Literal belief in the flood story

[Esquilax]

If humans were eliminating humans (humanicide) for no other reason than their own pleasure, this would certainly qualify as worse than omnicide as you have defined it. On one hand you have punishing people for their wickedness, on the other hand you have people killing people for fun.

But one of the reasons you posted for why god needed to kill everything was to assuage god's wrath, so apparently he was doing it to appease his own emotions anyway.

More importantly, this doesn't address the issue: A, the answer to a crime is rarely more of the same crime, regardless of the motivations behind it, and B, since when does "punishing people for their wickedness" involve sweeping every other sentient being in the world, including those humans who hadn't killed anyone? How is that just, to punish entities who merely inhabit the same space as criminals for crimes they didn't engage in, nor had the ability to prevent?

How do you know that His actions in this case were not the optimal solution to the problem?

Because an omniscient and omnipotent being, by definition, can accomplish what he needs to without killing anything. Hell, he could have just wished the wickedness out of everyone, since he clearly wasn't concerned with free will at the point that he was going to terminally rob everyone of theirs.

Again with the murder equivocation. What options do you have in mind?

Equivocation? What else would you call the unnecessary, unwarranted taking of life through violence?

While I'm not adamant one way or another I tend to also not be in favor of the death penalty. Perhaps for different reasons. Men are fallible and the death penalty is final. By nature fallible men cannot serve perfect justice. I think where you are running into trouble is that your viewing God like you view people. His ways are not our ways, nor his thoughts our thoughts.

Sorry, no double standards here: god doesn't get a free pass to behave worse than you'd expect people to, and no amount of "mysterious ways" handwaving is going to change that. This is just an argument from ignorance you're using here.

If God exists, and He is all knowing and all powerful there would be no logical reason to believe that any of His actions were anything other than optimal. They would be perfectly 'thought out' and perfectly 'carried out.'

Even when they're demonstrably not? Seriously, you can't worm your way out of logical issues by simply presupposing that they don't exist.

Again with the 'murder'. If killing someone is a just punishment then it is by definition not murder. In using this term you are using an argument by emotive language.

Do you seriously not understand that I don't find god's actions just, and that I don't find your baseless presupposition that they are just a compelling argument?

If you accept the claim that everyone was wicked as you have done above, calling it an ad hoc (a made up statement to justify a claim) is a self-refuting claim. While a statement can be either true or false, it cannot be both at the same time (which is what your statement does).

Sorry, that was poor sentence structure on my part. I personally believe the claim of wickedness to be ad hoc, but I'm saying that even if I didn't and took it one hundred percent seriously, god's actions still wouldn't be justified.

Then you have not presupposed the Biblical God but simply God in general terms. The topic here is not one of deist but rather Biblical deism. See more discussion in the 'hidden' response below.

I'm willing to presuppose the existence of a god, even one that caused the christian bible to be written as an accurate account of his actions; however, claims about his attributes would still be internally inconsistent within that framework based upon his actions. If I'm presupposing the god as depicted in the bible is real, then I cannot logically reconcile his claim of being just with the actions he's performed. If some of those actions, the flood among them, are true, then he cannot be a just god. If those actions are untruthful, then he cannot be an infallible or honest god. Either way, the bible is out of whack with its description of the creator.

I'll make presuppositions if you want, but only up until the point where they stop making sense. At that point, I've gotta start untangling some of this stuff.

At this point I must interject the circular reasoning argument upon myself to clarify. I agree that if I was using the above argument to prove the truth of the words of the Bible it would bear having to defend against the circular reasoning fallacy. However, if we presuppose the Biblical God (as we have for this conversation), I am under no obligation to prove the Biblical God exists but rather to show the logical consistency that if we presuppose the Biblical God we must also presuppose the Bible is true. The two cannot be divorced.

If the Biblical God is true then the Bible is true (as shown above), if some or all of the Bible is false then we would be making an argument with the premises that God does lie, and God does not lie. We would be introducing premises that would directly contradict one another.. We would be simultaneously assuming 'the Biblical God' and not 'the Biblical God'. Both of these practices violates the law of non-contradiction.

As I've explained above, those two presuppositions, of the existence of god and the accuracy of the bible, also violate the law of non contradiction. For the purposes of this argument we kind of need the flood story to be truthful, and henceforth the claims of god's attributes must be, in my position, false in order for that to be so.

Just because I presuppose some things for this thread doesn't mean I need to agree with every part of the bible, else you've got no more work to do with your argument.

Where do you get your contentions from?

My brain meats?

Here: Premise one: a A god exists that has the power to resolve the wickedness issue without killing anyone. Premise two: Despite this, that god opted to kill everyone, even those that had nothing to do with the proposed problem. Premise three: Killing the innocent is morally wrong. Conclusion: God did not perform the morally or logically optimal set of actions when he flooded the world.

Still waiting for proof of that assertion.

It's a simple biological fact that self awareness doesn't appear in children until at least fifteen months or so after birth. Things that aren't self aware cannot be moral actors, as there isn't a person in there to act. Therefore, any child younger than a certain age at the time of the biblical flood was a murdered innocent.