The “problem of suffering” is especially a problem in the monotheistic religions. In ancient Greek and Roman religions, with their many, many gods, it wasn’t an intellectual puzzle. If there’s suffering, it’s because some or all of the gods are ticked off and out to get you. There are some bad ones up there as well as good ones. Just the way it is.
But if there’s only one God, why is there suffering? Many people have very simply solutions and they don’t see a problem. But there is a problem. It just has to be explained. Here I continue by showing why it’s a problem and to motivate some thinking by trying to explain how deep thinkers have expressed the problem and tried to address it.
Again, this is excerpted from my book God’s Problem (HarperOne, 2008). Just before this excerpt
The gospel according to “john” seems to point at the fact that the world is under the influence of satan…the blame seems to be on him..so God is basically allowing the bad things to happen for a time…i guess to prove the point that humanity without his sovereignty can’t flourish …
If indeed the kingdom of God will be one day a reality, will that resolve the problem of suffering?
Can a future where the dead ones are resurrected and life reinstated to a blessing state, justify and make up for the horrors witnessed in the human history?
The idea that a perfect, beautiful afterlife will make everything we’ve suffered here worth it never worked for me. Some people experience unspeakable horrors throughout their life. Victims of state violence, torture, abuse (sometimes for decades). Parents who lose children to devastating disease. Grinding poverty. If we all get the same beautiful afterlife, that doesn’t seem fair. I’m a normal human who’s had setbacks and sometimes difficult circumstances. But I haven’t lost a limb or extremity. I haven’t undergone torture. I had two parents who stayed alive, together and in reasonable health throughout my childhood.
It doesn’t seem fair that victims of famine/devastating disease/violence/oppression and I – someone who’s had it relatively easy – should both get the same reward. It seems at least that those who had it much worse here should get some better version of heaven. Of course it’s possible that those of us who’ve suffered enormously will get to heaven right away and those of us who haven’t (like me) will have more suffering in another life or purgatory or whatever, but I really don’t think that solves the problem. Given that the Abrahamic god is sort of a dick, though, that might be His solution.
Why God is not God if He/she/ … is not omnipotent ? That’s circular reasoning on the presumption of the omnipotent (image of ) God in the Holy Books
Suppose a non-omnipotent being exist that is morally and intellectually superior to humankind than you will deny that being the name of God ?
Suppose one does exist! What would be your reasons for thinking so?
My reason for thinking so is that I cannot accept the (image of) God as defined in the Bible. But I accept that the authors of the Holy Books where searching for te One and Only. Sometimes they were close, but most of the time they were even not in the neighborhood especially when they were describing the immanent God.
So I strongly believe that our human reality is part of a Godly reality, who is superior morally, intellectually and informatively and has a its own good Will. But given human reality I doubt that God has more than the power of a fly to intervene in our world.
Me for myself I have more than enough ‘strong evidence’ of thinking so. But I fully agree that is no argument vis a vis somebody else and I doubt ‘God’ wants me to so if He/She/ They … doesn’t do it Him/Her Self.
I get that this is what you think (That our human reality is part of a Godly reality). What I’m not following still is what makes you think so? It sounds like you’re saying that you assume it’s true?
Hope I’m not bothering you, but please take into consideration this except from David Aune, also page 121:
The phrase “those who are accounted worthy to attain that age and the res-
urrection from the dead” can be construed two ways, both dependent on how
καταξιωθέντες is understood. On the one hand, καταξιωθέντες can be consid-
ered as a decision on the part of God in considering the righteous dead worthy
of resurrection. This is perhaps how the Third Evangelist himself understood
the logion, […]
He then continues:
καταξιωθέντες can be
considered as the act of being counted worthy (a passivum divinum) to attain
“that age” and “the resurrection from the dead” at some point in this present life.
