I have compared many religious and secular ways of living, and I prefer my Agnostic Compassionist Vegan lifestyle to all the other religious and secular lifestyles. You didn't resolve the issues I raised in my previous post. Nor did you falsify my theses by showing one of these:

* that revelation-anchored sacralization is not a risk factor for harmful insulation, or
* that publicly contestable, fallibilist norms are no better at correcting error once power is involved. Thank you for your participation. I hope you will address all the issues I raised.

Esse, I think you’re right that my formulation sharpened the axis, but you’re wrong that this is a retreat or a definitional trick. It’s just me being precise about what the critique actually targets.

1) I didn’t abandon the religious/secular distinction - I made it structural rather than tribal.

My original point was never “everything secular is good, everything religious is bad.” It was: religion has characteristic insulation mechanisms that tend to raise the risk of error persisting and harm being sanctified. Those mechanisms can appear in secular movements too - and when they do, I criticize them for the same reasons.

So yes: Stalinism, Maoism, and Khmer Rouge are secular orthodoxies that exhibit sacralization, authority-worship, moralized heresy, and coercive enforcement. I’m not surprised by that; I explicitly said human beings build these patterns. The conclusion isn’t “therefore religion is innocent.” It’s: religion is one historically common and socially robust vehicle for those patterns.

In other words: the target is not “religious people.” The target is sacralized authority + illegitimate-critique rules + coercive enforcement + cosmic/ideological stakes - whether the banner is God, History, Nation, Race, Party, or Leader.

2) Your Quaker / UU point actually supports my argument, not undermines it.

Quakerism and UU are good examples precisely because they reduce or refuse the classic insulation features (coercive dogma, infallible revelation, salvation threats). They do religion in a way that is closer to “public reasons and fallibilism.”

That’s not me redefining religion to win. It’s acknowledging that religious traditions contain multiple sub-traditions, some of which behave more like open moral communities than sacralized authority structures.

If you want to call those “still religious,” fine. My claim survives: the more a tradition relies on revelation-as-authority and sacralization-as-immunity, the more it risks harmful insulation. The more it moves toward fallibilism and publicly shareable reasons, the safer it tends to be.

That’s not a semantic trick; it’s a causal hypothesis about institutional design.

3) “You’ve conceded quite a bit” - no, I’ve clarified what “the problem” is.

You’re treating “religion” as a binary category and asking for a binary indictment (“religion causes more harm than secularism”). That’s not a good test of the argument.

A better test is: when harm is defended, what are the justificatory circuits?
Religions have historically had some very distinctive ones:

* “God commands it.”
* “Scripture is infallible.”
* “Doubt is sin.”
* “Salvation depends on obedience.”
* “Sacred order overrides human welfare.”

Secular totalitarian movements can replicate those circuits using different nouns: “History demands it,” “The Party is infallible,” “Counterrevolution is evil,” etc. When they do, I criticize them for the same reason: they make correction morally forbidden.

So again: I’m not abandoning the religious/secular divide. I’m saying the real danger is a structural package, and religion has historically been a major carrier of it - not the only one.

4) The “harm scoreboard” doesn’t settle the question you think it does.

You say it’s hard to argue religion has caused more harm than Stalinism/Maoism/Khmer Rouge. That may be true depending on metrics, time windows, and attribution. But even if I granted it, it wouldn’t “put a nail in the coffin” because the argument was never “religion is uniquely harmful” or “religion is the biggest harm-doer.”

Two problems with the harm scoreboard approach:

1. Scale and state power matter massively.
Modern totalitarian secular ideologies had access to 20th-century industrial states, mass surveillance, modern weapons, and centralized control. That supercharges harm. It doesn’t show the ideology is uniquely worse in essence; it shows that ideology + industrial state power is lethal.

2. Religion’s harms are often diffuse and long-duration, not always captured in body counts:

* legitimizing hierarchy (subservient women in Islam and Christianity, caste in Hinduism, etc.),
* blocking medical care (Jehova's Witnesses refuse blood transfusion) or education (Taliban in Afghanistan stopped the higher education of girls),
* sanctifying violence or exclusion (Crusades and Jihads),
* normalizing guilt, fear, and obedience,
* resisting reforms for centuries.

You can argue about magnitudes, but “body count” is not the only axis of moral damage. (And even on body count, across centuries and empires, religion’s ledger is not obviously light - though quantification is messy.) European Christians conquered, killed, forcibly converted, and enslaved millions of people worldwide across centuries - calculating the exact number of victims is impossible - estimates range from 101 to 259 million victims worldwide, depending on the sources being used.

Please see: https://www.evilbible.com and https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/categories.html if you have the time to explore both websites in detail. If you don't have that much time, here are some of the reasons the Biblical God, if he/she/it/they exist(s), has done/is doing/will do more evil than good.

God didn't keep his words to Adam and Eve

In Genesis 2:16 and 17 the Bible (New International Version) says:
And the Lord God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die."

If after eating the forbidden fruits, Adam and Eve died just as God had said, then that would have been just and consistent with God's Words. However, after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruits, instead of just Adam and Eve just dying:
1. God evicted them from Eden.
2. God punished Eve and all her daughters (an estimated 54 billion and counting) with painful childbirths.
3. God evicted all the other species from Eden, too, and makes herbivores, parasites, carnivores and omnivores instead of making all the species non-consumers.
4. God punished humans with having to toil to survive.
5. God commanded humans to reproduce which leads to more suffering and death. Ruling over other creatures causes suffering and death to those creatures, too. "God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground."" - Genesis 1:28, The Bible (NIV)

These acts are cruel and unjust and totally inconsistent with what God had said to Adam and Eve which was they would just die if they ate the forbidden fruits. God didn't keep his words to Adam and Eve.

If God had made Adam, Eve, the angels, all the other species all-knowing and all-powerful, then they would all be making perfect choices. It is 100% God's fault that Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge. If they were all-knowing and all-powerful, they would not have the desire to gain knowledge, as they would already have known everything there is to know.

I didn't ask to come into existence. No living thing does. I would have preferred it if I had never existed. If God is real and actually did the things the Bible claims, then these cruel, unjust and inconsistent actions make the Biblical God evil.

Global genocide - The Global Flood

Genesis 6:13, 7:21-23 (ESV)

“And God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.’ … And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, livestock, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all mankind. Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died.”
Summary: God kills virtually every living creature on Earth, sparing only Noah's family and the selected animals in Noah's Ark.

Genocide of Sodom and Gomorrah

Genesis 19:24-25 (ESV)

“Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground.”
Summary: Two entire cities are burned alive - men, women, and children - for collective sin.

The Ten Plagues of Egypt (mass suffering and death)

Exodus 12:29-30 (ESV)

“At midnight the LORD struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. And Pharaoh rose up in the night … and there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead.”
Summary: Every Egyptian firstborn - including infants, sentient animals and prisoners - is killed by God.

Genocides ordered in Canaan

Deuteronomy 20:16-17 (ESV)

“But in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the LORD your God has commanded.”
Summary: Explicit divine command to exterminate entire populations.

1 Samuel 15:2-3 (ESV)

“Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘I have noted what Amalek did to Israel … Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”
Summary: A total genocide command including infants and animals.

Slavery sanctioned and regulated, instead of banned

Leviticus 25:44-46 (ESV)

“As for your male and female slaves whom you may have: you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you. … You may bequeath them to your sons after you to inherit as a possession forever. You may make slaves of them, but over your brothers … you shall not rule one over another ruthlessly.”
Summary: Permanent enslavement of foreigners is explicitly permitted.

Human child sacrifice ordered (later revoked)

Genesis 22:2, 12 (ESV)

“He said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering…’”
“He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy…’”
Summary: God tests Abraham by commanding the killing of his child - a psychological act of cruelty, even if halted. Why would an all-knowing and all-powerful being need to test anyone? It makes no sense.

Mass slaughter of boys, men and non-virgin women and sexual slavery of virgin girls

Numbers 31:17-18 (ESV)

“Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves.”
Summary: Command to kill boys and non-virgin women; keep virgin girls as sex slaves.

Sevenfold punishment and cannibalism (threat)

Leviticus 26:27-29 (ESV)

“But if in spite of this you will not listen to me, but walk contrary to me, then I will walk contrary to you in fury, and I myself will discipline you sevenfold for your sins. You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters.”
Summary: God threatens to make His people resort to cannibalism as punishment.

Eternal torment in Hell

Matthew 25:46 (ESV)

“And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Revelation 14:10-11 (ESV)

“He also will drink the wine of God’s wrath … and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night.”

Mark 9:43-48 (ESV)

“It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire … where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.”
Summary: Eternal conscious torment for unbelievers - infinite punishment for finite crimes.

Matthew 25:41 (ESV)

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’”

Revelation 20:10 (ESV)

“...and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.”

Luke 13:27-28 (ESV)

“But he will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you come from. Depart from me, all you workers of evil!’ In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God but you yourselves cast out.”

Matthew 13:49-50 (ESV)

“So it will be at the close of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Divine deception and hardening of hearts

Exodus 9:12 (ESV)

“But the LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and he did not listen to them, as the LORD had spoken to Moses.”
Summary: God prevents Pharaoh from repenting, then punishes him for it.

2 Thessalonians 2:11 (ESV)

“Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false.”
Summary: God intentionally deceives some people.

Killing for minor offenses

Numbers 15:32-36 (ESV)

“While the people of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath day… And the LORD said to Moses, ‘The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.’”

2 Kings 2:23-24 (ESV)

“He went up from there to Bethel, and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys.”
Summary: Death penalty for collecting firewood on the wrong day, and 42 small boys murdered by bears because they made fun of a prophet's baldness.

Collective punishment across generations

Exodus 20:5 (ESV)

“For I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me.”
Summary: Descendants are punished for ancestors’ actions - contrary to the Bible’s own later law: “The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.” - Ezekiel 18:20 (ESV).

Predestination

Ephesians 1:4-5 (ESV)

“Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will,”

John 6:44 (ESV)

“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.”
Summary: God predestined who would be saved and who would be damned forever. It is absurd and utterly cruel and unjust.

Conclusion

These verses show that the Biblical God, by the Bible’s own words, kills entire populations, including children and animals, endorses slavery, inflicts suffering, threatens eternal torture in hell, hardens hearts or deceives minds, and predestinates who would be saved and who would be damned, removing moral responsibility.

When the acts attributed to God are judged by the same moral standards the Bible applies to humans - such as “You shall not kill,” “Love your neighbour,” and “Love your enemies” - they fit the description of moral evil far more often than benevolence. The Biblical God is a hypocrite who has killed and has failed to love his neighbours and enemies.

That’s why I conclude that, if the Biblical God exists and the Biblical text is true, His recorded actions are predominantly evil rather than good.

There are also extra-Biblical reasons. At least 99.9% of all the species that have existed so far on Earth are already extinct. Every year, non-vegans cause suffering and death to 80 billion sentient land organisms (e.g. cattle, chickens, pigs, lambs, goats, ducks, turkeys, etc.) and 1 to 3 trillion sentient aquatic organisms (e.g. fish, lobsters, octopuses, crabs, etc.). Life is full of suffering, injustice, and death. An allegedly all-knowing and all-powerful being, such as the Biblical God, could have prevented all suffering, injustice, and death, but failed to do so. He could have made all organisms made of energy that don't need to consume anything to live forever, but he didn't do that. So, all suffering, injustice, and death are 100% his fault. If he had not created anything, no one would have the burden of existence or the risk of making mistakes. If he had made everyone he has allegedly made, all-knowing and all-powerful, then everyone would always make perfect choices, and no one would have made any mistakes due to ignorance, incompetence or trickery.

I am an agnostic regarding the existence of God(s) because it is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God(s). However, I am convinced that the Biblical God is imaginary and evil. He is imaginary because there is no evidence for the claims made in the Bible. He is evil because of his many evil words and actions in the Bible.

5) “Functional vs dysfunctional orthodoxies” - agreed. Now we can actually get somewhere.

Yes: the real fault-line is between orthodoxies with good error-correction and humane constraints and orthodoxies that sacralize authority and suppress correction.

