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You forgot the actual Epicurean belief. God(s) exist but they don’t give a fuuuuuuuuuck.
Epicurus was the first deist.
Really more an atheist.
Don’t forget that not long before him Socrates was murdered by the state on the charge of impiety.
Plato in Timeaus refuses to even entertain a rejection of intelligent design “because it’s impious.”
By the time of Lucretius, Epicureanism is very much rejecting intelligent design but does so while acknowledging the existence of the gods, despite having effectively completely removed them from the picture.
It may have been too dangerous to outright say what was on their minds, but the Epicurean cosmology does not depend on the existence of gods at all, and you even see things like eventually Epicurus’s name becoming synonymous with atheism in Judea.
He is probably best described as a closeted atheist at a time when being one openly was still too dangerous.
wouldn’t that be more like an agnostic than an atheist?
since atheist believes that gods don’t exist
since atheist believes that gods don’t exist
This is a common misconception.
Theist is someone who believes God(s) exist(s).
An atheist is someone who does not believe God exists. They don’t need to have a positive belief of nonexistence of God.
Much like how a gnostic is someone who believes there is knowledge of the topic.
And an agnostic is someone who believes either they don’t have that knowledge or that the knowledge doesn’t exist.
So you could be an agnostic atheist (“I don’t know and I don’t believe either way in the absence of knowledge”) or an agnostic atheist (“I don’t know but I believe anyways”) or a gnostic atheist (“I know that they don’t and because I know I don’t believe”) or a gnostic theist (“I know they do and I believe because I know”).
Epicurus would have been an Agnostic atheist if we were categorizing. They ended up right about so much because they were so committed to not ruling anything out. They even propose that there might be different rules for different versions of parallel universes (they thought both time and matter were infinite so there were infinite worlds). It’s entirely plausible he would have argued for both the existence and nonexistence of gods in different variations of existence given how committed they were to this notion of not ruling anything out.
But it’s pretty clear from the collection of his beliefs that the notion of a god as either creator or overseer of this universe was not actively believed in outside of the lip service that essentially “yeah, sure, there’s gods in between the fabric of existence, but not in it.”
The Epicurean philosophy itself was very focused on the idea that the very notion of gods was making everyone sick, and that they offered their ‘cure’ for people to stop giving a crap about what gods might think or do.
Your second one is a typo “I don’t know but I believe” should be an agnostic thiest.
Thanks for the heads up! Fixed
I see, I have no more knowledge to improve this conversation, but thanks for sharing
Based on the anecdote of Socrates and the Pythia, that makes you one of the wisest people in this conversation.
It may have been too dangerous to outright say what was on their minds,
That alone has held back a lot of progres throughout the centuries.
It still does today, too.
“God works in mysterious ways”
The cope that always comes across when I hear this is intesne
imo every religion ever is a cope. All of those elaborate ideas about supernatural beings and alternate planes of existence to somehow cope with the fact that one day the good man, and the evil man, will both die and rot just the same.
It feels incredibly unjust for good men to die the same way evil men do, and for a lot of people that’s too much to handle. We as humans have such a strong sense of “fairness” that we attempted to structure our entire society around the idea of justice for all, and so by comparison nature feels cruel and unfair, you can either learn to live with that, or tell yourself really really hard that it’s not the end :) after they die the good man will be happy! and the evil man will get the punishment he deserves!
now layer that with milenia of different ideas about what qualifies you as “good” and “evil” and you’ve got religion.
This is my personal opinion, and honestly I don’t mind nor care how the other person deals with their existential dread, as long as they aren’t bigots about their way of coping.
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If there is a ‘god’ then they are a fucking asshole.
“If there is a god, he must ask me forgiveness.”
-Scrawled on the walls of a Nazi concentration camp cell
All religion is not about logic or reason, rather it is about identity. You can join a club for scale model trains, and you can join it for the only reason that you want to and because you enjoy it. You then identify as a member of the train club. It becomes part of your identity.
Religion is similar except it adds a dogma and doctrine that defines your entire world view. To lose this world view is to lose your identity. People would rather die than lose their identity because psychologically one’s identity is synonymous with their life.
The only way a person will lose religion is if they have decided for themself that it’s time for change. Much like an addict, it a personal identity change. You have to say to yourself, I am no longer an alcoholic or I am no longer a Mormon. There is no amount of convincing, rationality, evidence or influence that can change a person until they are ready and willing. It’s transformative and traumatic. You just have to accept those who are lost to it.
