Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense Regarding The Problem Of Evil:

I disagree that genocide ceases to be genocide because you feel you have moral justification for said genocide. If Jews truly were evil at their core, that may have justified (at least to some) the holocaust, but it would still be genocide. Same goes for the biblical flood story. God intended to kill all humans except for one family. It doesn't matter what his reasons were or if he felt entitled or otherwise justified. Its still genocide by definition.

I don't see why restrict the focus like that. We can include the adults and the children. We can also include all the animals that were needlessly killed by God in this story who don't even get a mention.

There was no global flood. But in the fiction as written in the Bible it is explicitly God's doing.

I disagree with this. You could use that same logic to claim that if anything in the bible is fact, then all of it is fact. And you can apply that same logic to any story that mixes fact and fiction to show it isn't sound logic.

We don't. At least I don't. I am analyzing a fictional story and a character within it.

What were these people doing all of the time that was so wicked? Homosexuality? Worshiping the wrong god? Eating shell fish? The bible lists many thing as wicked that to me clearly are not wicked. And to justify killing people, I'd want a lot more than just a declaration that they are wicked by the person who is killing them. Most who engage in genocide think they are justified in doing it.

You did mention "murderous". By this do you mean they were all killing each other? If they were then society would have collapsed and few of them would be alive. They'd run out of people to kill, so they would have to stop killing. And even then, even if they were murderous, God would be doubly so. None of these people killed EVERYONE else, the way that God did in this flood (except Noah's family). You'd be judging these people with a totally different standard than you'd be judging God.

Add to that the claim that God is all-knowing, and would have known full well that this situation would take place when he created life in the first place. Does the good outweigh the bad in this situation? Evidently not, because God sees fit to kill everything. It almost looks like an oops, lets try again to me. And an all-knowing being should have known better than to have created life the way he created it in the first place if he knew this would be the result.

If parents bring harm upon their children, then YES, they are morally culpable for it. But that doesn't absolve others who are not the parents for the harm that those others do to those same children, ESPECIALLY if they are all powerful and could punish the parents without harming the children.

Mothers are not omnipotent. And the harm resulting from them using harmful illegal drugs during pregnancy is them doing so and not somebody else doing so.
If somebody else drugs the mother with those drugs without her knowledge or without her agreement, then isn't that other person responsible?
If that other person knows the mother is pregnant and convinces the mother to take those drugs, isn't that other person also responsible for the harm done to the baby? Is it all on the mother?
I think you could justify a wide variety of evil under this faulty logic. And Christians realize this when the devil is blamed for anything humans do with his encouragement.

It doesn't say anywhere in this bible story that these mothers asked God to drown them and kill their children. It doesn't say any of them had any idea that this would happen either. God had to explictly tell Noah, or even he would not have known the flood was coming and to build the ark.

God is supposed to be omnipotent. He can't punish the mother without killing her children? You've got serious flaw in logic here.

Not all of them did. There were many who opposed Hitler and the Nazis from the very start.

There is a problem in war in that if you bomb the enemy with the intent of crippling their military or their political leaders who made war on you, you also will have some "collateral damage", meaning some innocents will die along with them. That is because human soldiers and militaries are not omnipotent in the way that God is claimed to be.

And it would be wrong during WW2 for an allied soldier to see a German infant in her crib and shoot her dead, would it not? Or do you find that okay?

I find it disturbing overall here that you are seeking to justify genocide. What can't you justify by saying "God wanted it"? Is there anything you would refuse to do if you believed God wished you to do it? Are you aware that Nazi soldiers had "Got Mit Uns" enscribed on their belt buckles, meaning "God is with us"? Religion has long been used by evil opportunistic men as a tool to override people's internal senses of morality. That is one of the uglier sides of religion. Thankfully the opposite can also happen, wherein thoughts of or the words of Jesus can encourage people to do good.

 

This may be the most recurring theme in the Bible, the idea that obedience to God trumps morality. The bible pushes this confusion of obedience to power for morality over an over again.

You can see it in the story of Adam and Eve, wherein they are punished for disobeying God in the very act of eating of the fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Before they ate of that fruit, apparently they didn't have any concept of right and wrong, and for some reason God didn't want them to, but instead demanded they obey him and disobedience to him was in and of itself the "original sin".

You can see it in the ten commandments, the first and foremost being "Thou shalt have no gods before me". In fact half of the ten commandments are not about morality itself, but about obedience.