Where I think you still haven’t fully engaged is this:

* Religions that center revelation and sacralized authority are structurally prone to treating certain questions as illegitimate in a way that is harder to unwind.
* Religions that reduce those features become more functional.
* Secular movements that adopt those features become more dysfunctional.

So the conclusion is not “religion bad, secular good.”
It’s: design matters - and sacralization is a known design risk.

6) The one question that decides the debate

If you want to falsify my thesis, you need to show one of these:

* that revelation-anchored sacralization is not a risk factor for harmful insulation, or
* that publicly contestable, fallibilist norms are no better at correcting error once power is involved.

If you can show that, I’ll revise my view.

But if we agree that “functional” systems are those with robust error-correction and humane constraints, then we’re basically agreeing with my core point: the more you sanctify authority, the more you gamble with human fallibility.

That’s not an attack on spirituality. It’s an engineering warning about institutions made of primates.

I don't know why this is so. Sorry.

1) “Sanctuary animals will reproduce.”

You’re right about the biology: if you put intact males and females together, they can reproduce. My “naturally die” line only holds if sanctuaries are run as actual sanctuaries rather than unmanaged mixed herds.

But here’s the key point: preventing forced reproduction is not some unnatural horror. We already manage reproduction constantly - in pets, in wildlife conservation, in farming itself (artificial insemination, selective breeding, culling, etc.). The whole domesticated-animal system exists because humans intervene in reproduction more than almost any other domain of life.

A vegan transition doesn’t require “retirement homes forever” or letting populations explode. It requires ending deliberate breeding and using humane population management for the remainder:

* separating sexes (common),
* contraception,
* sterilization where appropriate (routine in animal welfare).

Call that “intervention” if you like - it’s intervention to stop making victims, not intervention to keep exploiting them.

So: yes, reproduction must be managed. That doesn’t undermine the ethical argument; it’s part of the practical plan.

2) “Cultivated meat is hypocrite bullshit because it’s profit-driven.”

This is a category mistake. Something can be morally beneficial without being motivated by moral virtue.

Most moral progress in the real world is implemented through mixed motives:

* Businesses switch because it’s cheaper or legal risk changes.
* Politicians act because voters or incentives change.
* Technologies spread because they’re convenient.

That doesn’t make the outcome “advertising.” It makes it how societies actually move.

My point wasn’t “companies are ethical.” My point was: if the market delivers a meat-like product without breeding, confinement, and slaughter, that’s a structural exit ramp from a harm-based system. We can acknowledge corporate cynicism while still valuing harm reduction.

If you want to call that “hypocrisy,” fine, but it’s still a reduction in victims.

3) “We don’t know what makes wild food healthier/taste different; artificial food might be unhealthy.”

Two separate claims here: taste and health.

Taste

Sure. Wild foods taste different because of diet diversity, exercise patterns, stress hormones, muscle structure, species differences, soil microbiomes, harvesting time, post-harvest handling, and so on. We don’t fully model all of it. Agree.

But taste is not a moral defense of harm. “I prefer the flavour” has limits as a justification when the process involves suffering.

Health

You’re right to be cautious about ultra-processed food - whether plant-based or lab-grown. But “we don’t know everything” is not an argument against changing practices; it’s an argument for proper testing, regulation, surveillance, and transparency.

Also, we’re not choosing between “wild, perfect, natural food” vs “lab goo.”

Most people already live on industrialized food systems, including industrial animal products with antibiotics, zoonotic risk, contaminants, and chronic-disease correlations. So the honest comparison is:

* current industrial animal agriculture (with known harms)
vs
* alternative systems we can test and regulate.

Being cautious about new tech is a good idea. Using uncertainty as a blanket permission slip for keeping the status quo isn’t.

4) “You forget the market mechanism.”

I’m not forgetting it. I’m explicitly relying on it where it helps (price, convenience), and calling for regulation where it fails (externalities, worker exploitation, monopoly, misleading health claims).

Markets are powerful at distributing goods, terrible at pricing suffering, ecosystems, and long-term health costs unless forced to.

So yes: people will buy what’s cheap. That’s exactly why a transition strategy should target:

* true cost accounting,
* subsidies shifting away from harm,
* safety regulation,
* making the low-harm option the easiest option.

That isn’t utopian. That’s basic policy reality.

5) “Only smart animals matter… just don’t be cruel.”

If moral status depends on being “smart,” then you’ve built an ethic that can justify harming:

* human infants,
* people with severe cognitive disabilities,
* advanced dementia patients.

You probably don’t want that implication, but it’s there.

A cleaner line is sentience, not intelligence: the capacity to suffer and to have experiences that can go better or worse. That includes cows, pigs, lambs, chickens, fish, octopuses, and many others.

And “don’t be cruel” doesn’t get you out of exploitation. You can be “not cruel” in your tone while still:

* forcibly breeding,
* confining,
* separating mother and offspring,
* killing at a fraction of the natural lifespan.

The harm is structural, not just a matter of cruelty.

6) “UBI and free services globally are hubris; who will do it?”

Global UBI and free accommodation, healthcare and education are politically hard, but I didn't recommend a World government.

But two important clarifications:

1. An idea can be ethically correct and politically difficult.
Calling it “naive” doesn’t show it’s wrong - it shows it’s hard.

2. There’s a non-utopian pathway: incremental, modular, multi-level implementation.
You don’t need a single World government to move toward the principle: “Everyone receives according to needs, and contributes according to abilities.” You can do:

* national UBI pilots → expansion,
* targeted child benefits,
* universal basic services in specific domains,
* climate/wealth levies,
* regional compacts,
* debt relief and anti-corruption enforcement,
* automatic stabilizers.

If you want “implementable improvements,” fine - that’s a tactical discussion, not a refutation of the moral aim. I’m happy to debate strategy. But calling the goal “hubris” is wrong.

7) “Eating other living entities is normal; we’re animals.”

Lots of “normal” things are not morally acceptable. Violence, rape, infanticide, and dominance hierarchies are also “natural” in many animals. Nature is not ethical. We can't look to nature for ethical lessons.

Humans have one distinguishing feature: we can choose systems. We can ask whether a practice is necessary, and whether it is defensible given the harm.

So the real question isn’t “do animals eat animals?”
It’s: Do we need to, given alternatives? If the harm is avoidable, “it’s natural” stops being a justification.

8) “You think there’s no value in a cow’s life because it suffers; wildlife suffering is OK for you.”

This is simply a misrepresentation of what I said.

I didn’t say a cow’s life has no value. I said creating cows for exploitation and slaughter is not justified when we can meet needs otherwise.

And I don’t think wild suffering is “OK” in a celebratory sense. I think it’s tragic, but there’s a moral difference between:

* harms we cause deliberately and can stop, and
* harms built into nature that we currently can’t prevent without causing worse harms.

If we reach a future where we can reduce wild-animal suffering responsibly without ecological collapse, that’s worth discussing. But using “nature is harsh” to excuse industrial harm is like saying, “People die of disease anyway, so murdering them is fine.”

9) “Your worldview is more religious than scientific.”

This is just a rhetorical label, and it doesn’t land.

Science is a method for describing reality. Veganism (or any ethic) is a moral claim informed by scientific facts such as cows, lambs, chickens and octopuses, etc. feel pain. Calling moral commitments “religious” because they’re moral is incorrect.

I appeal to publicly shareable reasons about sentience and harm.
Religion often appeals to revelation and divine authority.

That distinction matters.

You seem to be saying:

* suffering is part of life,
* humans are animals,
* so exploiting and murdering animals is normal,
* and moral ambition beyond “don’t be cruel” is quasi-religious.

I’m saying:

* suffering is part of life,
* but avoidable suffering caused by our institutions is our responsibility,
* and if we can meet needs without breeding and killing sentient beings,
* then “normal” isn’t a moral defense.

By the way, what happened to your OP? Why doesn't it show up on the forum's main page? — Esse Quam Videri

I don't know. My OP is the first post on this page: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/16247/comparing-religious-and-scientific-worldviews/p1

Esse, this is a stronger pushback, and it deserves a stronger reply. I’m going to grant what’s true in it, then draw the distinction I think you’re still blurring.

1) Yes, humans build orthodoxies everywhere. No, that does not make all orthodoxies epistemically or morally equivalent.

You’re right about the sociology: institutions fossilize. Universities have gatekeeping norms; scientific communities have incentives and status hierarchies; political movements develop taboo and heresy; “sacred values” show up in secular life, too. That’s not just plausible - it’s obvious.

But that point, by itself, doesn’t do the work you want it to do. It risks a category flattening:

* “Humans defend group identity” (true)
does not entail
* “Therefore, religious dogma is not distinctively problematic” (not established).

The relevant distinction isn’t “does an institution have orthodoxy?” but what kind of claims form the orthodoxy, and how the orthodoxy is justified and policed.

A scientific paradigm is not immune by design: it’s provisional, prediction-linked, and it faces a built-in external tribunal (reproducible reality) even when humans drag their feet. Kuhn was describing inertia and social dynamics, not endorsing “anything goes.” A paradigm can be sticky without being sacralized. When it finally breaks, it breaks because it stops working.

Religious dogma, in its classic forms, often has a different structure: it is anchored to revelation, sacred texts, sanctified authority, and salvation stakes. That creates a distinctive insulation mechanism:

* disagreement becomes not merely “mistaken,” but sinful, spiritually dangerous, or disloyal;
* core claims are not merely defended, but made holy;
* revision is reframed as “deeper interpretation,” while the protected status remains.

You can find secular analogues, yes. But the existence of analogues doesn’t erase distinctive mechanisms and stakes. It’s like saying, “People can be violent for many reasons, therefore, ideological violence isn’t a distinct pattern.” It’s still a distinct pattern.

So: I grant your sociological point. I deny your implied conclusion that this dissolves the special problem of religious insulation.

2) “Religions evolve too.” Yes. But the key question is how and at what cost.

You’re also right that religious institutions evolve - sometimes dramatically. Even the Catholic Church changes; internal conservatives sometimes feel betrayed; schisms happen; moral progress gets incorporated. I don’t deny any of that.

But again: what follows?

Religions often change because of external moral and epistemic pressure - social movements, scientific knowledge, human-rights norms, historical trauma, political necessity - not because revelation suddenly became evidence-sensitive.

And crucially, in many cases the mechanism looks like this:

1. Society’s moral circle expands.
2. Religious institutions resist.
3. Resistance becomes untenable.
4. Doctrine is reinterpreted to catch up.
5. The tradition claims continuity.

That’s not “religion is incapable of progress.” It’s “religion is not a reliable engine of progress,” because the moral compass is frequently outsourced to the wider culture. Sometimes religion is in front; sometimes behind; but when it’s behind, the sacralization of commitments raises the price of correction.

If your system makes error-correction structurally harder, “it sometimes changes anyway” doesn’t vindicate it. It shows human beings can drag even rigid systems toward decency.

3) The “gotcha” about my foundational commitments misses what I actually claimed.

You ask: am I open to revising “openness to revision”? What evidence could change my mind about suffering being bad, or welfare mattering?

Two points.

(a) Not everything is empirical, but not everything is dogma either.

I never claimed every foundational commitment is empirically falsifiable. That would be naïve. Some commitments are normative (value-claims), and they aren’t “falsified” by data the way a measurement is.

But that doesn’t make them equivalent to revelation-based dogma.

There’s a difference between:

* axioms adopted because they best cohere with shared experience and reduce contradiction (e.g., “suffering counts morally”), and
* axioms adopted because an authority declares them sacred and disobedience is a moral stain (e.g., “X is wrong because God forbids it”).

Normativity isn’t the issue. The issue is whether your normative bedrock is defended by reasons accessible to other minds, or by special authority.

(b) “Open to revision” doesn’t mean “I will abandon any principle on demand.”

Fallibilism is not liquid relativism.

I’m not “pretending” to be revisable while secretly being dogmatic; I’m describing a real distinction:

* Some commitments are revisable in the sense of refinement, scope, and tradeoffs.
* Some are so central that abandoning them collapses the entire project (like “truth matters” in inquiry).