One reason for construing the sentence in this way is its striking ambiguity in
comparison with the parallel in Mark 12:25, which is a model of clarity: ὅταν γὰρ
ἐκ νεκρῶν ἀναστῶσιν, “for when they are raised from the dead.” The correctness
of this interpretation is assured by the fact that it is difficult to conceive of an act
of “being counted worthy” as occurring […] subsequent […] death.
Initially he seems to agree that the merit can be awarded after the persons’ death, yet before the resurrection; but later denies it. Am I missing something?
“The righteous dead” always means “the dead who were righteous when they were alive” (comparable to the “wise” who are raised in Daniel 12:1-2)
What me think so is concrete evidence
OK! Some things convince one person and not another. But I’m not sure if concrete evidence for a divine realm is logically possible?
I’m 100 % sure that is logically possible because those things happened to me and if those things would have happened to you, you would be convinced also. So the point is not that I’m logically more flexible than you. I’m not , in fact I’m a very sceptical intelligent older man who lost his faith in the Bible as the word of God or Jesus as the son of God. But the more I’m losing my (catholic) religion the more I believe in the One and Only because of the ‘unnatural’ things happend.
But you avoided to answer my crucial point :
Suppose a non-omnipotent being exist that is morally, intellectually and informatively superior to humankind you deny that being the name of God because it is not the omni-potent God of the Bible ?
No, I’m saying I don’t know why I should think such a being exists.
An example was brought home to me a day ago. I was reading the current issue of Archaeology; the last article in it was “Letter from Poland” about a team excavating the remains of people murdered by Nazi forces in 1939 and again in 1945. These were good people, some Jews, some Christians. All proclaimed “enemies” …
Dr. Ehrman (@BDEhrman),
I’ve recently read an article about Luke 20:34-36 (the “in the after-life, you won’t marry”). Dr. David E. Aune (Notre Dame) comments:
The correctness of this interpretation is assured by the fact that it is difficult to conceive of an act of “being counted worthy” as occurring at any time subsequent to physical death. This logion, then, reflects the view that humanity is currently divided into two classes, the “sons of this age.” who marry, and “those who are counted worthy to attain that age and the resurrection from the dead,” i.e., “sons of God” or “sons of the resurrection,” who do not marry. That is, celibacy is regarded as a prerequisite for resurrection. (p. 121)
He’s referring to the interoperation that Luke, as opposed to the others, says, that only those who starting from this life won’t marry are saved. However, I don’t really get it. I was wondering what’s your take on the text, and if I you see Dr. David’s point. I checked the Greek and the “counted worthy” there is aorist, so I think the Berean Literal Bible translates it best: “But those having been considered worthy […]”
Anyhow, I don’t see why this would imply that Luke says that only those who don’t marry enter Heaven.
Original article:
https://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com/2016/12/18/lukes-surprising-and-oft-ignored-views-on-marriage-and-resurrection/
Interesting. I don’t think I agree with his reading (since Jesus elsewhere does not insist on celibacy for entering the kingdom, but ethical behavior toward those in need). But David Aune is a very learned New Testament scholars whose views were/are never to be taken lightly.
Jesus does indeed talk otherwise elsewhere. But I’m talking strictly about this Lukan passage. Do you get his point? I don’t! I mean why does the fact that they are “counted worthy” have to precede their deaths? The text says at an aorist time that they are “counted worthy” and “share” in the resurrection. But then, it says at a present time that they don’t “marry” and neither “die”. That present time must be in the age to come, since obviously they need to first die in order to be “partakers of the resurrection”. Therefore, also the fact that the they don’t marry needs be understood in the future age.
All the Christian authors who talk about a person’s fate in the afterlife (whether resurrection or going to heaven) indicate that it depends on what happens inthis life before death. Being worthy means being one who will be given teh good afterlife. Aune is suggesting that being celibate will make one worthy according to this saying. The statement that the do not die refers to those who enter the afterlife. It’s permanent.
Precisely! If the statement that they do not die refers to those who enter the afterlife, why would not also “neither marry nor are given in marriage” refere to the after-life?
People who are worthy will enter the afterlife. At that point they will not be married. And they will never die.
