(December 27, 2017 at 8:57 am)Angrboda Wrote: @Neo
Reading Augustine. I come to a different conclusion than he did. He assumes that God, being good, cannot create evil. This is entirely too simplistic. God, being good, would not create evil, unless he had a compelling moral or non-moral reason for doing so. When the caveat is added, it's clear that Augustine's argument is too facile, and that his conclusion doesn't follow because his premises are not sound. The rest of Augustine's argument is a bunch of semantic confusion, metaphorical nonsense, and outright word salad. It's not obviously clear that our possessing free will is a compelling reason for allowing the existence of evil. Just as we can fail to recognize free will as an overriding concern in the question of evil, we can easily overlook possible reasons why God may have created evil, whether they be moral or non-moral (I think it's a truism that God has interests beyond those that are strictly speaking "moral concerns"). And the idea that God may have had a "more compelling reason" for evil that we simply are ignorant of is an argument which still mints plenty of coin. The argument that evil is the privation of good is faulty, and rests more upon clever word play and people's general inattention to the concept of implicit values than anything else. I'm sorry, I don't find your concept that evil is the privation of good to be well supported other than by tradition and empty metaphor. If you have a more compelling argument for the position, or a better explication of it than Augustine, please provide it.
Ignoring, a full understanding of quantum mechanics may prove free will doesn't exist, I think "perfect" can only mean: "is not evil" and "never makes mistakes".
Clearly and unmistakably the "free will to be good or evil" scenario doesn't work. There is no possible scenario where a god gives man free will to choose good or evil where that god would gain a right to punish someone if they chose evil. God cannot create a scenario to test choosing good or evil without being evil i.e. in any scenario possible god must create a temptation and endow the person to be tested with desire (otherwise they would never choose evil) which is undeniably evil as it means god must have made man imperfect and therefore not only may man choose to be evil, because god made man imperfect (and there must be a difference between perfect and imperfect) man is forced to choose evil to prove good can make someone imperfect.
The only possible out for that is if you invent a scenario where god is allowed to be evil to run the test but, unfortunately, there is no scenario where god could be allowed to be a bit evil without that god being evil enough to lie about the existence of heaven.
That removes two essential requirements of faith in the god of Abraham: Man chose evil and there's a heaven. (And there are many other observations as to why the god of Abraham is evil or doesn't exist.)
