If there were a creator, what would be their limits?

[JesusHChrist]

Plenty of virtual paper.

I'm also a creator - music, cooking, large messes, copious quantities of piss.

My limitations are, money, brains, talent and an inordinate penchant for sexytime. To my downfall it is. What more could I create if I wasn't always hound dogging after my sweet GF? She is a saint. Fortunately, St. GF of Perpetual Horniness. Lucky me.

Next question?

[Pyrrho]

Pyrrho: Sure, but an amazing baker could deliberately bake a crappy burnt loaf.

Okay, a great baker (that is, a baker of great skill) could willfully make a bad loaf. In such a case, the immediate question would be, why?

Of course, one can imagine all sorts of reasons, like getting back at someone, so the baker gives the person a bad loaf instead of a good one. All of the reasons, though, that I can at present think of, refer back to events that happened in the past, which make it no longer an analogy for a god creating everything in the beginning.

I suppose we can imagine a baker who takes delight in causing pain and suffering, and so he willfully bakes bad bread, even though he is capable of baking great bread. This would be analogous to a god who is omnipotent (very capable), but who is evil, taking delight in causing pain and suffering.

As an aside, we would not call a baker a great baker, if the baker always baked bad bread, no matter how capable the baker might be. Suppose, for example, that I claimed to be the most capable baker in the world, but every time I baked anything, it was dreadful. Would you have any inclination to believe my claim?

So I guess an omnipotent god could choose to create this dung heap instead of a good universe where we all get infinite pizzas and don't have to do boring stuff.
...

Sure, an omnipotent creator is not incompatible with this world. But it must then want there to be exactly as much pain and suffering as there is, or it could, being omnipotent, have just as easily made something with a different amount of pain and suffering. As a consequence, if this world were created by an omnipotent being, it must be evil, since it chose to create a world with all of the pain and suffering that there is.

Every baby that has burned alive in a fire, was chosen to be that way, by the creator, if the creator is omnipotent. Every bit of agony and suffering that has ever happened in the world, was selected by that being to be brought about. Being omnipotent, it could have chosen anything else, and anything else would have been equally easy to do. That is because, for an omnipotent being, doing anything is effortless. If something were hard for it to do, then that would be a sign of weakness, which is impossible in an omnipotent being.

If we look at the problem of evil, it is a problem for a being that is omnipotent and perfectly good. It is not a problem for a being that is omnipotent only, for it may be evil. And it is also not a problem for the existence of a being that is perfectly good, for it may be impotent. (Indeed, it would have to be more impotent than a human, because it does not even bother to call the police when someone is getting attacked.)

(Sometimes, it is added that the being is omniscient, and perhaps I ought to include that here, but for the being to really be omnipotent, it needs to know everything. It cannot do everything if it lacks knowledge about what is going on, and so its power is limited if it isn't omniscient. But if someone has a problem with this idea, we can restate the matter in the more traditional form, and say that the problem of evil is a problem for the existence of a being that is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good, but isn't a problem for a being to exist that has only one of those qualities.)

This also explains why the problem of evil does not come up in religions like the ancient Greek and Roman religions. None of the gods were thought to be omnipotent, nor were they generally thought to be perfectly good. (Nor were any of them thought to be omniscient.) So there is no contradiction between their existence and a world very much like ours (as far as evil in the world is concerned).

[robvalue]

It's hopelessly naive that everyone just believes that their God really is all benevolent. It's bad enough to just take their word for it, even if life seemed great. But to believe it, plus thinking its omnipotent, in the face of obvious needless suffering every single day of your life...

That takes a special kind of reality denial.

As to the baker thing, all we know is that by assumption he made this reality, so he his power is, at a minimum, high enough to make all of this. Or at least, it was. No reason to think the creator still exists at all.

[Pyrrho]

...
As to the baker thing, all we know is that by assumption he made this reality, so he his power is, at a minimum, high enough to make all of this. Or at least, it was. No reason to think the creator still exists at all.

Yes, that is an excellent point. If the universe was created by some being, it was capable of creating the universe. It may no longer be as it was, perhaps being old and senile, or maybe dead. All that could be said, if we knew that the universe was created by a being (which, of course, we don't know and have absolutely no reason to believe at all), that it was powerful enough to create this, at the time it created this. That entails nothing about it presently at all. And it also would give us good reason to believe, that it was either very limited in its abilities, or it was evil, given the mess that is the world.

[IATIA]

If a dog cannot fathom a science book.

How do you know it cannot?