If God created all the good things around us then it means he created all EVIL too

[Crossless2.0]

Besides, when I'm alone and talking to myself, sometimes Stimbo talks to me and . . . shows me things!

That was meant to be our little secret. You know what I have to do now, don't you?

You mean . . . oh, God, no! I'm sorry!

[shudders, lights candles in the prayer closet, and starts filling hot water bottle]

[Neo-Scholastic]

The concept of evil as "the lack of the good that ought to be there" is actually pre-Christian. Plato hints at is, but Aristotle developed it in his Nichomachean Ethics, Augustine popularized it. Today we call it virtue ethics. In order for it to work though you need to accept the notions of formal and final cause.* Formal cause is the notion that it means something to be human, more specifically, things that are essentially normative. Final cause is the notion that some things have desired ends, i.e. a purpose. An analogy might help. A dull, bent and rusty nail is a bad nail. It lacks all the essential features a nail ought to have: sharp, straight and fresh. A nail needs to have those features so it can do the job it is supposed to do. Nails have a right and proper use, fastening wood pieces together, not cleaning your ears. It should be obvious how these notions cannot be reconciled with modern atheistic naturalism. The atheist can list all kinds of facts about human beings, but that says nothing about the right and proper way to live, i.e. values. If there is no ultimate purpose to human life then there isn't anything we are supposed to do. If humans don't have essential natures then there are no general virtues for which they should strive.

In the first quote from you in this reply your argument relies heavily on what is "evident". In this argument you want to throw out what is "evident".

I’m not sure to what you refer. My only intention in the second post you quoted was to show the conceptual relationship between essences, purposes, and imperatives. I don’t see where I pointed to any specific common observation only that virtue ethics depend on specific premises. The first quote (from another thread) was merely to reveal an ambiguity in the use of the word evidence.

The Bible talks about sin as a "stain". Using the "lack of" example, how do I stain my shirt by applying a "lack of" wine? And the Bible clearly states that we need to be forgiven for sin. The narrative clearly lays out "sin" is an impurity which must be expunged through forgiveness. How do you expunge nothing? And using the impurity or imperfection narrative you can actually make a pretty damned compelling logical argument that "good" is actually the absence of "evil". Something which is pure, after all, is that to which no contaminants have been added. Something which is perfect is that which has no imperfections in it. And the Bible REPEATEDLY talks in this narrative, evil and sin being expressed, not as absences of good, but real, separate things.

That’s one interpretation of the texts using a straight-forward surface approach. That interpretation serves well enough as basic instruction for everyday living. You will find however that the most learned Christians, from the time of Origen on, approached the holy scriptures in a much more nuanced way.

As for your logical proofs, do you really think the further you go back in time, the smarter and wiser people get? You do realize the collective human race has had an intelligent thought or two since Aristotle and Plato, right? …All of these logical proofs you're digging up from hundreds of years ago, these people were not more learned, more intelligent or more wise than the great minds of the 20th century or today. In fact, in every case, they are less learned, less intelligent and less wise, without exception. You simply are not going to be able to dig up some great wisdom from the past which in any way trumps the wisdom of today.

No, I do not believe that people of the past were necessarily smarter or wiser than modern people. At the same time, it is the height of arrogance to believe modern humans have more mental capacity that the very first Homo sapiens. While modern Man may have better technology and more accurate understanding of Nature, someone only needs to read Seneca, Lao-Tzu, or Hillel the Elder, to realize that certain fundamentals of the human condition have not changed.

I'll take what Hawking knows over what Plato knew any time. Hawking knows everything Plato knew PLUS another 2,400 years of accumulated human knowledge.

YMMV I’ll take Homer over Hitchens, Kant over Dennett, and Cicero over Dawkins any day. A hundred years from now people will still study the former and the later flashes-in-the-pan will be long forgotten.

[Asmodee]

...

I don't think it's arrogance to say that our minds are better, even vastly better than those of our predecessors.  Actually, it's pretty easy to show that's true.
Take Pythagoras, for instance.  He is famous for figuring out how to calculate the distance of one side of a triangle if you know the other two sides.  In its day, this was monumental.  This wasn't common knowledge.  This was a big deal.  Today it's high school.  The greatest contribution of the day is common knowledge today.  That is a single example in many.  A person who figures it out for the first time, that is impressive.  But an entire society who just knows it and many thousands of other similar things is considerably more impressive.  I know what he figured out and literally thousands of other things he didn't know, and I'm not a genius.