Maybe God is studying ethics, and we are his show and tell assignment.
Or we’re in a microverse powering his spaceship.
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You’re just being silly now
To nibble further at the arguments for God: free will is absurd.
If god is all knowing and all powerful, then when he created the universe, he would know exactly what happened from the first moment until the last. Like setting up an extremely complex arrangement of dominoes.
So how could he give people free will? Maybe he created some kind of special domino that sometimes falls leftward and sometimes falls rightward, so now it has “free will”. Ok, but isn’t that just randomness? God’s great innovation is just chance?
No, one might argue, free will isn’t chance, it’s more complex than that, a person makes decisions based on their moral principles, their life experience, etc. Well where did they get their principles? What circumstances created their life experience? Conditions don’t appear out of nowhere. We get our DNA from somewhere. Either God controls the starting conditions and knows where they lead, or he covered his eyes and threw some dice. In either case we can say “yes, I have free will” in the sense that we do what we want, but the origins of our decisions are either predetermined or subject to chaos/chance.
A good read on the inverse of what you’re stating, namely that free will is logical:
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTaoist.html
Got to be honest, I started reading that, saw how long it was and stopped. Would you want to share the gist?
It’s a long read and worth it, because it beautifully explores the theme.
But these are two quotes that summarize the main though:
God: Why, the idea that I could possibly have created you without free will [is a fallacy]! You acted as if this were a genuine possibility, and wondered why I did not choose it! It never occurred to you that a sentient being without free will is no more conceivable than a physical object which exerts no gravitational attraction. (There is, incidentally, more analogy than you realize between a physical object exerting gravitational attraction and a sentient being exerting free will!) Can you honestly even imagine a conscious being without free will? What on earth could it be like?
And
Don’t you see that the so-called “laws of nature” are nothing more than a description of how in fact you and other beings do act? They are merely a description of how you act, not a prescription of of how you should act, not a power or force which compels or determines your acts. To be valid a law of nature must take into account how in fact you do act, or, if you like, how you choose to act.
Thanks for sharing.
I don’t think the excerpt you provided addresses the points I was making. What do we mean by free will? Presumably it’s the idea that a person is able to make their own choices, and they’re not being controlled by some external force.
On the one hand, yes, I can imagine a conscious being without free will - imagine a scientist could disconnect the nerves that control your body and replace them with a remote control, but the nerves which provide sensation stay - someone else is driving the car, but you still see and hear what’s going on.
But that’s not what I mean when I say free will is absurd. I mean the idea that we could act without reference to our past experiences, conversations, physical circumstance, DNA, isn’t plausible. Yes, I like to eat fruit loops for breakfast! They taste good and I enjoy the sensation. I have “free will” to eat gravel instead, but I don’t.
In the normal mundane world that’s fine - we can say we have free will. In the case where we argue that an all knowing and all powerful God exists that’s an issue. Because God knows every possible force and prior circumstance that will act on us, and he put those forces into motion. So such a God would have decided for us what will happen.
The following two are more relevant quotes to your points:
Mortal: Well, are my acts determined by the laws of nature or aren’t they?
God: The word determined here is subtly but powerfully misleading and has contributed so much to the confusions of the free will versus determinism controversies. Your acts are certainly in accordance with the laws of nature, but to say they are determined by the laws of nature creates a totally misleading psychological image which is that your will could somehow be in conflict with the laws of nature and that the latter is somehow more powerful than you, and could “determine” your acts whether you liked it or not. But it is simply impossible for your will to ever conflict with natural law. You and natural law are really one and the same.
Mortal: What do you mean that I cannot conflict with nature? Suppose I were to become very stubborn, and I determined not to obey the laws of nature. What could stop me? If I became sufficiently stubborn even you could not stop me!
God: You are absolutely right! I certainly could not stop you. Nothing could stop you. But there is no need to stop you, because you could not even start! As Goethe very beautifully expressed it, “In trying to oppose Nature, we are, in the very process of doing so, acting according to the laws of nature!” Don’t you see that the so-called “laws of nature” are nothing more than a description of how in fact you and other beings do act? They are merely a description of how you act, not a prescription of of how you should act, not a power or force which compels or determines your acts. To be valid a law of nature must take into account how in fact you do act, or, if you like, how you choose to act.
So the free will isn’t as tied to non-determism as we like to think. This leads us to a false dichotomy. And you will have read correctly that Smullyan doesn’t see the ‘God’ as all-powerful but rather more all-enveloping, the God isn’t detached from the person as he’s thinking. Also that the god image of the percieved Judeo-Christian faiths are a bit different than the God in a taoïst understanding (which Smullyan adheres to and thinks of as a more logical deistich model.
