(June 5, 2022 at 7:21 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: You simply, by your own logic, cannot know if your belief that your god is good, or omniscient, or purple, is or is not correct -- even inside this framework you're trying to impose upon the conversation.
I notice you completely ignored my point that theists continually judge their gods as good or evil on a regular basis, even as (as you admit) they have no way of knowing it. You should perhaps answer that point? How can you judge your god to be good or evil if you don't have the same knowledge he or she has? Because that is your argument.
Let's start with the last point: theists judging God (I prefer describing, but let's not get too caught up in semantics) to be benevolent or malevolent. As I said, theists usually refer to scripture when it comes to God's character. I am aware that the Old Testament contains many morally ambiguous verses, but I'll let christians sort out their mess. In Islam, God is described as merciful, gracious, among other properties. And, in contrast to christianity, God is not omnibenevolent, in the sense that God doesn't love everyone unconditionally.
Being close to God is something that one needs to earn by faithfully performing religious deeds, having good conduct, etc. You know the drill.
And it makes sense to me, at least. I don't conceive how God can "love" a mass murderer, or a rapist who never showed remorse or repented. The Christian God apparently adores the likes of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, etc, etc. He loves them so much that he sacrificed himself for them and then resurrected himself. You can see why the christian concept of God is nonsense, precisely because it posits unconditional benevolence, which is simply a human fantasy. And I forgot to mention that this vulnerability in christian belief gives us the following knockdown argument :
1. God, as conceived in christian belief, is unconditionally benevolent.
2. (From 1.) God, as conceived in christian belief, is unconditionally benevolent towards non-christians.
3. According to christian belief, non-christians are damned to eternity in hell, where the christian God continues to love them unconditionally.
4. (From 2. And 3.) The christian God doesn't exist.
As for how I know God is omniscient:as I said, the thread isn't about the perennial question of God's existence. We assume here that there is some sound argument establishing the existence of the God of classical theism, the orthodoxly conceived God of major religions. Some arguments purportedly establish more than just the existence. Take the ontological argument, which defines God as a being than which no greater can be conceived. Clearly, this definition entails omnipotence and omniscience. The soundness of this argument is another matter entirely, there are dozens of variants of the ontological argument alone, the modern ones are logically valid (and also sound if you accept that the concept of God is possible, not just conceivable), and whatever objection you might have against one of them may not carry over the other variants. So, if someone accepts the aforementioned argument, he accepts, by the same token, that the being whose existence is established is the greatest conceivable, hence omniscience.