Think of it in terms of computers.  Let's say you take a modern-day computer back, say, 3,000 years.  You show the people how to use it to do calculations quickly, but they have to come up with their own formulas.  At the same time you take a crappy computer from the 1960s and give it to physicists today.  The computer you have 3,000 years ago is far superior, but even so they will do less with it because they don't have the knowledge to even know where to start looking for knowledge.  Even if our brains were physically identical (they are certainly not worse) the knowledge they hold is vastly superior AND in much greater quantity so the conclusions they reach are vastly superior.  Add to that the fact that half the things they think they knew back then were actually wrong and the difference is even more pronounced.

I'm not saying ancient peoples were necessarily stupid.  There were some great minds in the past.  That is absolute fact.  However, the information they had to work with was riddled with superstitions, misconceptions and lack of understanding and there was no proven, structured process for discovery like there is today.  There were many, many incredibly complex, well thought out concepts of the past which were just wrong.  Given the information they had at the time, it was damned impressive.  The people who came up with the ideas were very intelligent.  But they still didn't come to accurate conclusions.  It's not there there was something wrong with their brains, there was something wrong with the knowledge they had to work with.

So I stand by my claim that ancient peoples are unlikely to have any "knowledge" which is very impressive today.  Yes, the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun was a big damned deal that took a fine mind to figure out in its day.  But it's hardly a mind-blowing revelation to any first grader today.  Great mind, great discovery at the time, not something you'd be impressed by if it happened today.  What would you think of a man who approached you excitedly and showed you his measurements using ancient techniques and confided in you that he was pretty confident the Earth revolves around the Sun?  Would your fist thought be, "You're a genius!!!"  No.  You'd think, "Where have you been the last few hundred years?"

[Neo-Scholastic]

… these people were not more learned, more intelligent or more wise than the great minds of the 20th century or today. In fact, in every case, they are less learned, less intelligent and less wise, without exception

-my emphasis-

I'm not saying ancient peoples were necessarily stupid. There were some great minds in the past. That is absolute fact...I stand by my claim that ancient peoples are unlikely to have any "knowledge" which is very impressive today.

You may have inadvertently contradicted yourself. But I do understand what you are trying to say, i.e. people of the past had less knowledge available to them than today. The natural science of the ancient world was crude and often wrong. That does not change the fact that natural science, mathematics, and philosophy are separate domains. The field of mathematics has progressed since ancient times, but the proofs of Euclid and Pythagoras (your example) have not changed. They are just as applicable today as they were in 500 BC. The same is true in philosophy. The classical logic in Aristotle’s ‘Prior Analytics’ is still used. Only further philosophy can revise a prior a philosophical position, not biology, nor psychology, nor history, nor economics, nor even physics.

[Asmodee]

… these people were not more learned, more intelligent or more wise than the great minds of the 20th century or today.  In fact, in every case, they are less learned, less intelligent and less wise, without exception

-my emphasis-

I'm not saying ancient peoples were necessarily stupid.  There were some great minds in the past.  That is absolute fact...I stand by my claim that ancient peoples are unlikely to have any "knowledge" which is very impressive today.  

You may have inadvertently contradicted yourself.

No, I did not.  "Less learned, less intelligent and less wise" does not mean "stupid".  You can have a great mind which is simultaneously "less great" than a greater mind.

But I do understand what you are trying to say, i.e. people of the past had less knowledge available to them than today. The natural science of the ancient world was crude and often wrong. That does not change the fact that natural science, mathematics, and philosophy are separate domains. The field of mathematics has progressed since ancient times, but the proofs of Euclid and Pythagoras (your example) have not changed. They are just as applicable today as they were in 500 BC. The same is true in philosophy. The classical logic in Aristotle’s ‘Prior Analytics’ is still used. Only further philosophy can revise a prior a philosophical position, not biology, nor psychology, nor history, nor economics, nor even physics.

The same is not true for philosophy.  There are no right or wrong answers in philosophy.  It's just ideas.  Mathematics by nature has definite, unquestionable right and wrong answers.  Comparing philosophy to mathematics to show relevance is like comparing a watch to a flagellum to show design.  The two have very little in common.

And I disagree that only philosophy can revise prior philosophy, especially when that philosophy tries to dictate what is reality.  Philosophy is not, after all, a way to "prove" knowledge.  It is the study of the nature of knowledge.  You cannot prove anything with philosophy.  So when someone makes a claim that they can philosophically prove some reality, they have very much entered into the realm of science, the actual study of all of reality.  They are on science's turf, so yes, biology and physics rule the roost in that area.