You can see it in the story of Abraham and Isaac, in which God puts a man's love for his son directly in competition with obedience to God, as God tells Abe to kill his son. Abraham obeys and is ready to do it before God tells him he passed the test and spares the son. A moral ending to this story would have been Abe standing up to God and saying "NO! It would be wrong for me to kill my son" and God then saying he passed the test in standing up to an evil request from an authority figure. God would then be a moral guide instead of a tyrant in this particular story.

You can see it throughout the Book of Judges over and over again.

You can see it in the oft repeated mantra of "faith over works". Its not good deeds that get you into heaven, but faith in God, and in the sacrifice of Jesus. You have to celebrate the torture and death of an innocent and perfect (so they claim) man, and then your own sins, including ones you inherited from your ancestors (itself an immoral idea). You won't be held responsible in the afterlife for your horrible misdeeds so long as you accept somebody else being sacrificed in your place. That's not just a total avoidance of personal responsibility, but downright evil I say.

In fact, turn to any random place in the Bible and I bet you can find the obedience trumping morality message being pushed within five or six pages. It could be argued that it is the core message of Christianity. It is the core message of Islam as well. Perhaps that is why these two religions have spread so well and been kept in places of power. It is useful to those in power to convince the masses that obedience to power is a virtue.

But I say it isn't moral to subject your will to another because they demand it and hold great power. It isn't moral to subdue your own feelings of what is right and wrong and defer it to the powerful because they demand it and threaten or bribe you, be those threats/bribes eternal or not. It isn't moral to "just follow orders" to do evil. And it isn't an excuse either.

 

Wait. What? Why? You can't think of any arguments that explain natural disasters other than the one you presented? I can think of many.

Perhaps there is no God and natural disasters are simply the result of geological activity etc, and the victims of these disasters are not deserving of their fates, but are simply unlucky? Perhaps religions try to explain them in an attempt to make the world seem more fair than it is?

Or perhaps God causes these natural disasters because he enjoys watching humans suffer? The Evil God hypothesis makes just as much sense to me as the Good God hypothesis. Why do you prefer one over the other? Even were I to believe in a God, I wouldn't immediately presume that God to be benevolent towards me, and definitely not towards victims of natural disasters.

 

God did not want us to have free will, this is shown by the fact that god didn't want us to eat from the tree of knowledge. Any atheist who points to the bible as to why god doesn't exist is ignoring the possibility that god exists but is NOTHING like she is portrayed in the bible.

 

God could exist. Atheists can't disprove that God exists anymore than they can prove ghosts or faeries don't exist. There are people who believe in each of these. Others don't believe in any of them. You can't disprove them.

The best a non-believer can do while looking at the bible is to analyze it as they would any other fiction, and Bible God is written as doing many evil things, more than Darth Vader or Voldemort.That Bible God is considered by believers to be the hero of the story is pretty shocking to some of us who didn't grow up with that belief.

 

So, if we can show that God's acts as they were described are not actually moral, then it follows that the Bible is not true/reliable. That seems to be exactly the point that atheists are trying to make.

Obviously, anyone who believes that God does not exist does not believe that God is evil. However, we are able to consider the idea that God exists and did the things suggested.

We're talking hypotheticals altogether here, so I don't see a reason to not consider (1) on its own.

Consider the following steps of logic:
1.1: Let's assume God killed innocent people in the flood.
1.2: Avoidably killing innocents is evil (regardless of any other acts you may be committing at the same time)
1.3: Therefore, from 1.1 and 1.2, in that hypothetical, God is evil
2.1: Let's now assume that God killed innocent people in the flood and he was morally justified in doing so
2.2: God was justified in murder, therefore God is not evil
3.1: Let's now assume that God killed innocent people in the flood and he was morally justified in doing so
3.2: Point 3.1 is a subset of the premises in 1.1, so everything in 1.x must still be true.
3.3: Point 3.1 is a subset (well, actually the exact same set) of the premises in 2.1, therefore everything in 2.x must be true
3.4: Point 1.3 is true, so God is evil
3.5: Point 2.2 is true, so God is not evil
3.6: God is evil and not evil. Contradiction. At least one of the premises must not be true.

At least one of the premises must not be true. Atheists tend to choose 1.1 and 2.1. Bible believers must choose 1.2 (or possibly 2.2, but I haven't seen that in practice).

As you can see, 1.x shows that the Bible suggests that God is evil. Points 2.x show that God is good (but can be replaced by any statement about God being good which are plenty). In other words, the point you're making is only a little bit of what the "many atheists" you talk about are saying.

 

If "hypotheticals" only then there is no "We're" involved here
because I will NOT discuss Hypotheticals" only. with you.

