Didn't Epicurus and Plato DESTROY the idea of God with these two questions ?!

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" - Epicurus

"Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?" - Plato

How does any Muslim, Jew, or Christian refute or debate these two questions ?!

Plato's question renders morality arbitrary when ordered by God, so what's the point of determining morality from the Bible ?

 

2 stupid questions posed by 2 ignorant Men.

 

you have no response so you resort to petty name calling

 

Epicurus does an excellent job of boiling down the Problem of Evil.

 

Likely, you do not see the incredible Irony your comment represents....which makes the irony even greater.

 

Not really.

 

Epicurus' question misses the point of the extreme good that is redemption, and the answer to Plato's question is:the latter. It is not morally arbitrary when one believes that God is the Objective measure.

 

What an excellent, erudite response, which more than adequately addresses in detail all of the points raised and shows by counterexample exactly why they are incorrect. You are sure to convince everyone, with such a high caliber of debate skill.

 

Even as non-religious, I can see flaws in both of those.

The problem of evil is easily defeated by a god who doesn't care about the wellbeing of humanity. The idea that God should be good is preposterous from the start. Even the argument as it is stated shows that if he is not willing, then he is malevolent, which is far from him not existing. It is also possible that God worries about some other aspect of humanity than its wellbeing, and humans feeling good about themselves isn't really necessary for him. I guess that's the general version of "God works in mysterious ways".

The second argument can also be dealt with. Either answer is fine, there's no logical fallacy in the theist position here. What's wrong with an arbitrary morality? If God sets it up, it can be universal and then, if it is written in the Bible, it can be found there. No particular problem. Besides, most theists I argue with don't claim their morals come from the Bible, if anything, they argue that morality is quoted in the Bible rather than the Bible being its source.

 

That is the point of the question though isn't it.

9,000,000 children under the age of 5 die every year. That boils down to 24,000 a day, a thousand an hour and about 17 or so a minute. Most of the parents of these children are religious which means at this moment someone is praying for their child to be spared and their prayers will go unanswered. The question simply says that either God can do nothing to prevent this suffering in which case he is incompetent or doesn't care to which means he is not benevolent. If one considers the divine command theory to be a good answer to this it brings into question the whole idea of morality because it so easily justifies the slaughter and needless death and suffering of countless people. It also means that since we cannot prove which God is real the terrorists blowing themselves up in order to follow their Gods divine commands cannot be condemned for these acts.

Continuing from above we move to the idea that God works in mysterious ways. In other words when God does something we would deem immoral we have to check it against the idea that God is benevolent and in order to keep that idea intact we must consider that God works in ways we cannot understand. But it is our merely human understanding of God we use to determine his goodness in the first place. In other words if we cannot know God we cannot know God.

 

Greeks are found to have a substantial relatedness to Ethiopian people and genetic distances are closer between Greeks and Ethiopian/sub-Saharan groups than to any other Mediterranean group (Arnaiz-Villena et al. 2001). The 2001 study speculated on the Greek civilisation's Egyptian roots and the displacement of Egyptian-Ethiopian people living in pharaonic Egypt to Ancient Greece gave rise to the modern-day Greeks. As a result, Greek philosophy could be interpreted in African contexts and Plato's words would be better understood by referencing Egyptian mythology. According to "The Destruction of Mankind", Ra stops short of destroying all of humanity after discovering that humanity is plotting rebellion against him and Greek thinkers' sceptical attitude towards the gods may have originated in ancient Egyptian culture.

 

Just bear in mind that the Problem of Evil doesn't disprove the idea of God. It just proves that if a God exists he's an evil dick.

 

Epicurus' presentation of the Problem of Evil is just too easy to counter. I know it seems good on its face, but any devout believer can respond with "what is a mere 100 or fewer years of suffering when compared to eternity in paradise?" or "we're all made ultimately more strong by the trials of individuals." To put that second bit in perspective, imagine loving a herd of elk. It isn't malevolent to allow wolves to take down the weak and sick. It makes the herd stronger. A supposed god would be no less malevolent for allowing some apparent evil to take place among us if it makes us all stronger in general. Also, it's easy to use the Problem of Evil to show Heaven to be reality, since an allegedly loving god would not allow bad things to happen to good people if they were not later presented with such a great reward for enduring.

 

Let's give it a shot. At least my answer won't be the worst one in this thread

God created evil, because God created Iblis, Lucifer, Satan, whatever you want to call the devil (see what I did there? Anyway)... But why? Well, to give us, humans, free will. Hear me out.

If there was no bad, there can only be good, yes? An infinite amount of good, because there is nothing to counter the good. The same thing here, sort of, in that without Iblis (bad) there is nothing to counter Allah (good) meaning... There is no point in creating us. There is no test. Everybody would just believe in God, and that would be it (keep in mind here God stands for what is good). There is no way to test our faith in God, and thus, no real reason for faith at all. Life would be meaningless in a religious sense.

