows the exact moment when this is going to happen and sets up all of the things in "the yard" knowing their ultimate outcome. You don't. If you knew the future and what would lead to your grandchildren's sufferings, then you would certainly be responsible for not setting up your backyard to best accommodate them.


No, there are real differences. You are not omnipotent or omniscient. If you were, then it would be your fault to a great extent, if not fully. Especially horrendous wounds. We might be able to avoid questioning a God who only allowed scrapes, but pretending this is not a world where people put the barrels of shotguns into their mouths and pull the trigger seems a bit ridiculous.


We don't need a world with this many severe sufferings to learn. In fact, so many of them actually go far beyond the point of being instructive. As I said before, this is a world where people put the barrels of shotguns into their mouths and pull the trigger. There isn't a lesson, and few things in life are set up where any meaning can actually be found but rather where people usually just invent a meaning.

What is the lesson from a mother who rapes her long-lost son? What is the lesson from being shoved into a camp where most of your friends and family are killed? What is the lesson from a long-standing feud where people turn themselves into weapons? What is the lesson from the score of rapes from war? What is the lesson from a suicide cult, where people's lives are hijacked to serve a madman's desires? What is the lesson from the other cults? How can objective lessons exist, in the face of disagreement about the content of lessons? To be focused upon a God that everyone has theological disputes about the nature of? To be focused upon a God who would allow all of the evils of the world to exist to fulfill His will? TheOddGoat has somewhat of a point when he claims that such a being, one who would allow all of the evils of the world to exist, would be worse than Hitler. It isn't as if He couldn't do something, to make the babies bullet proof, to strike down the cult leaders when they go too far, to stop on-going feuds, to cause massive freak accidents that stop death camps and attempts to genocide, to step into the minds of the suicidal before they decide to pull the trigger or get the gun, etc.

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 10 Nov 2009, 4:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

What if the almighty creator is just that a creator? and we are making him out to be our protector, we are assuming this god will stop his busy day after creating us, after giving us free will and we still want more? and we assume he is happy for us to be praying to him, instead of us solving our own problems. We should worship him if anything for the live he bestowed upon us, not worshipping him for the fact we want to go to heaven when we die.

That's why religion doesn't work for me, we have it all backwards.

One, who says we have "free will"? It seems to me that the best evidence suggests that the mind works by Newtonian mechanics and is a dispersed neural network, rather than a system with a "free will neuron" that does whatever it wants to.

Secondly, why should we worship God for making us alive? Why not our parents? What if we don't really think that creating life was a great thing?

If a scientist creates some little intelligent robots should they worship him? If the scientist demanded worship from them he might rightly be considered a pretentious, self important ego maniac. If the little robots chose to worship him of their own volition that would be a different matter, but even so I'd expect a level headed scientist to dissuade such behaviour.

I agree. The very notion of "free will" is nonsense if the concept and what it actually implies is looked at.

Great, so bad choice of words? instead of free will what about consciousness? The ability to think for ourselves is what I meant I didn't think the term free will would be contested.

I don't worship god personally, I would think it would be more rational to worship what he has given instead of what we are going to get. Why would I worship my parents, they were part of the same cycle of creation, no? If you don't think life is that great, good for you, you can see theres more to this mystery of existence then our short period on our earth. But if you think this is it, than why wouldn't you feel life is a gereat thing?

Aw, I was just going to suggest garden rakes.

Well, I am making this point partially in response to a free will defense.


Well, um... honestly I would think it would be more rational to worship in a relationship, which is not based upon past action or future action but rather present action. Sort of like you obey a king who continues to defend you against assault.

Your parents literally created you. You grew in your mother's womb. I can't think of a more literal act of creating a person that exists.

Umm.... I am confused by your confusion. "If you don't think life is that great, good for you, you can see theres more to this mystery of existence then our short period on our earth. But if you think this is it, than why wouldn't you feel life is a gereat thing?"

Your thought patterns do not follow to me, you are making implicit assumptions that I am not familiar with and I have difficulty tracking them down.

1) I do not think life is great
2) ???
3) Therefore I think that there is more than life on earth.

I would suppose that 2 would be the following two propositions
2) Life is very good
3) Greatness is a matter of comparison
Leading to 4
4) Life is not good compared to what is beyond life.

Which implies that something beyond life exists.

The issue is that one can reject premise 2 without problem. If life is very good, then why do people consider suicide? Either the suicidal are deeply irrational, or life is not very good. There is little reason to believe that the suicidal are just deeply irrational, and some groups that have admired suicide, such as the Stoics were very rationalistic.

I don't see how rejecting the premise "Life is very good" is hard to understand.

Not so. His inability to contradict Himself is a matter of character, not potency.



No, not unless He told someone to do it.

Ok, let us phrase it this way:

1) Beings are responsible for the forseeable results of their actions.
2) God is omniscient, therefore he knows all results.
3) God's action is the basis of all things that occur
4) All of the evils in the universe are foreknown results from God's action(s) (from 2 & 3)
5) Therefore God is responsible for all evils. (from 1 & 4)

Point 5 is insufficient in itself for establishing the veracity of the problem of evil though. So, let us go further.

6) A world with less evil and no loss in goodness is possible.
7) Therefore God is responsible for gratuitous evil (from 1, 2, 3, and 6)
8 ) Good beings do not cause gratuitous evil.
9) Therefore God is not good. (from 7 & 8 )
10) God is defined as good.
11) Therefore God does not exist (from 9 & 10)

Now, I think premise 1 is acceptable. 2 & 3 seem hard to contest. I expect that 6 is the point that would be most contested. The big issue is that in order to disprove 6, one must prove that all evils in the world are necessary to a particular end. And in order to shed doubt on 6, one must show that there is good reason to think that a large number of evils are necessary to a particular end. The big issue is that even the free will defense can run into problems here, because one must argue that a world with these problems is likely even with all of the capabilities God has to change the results of a person's choices and mitigate the evils that people can suffer, which given God's omnipotence and omniscience, one could imagine that God could discreetly do things that would protect people from horrible evils in all sorts of ways without getting in the way of free will. The free will to pull the trigger on a gun does not mean it fires, nor does it mean that the target will be killed by the bullet, nor does it mean that the trigger-puller cannot have an unfortunate stroke around that period of time, and the list could go on and on.

As far as I know, God created both good and evil. However, I am not aware of His ever having done anything to cause any man to embrace or become evil.

Did He know some of us nevertheless would? I would say He did.

Does that make Him evil? I would say it does not.

But if He does not exist, then why are we discussing Him?

to both of you. I've always had a problem with the contradictory nature of religions too. During my temporary Catholic years, I never could agree to the idea that my Jewish friends and family members would be going to hell because they had not accepted JC as their lord and savior, even though many of them were amazingly kind and giving human beings. Meanwhile, the child raper in the next town would be given a first class pass to the pearly gates with just a few Hail Mary's and an Our Father. I would often argue this idea to family and religion teachers. I would say "Why must my Jewish friends go to hell even if they are good people?" and they would say something like "oh don't worry, God loves everyone," and I would say "then why should I practice Catholicism?" and they would say "because it is the only true way to God" etc. etc. etc. It was basically some circular avoidance technique typically heard by politicians. Eventually I gained the courage to think for myself and abandoned religion altogether. Things make a lot more sense now.