From the narrow and vastly incomplete knowledge we humans have about the universe and life itself, it’s easy to see how someone an see suffering as a problem as to God’s existence.
A person with more humility will recognize that God’s existence is as probable as not.
The 3rd assertion is true: We observe it. We experience it. It is a given.
Therefore the 1st and 2nd assertions cannot both be true. Either one or both is/are not true.
There is no explanation for suffering. It is what it is. All we can do is try our best to mitigate it.
One difficulty with your formulation of the ‘problem of evil’ may be that you assume God’s omnipotence as a static quality. rather than as an ongoing achievement. So requiring not only that God can master evil, but also that God’s mastery should be both *easy* and entirely past. Whereas through the Hebrew Bible, God’s mastery of evil is hard-fought, costly, risky, ongoing and yet to be fully achieved (e.g at Isaiah 25).
In principle, you might reconcile your three assertions through process theology:
– there is an all-powerul and loving God;
– there is specific suffering;
– humans have free will;
– God has has the capabilty of ending this suffering and has empowered Bart to do so;
– but Bart makes a free-will choice to study the New Testament instead.
Or otherwise, and more attuned to the text of the Hebrew Bible, they may be reconciled liturgically:
– there is an all-powerful and loving God;
– there continues specific suffering;
– God’s apparent inaction in the face of suffering is inexplicable to us;
– so in our liturgy, we reproach God for inaction; while continuing to assert both faith in his ultimate mastery and comittment to participate in the struggle of creation;
– repeat until God acts.
Hi Bart,
Can you please define “love” from a non-anthropomorphic perspective?
Love is a human quality (at least from the most definitions of it), and we don’t know if other high-level animals (like horses) experience love as humans do. Also, we know for sure that many other living organisms (like flies) don’t experience love as humans do.
This is the major logical fallacy in metaphysics: using anthropomorphisms; because the concepts and laws of a closed system (like our universe) might not be valid for a higher system (like the world outside this universe). Based on this, the concepts and laws related to human behavior might not be (as well) valid for the world outside this universe.
Regarding the concept of suffering: there are so many thoughts about it, including the one I have presented in a platinum article here (part 2, a discussion on the issue of suffering, dated 25-Sep-2023), and this is here the original article in my library site:
https://omr-mhmd.yolasite.com/resources/65-Spirit-20.pdf
I’m not sure there is a non-anthropomorphic concept of love.
I agree. I don’t think “love” has a non-anthropomorphic definition. Therefore, “love” shouldn’t be used or considered in any logical analysis related to God; unless it was defined in that particular analysis in a non-anthropomorphic perspective.
Here’s my layperson non-anthropomorphic explanation of love: Love is a type of cooperation. I am a cooperative of numerous cells working in concert. Each cell is a cooperative of the descendant of an Archaea and a bacteria-like organism (mitochondria). Love, in this basic form, has been around for over a billion years (500 million years for metazoan eukaryotes). Add evolved chemicals like oxytocin providing emotional incentive for cooperation and you have what we call love. Love is present in many animals, not just humans. Love (cooperation) enables great power and freedom for living organisms. The dark side is competition with other cooperative organisms for limited resources (real or perceived) which results in killing for food and, on the human social level, murder and wars. I believe the evolutionary trend for humanity is likely to be more cooperation and not less. Probably to be learned the hard way (As suggested in fictional Star Trek universe where humans have achieved a much higher level of cooperation than our own but only at the expense of a devastating world war). My mental path to this model/explanation of love is how I was able to cross from existential Christianity to non-Theism.
My issue with any discussion of “the problem of suffering” is the question “what is suffering?” I may stub my toe, and it may hurt a lot, but is that “suffering?” I may be very anxious about an upcoming job interview, but is that “suffering?”
On the other hand, everyone eventually dies. Is it “real suffering” if millions of people die in a holocaust, famine, or natural disaster but not “real suffering” when an individual dies of natural, age related causes? And is there a different degree of suffering involved with a prolonged, dementia-related death as opposed to sudden heart failure?