His main point is about the misunderstanding of determinsm, as in the following passage:
God: It is interesting that you have twice now used the phrase “determined to act” instead of “chosen to act.” This identification is quite common. Often one uses the statement “I am determined to do this” synonymously with “I have chosen to do this.” This very psychological identification should reveal that determinism and choice are much closer than they might appear. Of course, you might well say that the doctrine of free will says that it is you who are doing the determining, whereas the doctrine of determinism appears to say that your acts are determined by something apparently outside you. But the confusion is largely caused by your bifurcation of reality into the “you” and the “not you.” Really now, just where do you leave off and the rest of the universe begin? Or where does the rest of the universe leave off and you begin? Once you can see the so-called “you” and the so-called “nature” as a continuous whole, then you can never again be bothered by such questions as whether it is you who are controlling nature or nature who is controlling you. Thus the muddle of free will versus determinism will vanish. If I may use a crude analogy, imagine two bodies moving toward each other by virtue of gravitational attraction. Each body, if sentient, might wonder whether it is he or the other fellow who is exerting the “force.” In a way it is both, in a way it is neither. It is best to say that it is the configuration of the two which is crucial.
That was an excellent read, thank you!
You’re welcome!
You see, shit like this is why I think some of the Eastern philosophers like Xunzi hit the mark on what “God” is: God is not a sentient being, God does not have a conscious mind like we do, God simply is.
Of course, those people didn’t call this higher being the God, they called it “Heaven”, but I think it’s really referring to the natural flow of the world, something that is not controlled by us. Maybe the closest equivalent to this concept in the non-Eastern world is “Luck” – people rarely assign “being lucky” to the actions of <insert deity here>, it simply happens by the flow of this world, it is not the action of an all-knowing, all-powerful deity. But like I said, it’s merely the closest approximation of the Heaven concept I can think of.
The side effect coming out of this revelation is that, you can’t blame the Heaven for your own misfortunes. The Heaven is not a sentient being after all!
This is always bizarre because “evil exists” is taken as a given and I don’t think it does. Evil is just a judgment call made by humans about the intentional and uncoerced actions of other humans; nothing less volitional than that can be argued as evil.
You can simply replace evil with suffering, or ig a christian context might say sin? The point is the paradox is a structure, if any choice of word makes it work, then it works.
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whoa
relevant username!
Objectivity can by your own logic be subjective as it is a judgment about a concept made by the condition of general consensus. Have fun word smithing your way out of any conceptual discomfort or useful conveyance of thought related to the human condition.
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Evil is just a judgment call made by humans about the intentional and uncoerced actions of other humans
Cancer is not an intentional and uncoerced action of other humans.
Earthquakes and tsunamis are not intentional and uncoerced actions of other humans.
If an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god existed, there would be no justification for these.
This guide lacks the branch where people’s sense of good and evil differs from the God’s one.
So wait the argument is that yes, by human definition, God is evil, but that he thinks all the atrocities in the world are totally awesome? That doesn’t make him less evil
More like, on the scale of mortal vs god, the things that are important to us either aren’t important to god(s) or may be so insignificant to be actually imperceptible.
As a thought experiment, say you get an ant farm. You care for these ants, provide them food and light, and generally want to see them succeed and scurry around and do their little ant things. One of the ants gets ant-cancer and dies. You have no idea that it happened. Some of the eggs don’t hatch. You notice this, but can’t really do anything about it. So on, and so forth. Now - think about every single other ant you’ve passed by or even stepped on without even noticing during your last day outside the house. And think about what those ants might think of you, if they could.
Now an argument that a god is omniscient and all powerful would slip through the cracks of this because an omniscient god WOULD know that one of their ants had ant-cancer and an all-powerful one would be able to fix it. But the sheer difference in breadth of existence between mortal and god may mean that such small things are beneath their attention. Or maybe he really does see all things at all times simultaneously down to minute detail. We don’t know. It is fundamentally unknowable to mortals. Our scales of ethics are incomparable.
We also don’t know if the ethical alignment of a god leans toward balance rather than good. It would make sense, in a way, if it did. Things that seem evil to us are in fact evil, but necessary in pursuit of greater harmony. Or in fact even necessary to the very function of the universe from a metaphysical perspective. If we assume the existence of a god for this argument it leads to having to assume an awful lot more things that we can’t really prove or test one way or the other. But one thing that seems pretty self evident is that the specific workings of a god are fundamentally unknowable to mortals specifically because we are not gods. We don’t have a perspective in which we can observe it so any argument made in any direction about it is pretty much purely conjecture by necessity.
