(November 13, 2013 at 3:12 am)GodsRevolt Wrote: Killing innocents as immoral? Yes
And yet there are Biblical stories where god, either directly or through others, is responsible for the death of innocent people. Job's children and workers are massacred by Satan with god's tacit approval. Numerous nations in the land promised to the Israelites are slaughtered to the last woman and child (with occasional exceptions allowing virgin girls to be taken as wives). Nearly the entire world by a flood.
Either god committed immoral acts, or some other explanation must be given. The first is seemingly the easiest, though I find it unconvincing (the devil killed those people!) but the others require explanations that I consider to be too much of a stretch (there were no innocents to spare). Remember that we're talking about an act that is absolutely immoral, which is to say that there cannot be a circumstance in which it is a moral act. Is god immoral, or does his authority render an immoral act moral?
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