Your "We're" means at least 2 people , , , so you will have
to find somebody else to talk with about your
"hypotheticals altogether."

My view is that you do not accept the historical accuracy
of Genesis and so far as I know you may not even believe
the Genesis Flood ever even happened.

You do not believe the Bible is true about what it says
happened in Genesis, but nonetheless you want to
argue about what it says ---you want to argue about
your "hypotheticals altogether."

You do not believe the Bible is true in what it says,
but you want to argue about what it says.

You CAN do that --- but NOT with me

If you discuss your "hypotheticals altogether" you will
discuss them with somebody else and not with JAG
and I will give you my reason why in a nutshell.

Here it is:

If we take any part of the Genesis narrative seriously, we have to take all of it
seriously. Otherwise the Genesis Flood never even happened and you no longer
have a "genocidal moral problem" with God. The only way you know there even
was a Genesis Flood is because Genesis says there was one.

___________________________________________________________

I include parts of my original post below in order to carry over my context.

Here are the takeaway points from my post below: If you
take any part of Genesis to be true, you must take it
all to be true.
{1} God drowned adults and children in the Genesis Flood.
{2} God had moral justification for doing that.
{3} If {2} is not true, then {1} is not true.
{4} Either way, you will have no "genocidal moral problem" with God


A crucial part of the narrative of The Great Flood was the total wickedness
and murderous violence of the people living at the time of The Great Flood.

If we take any part of the Genesis narrative seriously, we have to take all of it
seriously. Otherwise the Genesis Flood never even happened and you no longer
have a "genocidal moral problem" with God. The only way you know there even
was a Genesis Flood is because Genesis says there was one.

So the Genesis narrative says that God did drown all living beings at the time of The
Great Flood. The Genesis narrative ALSO explains WHY God made the decision
to drown them.

Here is why:

"The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become and
that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the
time." Genesis 6:5

"Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence . . .for all
the people of earth had corrupted their ways" Genesis 6:11-12

Note the following from Genesis 6:5 and Genesis 6:11-12
a} man's wickedness had become great in the Earth
b} every inclination of the thoughts of man's heart was ONLY evil
c} and evil ALL the time
d} the Earth had become corrupt in God's sight
e} the Earth was full of violence {we're talking murderous violence here}
f} for ALL the people had corrupted their ways


REPEAT:
We take the narrative that God drowned them seriously and as being historically true.
We then ALSO have to take Genesis 6:5 and Genesis 6:11-12 seriously and as being
historically true. If we do not take the Genesis narrative that God drowned them as
historically true, then you have no "genocidal moral problem" with God. If we also take
Genesis 6:5 and Genesis 6:11-12 as historically true then you have no "moral genocidal
problem" with God --- because these verses present moral justification for the Genesis Flood.

So either way, you will have no "genocidal moral problem" with God.

"The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become and that every
inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time." Genesis 6:5

"Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence . . .for all the people
of earth had corrupted their ways" Genesis 6:11-12

These people were not salvageable.

Total wickedness. Murderous violence.

And both of those all the time, not just some of the time.

____________________________


JAG

 

What else could atheists possibly do regarding the Bible? We either have to ignore it, or address it as a work of fiction, since we don't accept it as truth.

We realize that some of you believe it to be fact, so it does impact us via your actions and beliefs, so they matter to us.

A few posts up you were trying to justify a claimed genocide based on your beliefs from this book. That's fascinating and a bit alarming to me.

You are certainly free to discuss the Bible with whoever you wish, and nobody will force you to discuss it with atheists. But I do note that you didn't write anything in the OP restricting this to Christians, and you explicitly invited me and linked me to this thread after writing you assumed (correctly) that I'm atheist.

 

"We're talking hypotheticals altogether here"___Swensson

Swensson, even though, as I explained up-thread, I will not
discuss your "hypotheticals altogether" --- nonetheless, at
the human level, let me say that I truly appreciate you putting
all that together up there. I know you invested some time and
thought into putting that together and I DO appreciate your
efforts. Thank you.

JAG



``

 

And JAG,

I'll go with whatever interpretation of the Bible that you want. Is the Bible all literal, or are some parts of it metaphorical? If the latter, which parts?

I already noted above that I see a recurring theme in the Bible of obedience to God being equated to morality. Do you disagree? Have I misread it? You didn't answer that, and the quotes you gave, from somebody I presumed you respect, stated that this life is a test to see who obeys God and goes to heaven (rather than doing good and going to heaven), which seems to also be equating obedience with morality. Can you conceive of Good without God? Can atheists do good? Or are we evil by definition because we don't believe in God and therefore don't obey him (how could we if we don't believe he's real?)?