Wut?
You keep repeating that the “scale of ethics” is incomparable but flip flop between “theyre not omnicient or omnipotent”… “but maybe they are”
And what does “balance” have to do with ethical behaviour without you begging the question.
“If we assume the existence of god, we have to assume a lot of other things too” and…???
Ultimately you spent a lot of time stating the cop-out argument of “its beyond us mere mortals”. To which I can fairly respond… no.
To which I can fairly respond… no.
You can’t, though. Or, well, you can say it all you want but that doesn’t make it true. I’m pretty certain that cats and dogs and bugs also think they’ve got humans figured out and I guarantee you they definitely, definitely don’t, because it’s physiologically impossible for them to understand. They’re just not equipped for it. Just like mortals wouldn’t be equipped to understand the perspective of an immortal, all-encompassing being, it’s impossible for you to accurately place yourself in that perspective.
The ant farm thing was a little hamfisted but I think the analogy still stands for the purpose I introduced it for.
And what does “balance” have to do with ethical behaviour without you begging the question.
It is a possible explanation for the existence of evil. As in, the post we’re arguing in the comments of right now. Nowhere in there did I ever say “this is the way things are”, only “this is a possible explanation for a question we cannot definitively answer”.
If we assume the existence of god, we have to assume a lot of other things too" and…???
Please explain what part of that doesn’t make sense.
This is all theoretical anyway, if a god existed your understanding of them would be limited to whatever they decide you’re able to understand of them anyway, so the argument is largely academic regardless of feelings or underlying truth. The point I was trying to make here is that the difference in the sheer scale of existence between a mortal and a god is such that we may be as ants to them. We possibly could not understand them no matter how hard we try - we’re just not biologically equipped for it - and some things that we consider important may be so unimportant as to never even get noticed by a god. But none of this is provable or even falsifiable so it’s all a thought experiment anyway.
Ants are a bad example though as ants lack the physical capabilities to feel emotions, they don’t have self awareness and may not even be able to feel pain. Also we didn’t create ants and their properties.
It’s an analogy, not an example. We are significantly further from a theoretical, all powerful, all knowing god than we are from ants. The scale of sentience from “inanimate object” to “all powerful god” is likely to have us mistaken for inanimate object. So the analogy serves its purpose, but of course the specifics are different.
The analogy is not good then. If we are talking about the Christian god, it is specifically told that he created humans and their properties. That is equivalent to us creating our own species of ants through genetic manipulation. Ants that feel pain and sorrow, plan for the future, form meaningful bonds with each other, make art and so on. Then we also (on purpose !) make it so some of them are depressed enough to kill themselves because they can’t take the pain anymore. Make some die of cancer in a week-long, painful battle.
No ethics commission would ever let that experiment pass. Either god has nothing to do with the christian one or doesn’t exist.
The problem my agnostic ass meets with good ol’ Epi is the disingenuousness inherent in assuming “Godly” rationale to “human logic” semantics. My dude, people can’t agree on human meaning and I’m supposed to make assumptions on God?
Why test if It knows the result of the test?
Geez Epic Manster, I know they didn’t have spring mattresses in your day but the mattress factory also knows the result my mattress should have gotten at testing but tested it anyways…because the testing provides the necessary shape.
I still maintain my agnosticism and keep my two extremes whenever I don’t feel like just being sure it’s all bullshit anyways:
If God exists, it doesn’t care for our suffering for reasons wholly beyond us (like a greater suffering of its own and why not, it’s shit all the way down).
God exists, cares, is a bit sad, but we’re all fucking mattresses where the cosmos is gonna poke, prod, and simulate fucking atop of us until we reach the appropriate factory required settings.
I already had coffee tho, so the middle atheist ground is in effect; none of it real, nothing matters except trying to not be total cockwaffles so everyone else can enjoy their nihilism too.
The problem my agnostic ass meets with good ol’ Epi is the disingenuousness inherent in assuming “Godly” rationale to “human logic” semantics. My dude, people can’t agree on human meaning and I’m supposed to make assumptions on God?
I think the idea here is that this deity being perfect would give some sort of absolute underpinning to the universe, having been designed by an intelligent mind. If it’s made in this systemic way, even if we don’t currently comprehend it properly, given enough time, we should be able to figure out at least some of the rules, providing insight into the nature of things and the mind of the universe’s creator.
