Intergalactic Summit

Eh, things happen. Mass-enslavement here, big rebellion there, a little peace treaty to settle things, then a big messy incursion and now we're staring each other down from a no-man's land filled with paid demigods beating their heads in over our respective empire's name.

History is funny like that.

Edited:

Holy Mother, if you'd be willing I'd be interested in hearing whether there's a meaningful distinction between "just/merciful" and "benevolent." The concepts seem kind of similar to me.

Benevolent was not the term used, but rather omnibenevolent. And more to the point, the original argument that was presented in the original post and by Slayer elsewhere is that God could not be omnibenevolent, or perfectly good because bad things happen. It's a sort of theological fallacy that happens often I am afraid. In grief, parents will ask me how God could let their child die. Even I can be prone to it. I wondered the same thing after Her Majesty died.

The fallacy in question. My response is simply that God is not described as omnibenovolant.

Is God good? Yes. Is He perfectly good? Also, yes. God's aseity requires it. (Side note, the theological debates that come from determining what is required for God's aseity and what is not are long, fierce, very passionate.) God is that which is none higher. If God was not perfectly good, then one could conceive of a being that was perfectly good and therefor higher than God. Making God not God.

Omnibenevolent is a pretty sloppy term, theologically speaking. It's one that requires a lot of defining; so most of the time those of us in the clergy don't use it, preferring other more precise words. If Slayer was as of the opinion that omnibenevolence on the part of God requires that God ensure that nothing evil ever happens to us, then I will point out that such a belief is nowhere to be found in the Scriptures or Dogma.

As far God's moral code, since God is the supreme creator of all that is not Him, that includes morality, or morality is an essential component of God's aseity. Put simply, morality as we understand it is either a construct created by God, or morality is a concept that exists of God. If the former, since God created it and He is a perfect and sovereign being, He can change what is and is not morally good at His pleasure. The other school of thought is that morality is an essential component of God. A perfect and supreme being could not exist without morality, so therefor morality is of God and God could not act contrary to morality.

God is perfectly good. God is all powerful and all knowing. God is also a necessarily moral being. However, evil exists. At this point, Slayer is trying to pull a gotcha, but the answer is actually pretty simple. Free will exists. Because, if it didn't, then reality would be a deception.

I think I exist and that I am able to act on my own volition. I decide to go get a glass of wine. When I sit back down two things are true. The first option is that I really did decide by my own will to go get that glass of wine. The second is that God decided I should get a glass of wine and then tricked me into thinking that I wanted to get it myself. Since we know that God is perfectly good and that He is a perfectly moral being, we know that He would not deceive us.

This is not to say that God does not act. The evidence of God's actions are the recordings of miracles throughout the millennia. I look out the window every day here in Sarum Prime and see evidence of that. Most of the time, though, God is more subtle.

In the aftermath of Her Majesty's death, I tried to find God's will in such an act. Through prayer, meditation and a rigorous application of theology, I believe that I understand it. The truth may be far simpler, though. Empress Jamyl died because the Drifters are just evil and not any act of God, the same reason the child fell from the tree and died. Sometimes, bad things just happen and are a necessary byproduct of free will the same way that helium is a necessary byproduct of hydrogen fusion.

Ugh. I told myself I wouldn't do this. I told my crew I wouldn't do this. I even told the hangar tech I chatted with briefly on the way back from the Taco joint on Level Six that I wasn't gonna do this.

I suck at not doing this.

Here's the problem:

If God is axiomatically omnipotent, then the statement that 'a perfect and supreme being could not exist without morality' is patently false. If God cannot exist without morality, then God is not omnipotent, and so axiomatically, not God. So the second school of thought vis-a-vis morality can be thrown out.

Free Will, on the other hand, is an incredibly tricky topic. In your example, God takes no action that determines that you will decide to go and get a glass of wine, and so you have free will. However, this example overlooks the fundamental problem itself:

God is omniscient. All-knowing. God knows all that will ever happen before any of it does. Therefore, God knows that you will decide to go and get a glass of wine before setting the initial conditions and behaviors of the universe. What's more, God knows that if those conditions and behaviors are different, you will make different choices. God knows all of these things before God decides what the initial conditions and behaviors of the universe to be created will be. Thus, by choosing to create this universe, with the initial conditions that were present, and the behaviors and physical laws that govern it, God determined that you would 'decide' to get that glass of wine.

That's inescapable. There is no way to say that an omniscient being with perfect predictive capabiities (as is necessarily a part of omnipotence) does not know what all of the consequences of his decision will be, and so is not only deciding on the initial, immediate decision, but is also deciding which set of consequence-cascades will take place. Not 'might' take place, either. Will take place. And you never had any chance of choosing otherwise - because the perfectly predictive omniscience of the Creator ensured that only those decisions that were predicted could be made, as a result of the initial conditions of the universe, and the physical laws it follows.

