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Sure, a deity could believe that children dying from painful diseases is righteous and good: perhaps it finds it entertaining, and it believes the greatest good

Sure, a deity could believe that children dying from painful diseases is righteous and good: perhaps it finds it entertaining, and it believes the greatest good is its own amusement. That's a good argument for atheism. Because if such a god is real, we're in a waking nightmare we'd best bury our collective heads about, for our psychological wellbeing.

breuleux 5y ago
I don't think it's necessarily as sinister as that. Perhaps God is simply an engineer who loves designing systems that straddle the line between order and chaos and believes that the laws of physics are supremely perfect and anything that proceeds from these laws is good. Perhaps they find the process of evolution breathtaking beautiful, and the cruelty of natural selection is lost on them. Perhaps they can't understand or relate to our experience any better than we can understand the experience of an ant. It is entirely pointless to worship such a God, but I wouldn't say it's a nightmare that it exists.
- exo-pla-net 5y ago
  You'd have to impose a lot of conditions on such a god to make it not nightmarish. Without a god, we control our own destiny. A lot of things are currently awful, but with enough human ingenuity, we can overcome them. On the other hand, if our fate is determined by a god driven by its own motives, we have lost control of our destinies to something that evidently doesn't care about us. We would be ants on the back of a whale that might decide to dive at any moment, doomed perhaps to see our loved ones swirl away screaming into the watery void, on whale's whim, pointless.
  - breuleux 5y ago
    I mean, a god might say that any destiny you choose is good, because it would proceed from the laws of physics, but you could still choose what it is. Personally I don't think it's worth caring about, just like it isn't worth thinking about how our universe might be a bubble in a greater universe that's just about to pop and destroy us all in an instant ;)
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  Another attempt to let God off the hook is to say that God is omniscient in the sense that God knows everything that happens in the universe at the present time, but not what will happen in the future because God has created the universe such that there is non-determinancy in it.. God winds up the universe as it were (ie. creates the "laws" of physics, starts up the Big Bang, etc) and lets it run, without knowledge of the ultimate outcome or even everything in the next moment. Then, in some theologies, God withdraws. One could question what kind of God is one that would let the universe run like this and not interfere to, say, save the innocent from harm? Or what kind of God would withdraw from the world? There's a lot of theological hand-wrining about such questions. Another attempt is that of the Gnostics, who thought that the ultimate, perfect God did not create the world. Instead there were a great number of intermediate beings or gods that emanated from the ultimate God, each lesser and more imperfect than the last, and it was the lowest and most imperfect of these (the demiurge) which created the world, in ignorance, madness, or stupidity. Thus the blame for suffering is shifted on to this ignorant/mad/stupid god instead of the ultimate, perfect God. Despite such efforts, of course, there remains the question why any imperfection would or even could come from the ultimate, perfect God in the first place.
foobiekr 5y ago
Funny. Wathammer 40000 actually sort of follows this logic in the atheist 30k era. The problem is the evil gods find a way to make themselves evident.

breuleux 5y ago

I don't think it's necessarily as sinister as that. Perhaps God is simply an engineer who loves designing systems that straddle the line between order and chaos and believes that the laws of physics are supremely perfect and anything that proceeds from these laws is good. Perhaps they find the process of evolution breathtaking beautiful, and the cruelty of natural selection is lost on them. Perhaps they can't understand or relate to our experience any better than we can understand the experience of an ant. It is entirely pointless to worship such a God, but I wouldn't say it's a nightmare that it exists.

exo-pla-net 5y ago
You'd have to impose a lot of conditions on such a god to make it not nightmarish. Without a god, we control our own destiny. A lot of things are currently awful, but with enough human ingenuity, we can overcome them. On the other hand, if our fate is determined by a god driven by its own motives, we have lost control of our destinies to something that evidently doesn't care about us. We would be ants on the back of a whale that might decide to dive at any moment, doomed perhaps to see our loved ones swirl away screaming into the watery void, on whale's whim, pointless.
- breuleux 5y ago
  I mean, a god might say that any destiny you choose is good, because it would proceed from the laws of physics, but you could still choose what it is. Personally I don't think it's worth caring about, just like it isn't worth thinking about how our universe might be a bubble in a greater universe that's just about to pop and destroy us all in an instant ;)
pmoriarty 5y ago
Another attempt to let God off the hook is to say that God is omniscient in the sense that God knows everything that happens in the universe at the present time, but not what will happen in the future because God has created the universe such that there is non-determinancy in it.. God winds up the universe as it were (ie. creates the "laws" of physics, starts up the Big Bang, etc) and lets it run, without knowledge of the ultimate outcome or even everything in the next moment. Then, in some theologies, God withdraws. One could question what kind of God is one that would let the universe run like this and not interfere to, say, save the innocent from harm? Or what kind of God would withdraw from the world? There's a lot of theological hand-wrining about such questions. Another attempt is that of the Gnostics, who thought that the ultimate, perfect God did not create the world. Instead there were a great number of intermediate beings or gods that emanated from the ultimate God, each lesser and more imperfect than the last, and it was the lowest and most imperfect of these (the demiurge) which created the world, in ignorance, madness, or stupidity. Thus the blame for suffering is shifted on to this ignorant/mad/stupid god instead of the ultimate, perfect God. Despite such efforts, of course, there remains the question why any imperfection would or even could come from the ultimate, perfect God in the first place.

foobiekr 5y ago

Funny. Wathammer 40000 actually sort of follows this logic in the atheist 30k era. The problem is the evil gods find a way to make themselves evident.