I think it is safe to use the Epicurus argument based on all the answers offered thus far.
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?
It is pretty obvious that amount of side stepping and deflections, respondents believe in a non interventionist type of god which is the premise of deism.
Just for the record, there is actually no such thing as
free will. It is a myth. In fact the whole premise of this philosophy fails as your lot in life is practically determined by where you are born, everything else is a logical progression from there. Calvinism is probably the closest model to reality even though in itself it is pretty warped.
Freewill suggests that one is able to affect outcomes but we cannot as the choices we make are always governed by external criteria not under our influence. We are presented with a choice which we make. What leads up to that choice is a whole sequence of events preceding the choice outside our control OR the result of earlier choices.
The only way one is able to see this is by reflection of your past. It would be nice if we were able to see the future based on alternate choices we could make but safe to say, no one can see or predict the future concerning one's own lot in life.
Theists should actually study this
concept of free will I am sure that you will see how weak this argument actually is.
Perhaps I see stuff differently b/c I have lived in 3 different countries where internal cultures were different in many ways.
Here is an example.
I am a smoker since I was 8. I am now 55. Did I have free will to start smoking? Let us look at the external circumstances.
- Tobacco was discovered in the USA and exported back to Europe. Sir Walter Raleigh
- Advertising campaigns suggested it is cool to smoke and even macho in many cases. Also posited as a relaxing thing.
- My brother started working at 18 and is 10 years older than me, thus I had ample access to cigarettes, I thought my bro was cool, all his buddies smoked (peer pressure)
So there were a number of issues outside my control that led me to make the choice to smoke or not to smoke.
Was I coerced or did I really make an unambiguous out of the blue choice to smoke?
Bear in mind, we all grew up in a cult that suggested smoking is a sin.
That decision 47 years ago will have negative effects on my health and probably my longevity. However I still enjoy smoking, pretty cheap here, roughly a dollar for 20.
Really what influences us the most is conformance to other peoples (apparent) standards.
There are just too many examples I can posit that refutes the concept of free will.
Furthermore, the whole concept of freewill is derived from a false premise aka a set up which suggests humans are born inherently flawed aka original sin. Seeing that the tale of Adam and Eve do not represent reality in any way whatsoever, the aspect of OS is moot. This invariably leads to the conclusion that even if the Jesus fella existed, his supposed sacrifice made not one iota of difference to the evolution of societies. We observe that self proclaimed christians are no different to anyone else.
The question of this thread is valid and a hard one to ratify considering the close ties of the RCC and Hitler and the mere fact that Hitler and his followers were mostly christian yet were able to carry out atrocities however they chose to justify their acts. Actually the parallels to Nazi Germany with the US patriotism are eerily similar.
The buckle of the German army had this
Gott mit uns
The US has "in God we Trust" on their currency, in their pledge and so on.
The reality is that humans do despicable things regardless of their beliefs, there is no god to apportion blame to. Your own bible even suggests that it rains on the just and unjust alike.
I have said numerous times here, god is real to the believer but only exists in their mind. Were that not the case here, one answer would have sufficed but what we so often see in a lot of jumping through mental hoops to defend this imaginary god. God is really only an extension of your own ego. Whatever good or bad christians do is not because of their beliefs, it is because they are inherently good or bad people.
Folk profess that they are fallible and not perfect but follow a supposed perfect Jesus who likely did not even exist as reported. It is of course easy to defend this when you cherry pick the bible for all the warm fuzzies and ignore the blatant contradictions by the same alleged man.
I can do much the same and make a very convincing argument for a secular non religious Jesus. The gospels are not even a biography as a lot of it was hearsay. Imagine me attempting to do a biography of anyone w/o first hand knowledge or at the very least many corroborating and reliable testimonies. We do not even know who the authors of the gospels actually were, the origins. The best info we have is that certain books were voted into the canon circa 350CE which is a huge lapse of time to lose important details or add embellishments.
Most folk follow the bible texts derived from the KJV1611 translation. They did not translate from originals and only used the Septuagint which was based on erroneous texts. I have posted a pic that summarises this more than once.
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