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“God works in mysterious ways”
The cope that always comes across when I hear this is intesne
imo every religion ever is a cope. All of those elaborate ideas about supernatural beings and alternate planes of existence to somehow cope with the fact that one day the good man, and the evil man, will both die and rot just the same.
It feels incredibly unjust for good men to die the same way evil men do, and for a lot of people that’s too much to handle. We as humans have such a strong sense of “fairness” that we attempted to structure our entire society around the idea of justice for all, and so by comparison nature feels cruel and unfair, you can either learn to live with that, or tell yourself really really hard that it’s not the end :) after they die the good man will be happy! and the evil man will get the punishment he deserves!
now layer that with milenia of different ideas about what qualifies you as “good” and “evil” and you’ve got religion.
This is my personal opinion, and honestly I don’t mind nor care how the other person deals with their existential dread, as long as they aren’t bigots about their way of coping.
If there is a ‘god’ then they are a fucking asshole.
“If there is a god, he must ask me forgiveness.”
-Scrawled on the walls of a Nazi concentration camp cell
Maybe God is studying ethics, and we are his show and tell assignment.
To nibble further at the arguments for God: free will is absurd.
If god is all knowing and all powerful, then when he created the universe, he would know exactly what happened from the first moment until the last. Like setting up an extremely complex arrangement of dominoes.
So how could he give people free will? Maybe he created some kind of special domino that sometimes falls leftward and sometimes falls rightward, so now it has “free will”. Ok, but isn’t that just randomness? God’s great innovation is just chance?
No, one might argue, free will isn’t chance, it’s more complex than that, a person makes decisions based on their moral principles, their life experience, etc. Well where did they get their principles? What circumstances created their life experience? Conditions don’t appear out of nowhere. We get our DNA from somewhere. Either God controls the starting conditions and knows where they lead, or he covered his eyes and threw some dice. In either case we can say “yes, I have free will” in the sense that we do what we want, but the origins of our decisions are either predetermined or subject to chaos/chance.
A good read on the inverse of what you’re stating, namely that free will is logical:
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTaoist.html
Got to be honest, I started reading that, saw how long it was and stopped. Would you want to share the gist?
It’s a long read and worth it, because it beautifully explores the theme.
But these are two quotes that summarize the main though:
God: Why, the idea that I could possibly have created you without free will [is a fallacy]! You acted as if this were a genuine possibility, and wondered why I did not choose it! It never occurred to you that a sentient being without free will is no more conceivable than a physical object which exerts no gravitational attraction. (There is, incidentally, more analogy than you realize between a physical object exerting gravitational attraction and a sentient being exerting free will!) Can you honestly even imagine a conscious being without free will? What on earth could it be like?
And
Don’t you see that the so-called “laws of nature” are nothing more than a description of how in fact you and other beings do act? They are merely a description of how you act, not a prescription of of how you should act, not a power or force which compels or determines your acts. To be valid a law of nature must take into account how in fact you do act, or, if you like, how you choose to act.