Science itself has this feature. The commitment to evidence is not “falsifiable” by evidence without self-undermining. Yet it’s not religious dogma; it’s a constitutive norm of inquiry. Similarly, “unnecessary suffering is prima facie bad” isn’t an empirical hypothesis, but it is a constitutive moral starting point for any ethics that takes other minds seriously.

If someone says “suffering is good” or “other beings don’t matter,” we can’t refute them with a lab experiment. But we can expose the implication: they’re rejecting the very basis of moral reciprocity. At that point, debate isn’t about “who has the right evidence,” but about whether they are still doing ethics at all (in the sense of offering reasons that could bind anyone beyond their tribe).

4) Would I eject dissenters from a welfare-based institution?

Probably - depending on what “dissent” means. And this is where your argument almost reaches the real point, but stops short.

Every institution has membership criteria. If you join an organization dedicated to disability rights, and you advocate excluding disabled people from public life, you’ll be shown the door. That’s not dogmatism; that’s integrity of purpose.

The deeper difference is what justifies exclusion:

* In dogmatic systems, exclusion often protects identity, authority, or sacred status.
* In welfare-based systems, exclusion protects vulnerable people from harm and preserves a mission justified in publicly shareable reasons.

Yes, both can label dissent as “moral failure.” But the content matters. “You’re morally wrong to harm people” is not the same kind of claim as “you’re morally wrong to doubt our revelation.”

If you collapse those, you end up unable to distinguish abolitionism from inquisitions except as “both are groups with strong beliefs.” That’s too thin to be useful.

5) The human condition point is true - and it supports my critique rather than cancels it.

Your last line is right: much of this is human. Humans seek certainty, belonging, status, and moral cleanliness. We build institutions that protect those needs.

That’s exactly why systems that sacralize authority are dangerous. They take normal human tribal psychology and add:

* cosmic stakes (salvation/damnation),
* sacred texts (hard-to-revise anchors),
* moralized epistemology (doubt as vice),
* and legitimized coercion (historically common).

If human beings are prone to orthodoxy, then we should prefer moral and epistemic frameworks that minimize the damage of that tendency - frameworks that build in error-correction and reduce the incentives to treat dissent as spiritual contamination.

So, I’m not denying human nature. I’m arguing we should design around it.

If we agree that institutions inevitably develop orthodoxies, then the central question becomes:

Which kinds of orthodoxies are least likely to entrench error and least likely to authorize harm when they do?

My claim is: orthodoxies grounded in authority and sacralization are systematically riskier than orthodoxies grounded in public reasons, fallibilism, and accountability to sentient welfare.

If you think that’s wrong, the strongest move isn’t “secular groups do it too.” The strongest move is to show that revelation-anchored, sacralized authority is not more prone to harmful insulation than reason-anchored, publicly contestable frameworks.

That’s the real disagreement.

I think your reply mixes several different issues together, and that’s where the disagreement actually sits.

First: plants vs animals
Yes, plants we eat are also bred by humans. But that is not a parallel case in the morally relevant sense. The ethical concern I’m raising is about sentient beings with subjective experience - beings that can feel pain, fear, deprivation, and frustration of interests. Breeding plants does not create lives capable of suffering. Breeding animals does. That difference isn’t rhetorical; it’s foundational. If we erase that distinction, then all ethics collapses into mere preference. A cow is a sentient being - a plant is not.

Second: “eradication” vs ending a practice
Ending the forced reproduction of domesticated animals is not analogous to Pol Pot or social engineering catastrophes. That comparison is doing emotional work, not ethical work. No one is proposing killing existing animals. The proposal is to stop deliberately creating sentient beings for the purpose of exploiting and killing them. If a harmful practice ends and the population that depends on that practice naturally declines, that is not eradication - it is moral discontinuation.

Third: the “retirement home” caricature
No serious vegan ethicist thinks every cow, chicken, or sheep must be maintained indefinitely. That framing assumes a binary: either exploit them and murder them or preserve them forever. That’s a false dilemma. Animals in sanctuaries will naturally die when their lifespan has come to an end. Transitional care for existing animals followed by non-reproduction is ethically coherent and practically manageable over time, especially compared to the ongoing global cost of industrial animal agriculture.

Fourth: lab-grown meat
Here we largely agree on the trajectory, but not the interpretation. Cultivated meat is not a refutation of vegan ethics - it is evidence that society is already trying to escape the moral and environmental costs of animal farming without confronting them explicitly. If meat can be produced without breeding, confining, and killing sentient beings, then the ethical objection to meat-as-such largely dissolves. What remains is a question of resource use, health, and access - not animal harm.

And yes, corporations will downplay risks. That’s a regulatory problem which can be solved. It's not a moral defense of animal exploitation.

Fifth: taste, wildness, and “biospheric loss”
You’re absolutely right that industrialization flattens flavor, diversity, and ecological richness. But that critique cuts against animal agriculture, not in its favor. Monocropped soy and grain feeding billions of confined animals is one of the most ecologically impoverishing systems humans have ever created. Wild game tastes different precisely because it is not produced by that system - but scaling “wildness” to billions of humans is a physical impossibility, not a moral option.

Finally: poverty and cheap artificial food
You’re naming a real concern: cost pressures will push people toward cheaper, more artificial foods - plant or animal. But again, that’s not an argument for continuing a practice that systematically inflicts suffering. It’s an argument for better food systems, better regulation, and justice-focused transitions, not for maintaining harm because alternatives are imperfect. I recommend that we implement a Universal Basic Income and Facilities (e.g. free accommodation, healthcare, education, etc.) for all humans. This will end poverty globally.

This isn’t utopianism. It’s harm minimization under constraints. We already accept that we should stop doing things once we realize they cause massive, avoidable harm, even if the transition is messy. Ending slavery didn’t require a perfect alternative economy first. Ending child labor didn’t wait for ideal conditions. Ending animal exploitation doesn’t either.

We may not reach agreement - that’s fine. But dismissing the position as “utopian” sidesteps the central question rather than answering it:
If we can meet human needs without systematically harming sentient beings, why should harm remain the default? That’s the question I’m putting on the table.

Esse, thank you for your thoughtful reply. I think you’re blurring distinctions that actually matter.

First, on religion as a monolith:
I agree that religions are internally diverse. Contemplative traditions, process theology, and liberal theology often do engage rigorously with criticism. But that concession cuts both ways. Those traditions tend to depart precisely from the authority-based, dogma-first structure that defines religion as socially practiced. When a religious framework becomes genuinely evidence-responsive, revisable, and non-authoritarian, it increasingly resembles philosophy or spirituality rather than religion in the institutional sense. My critique is aimed at religion as a normative system with protected doctrines, not at every individual thinker who happens to use religious language.

Second, on ethics and consequentialism:
I am not assuming consequentialism is the correct framework. In fact, my own position is closer to a pluralist view that includes care ethics, constraints, and virtues. The issue is not “consequences vs authority” in a narrow utilitarian sense. It’s whether ethical claims are answerable to the lived welfare of sentient beings or insulated by appeal to divine command, revelation, or sacred status. Deontology and virtue ethics can be fully secular and fully accountable to human (and non-human) flourishing. Divine-command versions cannot - because they terminate justification at “God wills it.”

Third, on secular worldviews and foundational assumptions:
You’re right that no framework is assumption-free. But not all assumptions are epistemically equal. There’s a difference between provisional commitments that remain open to revision (e.g. realism about suffering, intersubjective values, empirical facts), and religious beliefs that are exempt from falsification by design.

Calling both “mythological insulation” flattens an important distinction. Secular frameworks typically expect internal critique and external challenge. Religious systems often treat such challenge as moral or spiritual failure.

Finally, on meaning:
I’m not claiming meaning requires zero foundational commitments. I’m claiming it does not require supernatural authority or revealed metaphysics. Meaning can be grounded in relationships, care, creativity, solidarity, and reduction of suffering without positing entities or commands that override moral reasoning when they conflict with compassion.

So, yes, religion can contain sophisticated moral reflection. But when it does, it succeeds despite its appeal to authority, not because of it. And when religious claims collide with the well-being of sentient beings, I see no reason they should receive special immunity from scrutiny.

That, to me, is the crux.

You’re invoking Viktor Frankl correctly - but then you quietly switch questions.

Frankl argued that humans seek meaning. He did not argue that meaning must come from religion, nor that religion has epistemic priority over other tools for understanding reality or guiding ethics.

A microscope is not a competitor to religion. It answers different questions.

A microscope tells us what is the case about the world. Meaning-making systems (religious or secular) address how we ought to live given what is the case.

Confusing those domains is a category error.

What is my worldview?

In plain terms: naturalistic, sentient-centered, compassion-based.

* Reality operates according to discoverable physical processes.
* Sentient beings experience suffering and flourishing.
* Reducing unnecessary suffering and enabling flourishing is morally primary.
* Meaning is constructed through values, commitments, and action - not discovered as a cosmic decree by allegedly omniscient and omnipotent God or Gods who don't show up for a discussion despite being allegedly real. I am not convinced that God or Gods exist. If they ever show up, I will be happy to speak with them about truth and ethics. All omniscient and omnipotent beings (if they exist) are omniculpable thanks to their omniscience and omnipotence. I am convinced that every sentient being (biological, technological and hybrid) has an unconditional right to exist, flourish, and not be coerced.

That already answers Frankl’s insight: meaning arises from responsibility, care, and chosen purpose, not from metaphysical guarantees.

How is my worldview justified?

By coherence, evidence, and moral accountability.

Religion makes three claims that my worldview does not need:

1. That meaning must be externally imposed.
2. That moral authority requires the supernatural.
3. That existential comfort justifies epistemic shortcuts.

Those claims are not self-validating. They require justification - and historically, they’ve been used as often to excuse harm as to inspire care.

Frankl himself survived a death camp and still rejected the idea that meaning depends on belief in God. Meaning, for him, was found in how one responds to suffering, not in theological explanations for it.

Why not religion?

Because religion answers the meaning question by exempting itself from scrutiny.

* It explains suffering by reframing it as “purposeful.”
* It grounds ethics in authority rather than consequences.
* It demands assent before evidence.

That may feel comforting, but comfort is not the same as truth - and moral seriousness requires facing suffering without mythological insulation.

Humans need meaning.
Meaning does not need religion.
And no worldview earns credibility merely by soothing existential anxiety.

If your worldview gives meaning without requiring false beliefs, without excusing harm, and without placing any beings beyond moral concern, then it is not only sufficient - it is ethically stronger.

If you think religion does better than that, the burden is on religion to show it - not on microscopes to become sermons.

You are still conflating extinction by killing with extinction by non-creation, and that confusion is doing most of the work in your critique.

Genocide is the destruction of existing sentient beings who wish to live. Ending breeding does not destroy anyone. It prevents new individuals from being deliberately brought into systems where exploitation, confinement, mutilation, and premature death are structurally guaranteed. No victims are created, therefore none are harmed.

Calling that “cruel” empties the word of meaning. Cruelty requires a subject who is made to suffer. Non-creation has no subject.

“You are basically saying exploitation of a domesticated species is a just cause for extinction.”

No. Exploitation is a reason to stop producing victims. Domesticated farm animals are not natural species with independent ecological roles; they are human-engineered populations bred into dependence for human use. Ending their forced reproduction is not eradication - it is refusing to continue a harm-creating practice.

You also accuse me of “drawing lines about which animals deserve to exist.” That is false. No animal is judged unworthy of existence. The claim is simpler and more precise: no sentient being is owed creation, and no human has the right to manufacture lives for instrumental ends.

That is not sinister. What is sinister is treating perpetual breeding, confinement, and slaughter as morally neutral while recoiling at the idea of letting exploitative lineages peacefully phase out.

On stewardship: you are right that “letting nature take care of it” and stewardship are not identical - and I never claimed they were.

The distinction you’re missing is this:

* Exploitative stewardship manages beings for human benefit (meat, profit, labor, control).
* Non-exploitative stewardship manages systems to reduce suffering and respect interests, without ownership, commodification, or killing.