Isn't this asking the same thing twice? I don't see how this question disproves the existence of God. You could answer both, I think.

[quote[How does any Muslim, Jew, or Christian refute or debate these two questions ?!

 

Ha ha ha...

After watching how children in the world die by starvation, the rich abuse of the poor, the corrupt getswhat they want while the honest suffers to be succesful, the injust prevails over the rightheous, after the documentary a dude said: The proof that God exists and that He is good(meaning merciful), is that nothing bad happens to bad people.

 

Why would God be benevolent? If he created the world, why would he be responsible for the wellbeing of humans? What if God just wants a crispy snack? Do you listen to the prayers of beef jerky?

God's lack of morality doesn't call the general notion of morality into question, only objective morality, which I think is bull droppings anyway. The reason humans think morality is objective is because we really want it to be, not because it's showing any signs of being. Morality is subjective. If there was a God, it wouldn't surprise me if he found the idea to not kill humans convoluted and unnecessary.

However, as long as morality is subjective, I can condemn, for instance, suicide bombers according to my own subjective morality, and hopefully others (humans) would agree with me.

Not sure what this means. If we throw the idea of a moral god out the window, we shouldn't be surprised to find that he does what we would see as immoral every now and again.

 

Either malevolent or incapable of stopping evil.

 

The answer to the topic's title is simple, No.

How to recognize evilness without goodness? and viceversa.

 

Plenty of good answers so far. Here's my take on it.

Epicurus misses the rather obvious point that "not particularly helpful" is different than "malevolent". A God who creates the universe, then lets it run its course without interference, isn't "malevolence". In fact, it's a pretty damn arrogant view to think that the creator of the whole universe doesn't have better things to do than wipe our asses all the time. He gave you a habitable planet. What more do you want? The world doesn't owe you a living, and neither does God.

Well, not much to debate here. This in no way "destroys the idea of God". If one were to base their case on this quote, one would fail, prima facie. No rebuttal neccessary. In fact, the quote is just a chicken and the egg question which doesn't even refer to "God", but the "gods" with which Plato was familiar.

 

The Problem of Evil deals with theistic gods, not deistic ones.

It's detrimental to the idea that God is a source of morality.

 

Well, then deism remains unscathed by these arguments. The OP doesn't distinguish, though, when saying they destroy "the idea of God". Perhaps the OP should say that they destroy ONE idea of God.

Only if you choose option one. Option two essentially states that God (or "the gods") IS the source of morality. And that is, I believe, the position taken by most Abrahamic theists.

 

As far as Epicurus' points are concerned I think that theologians would probably respond with some sort of diverting tactic about the nature of God and how God doesn't conceive of the things we as humans conceive and there's a bigger picture and all the rest of it. But the paradoxes remain.

On Plato's comment, I'm not sure if he was arguing against the gods but the nature of piety itself. If the gods love something which is pious simply because it is pious then for me that suggests that something other than the gods gave it the nature of piety and it could be that the gods are subordinate to some other power. If something has piety because it is loved by the gods then it doesn't have innate piety but only a sort of bestowed piety because the gods have ruled it to be pious. I think Plato was trying to slip in a bit of atheist thinking to a populace convinced that their lives were dictated by a bunch of squabbling gods on Mount Olympus.

 

Well, I can only speak from a Christian perspective.

As for Epicur and the problem of evil, I must have posted these videos dozens of times in this forum. Not because I think in it the problem of evil is finally solved, but because they give a pretty good summary of the Christian discussion concerning it from Augustine onwards up until Moltmann:

[video=youtube;aIrFCmUkQ4w]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIrFCmUkQ4w[/video]

[video=youtube;Y5wYOZSh4GU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5wYOZSh4GU[/video]

As for Plato: apparently he did not destroy the idea of God, quite the contrary: his idealist philosophy has influenced Christian theology probably more any other. For Christianity God is the ultimate "Form of the Good".

What's the point of determining morality from the Bible? There is no determining of morality other than that determined by God. The Bible gives us hundreds of years worth of people's ideas on morals and on God that Christians believe to be divinely inspired (while Christians will disagree on the extend in which it is inspired and in which it also reflects its authors limited human horizon). The point of looking at these ideas is that they can inspire your own. No need to invent the wheel anew, where it takes you in modern moral questions is another matter.

 

That finally convinced me.

 

Since all gods are imaginary the person doing the imagining can have them do whatever he wants them to do. So people can give their imaginary deity whatever characteristics they want him to have. That's the ultimate freedom all people share. Even when the party line is that the group's deity has certain qualities others can imagine him with qualities that they prefer instead. They just have to be careful that they don't anger the fanatics, who will gladly kill them for dissing their version of the deity.

One thing is 100% certain. No god of any kind will ever show up in all its reputed splendor to amaze the yokels.