Evil God and anti-theodicy

[MarcusA]

What's good and evil is you and me.

[FrustratedFool]

What's good and evil is you and me.

I personally dont believe in objective morality.

[MarcusA]

What's good and evil is you and me.

I personally dont believe in objective morality.

Neither do I. There is no such thing as God.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Plea bargain?

It's just commonsense.

Good sense is far from common. Use "mediocre sense", please, to avoid confusion with reality.

[MarcusA]

It's just commonsense.

Good sense is far from common. Use "mediocre sense", please, to avoid confusion with reality.

Sense is not sensibility.

[MarcusA]

I have tied myself in knots trying to disprove the existence of God. It simply is not possible.

[GrandizerII]

I think one of my struggles with this kind of argument is what do we mean by "evil God" exactly? Do we mean a maximal being that is consistently evil in the human sense, thus always lying, never showing love, and constantly enjoying the suffering of others? It seems to me that as problematic as the idea of a loving God may be, there appear to be more problems with having an evil God instead. I find that being consistently good (in the human sense) is more conceivable than being consistently evil.

Also, it seems like an evil God would be less likely to create a world like this in which we get to experience love and great companionship and enjoy all sorts of fun activities. Why even let us have so much fun?

Furthermore, for a lot of theists, God being good isn't anything like how us humans can be good. In fact, under Christian theism, God is the reason why anything is good. So replacing the word "good" with "evil" or "benevolent" with "malevolent" isn't really going to do anything effective; it's just substituting words.

What do you think?

I don't think there's any conceptual issue, in that they seem equivalent. And there's certainly no problem explaining fun with an anti-theodicy in the same way that theists would explain evil.  And also, the issue about substitution seems moot since in both cases we'd argue it was only an analogous good/evil based on human perception.

I think your strongest (only?) argument would be whether a maximally evil being is as coherent as a maximally good being (if we pull the Augustinian trick of defining evil in terms of an absence of good then doubly so).  Should we examine this point in more detail?  I think it the most profitable avenue to explore.

There were like three arguments (or key points) in my post, though admittedly not very well thought out, since I just only thought about this a short while ago after reading your OP, so all the points I'm making here are on the spot and liable to contain a few fallacies, I'm sure.

Ok, think of it like this: if the theist says God is good (or the standard of good or whatever), then you come along and suggest God is evil (or the standard of evil or whatever), what did that accomplish exactly? As far as I can see, it didn't really change anything about God's nature, all what changed were words. And so the theist is just going to shrug this one off (if that's all that is really happening).

As for what you consider to be my strongest argument, I actually consider to be quite weak compared to the point made in my previous paragraph. And not really sure how to pursue this one further.

[FrustratedFool]

I have tied myself in knots trying to disprove the existence of God. It simply is not possible.

It seems to me that nothing can be proven or disproven outside of maths, and the only fact that can be 100% known is that qualia exists.

That said, I think good arguments can be forwarded to convince many that God likely doesn't exist.

[FrustratedFool]

I don't think there's any conceptual issue, in that they seem equivalent. And there's certainly no problem explaining fun with an anti-theodicy in the same way that theists would explain evil.  And also, the issue about substitution seems moot since in both cases we'd argue it was only an analogous good/evil based on human perception.

I think your strongest (only?) argument would be whether a maximally evil being is as coherent as a maximally good being (if we pull the Augustinian trick of defining evil in terms of an absence of good then doubly so).  Should we examine this point in more detail?  I think it the most profitable avenue to explore.

There were like three arguments (or key points) in my post, though admittedly not very well thought out, since I just only thought about this a short while ago after reading your OP, so all the points I'm making here are on the spot and liable to contain a few fallacies, I'm sure.

Ok, think of it like this: if the theist says God is good (or the standard of good or whatever), then you come along and suggest God is evil (or the standard of evil or whatever), what did that accomplish exactly? As far as I can see, it didn't really change anything about God's nature, all what changed were words. And so the theist is just going to shrug this one off (if that's all that is really happening).

As for what you consider to be my strongest argument, I actually consider to be quite weak compared to the point made in my previous paragraph. And not really sure how to pursue this one further.

I guess the outworked consequences of that language change are what changes.

When theists say God is good they mean not just the tautology that God has the nature that He has, but that His nature is in some meaningful way analogous to the way humans intuit goodness - that in the same way we value courage, self-sacrifice, self-discipline, fairness, justice, kindness, etc God exemplifies those and has them in perfect or infinite measure. Thus they seek to explain evil and suffering and don't explain goodness and pleasure, and they trust that God desires to answer prayers that ask for such things and hope for an afterlife where there is an abundance of good and a lack of evil.

And evil God would flip that.

[MarcusA]

Humanity should be enough for all of us.