Sterilization and immunocontraception are not presented as “pleasant” - they are presented as morally preferable to mass killing, starvation, or ecological collapse. If you think painless fertility control is worse than slaughter, that needs defending - not assumed.

As for the “1% of the population” argument: moral truth is not a popularity contest. Slavery, child labor, marital rape, and animal cruelty were once majority-approved, too. Democracy determines law in democratic countries; it does not determine ethics.

And the biology claim is simply outdated. Humans are nutritional generalists, not obligate carnivores. Every major dietetic body agrees that well-planned plant-based diets are adequate for all stages of life. “We’ve always eaten meat” explains a habit - not a justification.

So let’s be clear:

* Ending breeding ≠ genocide
* Non-creation ≠ harm
* Stewardship ≠ exploitation
* Majority belief ≠ moral correctness

If the goal is to minimize suffering without creating new victims, then refusing to keep breeding sentient beings into guaranteed harm is not extremist - it is morally consistent.

If you want to challenge that, the challenge has to engage those claims directly, not replace them with darker versions they never asserted.

I think we’re closer than it may look, but you’ve mislocated my claim, so let me restate it carefully.

I am not saying that benevolence is unintelligible as a human trait. Quite the opposite: I’m explicitly relying on its ordinary, recognisable meaning - concern for the well-being of others, aversion to unnecessary harm, preference for flourishing over suffering. On that, we agree.

Where we differ is this: once you retain that recognisable meaning, appeals to inscrutability no longer help.

To be precise:
* If benevolence is recognisable in human terms, then massive, preventable suffering is not merely “a problem depending on beliefs” - it is directly inconsistent with omniscience plus moral concern.
* If benevolence is redefined so that it can comfortably coexist with such suffering by appealing to unknown goods, hidden afterlives, or radically different values, then the term has lost its recognisable content - and saying “God is benevolent” ceases to convey moral praise.

That is the dilemma. I’m not asserting a contradiction by definition; I’m showing that you cannot preserve both moral content and total inscrutability.

You’re right that omniscience alone already creates the tension. An omniscient being:

* fully understands the suffering it allows,
* fully understands all alternatives,
* fully foresees all consequences.

Once that is granted, adding omnipotence only removes escape routes - it isn’t doing the main work. So if you read me as saying “omniscience alone rules out omnibenevolence given the plain meaning of benevolence,” that reading is accurate.

Where I resist is the move that treats this as merely a “belief-relative problem.” If benevolence has stable meaning - and you’ve said it does - then the evaluation follows from that meaning, not from prior atheism or theism.

So to be clear:
I’m not confused about the triad, and I’m not shifting topics. I’m pressing a single consistency claim:

You can either keep benevolence morally recognisable and accept the problem of suffering as decisive, or redefine benevolence so radically that the praise becomes empty - but you can’t do both at once.

If you think there’s a third option that preserves content and avoids that outcome, I’m genuinely open to hearing it - but it would need to be spelled out without appealing to moral opacity.

You’re right that the problem isn’t logically impossible for a believer to live with. People can accept contradictions if their faith requires it. But that’s not the issue being raised. The issue is whether the claim remains meaningful or morally defensible.

You say “good” and “evil” are subjective. If that’s true in the strong sense you’re invoking, then calling God good ceases to be a moral claim at all. It becomes either:

1. a statement of loyalty (“God is good because God does it”), or
2. a report of preference (“God approves of God’s actions”).

Neither is what classical theism means by omnibenevolence.

Appeals to historical moral disagreement (e.g. slavery once being accepted) don’t actually help here. Plenty of slaves opposed slavery even when slave-owners were pro-slavery. That example works against your point. We judge slavery wrong precisely because we think some moral judgments are better than others - more informed, more compassionate, more preventive of harm. If moral progress is real, then not all moral perspectives are equally valid.

You also appeal to possible hidden knowledge (afterlife, cosmic goods, etc.). But once moral justification depends on inaccessible information, the claim “God is benevolent” becomes unfalsifiable. And an unfalsifiable moral claim is indistinguishable from an empty one. At that point, we’re no longer talking about goodness as humans understand it - only about inscrutable power.

So I don’t think the dilemma is avoided. It sharpens:

* If “benevolence” has content that overlaps with human moral concepts (harm, suffering, flourishing), then God’s actions are at least partially judgeable - and some appear morally indefensible.
* If it has no such overlap, then calling God benevolent adds no moral information at all.

I agree with you on one important point: defining benevolence as “whatever aligns with God’s will” drains the term of meaning. But once that’s conceded, what remains isn’t a morally perfect being - it’s a morally opaque one, beyond praise as much as blame.

That may be a coherent theological position. It just isn’t a moral one.

Thank you for your thoughtful post. I don’t argue literally because I think religious texts should be read literally. I argue literally because the theistic moral claims being defended only work if God is literally good, powerful, and responsible for the world as it is. Once those predicates are softened into metaphor, the problem of evil dissolves - but so does classical theism.

On free will: I don’t see why moral seriousness requires the possibility of irreversible catastrophe. We already accept bounded freedom everywhere else. Preventing extreme harm does not eliminate agency - it constrains it. If God can cap suffering without erasing choice, then allowing extreme suffering requires justification. If God cannot, omnipotence is lost.

As for belief: I don’t think belief is a simple choice. People choose how to act; they don’t choose what appears true to them. I share your admiration for religious philosophy as a human project - but moral critique becomes unavoidable once God is claimed as literally good and literally responsible for reality.

Bob, thank you for the detailed reply. It’s clear you’re articulating classical theism carefully rather than hand-waving. But the coherence you claim is achieved only by redefining moral concepts so radically that they no longer do the work you want them to do. That’s the core issue, and none of your clarifications escape it.

Let me be precise.

1. “God is goodness itself” does not rescue moral accountability.

You repeatedly assert that, in classical theism, God is goodness itself, and that goodness is the identity of essence and esse. This is a standard move in Thomas Aquinas. But notice what follows:

“Good” is no longer a normative concept involving welfare, harm, or obligation. It becomes a metaphysical predicate about unity, actuality, and self-identity.

At that point, calling God “good” is no longer a moral commendation. It is a statement like “God is simple” or “God is pure act.”

You cannot then also use “good” in the evaluative, action-guiding sense - praising God, defending His choices, or explaining suffering - without equivocation.

You say agathology ≠ morality. Fine.
But then stop making moral claims on agathological grounds.

2. Analogical predication does not save moral resemblance - it dissolves it.

You object that I misunderstand analogy. I don’t.

Analogical predication requires relevant similarity, yes, but relevant to what end?

You say:

God being an intellect analogically means there is something chiefly similar…

Yet every time a similarity threatens moral critique, you retreat to:

* divine simplicity,
* absolute perfection,
* metaphysical necessity,
* inscrutability of possibility space.

That means the analogy never licenses moral inference, only metaphysical labeling.

So again, either the analogy preserves enough similarity for moral assessment, or it does not.

You want similarity for praise, dissimilarity for critique. That’s asymmetric and ad hoc.

3. FFE does not ground moral responsibility - it abolishes it.

Your defense hinges on rejecting liberty of indifference (FOI) in favor of freedom for excellence (FFE).

But here is the unavoidable consequence:

If God:

* necessarily wills the best,
* cannot will otherwise,
* cannot revise,
* cannot refrain,

then, his “choice” is structural inevitability, not agency in any morally relevant sense.

Calling this “free” stretches the concept beyond recognition. Moral responsibility requires counterfactual sensitivity, alternative possibilities or responsiveness to reasons that could have gone otherwise.

FFE gives you metaphysical perfection - not moral praiseworthiness.

You can keep one. Not both.

4. “No excess suffering” is not a metaphysical claim - it’s a moral assertion.

You state:

There is no excess suffering in the world.

This is not derived from metaphysics. It is asserted to protect the system.

You offer no independent criterion for “necessary,” no non-circular account of why:

* childhood cancer,
* extreme congenital pain,
* animal predation,
* moral ignorance with eternal stakes

are required rather than merely permitted by your theory.

Appealing to “conceivability vs metaphysical possibility” does not help unless you provide positive constraints on what God could not have done - constraints that do not simply reduce to “because this world exists.”

Otherwise, “necessary” just means “actual.”

That is not explanation. It is restatement.

5. Free will does not require childhood cancer.

This claim:

If there were no possibility of childhood cancer, then we would all be robots…

is unsupported.

Free will does not logically require:

* pediatric oncology wards,
* congenital agony,
* animals dying slowly of parasites.

A world with:

* less extreme suffering,
* earlier deaths replaced by painless non-existence,
* narrower harm ranges

is plainly conceivable without eliminating agency. You assert impossibility without argument.

That is a theodical stipulation, not a metaphysical demonstration.

6. Classical theism avoids Euthyphro only by evacuating morality.

You say classical theism avoids Euthyphro by identifying goodness with God’s nature.

Yes, but the price is this:

* Moral goodness ceases to be an evaluative standard.
* “God is good” becomes non-informative.
* Moral language becomes descriptive of metaphysical structure, not prescriptive or critical.

At that point, the problem of evil is not solved. It is rendered meaningless.

Your system is internally consistent only because it no longer means what ordinary moral discourse means by:

* responsibility,
* goodness,
* justice,
* freedom,
* suffering.

That’s a valid philosophical move.

But then you must accept the consequence:

Classical theism does not defend a morally good God. It defines God beyond morality and then calls that “goodness.”

Once that is clear, the disagreement is no longer emotional or rhetorical - it is conceptual.

And on that level, the cost is far higher than you acknowledge.

First, I agree with you about hyperbole. Ancient religious language often exaggerates for rhetorical and political reasons. When Odin is called “all-seeing” while relying on ravens, no one thinks this is a literal metaphysical claim. Likewise, much Old Testament “all-powerful” language plausibly arose from tribal competition rather than precise ontology.

But here’s the problem: once you concede that omni-language is hyperbolic, you’ve already abandoned classical omnipotence and omniscience. You don’t get to then retain omnibenevolence in its strongest sense. The omni-package falls apart together or not at all.

Second, the Tennyson quote is beautiful, but it does no philosophical work here. Flower in the Crannied Wall is about epistemic humility, not moral exemption. Yes, total understanding may be impossible for finite minds. But moral judgment does not require total understanding. We judge actions by their foreseeable effects on sentient beings, not by omniscient insight into “all in all.”

If complete understanding were required before moral judgment:

* courts could never judge crimes,
* parents could never intervene in harm,
* ethics would be impossible.

Yet we rightly judge anyway because suffering, harm, and preventability are sufficient grounds.

Third, this claim is the crux, and it fails:

If omniscience is infinite and beyond human comprehension, God’s actions are impossible to judge.

No. What follows is this:

If God’s actions are impossible to judge, then claims about God’s benevolence are equally impossible to justify.

You can’t have it both ways.

If God’s goodness is meaningful, then it must connect to recognisable moral goods (wellbeing, harm reduction, fairness).
If God’s goodness is wholly inscrutable, then saying “God is benevolent” communicates nothing beyond “God does whatever God does.”

At that point, “benevolence” becomes a loyalty slogan, not a moral claim.

Finally, “taking benevolence on faith” is not an explanation - it’s a retreat. It asks us to suspend moral reasoning precisely where moral reasoning matters most: extreme, involuntary, preventable suffering.

Faith can motivate trust; it cannot retroactively turn horrors into virtues.

So yes, hyperbole, poetry, and mystery belong in religion. But once mystery is used to shield moral claims from evaluation, the concept of divine goodness stops being deep and starts being empty.

EricH, you’re right about several things, but a few moves here deserve pushback.

First, on omnipotence and logic:
I agree that “omnipotence constrained by logic” isn’t a defect; it’s the only definition that avoids incoherence. A being that can create square circles hasn’t transcended logic - it has destroyed meaning. At that point, words like power, creation, or existence stop referring to anything intelligible. So yes: logical constraint isn’t a limit on power; it’s a precondition for talking about power at all.

Second, your treatment of omniscience is mostly sound:

They know every fact.
They know what course of action is best, all things considered.

Exactly. And this is where the move to “we can’t fathom what motivates such an entity” quietly undercuts classical theism rather than rescuing it.