It seems to me that any perception of “real suffering” compared to ordinary suffering is always subjective, therefore any belief about when God should be involved to end suffering is also subjective. Don’t get me wrong, I also have a problem with the idea of an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God allowing suffering. I am just curious about where you draw the line between ordinary, stub your toe type of suffering and the type of suffering that may cause someone to lose faith in an all-loving, all-powerful God? I will guarantee that other people will draw different lines.
God is like an artist who has chosen a particular medium and is constrained by the medium in creating. Our universe is finely tuned for life to evolve. But pain, suffering, and death is unavoidable in that process. Otherwise, God would have avoided it.
God is all loving. God is with us in our suffering to comfort and console us. God suffers with us.
And we do have the capability to act on God’s behalf for good. You do not believe in God, Bart, but how many lives have been saved and helped through the charities you support with millions of dollars of contributions? Wow!
Concerning Hebrew scripture ideology — it amounts to wanting to be in control. To assert we can make good things happen and avoid bad things by following God’s statutes and doing what God wants. The human desire for this is obvious. Both in Biblical times and now. But the desire for it does not make it true.
An alternative view is that we do what God wants, that ultimately we come to want what God wants, because of the people we choose to be. And that is a way to find salvation amidst all the chaos, pain, and suffering.
1. God is all powerful.
2. God is all loving.
3. There is suffering.
These three premises do not validly conclude anything like, “4. God does not exist.” There must be some implicit premise added to make it valid. It could be something like, “2.5. An all powerful, all loving God would not allow suffering.” I think that is an awfully hard premise to prove.
It’s not enough to ask why God allows suffering. Yes, having an answer would dismantle the whole argument, but the arguer is claiming something else. The implicit premise 2.5. requires that there is no answer.
That’s right. “God does not exist” is not the logical result of a a syllogism. If you think that a loving God would allow millions of people to be born of birth defects, 300,000 people to be killed in a tsunami, 30,000 in volcanic mudslides, 25,000 die a day of starvation (in an age where a much smaller % of the population is doing so), that 11 million would be killed in a holocaust — if the question is whether an all-loving and all-powerful God wwould allow all this (or cause it), then it’s not a matter of logical proof but of what you think most likely. If you have no problem with an all-powerful all-loving God allowing or causing this, then I think you need to have some reason he woudl (other than just assuming he does exist and therefore does allow/cause it); if you do have a problem with the idea then you need to wrestle with the possibility that there is no such God.
“If you have no problem with an all-powerful all-loving God allowing or causing this, then I think you need to have some reason he woudl (other than just assuming he does exist and therefore does allow/cause it)”
That’s not quite true. The person disagreeing with the conclusion of the logical or probabilistic argument from suffering does not need to have a reason for why God allows suffering. He or she only needs to think it is possible or probable that God has a morally sufficient reason for allowing suffering (such that it is consistent with premise 2. that God is all-loving). Having an actual reason knocks the argument down entirely.
My son was born with a birth defect. I do not see why there cannot be (or it is improbable that there is) a morally sufficient reason for this. There could be some person I will meet or event I will attend that could end up becoming a great good. There could be some great thing he does in his life because he was born this way. I cannot tell you the reason but neither can the arguer say there’s none. That’s why I have never found this argument to be strong.
I agree that a person does not need to have a reason for why God would allow suffering. I may have misspoken? What I’m saying is that a person who thinks there is a God should have a reason for thinking so, whether suffering is a problem or not. My view is that what we think and believe should be for reasons, not for no reason. And if we just accept what others tell us, or what we were raised to think, those would be “reasons” of a sort, but they would not be very strong and certainly not compelling reasons.
I do want to agree with your sentiment, but I wonder often about people with severe mental illness or disabilities. We are definitely getting off topic…
My friend who was diagnosed bipolar murdered his mother. Can I fault him for having incorrect thoughts that led him to kill her? His illness lead him to delusions such as thinking Michael Chrichton was his real father. What if it might be OK for someone like that to hold a true belief for a bad reason?