I know they didn’t have spring mattresses in your day but the mattress factory also knows the result my mattress should have gotten at testing but tested it anyways…because the testing provides the necessary shape.
The mattress factory isn’t claiming their process is infallible, though, and they have QC exactly because they admit this and don’t want a factory defect to get out to customers. That’s a big difference from the omnipotent, omniscient deity being spoken of in the paradox here.
God having different morals makes a lot of sense. If you’re a super being that knows most people are going to end up eternally in a pleasurable afterlife at the end of the day, what’s a little temporary suffering while we meet?
Just saying, going to work isn’t so bad when I know I get to go home, maybe a grab a pizza with the money I earned on the way back.
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I actually don’t know, it was something I was just throwing out there.
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I already had coffee tho, so the middle atheist ground is in effect; none of it [is] real, nothing matters except trying to not be total cockwaffles so everyone else can enjoy their nihilism too.
This might just be the most British summation of my own beliefs I’ve ever read.
The bad execution of the flow chart was bothering me enough to create a cleaner version.
Is there actually “free will” without evil?
why not? you can choose to eat a banana or an apple, both perfectly non evil
I will die on a hill that says a banana is more good than an apple.
Making the apple relatively more evil on the scale from good to evil.
Others may prefer an apple. But I guess that is their free will to choose so 😉
I mean there was that whole ‘garden of eden’ thing with the apples…
Wasn’t the forbidden fruit in the garden of eden originally a fig or date or olive or something? It was changed to apple in the later translations. Something like that .
I thought it was a pomegranate
I’m allergic to bananas. But I’m pretty wicked so this tracks.
The free will is more about choosing to follow god or not. So if everything god does is good and everything they want you to do is good, you have no choice but to do those things. So you live in a perfect world but are a puppet.
An all-powerful god wouldn’t be affected by such logic. They could have changed the rules to allow for free will without evil.
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You have proof there is no God?
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By your logic, I could say there is no gravity, just an infinite number of invisible angles pushing things down.
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You asserted that there was no God.
You’re unable to prove your claim.
Now you’re resorting to an ad hominem attack.
You have a right to say you don’t believe in God, but no way to prove it.
And here’s a list of ad hominem attacks, so you can improve your logic.
Six hours later: resorts to ad hominem attacks when he can’t defend his argument. The hypocrisy is off the scales!
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The solution I have heard before that I thought was the most interesting would add another arrow to the “Then why didn’t he?” box at the bottom:
Because he wants his creation to be more like him.
He’s just a lonely guy. He made the angels but they’re so boring and predictable. They all kowtow to him and have no capacity for evil (except for that one time). Humans have the capacity for both good and evil, they don’t constantly feel his presence, and they’re so much more interesting! They make choices that are neither directly in support of or opposition to himself. Most of the time, their decisions have nothing to do with him at all!
Humans have the capacity to be more like God than any of his other creations.
That would fall under the “then God is not good/not all loving”. You described it as if it were a privilege, but the capacity of evil causes indescribable suffering to us and to innocent beings such as small children and animals. If God lets all of this happen just because he wants some replicas of himself or because he thinks it is such a gift to be like him despite it, he’s an egotistical god.
Also, if he gets bored of pure goodness, blissfulness, and perfection, then it was never pure goodness, blissfulness, and perfection for him. Those things, by definition, provide eternal satisfaction. So he either never created that (evil branch again) or he cannot achieve those states even if we wanted to. If he cannot achieve those states even if he wanted to, if he lacks enjoyment and entertainment and has to spice his creation from time to time, then he’s not all powerful.
Also, many people argue the necessity of evil as a requisite for freedom. If God needs to allow evil so we can be free, then he’s bound to that rule (and/or others): not all powerful.
[slow, earnest clap]
If humans aren’t predictable to this god, then that god isn’t all-knowing.
Would they have been predictable had they never been created? Is conceptualizing an entire universe the same as actually creating the entire universe so it can play out?
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Didn’t Epicurus live before Christianity was a thing?
In my quick searching, I can’t find much info on it. It seems that he made it in response to the idea that there were Greek gods that were concerned with humanity’s wellbeing and actively took a positive part in our existence. His ideas don’t apply to one religion or even try to say that there is no god, rather he is just saying that the gods are too busy / unconcerned with humanity’s wellbeing which was not the common view of the period.
Sounds more like he’s deist or agnostic rather than what the guide implies.
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