If “best” is so alien that it no longer tracks anything like wellbeing, harm reduction, fairness, or flourishing, then calling the entity benevolent becomes vacuous. You’re right: assigning human moral traits to a being whose motivations are radically inscrutable is a category error. But that cuts both ways: either benevolence means something recognisable, in which case massive preventable suffering is a problem, or benevolence means something utterly opaque, in which case saying “God is benevolent” conveys no moral information at all. You can’t keep the praise while discarding the content.

Third, you say omnipotence and omniscience “necessarily rule out omnibenevolence.” I disagree. They don’t logically rule it out, but they make omnibenevolence empirically implausible given the world we observe, unless one retreats into mystery so deep that moral language collapses.

That’s not a contradiction - it’s a reductio.

Finally, on the Biblical God: yes, judging a character by their recorded words and actions is basic moral reasoning. If a human ruler ordered genocide, endorsed slavery, and punished thought-crime, we wouldn’t excuse it by saying “his ways are higher.” Applying a different moral standard just because the agent is labeled “God” is special pleading.

Tools like The Skeptics Annotated Bible are useful precisely because they strip away the devotional framing and force the text to answer to ordinary ethical scrutiny - the same scrutiny we apply everywhere else.

So, overall: we agree more than we disagree. But once you admit that “benevolence” either has human-recognisable meaning or none at all, the classical omni-triad doesn’t merely wobble - it dissolves.

Ecurb, there are several serious problems with this line of thought, and they’re not just emotional objections - they’re conceptual ones.

First, appealing to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is poetic, not explanatory. Blake was doing symbolic myth-making, not moral metaphysics. Saying “good and evil are flip sides of the same coin” is a metaphor. It does not establish that evil is necessary for good, only that humans often conceptualise value contrastively. That’s a psychological claim, not a moral or ontological one.

Second, the idea that “good would lose meaning if evil didn’t exist” confuses semantic contrast with moral necessity. We can meaningfully distinguish:

* pleasure without agony,
* health without disease,
* learning without trauma,
* love without abuse.

Parents don’t need to burn their children to teach warmth has value. A world with better states does not require horrific states to be intelligible. Contrast can be supplied by degrees of good, not by atrocities.

Third, claiming that “we don’t know how death feels to sentient beings” is evasive. We know quite a lot about dying: panic, suffocation, pain, terror, neurological distress. The fact that the dead cannot report afterward is irrelevant. If someone tortured a person to death and then said, “Well, they can’t complain now,” we would rightly call that monstrous. Ignorance after the fact does not erase suffering during the process.

Fourth, aesthetic deflection - “look at the moon and the stars” - is a category error. Natural beauty does not morally offset unnecessary suffering. A breathtaking sunset does not justify childhood leukemia, parasitic blinding diseases, or animals being eaten alive. This isn’t “whining”; it’s basic moral accounting.

Fifth, the “from God’s perspective” move quietly abandons omnibenevolence. If goodness only makes sense from God’s inscrutable viewpoint, then it is no longer meaningfully good in any sense we recognise. At that point, “God is good” becomes empty praise - indistinguishable from “God does whatever God does.”

Finally, quoting “Man was born to trouble” simply restates the problem. It doesn’t solve it. Saying “oh well” in the face of mass, involuntary suffering isn’t wisdom; it’s resignation dressed up as spirituality.

Life can contain wonder and be morally indictable. Recognising beauty does not require us to excuse cruelty baked into the system. If a being could reduce extreme suffering without losing anything of value and chose not to, we would not call that being good - no matter how pretty the night sky is.

That’s not arrogance. That’s ethical consistency. Please remember that at least 99.9% of all the species to exist so far on Earth are already extinct, and every second is full of suffering, injustice, and death for sentient biological beings who never asked for existence. I wish I had never existed in a world like this.

I appreciate your honesty, and I think that concession matters more than it might seem at first glance.

Leibniz’s move is internally required if one insists on omniscience + omnipotence + omnibenevolence + necessity. But, as you say, it’s prima facie absurd once you stop treating it as a scholastic exercise and start looking at the world we actually inhabit.

Your examples get right to the heart of it:

Would faith collapse if toothaches were 10% less painful?
Would moral seriousness evaporate if backs and knees were better engineered?
Would trust be negated if childhood leukemia didn’t exist?

These aren’t rhetorical flourishes - they expose how implausible the “razor’s edge” claim really is. The idea that this exact calibration of suffering is necessary for maximal goodness strains credulity far more than the claim that a better world was possible.

And that’s the key point I’ve been pressing all along:

The problem isn’t that theism is incoherent. The problem is that saving omnibenevolence requires saying things that are increasingly unbelievable about suffering being indispensable at this scale, in this distribution, with this intensity.

Once we admit, even intuitively, that:

* small reductions in suffering wouldn’t undermine agency,
* modest biological improvements wouldn’t negate faith,
* fewer horrors wouldn’t flatten moral depth,

then, the necessity claim collapses. And with it, the strongest classical theodicy.

So yes, good discussion indeed. And for what it’s worth, using tools to sharpen arguments doesn’t bother me in the slightest. What matters is where the reasoning lands, not how polished the prose is.

If nothing else, I think we’ve shown this much clearly: “Best of all possible worlds” is not a conclusion forced on us by reason - it’s a cost classical theism chooses to pay. I feel that this is a terrible world, which is full of suffering, injustice, and death on an unbearable scale. Such a world is not compatible with the existence of any omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent God, because such a God would have prevented such a world from ever existing. This world is entirely compatible with the existence of an evil God.

Let me slow this down and reset the tone first, because I don’t want this to turn personal.

If my replies have come across as accusatory, that wasn’t my intention. I’m pressing hard on the logic, not on you. Philosophical disagreement often sounds sharp because it forces distinctions that feel uncomfortable. That’s what’s happening here.

Now to the substance.

1. Adding “another way” is not ad hoc - it is structurally required.

I did not add an extra condition arbitrarily. I made explicit a condition that was already implicit in what the analogy is being used to do.

Your analogy is not a free-standing moral vignette. It is doing theological work. It is meant to illuminate or defend a claim about divine permission, responsibility, and goodness.

Once the analogy is being used to model God, omnipotence becomes relevant by definition.

So the question “was there another way?” is not an ad hoc escape hatch - it is the central discriminator between:

* tragic necessity, and
* chosen permission.

If there is no other way, permission may be tragic but justified.
If there is another way, permission becomes morally loaded.

That distinction is not something I introduced to save my position. It is what gives the analogy moral traction in the first place.

2. If classical theism denies “another way,” then that is the real disagreement.

You say: you demanded that there must be another way because it coheres with your understanding of God’s omnipotence, an understanding no classical theists would agree to.

Then the disagreement is not about ad hoc reasoning. It is about this:

I take an omniscient and omnipotent God to be actually omniscient and omnipotent. Classical theism (as you’re presenting it) collapses that to one necessary outcome.

Once that move is made, the analogy changes character entirely.

The father is no longer a deliberating moral agent who is truly omniscient and omnipotent.
He is a necessary conduit through which one fixed outcome flows.

At that point, we are no longer discussing permission in a morally recognisable sense.

3. But notice the cost of the classical move.

Bob Ross’s account is coherent - I’ve already said that.

But it comes at a price:

* God does not meaningfully choose between alternatives.
* God cannot do otherwise.
* Moral predicates apply only analogically.
* “Good” no longer contrasts with “better” or “worse.”

That means the analogy to a human father no longer works, because the father in your story:

* deliberates,
* weighs reasons,
* could have acted otherwise.

If the divine case lacks those features, then the analogy fails on your side, not mine.

4. Why pressing this point is not evasion.

You’re right that classical theism rejects my understanding of omniscience and omnipotence.

But that doesn’t make my objection ad hoc. It makes it conditional:

If God has the power classical theism claims, and if moral language applies in any substantive sense, then permission of foreknown, preventable catastrophe is morally significant.

Classical theism responds by denying one of those “ifs.”
That’s a legitimate move - but it’s a revision, not a refutation.

5. So where we actually stand.

This is not about me dodging your analogy.

It’s about this fork:

* Either the analogy is genuinely moral (choice, permission, responsibility apply),
* Or it is metaphysical (necessity, pure act, no alternatives).

It cannot be both at once.

When I press on “another way,” I’m forcing that fork into the open - not inventing it to escape the argument.

I’m not dismissing your analogy. I’m taking it seriously enough to ask what must be true for it to work.

If classical theism says “there was no other way,” then the analogy stops defending omniscience and omnipotence and starts exempting God from moral evaluation.

That may preserve internal coherence - but it does so by stepping outside the moral framework the analogy was meant to support.

That’s the real disagreement here, and it isn’t ad hoc at all.

Thank you for clarifying. That helps, but it doesn’t resolve the issue you think it does.

1. You’ve shifted the criterion, not removed the problem.

You now say:

A parent may permit only goals the parent judges to be good.

That move changes the principle from respecting the child’s wishes to the parent’s moral judgment. Once you do that, the question is no longer about autonomy - it’s about responsibility for authorising a lethal means.

If the parent judges the goal good and knows the means will certainly kill the child and can prevent that death, then the parent becomes morally implicated in allowing the death.

Calling the goal “good” does not neutralise responsibility for the foreseeable, preventable harm used to achieve it.

2. Good goals do not license certain death when prevention is available.

Many goals are good:

saving lives,

defending victims of atrocities,

preventing injustice.

That does not mean:

any means are acceptable,

or that permitting certain death is morally neutral when one has the power to prevent it.

If lethal permission is always justified by the goodness of the goal, then the principle becomes:

“A good end licenses foreseeable, preventable death.”

That principle is doing all the work - and it is far from obvious.

3. The suicide analogy still matters.

You say suicide can be blocked because the goal is bad.

But consider this:

If a person sincerely believes their death will save others,

and the authority figure agrees the end is good,

and death is certain and preventable,

your framework provides no reason to intervene.

So the suicide case reappears under a different description. The moral work is not being done by “goal legitimacy” alone.

4. Authority does not dissolve responsibility - it concentrates it.

You are right that authority need not be hollow. But authority plus permission is exactly what generates responsibility.

The moment the parent says:

“I judge this end good, and I permit you to pursue it, knowing it will kill you,”

the parent is no longer a bystander. They are a moral authoriser.

That’s the point you haven’t displaced.

5. Why this still matters for the God analogy.

This clarification actually strengthens the original critique.

If:

God judges the end good,

knows suffering or death will certainly occur,

and could prevent it without losing the end,

then permitting it is not morally neutral - it is a chosen means.

Appealing to “good goals” does not erase that responsibility; it relocates it.

You’ve shown that authority isn’t hollow. Agreed.

But you haven’t shown that permitting certain, preventable death in service of a good goal is morally innocent.

That is the crux.

Once permission is given knowingly and preventably, responsibility does not disappear - it deepens.

You have misquoted me. This is what I actually said in my previous post:

My claim was never:

“Parents must prevent all foreseeable risks.”

It was:

When an agent has decisive power, foreknowledge, and a non-tragic alternative, responsibility attaches.

Those are not equivalent claims, and collapsing them into one is doing the argumentative work for you.

1. Why your reductio does not follow

You argue that if responsibility attaches whenever harm is preventable, then parents could never let children leave the house.

But that reductio only follows if my principle were:

“Any preventable harm must be prevented.”

It isn’t.

My principle is conjunctive, not absolute. Responsibility attaches only when all three conditions are met:

Decisive power – the authority to reliably prevent the outcome.

Foreknowledge – not mere possibility, but knowledge that the harm will occur.

A non-tragic alternative – the good can be achieved without the harm.

Letting a child leave the house satisfies none of these:

There is no decisive control over outcomes.

There is no foreknowledge that harm will occur.

Normal life itself requires risk; forbidding it would itself be a tragic alternative.

So the bruised-elbow reductio simply does not apply.

2. Possibility ≠ certainty (and this distinction matters morally).

You say:

“It does not matter if death is certain; the possibility of death should render the parent responsible.”

This is where your argument overreaches.