I sincerely don’t know the answer to this. I would prefer you are right.
Hugely difficult issues whether you believe in God or not!
I agree with the comment from danieljcathers.
The experience of God is wholly subjective. That doesn’t mean the experience is unreal or imagined, only that it is not subject to empirical, objective analysis or proof. What I see happen again and again (it’s very common among Unitarian Universalists) is that people create mental barriers about the existence of God with reasoning that is wholly subjective, but convince themselves that their reasoning is empirically based or somehow objective. That it is ultimately true beyond any questioning. In doing this, they shut themselves off from communion with God. They cannot hear God because God is unreal to them.
The argument about suffering is an example of this pattern.
As a Universalist I don’t think anyone is damned for not believing in God. Or that they can’t live happy lives, or can’t do good in the world without being in relationship with God . On the other hand, for many of us, experiencing God as present and engaged with us is transformational. It helps us become better people than we would otherwise be. We find salvation in communion with God, and a richer, happier life.
The solution is simple : there is no such God. But that doesn’t imply that a Godly Reality doesn’t exist and that we have not the duty to search for the will of the newly defined God in that reality
I agree. And then the quesiton is why we shoud think a Godly Reality exists. We can certainly assume so, if we choose. But what would make us think that its existence is more probable than not?
For myself i have enough evidence, and I will call that not omnipotent God ‘God’ in the biblical meaning of an anthropomorph being with only the power of a fly to intervene in human world but still morally, intellectually and knowingly far superior to us.
Therefore I said that a “God who is not omnipotent cannot be God” is circular reasoning by biblical definition fallacy. That is like saying that the earth cannot exist if it is not flat, because the earth is a flat planet according the Bible.
Dr. Ehrman, you say here that explaining suffering was not a problem for polytheists, because they could attribute suffering to angry, evil or mischievous gods. But for monotheists like the Israelites, the problem was more complex. I was wondering about the following: If I understand the development of Judaism correctly, it was only during the rise of apocalypticism starting in the 2nd century BCE that Jewish thinkers developed the idea of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, between the Devil and God. And they used this struggle as an explanation for suffering. This imagined Devil was extremely powerful, able to influence all people, run world affairs, start wars, etc. In fact, he seems to be almost as powerful as God himself. (But not quite, since God will defeat him in the ultimate battle.) It appears to me that this building up of the Devil into some almost-god-like figure is, in a way, a “return to polytheism” through the back door. Would you agree with that?
Good questoin. It completely depends on how we define “polytheism” and “monotheism.” Even monotheists believed in powerful supernatural beings who were not God himself, and sometimes these others could be thought of as gods. In judaism that was frequent — and so some scholars resists think of Jews as strict “monotheists.” But usually in Jewish thought, none of these other divine beings were eternal or on the same level of divinity as God himself.
Suppose we look half a millennium earlier and 1500 miles farther east to history’s other great sage, Siddhartha Gautama, aka “the Buddha” — who regarded suffering as being the *only* problem!
Buddhism is steadfastly agnostic on whether suffering is a consequence of divine purpose (or indifference) or simply intrinsic to the natural order.
One story in the canon tells of a disciple who threatened to abandon the nascent movement unless Gautama answered his questions about how and when the universe began, whether there was a creator god, the nature of life after death, etc.
The sage responded that he never claimed to have answers to such metaphysical questions, and went on to offer a parable about a soldier, struck down by a poisoned arrow, who refused treatment (😳) — until the doctor could tell him the kind of poison, whether the arrow came from a longbow or a crossbow, the rank of the enemy who fired it, and so on.
The soldier died, the Buddha concluded, with the answer to those questions still unknown to him.
To understand so inscrutable a problem as the source (and ending) of suffering, shouldn’t we consider looking beyond the theology of a primitive, animal-sacrifice cult? 🤔
If you mean finding an answer that will satisfy you personally, yes, you should look everwhere you can!
