how can a good God create a world iwhere there is suffering

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Asimov

Quote: "God desired all of these events to occur".

Not quite. God can desire a "greater good" for His creatures through their free will choice. Forcing His love upon us is not love at all. It is rape. I do not believe God is a divine rapist. To say that God allowed evil to enter human experience through our free will choice does not demand that He desires it. He can desire to bring about the greatest good through this freedom. By saying this, I do not make God contingent. I am not an open theist. God's knowlage is not determined by the future free will acts of His volitional creatures. All that God "wills" comes to pass without our free wills being infringed upon. This line of reasoning that you posit, once again is a veiled albeit a thinly veiled one, that God is not good. He "could
have done better". You and I may concieve in our own limited finite minds a "better world" which God could have created. Simply because we do not
know a good purpose for all evil, it doesn't necessarily follow that there isn't one. It doesn't disprove God's omnibenevolence. It merely reveals our ignorance.

Quote: "Really? I beat my girlfriend, the only reason I do it is because I love her. Doesn't sound very consistent, does it"?

I expected that kind of ignorant statement from you. It shows clearly what I have thought about your reasoning all along. Your motives are not to understand but accuse God. Try humbily admitting your ignorance of the love of God and stop forcing your atheisitc philosophy upon Him.

Quote: (in respose to where you would be if God chose to end all evil at midnight)
"Wherever he, as someone who can establish any state of affairs that he wants and loves me and wants the greatest good to be established, wants me to be".

He didn't just establish "any state of affairs" did He? He established that "He so loved the world that He gave His One and only begotten Son, that by believing in Him, you Asimov, would not perish".
This my friend is God's desire for you and His way into the best world that is yet to come. Here He will wipe away all our tears. Amen?

[Guest]

Paidion

Quote: "God creating beings which will choose only the good is inherently contradictory and thus incoherent. For if they choose only the good, they are not free to chooe the bad. This means that they are not truly free will agents".

I have a question with this one bro. If your statement is a correct assumption in all cases, is this consistant also for Jesus? He chose only the good. Will our "free will" be consistant for us in Heaven?
To be "free" I agree at least means the ability to make a choice between two alternatives unfettered. Returning to Eden, if Adam would have trusted God, what then would have become of free will? Maybe you would care to elaborate on the issues I raised also in an earlier post to you?

Thanks,
In Jesus
Bob

[Guest]

Returning to Eden, if Adam would have trusted God, what then would have become of free will?

Whether he chose good or evil, he still had a choice. Think of the flip side. Just because some people continually choose evil doesn't mean that God doesn't exist or isn't a valid choice.
D.

[Guest]

Yes, Jesus chose the good in every instance. But He did that out of His own free will, not because He was begotten by the Father in such a way that He could not have chosen otherwise. If that had been the case, then He would not have possessed free will.

Asimov's stance seems to be that God could have created people in such a way that they would always choose the good and yet be free will agents. This is what I believe to be self-contradictory.

I do not believe that the possibility that someone might always freely choose the good, is self-contradictory.

Here is an illustration which might indicate the difference. It's a poor illustration since coins do not possess free will, but let's suppose they do possess "randomness".

Roll a thousand dice. It is unlikely that they will all turn up "6". Nevertheless it is a possiblity. That they all do so is neither self-contradictory, nor a logical impossibility.
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But let's suppoe that someone throws a thousand dice which have been weighted so that they have to turn up "6". This would be analgous to God creating people so that they have to choose the good.

It would be self-contradictory to say that the weighted coins also possess "randomness".

If God had created people so that they would have to choose the good, then it would be contradictory to say that they also possess free wills.

[Guest]

Paidion

Quote: "I disbelieve that God allows murder and torture, and rape of little girls, etc. for some "greater good". I think affirmations that He does so, do an injustice to His all loving character. This kind of thinking also leads people to hate God".

How do you know? As awful as these things are to us, how do you know that they do not serve some greater purpose of God? Job's family suffered for no apparent good reason. David's child was taken for no good apparent reason. Joseph suffered at the hands of his brothers for no apparent good reason. Jesus suffered and died for no apparent good reason. It wasn't until we were told the reason why God allowed what He did under these particular cases that we understood after the fact. Disbelieve all you want. Just because we cannot percieve a "good reason" for some of the suffering in this world, it does not necessarily follow there is no good reason. Allowing evil to occur does not mean God is indifferent to it or that we are not responsible for our evil acts. What I do not allow myself to think is to worry about what others may think of God in His dealings with us . People will hate God no matter. It is in our "fallen" nature to hate God and have Him not rule over us. I think it would be presumptious on our part to put God in this kind of theological box, IMO.