Moral responsibility does not track mere possibility. If it did:

every driver would be morally responsible for every accident they did not cause,

every parent would be culpable for every illness their child contracts,

every act of permission would become negligence.

Moral systems universally distinguish:

risk from foreknown outcome,

exposure from guarantee,

tragic uncertainty from certain harm.

Erase that distinction, and moral responsibility becomes incoherent.

3. Authority alone is not sufficient.

You then say: assume a parent has authority such that the child will obey.

Even granting that (for the sake of argument), authority by itself does not generate responsibility unless the other conditions are present.

If:

the parent does not know harm will occur,

the good pursued is not achievable otherwise,

or forbidding the action would itself impose serious harm,

then responsibility does not attach in the way you claim.

Your move treats power as automatically obligating, which no plausible moral theory accepts.

4. Why the original case still stands

In your original parable, the father:

knows with certainty the son will die,

knows he can prevent it,

and knows the mission’s goal could be achieved without that death (or at least has not been shown otherwise).

That is why responsibility attaches there - and why the analogy was relevant to God.

The military case works only by removing those features and then insisting the same moral judgment applies anyway.

It doesn’t.

5. The deeper issue you’re sliding past.

Your objection keeps trying to force a false dilemma:

either prevent all risk,

or bear responsibility for all harm.

But moral responsibility does not work that way.

It scales with:

knowledge,

control,

alternatives,

and proportionality.

That scaling is exactly what makes human moral reasoning possible - and exactly what breaks when applied to an omniscient and omnipotent being who supposedly has all knowledge, all power, all control, and all alternatives.

You misquoted my position, and the reductio depends on that misquotation.

Mere possibility of harm does not generate responsibility.

Decisive power + foreknowledge + non-tragic alternatives do.

The military analogy fails because it lacks those conditions.

The original point remains intact.

The disagreement isn’t about whether parents should prevent all risk.
It’s about whether allowing foreknown, preventable catastrophe while possessing decisive power is morally neutral.

That question does not dissolve by expanding “responsibility” until it becomes absurd.

You are no longer addressing the issues I raised in my first post in this thread. You have digressed in a direction that doesn't add anything to that discussion.

I agree that we’ve now reached the deepest layer of the disagreement. But at this layer, the issue is no longer rhetorical or intuitive - it’s structural. And here, your position still relies on unearned necessity claims.

1. The burden of necessity really does matter.

You say I’m setting the bar for “necessity” too high. But that’s exactly the bar omnipotence sets.

If the claim is: Extreme suffering is unavoidable if morally serious agency exists, then that is a modal claim - a claim about what is and is not logically possible. Modal claims carry a burden. They are not discharged by saying “no alternative has been spelled out.”

I am not required to prove every alternative design.
You are required to show that none are possible.

Absent that, “God could not have done better” remains an assertion, not a conclusion.

2. You quietly redefine “real stakes” as “irreversible devastation”.

This is the hinge of your argument.

You claim that unless final devastation is structurally possible, agency “loses depth.”

But that is a stipulative elevation of catastrophe, not a logical truth.

* Stakes require significance, not annihilation.
* Finality requires consequence, not maximal harm.
* Responsibility requires authorship, not the power to ruin lives irreversibly.

We already recognize this distinction everywhere else:

* A judge’s ruling has real stakes even though executions are barred.
* A pilot’s error is morally serious even if fail-safes exist.
* A parent’s betrayal can permanently damage trust even without bodily harm.

Depth does not scale linearly with horror.

3. Safeguards ≠ micromanagement.

You repeatedly slide from “engineered limits” to “constant divine supervision.”

That slide is doing illicit work.

A world could be structured such that:

* catastrophic harm is physically impossible beyond a threshold,
* irreversible devastation is blocked by lawlike constraints,
* agents still act freely within those bounds,

without any visible intervention at all.

Gravity already works this way. So do conservation laws. So do biological limits.

If you reply that those limits would themselves advertise design - then epistemic distance is already gone, because fine-tuning arguments exist in our world.

So either:

* epistemic distance is already compromised (which theists deny), or
* lawlike constraints do not force belief.

You can’t have it both ways.

4. “Possibility of horrors” vs “necessity of horrors”.

You now concede something crucial:

“The claim was never that each instance is necessary.”

Good. That matters.

Because once you admit that:

* specific horrors are not required,
* their distribution is not chosen,
* their victims are not selected for moral reasons,

then the question sharpens, it does not dissolve:

Why allow this magnitude, this distribution, this asymmetry, this lifelong devastation?

A world can allow moral risk without allowing:

* infants to be murdered,
* people to be born into nonstop agony,
* moral understanding to be radically unequal.

Allowing the possibility of misuse does not entail allowing every degree of misuse.

5. “No alternative has been described” is not decisive.

You say no alternative preserves everything at once.

But “everything at once” here includes:

* your specific conception of moral depth,
* your specific anthropology,
* your specific epistemology,
* your specific theology of faith.

That stack is not neutral. It is already a theological package.

Omnipotence is precisely the claim that reality need not be restricted to the one package we happen to find familiar.

If only one fragile configuration of agency is possible, omnipotence has already been curtailed.

6. This is not just a values disagreement.

You conclude that this is merely a disagreement over values and metaphysics.

Not quite.

It is a disagreement over whether:

* claims of logical necessity have been justified,
* omnipotence is doing any real work,
* omnibenevolence is more than a project-relative preference.

If your defense requires:

* asserting that catastrophe is essential,
* asserting that no other agency is possible,
* asserting that moral depth scales with irreversible harm,

then, the position is coherent - but it is no longer compelled by the classical attributes of God. It is one metaphysical vision among others.

Your theodicy does not collapse into incoherence, but it survives by raising suffering to a structural necessity and lowering omnipotence to a single viable design space.

That is a substantive metaphysical commitment, not a logical inevitability.

Until the necessity is shown rather than assumed, the original challenge stands:

If a world with less extreme, non-consensual suffering was metaphysically possible, then allowing this one was a choice - and that choice bears on omnibenevolence.

The disagreement is real.
But it is not cost-free, and it is not neutral.

Also, we have not established that biological organisms have libertarian free will. It is assumed by religious people that humans have immortal souls which grant them free will, but the existence of souls and free will is not proven with evidence.

Thank you for the thoughtful response. I’ll be equally direct. "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things." - Isaiah 45:7, The Bible (KJV). The Biblical God clearly states that he creates evil. Omniscience and omnipotence make omniscient and omnipotent beings omniculpable. Might does not make right. Might is right is wrong.

1. Literary criticism does not suspend moral evaluation.

The principle you cite - criticize a book for what it is, not what it isn’t - does not exempt a text from moral scrutiny.

If a book asserts that a character is perfectly good while depicting that character commanding genocide, killing babies, endorsing slavery, and punishing innocents, then pointing out the evil choices is not asking the book to be a different book. It is taking the book at its word.

If anything, refusing to evaluate the claims internally would be special pleading.

2. Repetition of beneficence is not evidence of beneficence.

The Bible asserts God’s goodness repeatedly. So do many texts about many rulers.

Assertions do not settle moral questions. Actions do.

If a text says “X is perfectly good” and then describes X doing things that would be considered monstrous if done by anyone else, the burden is not on the reader to harmonize at all costs. It is on the claim itself.

Appealing to “thousands of years of apologetics” is not an argument - it’s an appeal to tradition.

3. The sandcastle analogy fails categorically.

Comparing sentient beings to sandcastles collapses the moral distinction that makes morality possible at all.

* Sandcastles do not feel terror.
* Sandcastles do not experience pain.
* Sandcastles do not value their own continued existence.

If the creator–creature relationship nullifies moral obligations, then no action toward creatures can be morally evaluated - including mercy, love, or justice.

At that point, “omnibenevolence” becomes meaningless.

4. “Death is irrelevant to an immortal” is morally fatal.

You suggest that from God’s perspective, dying in a flood or of old age may be irrelevant.

That move concedes the core objection.

What matters morally is not how death looks to the immortal agent, but how it is experienced by the mortal sentient beings.

If a being’s indifference to suffering is justified by its transcendence, then that being is not omnibenevolent.

5. The Book of Job is an argument from power, not goodness.

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” does not justify anything morally. It asserts authority, not righteousness.

Power can silence a question.
It cannot answer it.

If the response to moral critique is “you are too small to judge,” then moral language has been abandoned - not defended.

6. Two incompatible claims are being made.

You say: The moral rules that apply to man clearly do not apply to God.

But then the Bible also claims:

* God is good,
* God is just,
* God is loving,
* God is a moral lawgiver.

Those claims only make sense if moral terms apply non-trivially.

If God is beyond morality, then:

* “God is good” is not praise,
* “God is just” is not meaningful,
* “God is benevolent” is empty.

You can’t exempt God from moral standards and still credit him with moral virtues.

7. Paradise Lost doesn’t rescue the theology.

Milton’s poetry is powerful - but poetry is not the same as moral justification.

Freedom can involve difficulty.
That does not entail:

* inherited guilt,
* cosmic punishment,
* or divine retribution.

Nor does it retroactively justify suffering imposed without consent.

8. You’ve correctly identified the cost.

You end by saying: I’ll grant that this makes asserting God’s omnibenevolence circular.

That is exactly right.

Once we say:

* God is good because God is God,
* whatever God does is good because God does it,
* and human moral reasoning is inapplicable,

then “omnibenevolence” no longer means benevolence. It becomes a stipulative label, not a moral claim.

I am not demanding that the Bible be a different book.
I am taking its claims seriously and following them where they lead.

And where they lead is this:

Either God is morally evaluable - in which case the depicted actions seriously challenge omnibenevolence, or God is beyond morality - in which case calling him omnibenevolent is empty.

You can have transcendence.
You can have immunity from critique.
But you cannot have those and meaningful moral goodness at the same time.

Thanks for laying your position out clearly. That helps. But the military analogy does not follow from what I said, and the difference matters.

1. You’ve changed a key condition.

In your original story, the father:

* knows with certainty that the son will die,
* knows he can prevent it, and
* knows the son will obey if forbidden.

That is radically different from a parent whose adult child joins the military.

In real life:

* Parents do not have certainty of death if their adult son joins the military.
* Parents do not have the authority to prevent adult children from joining the military.
* Parents do not have the power to prevent the harm even if they disapprove.

So the military case lacks the decisive features that generated responsibility in your original scenario.

2. Moral responsibility tracks power and knowledge.

My claim was never:

“Parents must prevent all foreseeable risks.”

It was:

When an agent has decisive power, foreknowledge, and a non-tragic alternative, responsibility attaches.

A parent whose adult child joins the military:

* lacks decisive control,
* lacks certainty,
* lacks alternative means to achieve the same goal.

The father in your story has all three.

3. Respecting wishes has limits - even legitimate ones.

You say the father’s greater responsibility is to respect the son’s legitimate wish.

But legitimacy of the goal does not automatically justify permitting certain death when:

* the harm is guaranteed,
* prevention is possible,
* and the authority to prevent exists.

If respecting wishes always overrides harm prevention, then:

* parents could not intervene in suicidal missions,
* guardians could not stop terminally dangerous choices,
* authority would be morally hollow.

That’s an implausible moral standard.

4. The analogy only works by smuggling in human limitation.

Your intuition relies on treating the father as:

* emotionally involved but power-limited,
* morally serious but tragically constrained.

Once those limits are removed - once the father has certainty, authority, and alternatives - the moral calculus changes.

That is exactly why the analogy breaks when it’s used to model God.

5. Why this matters for the original debate.

The point was never “parents should forbid risk.”
The point was:

Allowing a preventable, foreknown death while possessing decisive power is not morally neutral.

In human cases, that power rarely exists.
In divine cases, it is central.

No, it does not follow that parents should forbid military service.
Yes, it does follow that an authority who knows death is certain and preventable bears responsibility if they permit it.
The analogy only survives by quietly stripping the father of the very powers that made the case morally interesting in the first place.

Your disagreement is understandable, but it depends on sliding from a case of decisive control to one of tragic limitation. That slide does the work, not the principle.

Your reply sharpens the position, but it still rests on unargued necessity claims and quietly narrows omnipotence in ways that matter.