Personally, I reached the same conclusion as Rabbi Kushner. The pervasiveness of evil aside, any defensible theology precludes omnipotence as a divine attribute.
Indeed, AFAIK all theologians implicitly acknowledge as much in conceding their God to be incapable of creating a logical contradiction (e.g. the legendary “rock too heavy for Him to lift”) or contravening His own, self-proclaimed, moral code.
Further, there are less obviously problematic (notwithstanding *Biblical*😳) examples.
Consider the inherent incongruity of divine countermandments (perforce contra omniscience), or the inescapable Catch-22 of divine favor bestowed at the importuning of one person by subverting the free will of another (a point the rabbi undoubtedly raises to rationalize Yahweh’s callous disregard for the existential plight of His own “Chosen People” in the mid-20th century.)
Additional evidence is barred by blog limits. 🙁
Personally, I concluded that Marcion was absolutely right about Yahweh — and went in quest of a more theologically coherent Jesus.
Since you have frequently noted that it was this “problem of suffering,” rather than any realizations arising from your scholarly work, that moved you to agnosticism/atheism, what I’m asking is this: Did *you* — personally — “look everywhere you can,” or merely presuppose Abrahamic theology to be the only form worth considering?
Do you mean did I look in every religious and philosohical tradition of all kinds? Nope. I’m interested in whether the Jewish and/or Christian (and/or Islamic) God is a reality, by which I mean whether htere is some kind of conscious being who is not part of the universe that we can observe and meausre or at least hypothesize (dark energy, etc.) who is a source of love and power. My view is the answer is no. Does that invalidate any other rligious traditions? Nope.
Does rejecting the existence of an omni-powered “Jewish and/or Christian (and/or Islamic) God” thereby debar *any* “kind of conscious being who is not part of the universe that we can observe and measure”?
Personally, I concluded decades ago that the Abrahamic deity was an absurdity (which assessment I eventually found powerfully affirmed by *your* lectures and books BTW! 😎)
Presuming “salvation” to be a process that requires an unknown number of lifetimes to accomplish may be a heresy for orthodox Christianity, but it provides a compelling solution to the problem of suffering!
However, let’s disregard the Buddha (notwithstanding his surpassing obsession with the problem of suffering), and all “other religious traditions” that obviate the issue by having reincarnation as a tenet.
The earliest articulation of the Theodicy conundrum in our own culture is attributed to the Greek philosopher, Epicurus (indeed, is AKA the “Epicurean Paradox.”) This was, perhaps, a century after Gautama — but nearly a millennium *before* the emerging RCC attempted to preempt “God’s Problem” by propounding a ‘loyalty oath’ developed in Nicaea!
Wasn’t that because some early (albeit subsequently exterminated) Christian sects *also* believed that there are more things in Heaven and Earth, professor, than are dreamt of in your philosophy? 😉
Most Christians at all times have thought that about my philosophy….
Mine, too! Maybe we can start a club and get t-shirts… or baseball caps (but not red ones! 😉)
Following the eventual reversal of fortune for Christianity — the 4th-century quantum leap from official sanction and persecution to official sanction and flourishing (🤯) — the long-simmering conflict over (IMHO incomprehensible) Trinitarian theology threatened to boil over and scald imperial hopes for a new era of monotheistic comity.
Thus, Constantine convened the first conclave of recognized Church Fathers who formally deified Jesus while inexplicably preserving Yahweh’s status as the one and only God — bisecting the Almighty into separate “persons” (and as an afterthought, including the Holy Spirit to make it: trisecting. 🙄)
Though Arius was overwhelmingly repudiated, his logic seems irrefutable: “If the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence: hence it is that there was when the Son was not. It follows then of necessity that he had his existence from the non-existence.”
For the one of us who *wasn’t* raised Catholic, you seem to have far more Christian charity (or credulousness) than me for the newly institutionalized church, joined in unholy matrimony with the secular state.
So can you briefly explain the RCC’s winning argument?
