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I mean, to start with, you’re mixing up motte and Bailey here- ‘only females wear skirts’ is very much a fact of our culture, and not a fact of nature, in a way that ‘only females breastfeed’ is the opposite. Leaving aside that skirts are generally designed for a woman’s body and not a man’s and so some adjustments might need to be made(but they clearly can be, see eg kilts), you wearing one would simply be odd, not female. Gender roles are a cultural universal but many of their specific expressions are not.
If God had intended for you to present and be seen as a woman, he’d have given you ovaries. That’s the actual statement. And as a teleological matter it’s straightforwardly true- it is simply impossible for you to get pregnant, large health improvements or further development will not enable you to get pregnant, you have xy chromosomes, etc. Your disagreement is too fundamental to be resolved on the level of ‘changing your gender can fit with your telos’. You don’t agree with the concept of a telos. And now we’re at the postulate level. Sure, I can write a ten thousand word essay- if I had the time- about why the balance of the evidence favors the existence of the Christian God as described in the Bible and expounded by the Catholic Church. But it is, fundamentally, impossible to falsify the statement ‘there is no God or higher purpose’- although my statement, ‘God is real, came to earth 2,000 years ago, and founded an institution which is incapable of erring from His will, which continues to provide knowledge based off of His intellect’ is falsifiable(not falsified, however).
I didn't mean to imply otherwise. As I said here, my point is that appealing to phrases like "the dictatorship of the universe" and "look in the mirror" fail to make the concept of a telos in its full Christian sense compelling. They're rhetorical smoke and mirrors. The desirability of following one's telos in the theological sense doesn't follow from the blunt fact of the impossibility of ignoring one's material circumstances.
To put it another way, I think "biological males can't get pregnant" cannot get you to "therefore they shouldn't get genital surgery and change their names even if they want to" any more than "humans are not swans" can get you to "therefore they shouldn't become airplane pilots", no matter how loudly it is repeated.
Is too. At least if by God we mean "an omnipotent omnibenevolent being" as opposed to an entity that's one but not the other. Still, let's not get into that.
I'm not sure which theological/philosophical tradition uses the word "omnibenevolent" when describing God, but it's not mine. It kind of implies that a theist believes that he is "well-behaved," which is a category error. God is good, in that he is "actual" - to say that X is good is to say that it has succeeded in being in some way. A pencil is a good pencil when it is able to draw, is sharp, long enough to be held easily in a hand, etc. God is good in that sense. God is not good in the sense of being accountable to others for duties and obligations that he performs admirably.
I was specifically talking about Catholics, since I was arguing with one. I grant that they don't seem to use the term "omnibenevolent". They do routinely say "God is good", though, in such a way as to imply we ought to look to God as a moral paragon and do what He says. 'By "God is Good" we just mean 'God is Actual'" doesn't pass the sniff test, as it seems to imply that Satan is a "good" Satan so long as he is able to tempt and torture, his hooves are duly cloven, he is able to strike terror into the hearts of men with the merest glance, etc. but you certainly don't see the Church teaching that "Satan is Good" (let alone implying that this is grounds to do what Satan says).
The telos of the devils is not to tempt, torture, and frighten men- like the other angels, their telos is to serve and glorify God. Lucifer’s ‘non Serviam’ makes him a bad angel, for which he will be tortured like the other damned and tempts men because misery loves company.
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I am specifically a Catholic, so great.
I would recommend reading Brian Davies "The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil" for a study on this topic. Catholics do not believe saying "God is Good" is tantamount to saying "God is well-behaved."
Satan is not good, his nature is to be an angelic messenger in constant adoration of God and serving humanity. He is not living up to his nature at all. He is a very bad example of an Angel.
Do angels have free will in Catholicism too? If not, I do not understand how come Satan could defy God without that being a part of his nature. And as far as I recall the Serpent tempted Eve before the Fall, so whatever flaw caused the Serpent to introduce sin into the world could not have come from man's original sin - if indeed it was a flaw.
Yes, although they don’t have thought process or senses. They just know things.
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Angles live in an eternal moment. They do not have time and so do not change. They have free will, in which they make one choice - the choice to serve God or reject God.
Every being that can love has free will. God made angels to love, and so they have that choice - love God or not. Everything they do is a consequence of the single choice they made at the moment of their creation.
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I'm sure that isn't the motte, but I rather think it's the bailey. Or rather, the bailey is "God is Good and therefore, among other qualities, benevolent". And even doctrinally, while I take the point about God necessarily not being accountable to anyone in the way that a human being is accountable for his actions, it seems incoherent to conclude that God is beyond human judgement, while also asking man to sing His praises. Praise is by definition a value judgement. If God isn't an admirable being, then on what basis could the Church recommend that I praise Him, i.e. express admiration? What does it even mean to praise an entity whom I would not be allowed, counterfactually, to criticize?
(Fair enough on the Devil-as-fallen-angel angle. Still - supposing you substitute your preferred nonexistent deity whose nature is destructive and malevolent, then I don't think the logic of Catholic morality can sanely hold that human beings could make no moral judgement of that being if it existed. But I recognize that Catholic theology wasn't really developed to return sane results in frictionless thought experiments that abstract away core tenets of dogma, so maybe it's okay to bite that bullet and say it's irrelevant because that's not the world God made, so it's alright that if Baal existed it would be moral to worship Baal? Still seems off.)