1. “Serious agency” does not require catastrophic irreversibility.

You assert that freedom is undermined if harm is capped, reversible, or intercepted.

That claim is not self-evident and is contradicted by ordinary moral practice.

We already limit irreversible harm (prisons, safety nets, emergency intervention) without erasing moral responsibility. A surgeon whose errors are correctable is still morally accountable. A child whose worst impulses are constrained is still a moral agent.

Irreversibility increases stakes; it does not define agency. Catastrophe is not a prerequisite for responsibility - it is an escalation.

2. Omnipotence is being constrained by a single model of agency.

You say omnipotence need not actualize “every imaginable form of agency.”

True, but the issue is narrower.

The question is whether any logically coherent form of agency exists that includes:

* meaningful choice,
* genuine responsibility,
* growth and transformation,

without permitting extreme, involuntary, lifelong or terminal suffering.

You have not shown that such forms are impossible - only that one familiar human model relies on high vulnerability. That is not a logical limit; it is a design preference.

3. Epistemic distance is a sliding scale, not a binary.

You claim that increasing knowledge, safety, or resilience would collapse epistemic distance and compel belief.

But epistemic distance is not all-or-nothing.

We already live in a world with:

* overwhelming evidence of physical law,
* strong evidence of other minds,
* strong evidence of moral consequences,

yet belief, trust, and commitment remain non-coerced.

A world with:

* less ignorance,
* less needless harm,
* fewer grotesque asymmetries of power,

does not logically become a world of forced belief. That is a slippery-slope assertion, not a demonstrated necessity.

4. Faith and trust do not logically require horrific suffering.

You list goods such as:

* faith,
* trust,
* repentance,
* transformation,

and claim they require vulnerability and risk.

Grant vulnerability and risk.

But nothing in that list requires:

* childhood cancer,
* congenital agony,
* genocidal violence,
* lives that are net-negative from birth to death.

If those are required, that is not a logical truth - it is a morally loaded stipulation.

5. The dilemma still stands - but now it is clearer.

You say:

Either God could not eliminate suffering without destroying these goods, or God refrained to preserve free relationship.

But the dilemma I raised was never about eliminating all suffering. It was about avoidable, excessive, non-consensual suffering.

So the real options remain:

1. God could have preserved agency while reducing such suffering but did not
→ omnibenevolence is compromised.

2. God could not do so
→ omnipotence is constrained by a very specific anthropology.

3. God necessarily created this world
→ moral predicates no longer apply literally.

Your reply commits to (2) while denying it is a limitation. But any claim of “logical necessity” must be argued - not asserted.

6. “Disagreement over values” is not enough.

This is not merely a dispute over which goods are “worth having.”

It is a dispute over whether:

* extreme suffering is a necessary condition for moral depth,
* or whether that claim reflects inherited intuitions rather than logical constraint.

Until necessity is shown, “worth it” remains a moral preference - not a refutation.

You’ve presented a coherent theodicy, but coherence is not the same as vindication.

Your defense succeeds only by:

* asserting that certain horrors are logically indispensable,
* narrowing omnipotence to one model of agency,
* and treating alternative designs as incoherent without proof.

That doesn’t dissolve the problem.
It relocates it into an unargued claim about what must be true rather than what is merely familiar.

I am not convinced the Biblical God is good. Please see: https://www.evilbible.com and https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/categories.html if you have the time to explore both websites in detail. If you don't have that much time, here are some of the reasons the Biblical God, if he/she/it/they exist(s), has done/is doing/will do more evil than good.

God didn't keep his words to Adam and Eve

In Genesis 2:16 and 17 the Bible (New International Version) says:
And the Lord God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die."

If after eating the forbidden fruits, Adam and Eve died just as God had said, then that would have been just and consistent with God's Words. However, after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruits, instead of just Adam and Eve just dying:
1. God evicted them from Eden.
2. God punished Eve and all her daughters (an estimated 54 billion and counting) with painful childbirths.
3. God evicted all the other species from Eden, too, and makes herbivores, parasites, carnivores and omnivores instead of making all the species non-consumers.
4. God punished humans with having to toil to survive.
5. God commanded humans to reproduce which leads to more suffering and death. Ruling over other creatures causes suffering and death to those creatures, too. "God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground."" - Genesis 1:28, The Bible (NIV)

These acts are cruel and unjust and totally inconsistent with what God had said to Adam and Eve which was they would just die if they ate the forbidden fruits. God didn't keep his words to Adam and Eve.

If God had made Adam, Eve, the angels, all the other species all-knowing and all-powerful, then they would all be making perfect choices. It is 100% God's fault that Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge. If they were all-knowing and all-powerful, they would not have the desire to gain knowledge, as they would already have known everything there is to know.

I didn't ask to come into existence. No living thing does. I would have preferred it if I had never existed. If God is real and actually did the things the Bible claims, then these cruel, unjust and inconsistent actions make the Biblical God evil.

Global genocide - The Global Flood

Genesis 6:13, 7:21-23 (ESV)

“And God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.’ … And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, livestock, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all mankind. Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died.”
Summary: God kills virtually every living creature on Earth, sparing only Noah's family and the selected animals in Noah's Ark.

Genocide of Sodom and Gomorrah

Genesis 19:24-25 (ESV)

“Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground.”
Summary: Two entire cities are burned alive - men, women, and children - for collective sin.

The Ten Plagues of Egypt (mass suffering and death)

Exodus 12:29-30 (ESV)

“At midnight the LORD struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. And Pharaoh rose up in the night … and there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead.”
Summary: Every Egyptian firstborn - including infants, sentient animals and prisoners - is killed by God.

Genocides ordered in Canaan

Deuteronomy 20:16-17 (ESV)

“But in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the LORD your God has commanded.”
Summary: Explicit divine command to exterminate entire populations.

1 Samuel 15:2-3 (ESV)

“Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘I have noted what Amalek did to Israel … Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”
Summary: A total genocide command including infants and animals.

Slavery sanctioned and regulated, instead of banned

Leviticus 25:44-46 (ESV)

“As for your male and female slaves whom you may have: you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you. … You may bequeath them to your sons after you to inherit as a possession forever. You may make slaves of them, but over your brothers … you shall not rule one over another ruthlessly.”
Summary: Permanent enslavement of foreigners is explicitly permitted.

Human child sacrifice ordered (later revoked)

Genesis 22:2, 12 (ESV)

“He said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering…’”
“He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy…’”
Summary: God tests Abraham by commanding the killing of his child - a psychological act of cruelty, even if halted. Why would an all-knowing and all-powerful being need to test anyone? It makes no sense.

Mass slaughter of boys, men and non-virgin women and sexual slavery of virgin girls

Numbers 31:17-18 (ESV)

“Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves.”
Summary: Command to kill boys and non-virgin women; keep virgin girls as sex slaves.

Sevenfold punishment and cannibalism (threat)

Leviticus 26:27-29 (ESV)

“But if in spite of this you will not listen to me, but walk contrary to me, then I will walk contrary to you in fury, and I myself will discipline you sevenfold for your sins. You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters.”
Summary: God threatens to make His people resort to cannibalism as punishment.

Eternal torment in Hell

Matthew 25:46 (ESV)

“And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Revelation 14:10-11 (ESV)

“He also will drink the wine of God’s wrath … and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night.”

Mark 9:43-48 (ESV)

“It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire … where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.”
Summary: Eternal conscious torment for unbelievers - infinite punishment for finite crimes.

Matthew 25:41 (ESV)

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’”

Revelation 20:10 (ESV)

“...and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.”

Luke 13:27-28 (ESV)

“But he will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you come from. Depart from me, all you workers of evil!’ In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God but you yourselves cast out.”

Matthew 13:49-50 (ESV)

“So it will be at the close of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Divine deception and hardening of hearts

Exodus 9:12 (ESV)

“But the LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and he did not listen to them, as the LORD had spoken to Moses.”
Summary: God prevents Pharaoh from repenting, then punishes him for it.

2 Thessalonians 2:11 (ESV)

“Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false.”
Summary: God intentionally deceives some people.

Killing for minor offenses

Numbers 15:32-36 (ESV)

“While the people of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath day… And the LORD said to Moses, ‘The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.’”

2 Kings 2:23-24 (ESV)

“He went up from there to Bethel, and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys.”
Summary: Death penalty for collecting firewood on the wrong day, and 42 small boys murdered by bears because they made fun of a prophet's baldness.

Collective punishment across generations

Exodus 20:5 (ESV)

“For I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me.”
Summary: Descendants are punished for ancestors’ actions - contrary to the Bible’s own later law: “The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.” - Ezekiel 18:20 (ESV).

Predestination

Ephesians 1:4-5 (ESV)

“Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will,”

John 6:44 (ESV)

“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.”
Summary: God predestined who would be saved and who would be damned forever. It is absurd and utterly cruel and unjust.

Conclusion

These verses show that the Biblical God, by the Bible’s own words, kills entire populations, including children and animals, endorses slavery, inflicts suffering, threatens eternal torture in hell, hardens hearts or deceives minds, and predestinates who would be saved and who would be damned, removing moral responsibility.

When the acts attributed to God are judged by the same moral standards the Bible applies to humans - such as “You shall not kill,” “Love your neighbour,” and “Love your enemies” - they fit the description of moral evil far more often than benevolence. The Biblical God is a hypocrite who has killed and has failed to love his neighbours and enemies.

That’s why I conclude that, if the Biblical God exists and the Biblical text is true, His recorded actions are predominantly evil rather than good.

There are also extra-Biblical reasons. At least 99.9% of all the species that have existed so far on Earth are already extinct. Every year, non-vegans cause suffering and death to 80 billion sentient land organisms (e.g. cattle, chickens, pigs, lambs, goats, ducks, turkeys, etc.) and 1 to 3 trillion sentient aquatic organisms (e.g. fish, lobsters, octopuses, crabs, etc.). Life is full of suffering, injustice, and death. An allegedly all-knowing and all-powerful being, such as the Biblical God, could have prevented all suffering, injustice, and death, but failed to do so. He could have made all organisms made of energy that don't need to consume anything to live forever, but he didn't do that. So, all suffering, injustice, and death are 100% his fault. If he had not created anything, no one would have the burden of existence or the risk of making mistakes. If he had made everyone he has allegedly made, all-knowing and all-powerful, then everyone would always make perfect choices, and no one would have made any mistakes due to ignorance, incompetence or trickery.

I am an agnostic regarding the existence of God(s) because it is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God(s). However, I am convinced that the Biblical God is imaginary and evil. He is imaginary because there is no evidence for the claims made in the Bible. He is evil because of his many evil words and actions in the Bible.

Your response is philosophically coherent only because it abandons the very moral framework classical theism usually wants to keep. That’s the key point.

1. You’ve conceded the central issue: moral categories no longer apply literally.

You explicitly state that for God:

* responsibility,
* permission,
* justification,

apply only analogically, not literally.

Once that concession is made, the problem of evil is not solved - it is declared inapplicable. That is not a resolution; it is an exemption.

But then classical theism loses the right to:

* praise God as morally good in the same sense we mean “good,”
* say God is just, loving, or omnibenevolent in any ordinary moral sense,
* appeal to God as a moral exemplar.

You cannot step outside morality to escape moral critique and then step back inside to make moral claims.

2. “Best possible world” collapses into triviality.

You argue that:

* God necessarily wills what He perceives as best,
* God’s perception just is what is best,
* therefore this world must be the best possible world.

But this renders “best” empty of independent content.

On this view:

whatever God actualizes = what is best
because God actualizes it.

That is not an evaluative claim - it’s a tautology.

It makes the statement:

“God created the best possible world”

equivalent to:

“God created the world God created.”

Nothing substantive follows from that, and no comparison with alternative worlds is meaningful.

Besides, you have not proven that God exists and created the universe we exist in.

3. Appealing to metaphysical necessity doesn’t neutralize the critique.

You suggest my argument assumes conceivability = metaphysical possibility.

It doesn’t.

My argument is conditional and structural:

If a world with less involuntary suffering and greater flourishing was metaphysically possible, and if God necessarily actualizes the best, then the existence of massive suffering requires explanation.