If God told you to, would you kill your children? Would you go to war against a neighbouring tribe if God said to? Would you suffer a witch to live? Would you kill a homosexual for having sex with another? Would you, as the Bible says Job did, endure being tortured by God on a bet with Satan, and still follow and respect God rather than turning against him? Is there anything you would refuse to do if God asked you to do it? Is there anything God could do to you or to anyone else that would make you question if God is benevolent? Could anything God did make you stand against him?

These may sound like harsh questions. But they aren't really. They are genuine and they flow directly from the text of the Bible. Adam & Eve, Noah, Job, the book of Judges and many other stories in that book directly address this.


Edited to add: This having to wait for a moderator to approve my messages is a bit irritating.

 

So what did the rest of life do to piss god off?

 

Why not? Hypotheticals can give us much insight into what is actually true (in particular, it helps us assess how we can know various things are true).

I don't think it is true that we have to take all aspects of it with the same amount of "seriousness" (whatever that means). Consider for instance a murderer in court. He could tell you in detail how the murder went down, and say that he was completely justified in his actions because of some slight offence that the subsequent victim caused. It seems to me it would be reasonable to consider the idea that the details of the murder were true but the moral assertion was not persuasive. It doesn't seem at all reasonable to say that in order to take the details of the murder seriously, we have to take the murderer's assertion of justification seriously.

It seems to me not at all unreasonable that an ancient author wrote down factual events accurately, but added moral judgement onto it in a less believable manner.

Of course, you are right in saying that if we allow for this line of thinking, we end up rejecting God altogether (by the contradiction between an omnibenevolent god who still contains a lot of evil). I don't think that makes the hypothetical impossible.

I mean, it's quite an unclear and definitely debatable understanding of what is a good justification. For instance, as you've mentioned, there will have been children too small to have even been able to commit any "murderous violence", perhaps even to consider the ideas that might make one evil. It is clear that the Bible says it was justified, but it is not clear that that makes it actually so.

It is also quite plausible that an atheists would say that an omnipotent God wiping out all of humanity is plausible or at least conceivable, whereas the idea that it could be good to murder innocent children when they could have been saved is not (and/or that it is equally inconceivable that a newborn child could be as unsalvageable as you claim).

But yes, no atheist actually has a genocidal problem with God. That's why atheists don't take up this issue with God. Instead, they object to people believing the Bible, so they take it up with those who believe the Bible.

 

Sometimes you hear religious folks accusing atheists of "rebelling against God" or "you suppress belief because you don't want to be held accountable for your actions in the afterlife", etc.If that were true of somebody, they wouldn't actually be atheist.

But I wonder how often something like that actually does happen. How many people are there who believe in God and agree with what he wants etc, but turn against him and disobey him? Satanists go against "God" and support "Satan" in rebellion against what they think God represents, but I've yet to meet one who wasn't doing so with "God" and "Satan" as figurative illustrations, and who actually believed God and Satan are real beings.

 

Good question. The bible gives some suggestions elsewhere of what is wicked. Perhaps they masturbated. Perhaps they engaged in homosexual sex or sodomy. Perhaps they wore mixed fibres or ate shell fish. Perhaps they were raped and didn't scream loud enough. Perhaps they beat their slaves longer and harsher than is explicitly allowed for in the BIble. Perhaps they were blasphemers; pagans who worshiped other Gods. Could be many things. Maybe JAG or another Christian will let us know what they think it was.

There's a bit of a problem in trying to justify the flood by claiming that all the humans but Noah and his family were wicked, without defining wicked. Its quite possible that the listener won't share the same moral judgments as the speaker.

 

I explained why not carefully.
Thanks for your efforts.
Best.
JAG

 

Maybe it's because the disobedience to him angers God so God blows up innocent animals and children who had nothing to do with the sin, you know, to blow off steam, like an abusive husband who had a hard day at work and beats his wife.

Or maybe its because God sees no problem punishing one person for something somebody else did. We already know there is the concept of original sin, wherein we are all punished because some lady and man we never met ate a fruit, for example.

 

Follow these steps to understand why there has been so much human suffering throughout history.

1) Free will does not exist, it is an illusion and it is not supported by science. There is no evidence for a soul.

2) The God of Christianity and Judaism does not exist, it is a human creation. It is not supported by science

3) Human behavior is partially determined by genetics and evolution. About 50% of one's personality may be genetically based. Humans share similar behavior traits with chimpanzees..

4) Natural disasters and human caused suffering all have causes that are generally understandable through scientific investigation.