Remember: we are forced to accept a measurable amount of uncertainty in quantum behavior because we cannot know the state of matter without affecting it in some way, and so doing, changing aspects of that state. God, being both outside of the closed system of creation, and omniscient, is under no such limitation... and wouldn't be even if he weren't omniscient, because being omnipotent means you have the power to be omniscient any freakin' time you want to be.

I will chime in on the core of this debate later on. There are, though, some things I'd like to note right away:

1) The claim that nowhere in Scripture God is called 'omnibenevolent'.

This is a rather grand claim. The Scriptures are a vast body of texts: A single copy is hundreds of thousands of square meters in size. Whoever claims that God isn't called omnibenevolent in any place of that large body of texts should be prepared to show not only that he isn't called that in the most popular and important quotes from the Scriptures, but that it is indeed found nowhere in there.

Furthermore one can easily argue that all-just basically means the same as omnibenevolent. This isn't a question of which term is used, but about the meaning of those terms.

2) It is the duty of the Amarr to educate:

To bring the message and the light of Faith to every planet of every star in the heavens. This can never be done by laserfire alone: But it can (at least in theory) be done by the reasoned word without violence. The priorities there should be clear, therefore.

3) The so called 'argument' that is given by the OP.

It is at best a defective argument and highly elliptical. It's not exactly specified what is to be understood by the three O's: What is it to be omnipotent? What is it to be omniscient? What is it to be omnibenevolent. Why would they conflict? All that is opaque at best in the OP's post and one has to do a lot of guesswork. That's not an argument. That's a pitiful attempt at one, if one is generous.

4) Amarrian theologians have actually long known this argument: It's no big worry.

Yes. We know it. Actually, historically speaking, Amarr theologians formulated it long before we left Athra - and did so mainly not because they were forced by atheists to do so. It even exists in numerous formulations, all coming with their specifc strengths and weaknesses. There are incompatibility formulations and inductive formulations, abstract and concrete formulations, axiological and deontological formulations. And the inductive formulations come in a great variety already by themselves.

One very concise way of formulating the 'Problem of evil' argument is as follows:

1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
5. Evil exists.
6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.
7. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

It comes with no surprise that Amarr theologians - who brought forth those arguments against the existence of God with much more dedication and rigor than most of the opponents who think that they can so easily dismiss the existence of God with unrefined versions of it - also found numerous ways to refute and defend against it. Even if the argument is given in a complete and valid version, that still doesn't mean that one can't question its soundness. In fact in the formulation above there are 6 explicit premises which all must hold up to scrutiny for the argument to work!

We heard a bit about possible approaches one can embrace to attack those premises, but it's good to give them a systematic treatment. I will do so in my next post.

There is no true choice involved. The choice that will be made under all circumstances is known before the choice is made that determines those circumstances. Thus, that initial choice determines the outcome of all others. There is no possible room for variation. Once those conditions are set, you will make all of the choices foreseen, because your choices are dictated by circumstances. In the exact same circumstances, you will make the exact same choice. You cannot even choose specifically to avoid that, because knowing you have made that choice before changes those circumstances, and so they are not exactly the same.

Why do people always take this bait, hook, line and sinker?
Its just another agitator with his smug athiesm superiority complex trying to stir people up.

It's not the "clergy who minister to actual faithful" who do the serious study of Scripture: That's the theologians (most of whom are 'actual clergy', too) who dedicate their life to the study of those parts - amongst all the others - of Scripture which you so easily dismiss. I, for my part, rather defer in regard to which Scripture is important to the theologians of the TC.

And even though the main ones of those don't talk directly about 'omnibenevolece', it doesn't simply follow that it's not implied. That's a fallacy that requires the most simplistic of literalisms to commit.

I am an atheist but I am simply interested in your religion as I an with all religions and I will get my translation software fixed.

I argue that as near as we can tell, even quantum events would be predictable if perfectly observed from an external vantage point that did not rely on interaction with those events. Given that, the existence of an omnipotent creator (and omniscience and perfect goodness are all capabilities of any omnipotent entity, by the nature of its omnipotence) who then creates this universe is, by choosing to create a universe of this nature, would preclude true free will, yes.

I don't necessarily believe in such an entity, mind you. But the evidence does strongly point to our decisions being no more unpredictable than the stimulus-response of an amoeba if we have the ability to accurately track all of the aggregate stimuli involved in the incredibly complex recursion that is our brain function. We know that decisions are often made before the conscious mind is aware of them, and that our conscious mind then rationalizes out a (potentially accurate!) reasoning for the decision. Ultimately, there's no evidence that suggests there is in fact actual 'free will', rather than a recursive complexity that approximates it by obscuring the discrete levels of stimulus and response that aggregate into any particular decision.