/lit/ - Literature

High quality post, friend! Very informative and useful!

>its a test

>>13529757
>if I post wojak faces instead of arguing I don't have to provide any answers to my mental gymnastics

>>13529757
>because free will

if god wanted me to believe in him why didn't he make me so i would

>>13529780
same reason the game doesn't just let you win once immediately you start a new game, boring for god

>>13529757
Because the demiurge is the creator of the material world we inhabit

>>13529757
>we are living the best possible world

>I am more righter because you are picture!

>>13529757
heh I remember grappling with free will in grade school too

>>13529786
If you lose a game you aren't killed or sent to hell for all eternity, and we would never say a pawn in a game has free will

>>13529789
Fundamental and knowledge-medicated

>>13529795
Unless you play the Star Game

>>13529757
>>13529774

>>13529757
>cos God no exist fren

>>>if I post wojak faces instead of arguing I don't have to provide any answers to my mental gymnastics

>>13529757
Lmao

>>13529757
>if god unreal how miracles like childbirth happen?

THE BEST THREAD ON /LIT/ RN

just want to die lads

Never understood this argument. Why is God supposed to care about our suffering?

>>13530289
Exactly. Omnipotence creates both suffering and joy, actualizing truth to the fullest extent, and maximizing meaning

>>13530292
Based and well put.

I never understood what the problems with Alvin Platinga's defense for this. It seems to be pretty settles among mainstream philosophers.

>>13530293

>>13529793
so how and when did you stop grappling with it you stupid fuck

>it all goes exactly according to His plan
>but you must accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior and stuff otherwise you'll go to hell

>>13530347
i explain it all here
>>>/wsg/2959306

>>13530293
this is all the proof i need....

>>13529757
>>13529763
>>13529774
>>13529793
>>13530197

these are good posts

>>13530402
If God has a plan then wtf was the point of giving people free will? It’s not like he can reveal himself without interfering with free will.
But wait a second: Christians act like him revealing himself to an atheist would violate their free will, but him revealing himself to a Christian somehow doesn’t?
So since he’s omnipotent, can’t he conjure up a way to reveal himself to everyone without violating their free will? Of fucking course he can’t bc the people who came up with the idea of God didn’t grasp what “omnipotent” actually means.

>>13530459
>It’s not like he can reveal himself
but when I was agnostic he did reveal himself to me and I still have my free will....

>>13530459
>>13530471
FREE WILL IS AN ILLUSION YOU TARDS

ITS ALL CAUSE AND EFFECT NIQQAS

>>13530292
I agree with the other anon. This is a very well articulated answer to God's reasons. Honestly saved.

>>13529757
I believe God is all powerful, but not all loving.

>it's all part of his plan

>>13530471
Then doesn’t that negate the point of him choosing not to reveal himself to nonbelievers? How did he reveal himself, if you don’t mind me asking? Or rather, how did you interpret said “revelation?”
>>13530475
I don’t believe the we really have free will either matey. Was just trying to make a point.

>>13530534
I don't know about this point that he doesn't reveal himself to nonbelievers... I was already becoming more open to the idea of God after being a closed minded atheist. To answer your other question it's pretty simple, God revealed himself by showing me things I did not know were possible and still are not considered possible.

posting in an unironically an excellent thread

>>13530533
>brainlet doesn't understand omniscience
It doesn't mean you can see a set future, it means you know every possible outcome of someone's actions. In another reality humanity is still in the garden of Eden, God is aware of this alternate reality, but we don't experience it.
In this formulation omniscience and free will are both possible simultaneously.
The arrogance required to think your snappy little two sentence copypasta can just blow something people have been arguing about for literally thousands of years out of the water, as if no one before some faggot on /r/atheism was the first person ever to wonder why God allows bad things to happen.

>>13530639
>It doesn't mean you can see a set future, it means you know every possible outcome of someone's actions. In another reality humanity is still in the garden of Eden, God is aware of this alternate reality, but we don't experience it.
>In this formulation omniscience and free will are both possible simultaneously.
>The arrogance required to think your snappy little two sentence copypasta can just blow something people have been arguing about for literally thousands of years out of the water, as if no one before some faggot on /r/atheism was the first person ever to wonder why God allows bad things to happen.

>>13530639
>claiming that you comprehend the nature of God
>criticize others for thinking thinking they comprehend God when he’s incomprehensible
>calling other people arrogant

>>13530292
Are you a Spinozist?

>The Natural-law Argument.
There is a very common argument from natural law. That was a favorite argument
all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and
his cosmogony. People observed the planets going around the sun according to the law of
gravitation, and they thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in that
particular fashion, and that was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and
simple explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for explanations of
the law of gravitation. Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat
complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced. I do not propose to give you a lecture
on the law of gravitation, as interpreted by Einstein, because that again would take some
time; at any rate, you no longer have the sort of natural law that you had in the
Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved
in a uniform fashion. We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws
are really human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depths of stellar space
there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would
hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that have been regarded as laws of
nature are of that kind. On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of
what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law than people
thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that
would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you
will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as
evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double
sixes came every time we should think that there was design.

The laws of nature are of
that sort as regards a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would
emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much
less impressive than it formerly was. Quite apart from that, which represents the
momentary state of science that may change tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws
imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are
behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which you may choose to behave,
or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in
fact behave, and being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that
there must be somebody who told them to do that, because even supposing that there
were, you are then faced with the question "Why did God issue just those natural laws
and no others?" If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without
any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your
train of natural law is interrupted. If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all
the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others -- the
reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to
look at it -- if there were a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was
subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an
intermediary. You really have a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God
does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate lawgiver. In short, this whole argument about natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have. I
am traveling on in time in my review of the arguments. The arguments that are used for
the existence of God change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard
intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies. As we come to modern
times they become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of
moralizing vagueness.

>>13530914
>The First-cause Argument
Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. (It is
maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the
chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First
Cause you give the name of God.) That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much
weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The
philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like
the vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there
must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a
young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time
accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read
John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me
that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the
further question `Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think,
the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God
must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the
world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the
same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant
rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said,
"Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. There is no
reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other
hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to
suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning
is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.

>>13529757
Unironically this. It's a terrible argument. Lasting consequences equal meaning. My times of playing D&N have showed me that you can't have a game in the same way were a DM says "ok ok we can re do that"
Takes away.
For the inquiring minds who wonder why to believe there's a God, go to www.coffeehousequestions.com
Some points to show that we live in some kind of simulated reality are:
>universe had a beginning
>there is a resolution to the universe which shows on the smallest level things snap from one spot to the next
>if there is a beginning, there had to be something to put things in motion. IE a source of energy from outside this system.