As for the "logic" of the past, most of what you bring up comes from a time before logic was formalized.  And again, it's philosophical logic, not "reality" logic.  It's like making a wish to a genie.  If you get the wish just right, if you don't leave any room for interpretation or argument, you'll get exactly what you want and the genie can't take liberties and, say, give you a million dollars, but money stolen from a drug dealer who is now coming for you.  That is what these philosophical ideas are trying to do.  They're trying to word things just right to force their point to be true.  It just doesn't work that way.

[Neo-Scholastic]

You cannot prove anything with philosophy.

Prove it.

And again, it's philosophical logic, not "reality" logic.

That's a new one!

[Asmodee]

You cannot prove anything with philosophy.

Prove it.

And again, it's philosophical logic, not "reality" logic.

That's a new one!

Show me one philosophical argument ever which, by itself, definitively proved anything.  Take your time.

I didn't put the "logic" part very well.  I don't have a philosophy background like you obviously do.  I have an electrical background.  In electronics "logic circuits", what I'm most familiar with (I know, not the same thing) are very specific and predictable.  You can prove definitively and then show how a logical circuit will react.  It is the same every time.  There is no argument, it is how it is.  Logic, as used in philosophy, is more akin to a lawyer arguing in a court.  It doesn't matter if he's wrong, all that matters is how well he argues his point.  That is "philosophical logic".  It is an argument, not a reality.  Circuit logic is a reality, not an argument.

[Godscreated]

---

God is not me, I'm me and I make furniture, God made the universe something I'm not able to do.
I know He hasn't because I see no evidence that He has, besides what reason would an omniscient being have to lie, to lie would undermine who He is.

GC

---

Perfect!  That means I can know with certainty that he doesn't exist because I see no evidence that he does.  I assume you have no problem with me making the definitive claim now that God definitely does not exist and simply disagreeing with that assessment rather than arguing the point.

Just because you say you haven't seen evidence of Him doesn't mean it's not there. You could be keeping your eyes closed or just plain denying what you've seen.

And aren't Christians fond of saying things like, "God works in mysterious ways" and "We cannot know the mind of God" and "Trying to understand how God thinks is like an ant trying to understand how we think"?  I don't what reason an omniscient being would have to lie.  I don't know that an omniscient being necessarily would or would not lie.  And if she thinks so much differently than we do, neither do you.

Yes, many Christians use these words, they are trying to tell people that God is so far beyond us that we could never fully understand HIm. Again I say an omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent being has no need to lie, it's simple reasoning. Your little digs are childish and I expect you will keep them up.

GC

[Foxaèr]

Perfect!  That means I can know with certainty that he doesn't exist because I see no evidence that he does.  I assume you have no problem with me making the definitive claim now that God definitely does not exist and simply disagreeing with that assessment rather than arguing the point.

Just because you say you haven't seen evidence of Him doesn't mean it's not there. You could be keeping your eyes closed or just plain denying what you've seen.

And aren't Christians fond of saying things like, "God works in mysterious ways" and "We cannot know the mind of God" and "Trying to understand how God thinks is like an ant trying to understand how we think"?  I don't what reason an omniscient being would have to lie.  I don't  know that an omniscient being necessarily would or would not lie.  And if she thinks so much differently than we do, neither do you.

Yes, many Christians use these words, they are trying to tell people that God is so far beyond us that we could never fully understand HIm. Again I say an omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent being has no need to lie, it's simple reasoning. Your little digs are childish and I expect you will keep them up.

GC

GC, once again spouting his rhetoric of insanity as though he has the monopoly on god.

Sorry, GC, but if god is beyond the understanding of mere humans, that means you too.

The truth of the matter is that man created god during a time when illiterate individuals relied upon church clergy to inform the masses of what they personally thought of the bible and god.

Today, with the literacy and critical thinking skills we now possess, it is much harder for you to hide the fact that your god is not real.

And we see your apologetics for precisely what they are.

[Cyberman]

Perfect!  That means I can know with certainty that he doesn't exist because I see no evidence that he does.  I assume you have no problem with me making the definitive claim now that God definitely does not exist and simply disagreeing with that assessment rather than arguing the point.

Just because you say you haven't seen evidence of Him doesn't mean it's not there. You could be keeping your eyes closed or just plain denying what you've seen.

Could be. What's the simplest possibility?