[Guest]

Bob, it truly grieves me that you think of God in that way.

[Guest]

What you are saying above does not amount to much more that simply your opinion about what God would or wouldn't do. And the last statement is just ad hominem.

In what way is stating that no moral being has a morally sufficient reason for allowing immorality to exist just my opinion? It's contradictory to maintain that one is moral yet allow immorality to occur.

Within the Christian worldview, we believe that God has a good reason to allow evil and suffering to exist. Similar to how a dentist has a good reason for causing me the pain that he does when he pulls my tooth. There is no logical inconsistency here at all.

Except that causing pain isn't necessarily evil. We ARE talking specifically about evil acts. A dentist doesn't force the pain on you either. In fact, a dentist does everything that he can, in his limited human ability, to prevent his patients from feeling pain.

God can be good, and allow bad to exist, for His own good purposes.

Naked assertion.

I was using the two more or less interchangably. Could you establish a definition for "culture" and "enviorment"? Either way, I'm interested to know the answer to the question.

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You can't use them interchangeably. What we experience in the world is how we come to know all things, including morality. That doesn't mean that morality is contingent upon culture or environment. Every event shapes our knowledge of reality.

[Guest]

I think your difficulty, Asimov, lies in your present understanding of free will. If man truly has a free will, he may choose to do good or chose to do evil, or choose to do anything else he chooses to do.

Are you free to literally jump into space and toot around Jupiter just because? No? So how exactly does man truly have free will? There are clear limitations to the amount of choice man has, or all the starving children in the world would choose to eat.

Seriously, if one is to consider what free will is, then one must have a consistent idea as to what that free will is.

It might be appreciative if you were to define 'free will', in your current understanding of the phrase.

God creating beings which will choose only the good is inherently contradictory and thus incoherent. For if they choose only the good, they are not free to chooe the bad. This means that they are not truly free will agents.

God creating beings who are only able to choose good is not inherently contradictory unless one wishes them to also choose evil (even though they cannot). Are you saying that God wants us to choose evil?

I can conceive of a world where moral agents freely choose only good, and do not choose bad. Where does that leave us in this discussion?

I disbelieve that God allows murder and torture, and rape of little girls, etc. for some "greater good". I think affirmations that He does so, do an injustice to His all loving character. This kind of thinking also leads people to hate God.

Somehow, when man and all nature fell from the way God created it, God allowed it all to continue.

I don't hate God, I hate very little, and non-existent beings are not part of that paradigm.

The only reason man and nature fell away was because God wanted it to happen. Placing the burden of guilt upon beings who were only acting in accordance with God's will is fallacious reasoning.

Suppose, at the present time, God should prevent all harm from happening to people.

1. To prevent people harming other people, it would be necessary to remove the free will of those who do the harming.

Non-sequitur. By preventing someone from stealing a candy bar, I am not removing their free will. I am preventing them from acting on their intent. However, even that is not necessary.

2. To prevent people from being harmed by natural forces, the stability of the world and nature would have to be suspended. For example, if you threw a rock over the cliff, it would fall, but if you stepped over the cliff yourself, you wouldn't --- so that you could not be harmed. There would be no consistency in the forces of nature.

Or you could just create a state of affairs where the natural forces do not harm anything, and be consistent.

[Guest]

Hi Asimov,

(I keep wanting to call you Isaac)

I would like to echo Derek in thanking you for your continued participation in this thread.

Thanks, it's an interesting conversation. I hope everyone is enjoying it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that your reasoning presupposes that God doesn't operate within limits.

No, my reasoning presupposes that God, like all beings, is limited by the necessity of logic, which isn't really a limitation.

That was the way I expected you to answer Traveler's workplace analogy. It's one thing to put up with a boss you don't like for the greater good of a paycheck when you're only human. It's quite another thing indeed when you're the all-powerful master of the universe who can shape reality to whatever whim is desired to put up with suffering.

Is that a fair presentation of where your coming from?

God can create any state of affairs that isn't incoherent. So in a way, yes.

"Given the presupposition of an all-powerful God that wants only a perfect world, why do we have an imperfect one?"

Am I understanding you correctly?

Perry

To more accurately summarize my thoughts on this:

Given that God is maximally great, everything that occurs in every possible world occurs because God wants it to occur. If this is true and evil exists contrary to the desires of God, why does evil exist?

[Guest]

Whew...that's almost everybody.