I'll take a look at the Brian Davies book, though going off the title - unwise, I know - I do want to clarify that I'm not talking about the general Problem of Evil here. I'm not convinced it would be immoral for a human being with arbitrary magic powers to create a universe like ours that contained evil - so the conventional Problem of Evil is not necessarily a defeater to "God is morally good". The Catholic God, however, is asserted to have actively performed deeds which I would judge as immoral if performed by a human being of equal power in the same circumstances.
When the Bible says "God is good" it is usually in the Psalms, sometimes in the prophets, and refers to God's faithfulness to His covenant with Israel. God is good = God keeps promises. I would argue that His nature doesn't let Him do anything but keep His promises, so it's not a statement that "God is well-behaved."
The other place we see God is good is when Jesus says, "What do you mean by calling me good? No one is good but God alone." Which you have to admit is cryptic and does not necessarily point to God being well-behaved.
God is adorable, but He is definitely beyond human judgement. We can only adore him and praise him by analogy.
You are assuming that malevolence is a presence instead of a lack. A being that is pure act without any potential cannot be destructive, only creative. Destruction is a privation of the good, not an active existence. Your arguments have lots of assumptions that you have not examined.
And then you go on to say that the theology that is routinely mocked for arguing about friction-less thought experiments like "how many angels can fit on the head of a pin" isn't set up for friction-less thought experiments. :) There is a lot for you to learn if you want to open up a few philosophy books. Good day to you.
You didn't answer my question. Why should we praise Him, if we cannot actually come to any conclusions of our own about whether he's morally good or not?
I'm assuming no such thing. I am asking you to picture an entity with abilities comparable to those ascribed to Satan, but which never used to be an angel; a being for whom it is instinctive to maim and torture and corrupt in the same way that it is instinctive for a scorpion to sting. If the existence of a creature which instinctively stings frogs is conceivable, so is that of a creature which instinctively flays infants, whether or not God did or would ever create one/allow one to be created. The metaphysical nature of evil doesn't enter into it. I maintain that by your logic, Orcus the Babe-Slayer would have to be deemed "good", to the same extent that a healthy poisonous scorpion is "good"; and that when sermons advise the faithful that "God is good", they are knowingly implying something rather more about God and how you ought to feel about Him than if they were saying "Orcus the Babe-Slayer is good" in this narrow technical sense.
I said it wasn't setup for frictionless thought experiments that assume away core tenets of dogma. I wasn't even saying it as a criticism.
Do you praise a sunset for being morally good? Do you praise a cat because purring nicely on your lap is morally good? What does praise have to do with this?
I think something that may be confusing is that Jesus is praiseworthy in a moral way - He actually has a human nature and can be described in the framework of "well-behaved." But God the Creator can be praised for his steadfastness, the largeness of His creation, etc, without being praised for being a moral agent that does the right thing when its hard.
Ok, I think I understand the question better. I thought you were asking if there was no God, but instead the Devil was God. Which confused me obviously.
If the question is then, "Can God create a creature for whom their good involves hurting other creatures?" and the answer is yes. He makes spiders and flies and calls them good, even though to us their value is difficult to identify.
But that is hardly the only thing Satan does. He also tempts people to chose depravity over behaving according to their own nature and God's will for them. Can God create a creature where this behavior is good for their nature? I think not, because it would be a contradiction in God's active will.
I think another confusion comes from the question, is it human nature to be prey, or is that a deprivation caused by the fall? Christianity teaches that it is not human nature to be prey, and that had there been no fall there would be no predation of humans by viruses or organisms. Natural disasters would not harm us somehow. Etc.
So a creature who's own good involves hurting humans, I would say that creating such a nature would be a contradiction to God.
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"Malevolence is a lack/destruction is a privation" sounds like it's only true in such abstract terms as to be a useless definition. Sure, I suppose if God creates a lightning bolt that happens to strike a human dead then God has technically not held anything back from the human that the human otherwise would get. More energy has been introduced into the system!
Ok? Sure God could strike someone with lightning. No problem with that at all in most Christian belief systems. I think it's actually a cliche? A literal literary trope? You keep throwing these at me and I don't know why.
God could also preserve someone who was struck by lightning miraculously. He doesn't have to. But he could preserve and give being to a body that was struck by lightning so that no biological disruption occurred.
God can and will destroy the whole world one day - He will no longer provide it with the constant ground of being and will remake it. When God destroys He does so by no longer providing for being for a thing. Everything that exists now only does so due to God's continuous, active action of providing being to everything. He can remove this at any time without being malevolent. Nothing is owed existence except in the sense that God owes it to Himself to keep his own promises. God breaking His own promises would be an injustice to His own simple, unchangeable nature.
Saying, "well what about a hypothetical where God isn't the sustain-er of being" is just describing a hypothetical without anything that pertains to what I understand the category "God" to be. "What about a circle that had no sides?"
God made tigers. A good tiger is not a friendly or well-behaved tiger. "What about a God who made you a tiger? No eternal life, no love, just violence and raw nature?" Ok, there are tigers. It does seem to be within God's capacity to make a tiger. What does it prove that you think Christians don't know already?
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By that reasoning, if God punished people for being kind and generous, he'd still be good.
The word "accountable" here is tricky. Clearly nobody can punish God if he doesn't act appropriately. So in that sense, God isn't accountable. But surely people can come up with conclusions about whether God's acts live up to his principles, and if they don't, conclude that God is acting badly.
I'm not sure I would agree that God has principles. He has a nature, and this nature cannot deceive or be deceived. Would you describe that as a principle that God has to live up to? I wouldn't.
I don't see how. Or rather, I think you need to expand upon the scenario a lot more. What are these people's natures, can God make a creature whose nature is to not be kind/generous, does God punish people or simple refrain from rewarding people?
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