I wouldn’t say I’m credulous about the church. I simply think that it often does a world of good. (And actually don’t know how it can be denied! It usually is by people who don’t know active Christians or the things they do in the world)
There wer lots of arguments for the equality of Christ with God, some based on biblical verses (John 10:30); others on biblical deductions (in Revelation both Christ and God announce they are the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and End), and some points of logic (if God was perfect he couldn’t not change, since a change would necessarily make him different and therefore either more or less perfectd; but if he *became* a Father at some point, he would have changed….)
It appears I might have this backwards, professor. For the one of us who *isn’t* an atheist, I seem to be far more cynical than you about the institutional church. But FWIW, I not only agree that it “often does a world of good,” but would in fact raise your “often” to a “mostly.”
It was plainly unchristian of me (🤨) to interpret your magnanimity as naiveté.
Perhaps, having spent most of a professional lifetime in politics has left me jaded and suspicious. But where you see Constantine and the early church fathers making a good faith effort to resolve difficult, theological issues, I see a 4th-century Joe Biden or Donald Trump and his power-mongering cronies rolling logs into a gilded nest they can feather for themselves. 😧
But, anticipating your oft-repeated challenge, I will readily concede that I have no evidence that would justify harboring such suspicions. Worse, I also “know active Christians” and am well aware of the (mostly) laudable “things they do in the world.”
I probably should heed the advice I heard somewhere that one should “judge not, that ye be not judged.” 😏
All “arguments for the equality of Christ with God” are not only a categorical contradiction for monotheism, but must reconcile the (preternaturally) compassionate and forgiving Jesus with the (relentlessly) vicious and vengeful Yahweh.
The psychopathically insecure god of the OT actually *boasted* of carrying a grudge against an offender’s innocent descendants “unto the third and the fourth generation.” 😳
Indeed, isn’t Yahweh having made good on this threat (in fact eliminating *any* limitation on divine retaliation) at the very foundation of orthodox Christology?
However, AFAIK the Jewish god was, otherwise, typical of Iron Age deities. Divine demands for flattery/appeasement by ritual, animal sacrifice prevailed throughout the Mediterranean basin well into the Common Era.
Although the Axial Age brought a theological renaissance that began several centuries earlier, it did so hundreds of miles down the Silk Road from Palestine.
More sophisticated theology was (notwithstanding the philosophical efforts of Plato & Friends) slower to take hold in the west. Thus, animal sacrifice cults — arguably more primitive superstition than religious paradigm — continued to dominate the world into which Jesus was born.
Wasn’t a theology grounded in human, interpersonal relations (subsidiary for Yahweh, but axiomatic for Jesus) strikingly anomalous in the west in the year 0?
Your argument that “if God was perfect he could not change, since a change would necessarily make him different and therefore either more or less perfect” is compelling, professor.
Indeed, as you have elsewhere observed, an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity cannot (OT tales notwithstanding) so much as change his mind!
Elijah may not have known that King Ahab would repent (oddly, for his wife’s offense 🤔), but Yahweh certainly *did* — and should, therefore, have always intended to punish “the children for the sin of the parents” (though in this instance it was of the very next generation.) Likewise for Jonah when the people of Nineveh repented and thereby reversed God’s judgment.
Wouldn’t the “Problem of Suffering” for humanity (writ large) have been dramatically reduced had Yahweh simply not backpedalled on destroying the ungrateful Chosen People during the Exodus?
An omniscient deity would *know* that bringing Israel into the Promised Land was a victory more pyrrhic than the Greek one at the Battle of Asculum. Jews would not merely suffer a military defeat, but ultimately endure near universal antisemitism, ceaseless persecution, and repeated bloodbaths over 3+ millennia — culminating in the attempted genocide of the Holocaust!
Isn’t reconciling all three Theodicy premises logically impossible?
Yup. That’s what makes it fun. But also, that’s why it’s called a “problem” But it’s not logically IMPOSSIBLE.
