Theists allege that were we more like God in having free will and not inclined to do wrong, we would be robots. They special plead Him from being Supreme Robot. They cannot have it both ways. If He isn’t so, neither would we be so! We naturalists can throw that back at them. Another thing we can throw back at them is John Hick’s straw man based on the all or nothing fallacy that we want paradise when it is anaturalists who declare that Heaven is paradise,we taking them at their word.It takes very little badness to contrast with the good.The tests for soul-making are horrendous at times. Hick pontificates that there might be analagous virtues in Heaven, but why not those in the first place. Theodicy is merely one dodge after another to exonerate God from responsiblilty for all the unredeemable evil. :’(
If God is not the Suprem Robot,neither would we be robots had we free will and not be inclined to do wrong!
A standard assumption is that god can do anything that is not logically impossible, such as produce a square circle. Oddly enough, a little reflection will show that we need to make this stipulation for one reason alone, namely, so that we can talk sensibly about god. There is no intrinsic reason that god’s omnipotence should prevent the logically impossible, including god’s own suicide and resurrection. This is something that Descartes recognised: omnipotence is incomplete without the ability to violate logic, whereas Descartes’ predecessors and many of his followers denied this.
If we assume the usual watered-down version of omnipotence, we run into all the usual well-known dificulties, such as omniscience (which is subordinate to omnipotence) vs. free will, and supreme benevolence (which equally is subordinate to omnipotence) vs. persistent evil in the world.
If, on the other hand, we accept the Cartesian view, we are then barred from making any substantive statements whatsoever about god because the question of whether logic does or does not apply in any particular instance is unanswerable, and we cannot therefore meaningfully offer god as an answer to anything.
In either case, the god hypothesis is fraught with grave ontological difficulties.
'Luthon64
Yes, Anacoluthon64, as you show here and I try to show in the ignostic-Occam thread. I find it a series of guesses for a series of mysteries to define God,a pseudo-explanation. Theists offer one dodge after another to absolve their ground of being or Sky Pappy for His putting us into an intolerable situation for many.Their putative explanations are just so much mumbo-jumbo backed by double talk- nonsense period. :’( Oh, how can God see the future and thus our lives, before it happens?