Return to David's theory of theodicy;Plantinga & Held (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, March 24, 2024, 09:28 (242 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: And his point that allowing evil happens for sufficient reason is similarly correct. Note in the original article Plantinga's critic accepted P's points. As usual you want to have God provide a Garden of Eden. As long as living requires eating there will be evil.

dhw: This has nothing to do with what I want - which is feasible answers to all the great questions! You are the one who starts with wishes and bends your answers to fit them. You and the critic accept that your God wants us to love him, and is happy to allow evil in order to gratify this totally self-centred interest. And yet you claim your God is selfless. If he is happy to allow the Holocaust (see below) as the price to be paid for ensuring people love him of their own free will, (a) he is not selfless, and (b) human suffering is clearly of little or no importance to him, despite P.’s and your belief that he loves us.

DAVID: God is person like no other person. God is not a self and does not need a soul.

Nobody is saying that God is a human being. But even you have agreed that your God probably has thought patterns and emotions like ours. If he wants us to love him, then don’t pretend he is selfless and emotionless.

DAVID: Theologians consider God as simple. We are more complex. Humans caused the Holocaust despite God, and humans stopped it, all because of our God-given free will. You bend your shape of God to fit your disbelief.

I have no idea what simplicity versus complexity has to do with anything. You support Plantinga’s theory that your God “allowed” evil to happen because he wanted us to love him of our own free will. Being omniscient he knew what would happen. The slaughter of 6 million Jews was not “despite God” if he knew it would happen and made no attempt to stop it because he wanted us to love him of our own free will. It is you who bend your God to fit your belief that he is selfless (and yet wants to be loved), loves us (you accept Pantinga’s theology) and yet is prepared to see us slaughter 6 million Jews so that he can be sure he is loved of our own free will, is all-good and yet designs viruses that will kill us, and for good measure messily, inefficiently and inexplicably designs and culls 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with the only purpose you allow him.

I finished my post with a request:

dhw: Please explain to me in your own words why you think a God who loves us and is selfless would be happy to allow 6 million of us to be slaughtered in order to ensure that we love him of our own free will?

DAVID: Same mistaken criticism.

You have not answered.

Current Jewish theology

QUOTE:
A traditional rabbinic story imagines that when God was about to create Adam, the angels split into factions and began to argue. “Kindness said, ‘Let him be created, since he will perform acts of lovingkindness’; Truth said, ‘Let him not be created, since he is all lies.’” How does God respond to the debate? “God took truth and cast it to the earth.” Faced with a choice between love and other competing values, God embraces the former and rebuffs the latter. God risks a lot, and puts up with a lot, all in the name of love—both the love God has for us and the love God hopes that we will embody and bring into the world."

DAVID: Rabbi Shai Held is president of the Hadar Institute. This essay is adapted from his new book, “Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life,” which will be published on March 26 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

This should put to rest dhw's terror of the riginal OT God he learned about as a child long ago. Ancient primitive Jews perhaps needed such a tough God to keep them in line. That guy is not necessary now. The God of the Talmud is today's Jewish God.

For heaven’s sake! One Jewish rabbi narrates a little allegory, and pretends he knows exactly what his God is thinking and feeling. He has no more knowledge of God than you, me or Plantinga! You have just agreed with Plantinga that your selfless, loving God gave us free will to do as much evil as we like because that was the only way he could ensure that we would love him properly. Shai Held tells us that God chooses love and rejects evil. So why in hell’s name did he create the possibility of evil in the first place?

As for me, I am not terrified of the OT God. I don’t even know if God exists, and I don’t regard the Bible as the Word of God. It’s a book riddled with contradictions. You have summed it up in your comment (bolded). Humans can change the image of God as they see fit. You exemplify the approach: “I first choose a form of God I wish to believe in. The rest follows.” You, Plantinga and Held are birds of a feather, and are just as ignorant of the truth as I am.