You can think of options! (For why God would allow / cause suffering if he was both all powerful nd all loving)
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I’m afraid you overestimate my deductive faculty, professor.
Since divine attributes are necessarily absolute, how can all three of those postulated by Herr Leibniz logically coexist?
If you’ll forbear my benighted persistence here, how is it possible for an all-powerful, all-loving God to even *allow* (much less be the source of) human suffering?
Personally, I’m inclined to jettison omnipotence. But in any case, how can an all-powerful, irresistible force avert a head-on collision with an immoveable commitment to universal benevolence? IMHO a cosmic confrontation — of Big Bang proportions! — is inescapable. 😳
However, I also have no hesitation about thinking outside of the Yahweh-delimited box.
The Buddha built an entire theology-philosophy entirely and *specifically* to answer the “problem of suffering,” propounding that all of it (within our power to mitigate, i.e., other than the consequences of natural calamities) is of our *own* creation — arising from ignorance/self-delusion or greed/attachment or hatred/aversion.
Since an agnostic/atheist must be similarly unconstrained, what do *you* make of the possibility proposed by the Prince of Kosala that (to paraphrase the more familiarly western, Prince of Denmark 😏), the fault lies, not in our gods, but in ourselves?
Is this answer inadmissible merely because it didn’t emerge from Judeo-Christian tradition?
I absolutely think the fault lies largely with ourselves, not the gods, since I don’t believe there are any goes. But I also don’t think the fault mainly lies just in ourselves, since it is an incredibly cruel universe we inhabit and it cares not a twit for us: hence hurricanes, floods, mudslides, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and on and one. No one is at “fault.”
Natural disasters are undeniably both intrinsic and ubiquitous in the “universe we inhabit” for our brief three-score-and-ten years — frequently having catastrophic, often fatal, consequences.
From species-specific plagues to such indiscriminate, mass exterminators as the mountain-sized asteroid that ended the Cretaceous Period (and three-quarters of *all* extant life on earth 😳) clearly the universe “cares not a twit for us.”
Any more than it did T-Rex, the most powerful and fearsome predator of that (or any) time. Or some of his more innocuous, avian progeny — the also ultimately doomed dodo birds and passenger pigeons. But, thanks to an emergent and especially clever ape, the less endearing small pox and polio viruses, as well.
Although “hurricanes, floods,” etc., inflict suffering on whatever has the misfortune to be in their path, such arise from inanimate forces that, lacking intentionality, *cannot* be “incredibly cruel.”
The evolutionary sine qua non for *every* species is the death of its individual members. No exceptions. Don’t take it personally.
We might recast blame for our ineluctable fate in this perforce universe to its (seemingly less than) “intelligent designer.” But doesn’t preserving omnipotence by sacrificing omniscience merely swap one theodicean deficiency for another?
(Besides, without extinctions, imagine the price of real estate! 😉)
There’s no question that the 2000° lava currently spewing from Kīlauea indiscriminately annihilates every living thing in its path from the caldera down to the ocean.
But that swath of total destruction will (in the geological blink-of-an-eye) be transmogrified into new and incredibly vibrant land, expanding what is arguably the closest thing on earth to the legendary Garden of Eden.
So astonishing (miraculous?) a metamorphosis wouldn’t be possible *without* the ‘creative destruction’ of such natural disasters as, for instance, deadly volcanoes that clear the way and reshuffle the biological deck.
Whether by divine design or remarkably elegant happenstance, there is an exquisite complementarity of temporal and eternal realms. While the latter provides the spark of life that animates otherwise inert matter, the former provides something unavailable in eternity: the opportunity for development.
Unceasing transformation — much of it sudden and catastrophic — is intrinsic to the physical universe, but constitutionally debarred by the timelessness of the spiritual one.
IMHO the concepts of “change” and “time” are effectively synonymous. Is it possible to define or measure (or even describe) either without reference to the other?
So the only way to upgrade your seat in heaven is by earning frequent flier miles traversing this “vale of tears.” 😇