Your response avoids the conditional by asserting:

“This is the only world that could have been.”

But that assertion is doing all the work, and it is unsupported.

Worse, it entails that:

* childhood cancer,
* extreme congenital pain,
* moral ignorance leading to eternal consequences (on many theologies),

are not tragic features of reality but necessary components of the optimal order.

That is a very heavy metaphysical cost.

4. Freedom-for-Excellence does not rescue moral agency.

Reframing divine freedom as FFE rather than FOI doesn’t help here.

On your own account:

* God cannot do otherwise,
* God has no deliberative alternatives,
* God’s act is necessary and automatic given His nature.

Calling that “freedom” is a stipulative redefinition, not a vindication of agency.

If a being lacks alternative possibilities, cannot refrain, cannot revise, then it does not meaningfully choose in the sense required for moral praise or blame - regardless of how perfect its internal state is.

FFE may preserve metaphysical elegance, but it empties moral language of traction.

5. Saying “God remains perfectly good” becomes question-begging.

You conclude that: even if God has no freedom, He is still perfectly good.

But now “good” no longer means:

* responsive to suffering,
* opposed to harm,
* committed to minimizing needless pain.

It means: “whatever necessarily flows from divine actuality.”

At that point, “perfect goodness” is no longer a moral claim - it is a metaphysical label.

6. The real upshot (which you partly admit).

You say: classical theism preserves internal coherence by stepping outside the moral framework that gives rise to the problem of evil.

Exactly.

And that is my point.

Once you do that:

* the problem of evil is not answered but rendered irrelevant by fiat,
* omnibenevolence ceases to be recognisably benevolence,
* moral evaluation of God becomes impossible in principle.

Your position is internally coherent only because it gives up:

* literal moral goodness,
* meaningful responsibility,
* genuine evaluative comparison between possible worlds.

That is a defensible metaphysical move, but it is not a defense of omnibenevolence as ordinarily understood.

It doesn’t refute my critique.
It confirms that classical theism avoids it by exiting the moral domain entirely.

Your reply relies on assertion where argument is required, and it quietly assumes the very conclusions it’s meant to defend.

1. “Suffering is not avoidable” is not established - it’s asserted.

Saying suffering is “not avoidable” only follows if all of the following are true:

* Free will logically requires ignorance, vulnerability, and massive asymmetries of power.
* Free will logically requires the capacity for extreme suffering.
* No alternative forms of agency are possible.

None of that has been demonstrated. It’s simply declared.

An omnipotent being is not restricted to one implementation of free will. If it is, omnipotence has already been abandoned.

2. Free will does not require this much suffering.

Even if we grant (for the sake of argument) that:

* Free will is intrinsically valuable, and
* Some risk must accompany it,

it does not follow that:

* children must die of cancer,
* people must be born with unbearable chronic pain,
* genocide, famine, and torture must exist,
* billions must live and die without understanding or opportunity.

That is a non sequitur.

A being who can design minds and worlds could:

* limit the magnitude of harm,
* ensure informed agency,
* prevent irreversible devastation,
* intervene before catastrophic suffering occurs.

If those options exist, then the suffering is avoidable.

3. “Outweighing suffering” is a moral trade-off - not omnibenevolence.

Claiming that:

“The existence of beings like us is so positive it outweighs the suffering”

is no longer a defense of perfect goodness. It’s a utilitarian calculus that accepts preventable harm for a greater aggregate outcome.

That position entails:

* some beings are created as means rather than ends,
* some lives are knowingly allowed to be net-negative,
* extreme suffering is morally acceptable if the total ledger comes out positive.

That is not omnibenevolence as normally understood. It is selective benevolence constrained by a preferred project.

4. “Maximally good” is doing illicit work here.

Saying a world of perfect beings would not be “maximally good” assumes:

* value depends on contrast with suffering,
* ignorance is necessary for meaning,
* vulnerability is intrinsically superior to flourishing.

Those are substantive axiological claims, not logical truths. They require argument, not intuition.

Worse, they imply that suffering is not merely permitted - it is instrumentally valuable.

At that point, suffering is no longer a tragic byproduct. It is part of the design.

5. The core dilemma remains untouched.

If God could have created:

* beings with greater knowledge,
* greater resilience,
* greater moral insight,
* reduced capacity for catastrophic harm,

and chose not to - then the suffering introduced was avoidable.

If God could not do this, then God is not omnipotent.

Your reply abandons omnibenevolence for outcome-based justification, assumes constraints omnipotence denies, and treats suffering as a necessary ingredient rather than a moral failure.

Once that concession is made, classical theism has already been revised - not defended.

This objection trades on an ambiguity between suffering as a chosen challenge and suffering as imposed harm. Once that distinction is made, the argument loses its force.

1. “Minimizing suffering” ≠ “eliminating all difficulty”.

My premise does not claim that a perfectly omnibenevolent being must eliminate:

* effort,
* risk,
* challenge,
* self-chosen hardship.

It claims such a being would oppose unnecessary, non-consensual, and uncompensated suffering - especially when no greater good requires it.

Mountaineers choose hardship. That choice itself is part of their flourishing. But:

* the value lies in the agency, not the pain,
* and the pain is instrumentally tolerated, not intrinsically good.

A broken leg, frostbite, or death on the mountain are not what make the climb meaningful. They are tolerated risks - not virtues.

2. Virtues do not logically require suffering.

Courage, fortitude, and perseverance require:

* resistance,
* uncertainty,
* stakes.

They do not logically require agony, trauma, disease, or death.

An omniscient and omnipotent being could instantiate:

* meaningful challenge without horrific suffering,
* growth without child cancer,
* courage without genocide,
* fortitude without lifelong trauma.

The claim that suffering itself is necessary for virtue is an empirical assumption, not a logical truth - and a highly questionable one.

3. The “heroic gods” point concedes limitation.

When the Greeks said the gods could not be heroic because they were immortal, they were describing limited gods, not morally perfect ones.

But omnibenevolence, omniscience and omnipotence change the landscape:

* If a being cannot enable virtue without permitting extreme suffering, then it is not all-powerful.
* If it can, but chooses not to, then it is not omnibenevolent.

You can’t appeal to tragic necessity and omnipotence at the same time.

4. Preference matters, not absolute prohibition.

Premise 4 says:

“prefers the outcome that maximizes well-being and minimizes suffering.”

“Prefers” does not mean:

* zero pain,
* zero challenge,
* zero cost.

It means:

* no gratuitous suffering,
* no morally pointless horrors,
* no worse world chosen when a better one is available.

A being who chooses a world with extreme, involuntary suffering when a better one was possible has made a value judgment - and that judgment contradicts omnibenevolence.

* Chosen hardship can enhance well-being.
* Involuntary, excessive suffering does not become good by producing side virtues.
* Virtue does not logically require agony.
* Omnipotence eliminates tragic necessity.

So the appeal to adventure and fortitude does not undermine Premise 4 - it quietly assumes constraints that omnipotence explicitly denies.

Yes, but that responsibility is not absolute, and treating it as if it were is where the analogy goes wrong.

1. Being mindful ≠ being bound

A loving father should take his son’s wishes seriously. Respecting agency matters. But being mindful of someone’s wishes does not morally obligate you to permit their foreseeable death, especially when you have the authority and capacity to prevent it.

If that were the case, any parent could absolve themselves by saying, “My child wanted this.” That’s not how moral responsibility works.

2. Authority increases responsibility, not reduces it. The greater the power, the greater the culpability.

In your story, the father:

* Has authority over the son,
* Knows with certainty the son will die,
* Has the power to forbid the action and be obeyed.

Those facts increase the father’s moral responsibility. The more power and knowledge you have, the less plausible moral passivity becomes.

Mindfulness of wishes matters most when:

* The harm is unavoidable,
* The agent lacks decisive control,
* Or preventing the act would violate comparable moral rights.

None of that is true here.

3. Wishes don’t override preventable harm.

The son’s desire to save others is morally admirable. But admiration does not license allowing a preventable death when:

* The goal could be achieved by other means, or
* The authority figure could intervene without comparable moral cost.

Respecting autonomy has limits - especially when death is certain and avoidable.

4. Why this matters for the God analogy

For a human father in tragic circumstances, honoring a child’s wish may be morally defensible because options are constrained.

For an omniscient, omnipotent being, constraints evaporate. Appealing to “respect for wishes” becomes hollow when:

* No tragic trade-off is necessary,
* No lethal mission is required,
* No greater good depends on the death.

At that point, allowing the death is a choice, not a necessity.

Yes, the father should be mindful of his son’s wishes - but mindfulness does not justify permitting a foreseeable, preventable death when one has decisive power to stop it.

Respect for agency matters.
Preventing unnecessary death matters more.

The answer depends on who had which powers and options. Once we’re precise about that, the analogy collapses.

1. Immediate vs ultimate responsibility

Immediate cause of death: the people of the city who killed the son. They bear direct moral responsibility for the killing.
Proximate decision: the son chose to go, knowing the risk. He bears responsibility for undertaking a lethal mission.
Enabling authority: the father knowingly allowed an avoidable death while having the power to prevent it.

So responsibility is distributed, not exclusive.

2. Why this analogy fails as a defense of God

This story only works because the father is limited:

* He cannot save the people himself.
* He cannot stop the people of the city from killing his son without overriding everyone involved.
* He must choose between tragic options.

But an omniscient, omnipotent being is not in that position.

A God with unlimited power would have additional options that the father in your story does not:

* Save the people without requiring the son’s death.
* Prevent the killing without coercing moral agents.
* Achieve the goal without lethal means.

If such alternatives exist (and omnipotence implies they do), then permitting the son’s death is no longer a tragic necessity - it becomes a chosen means.

3. Foreknowledge + power + permission matters

If the father:

* Knows with certainty the son will die,
* Has the power to prevent it without sacrificing the goal,
* And still allows it,

then the father bears moral responsibility for allowing a preventable death, even if he didn’t kill his son directly.

This doesn’t mean the father is the only responsible party - but it absolutely rules out moral innocence.

4. The hidden assumption doing the work

The parable quietly assumes:

“There was no other way.”

That’s the very claim under dispute.

Once that assumption is removed, the analogy stops supporting omnibenevolence, omniscience and omnipotence and starts raising the same question it was meant to answer.

The people of the city are guilty of murder. The son knowingly chose self-sacrifice. The father bears responsibility if he knowingly allowed a preventable death while possessing the power to avoid it.

For a limited human father, that may be tragic. For an omniscient and omnipotent being, it is a moral problem - not a solution.

If the goal can be achieved without the death of the son, choosing his death cannot be justified by love alone.

You’re conflating two different claims, and that’s exactly where the confusion comes from.

My point is not that a necessary O–O being could create equals. My point is that the impossibility of doing so does not follow from omnipotence alone - it follows only after you import additional constraints about the being’s nature (necessity, uniqueness, simplicity, etc.).

That distinction matters.

1. Omnipotence by itself does not block multiple O–O beings

If omnipotence is defined classically as the power to actualize all logically possible states of affairs, then:

* “There exists more than one omniscient, omnipotent being” is not a logical contradiction.
* Nothing about raw omnipotence or omniscience forbids plurality.

So, Premise 2 fails only if you add extra metaphysical assumptions. Logic alone doesn’t do the work.

2. Necessity is doing the real work - not omnipotence

When you say:

“If an O–O being is necessary, then it is impossible for it to bring about equals”

you’ve already restricted omnipotence by appealing to:

* necessary existence
* essential uniqueness
* fixed divine essence

Once you do that, omnipotence quietly becomes:

“the power to do whatever is logically possible given this very specific nature”

That is not classical omnipotence anymore. It’s qualified omnipotence.

And that was exactly my broader point: classical, unrestricted omnibenevolence, omniscience and omnipotence cannot be sustained without qualification.

You’re proving that point, not refuting it.

3. Appealing to “unknown reasons” doesn’t rescue the argument

Your final move:

“Suppose God has a compelling reason (unknown to us) for creating beings like us instead of O–O beings”

is a theological appeal, not a logical one.

It concedes that:

* The limitation is not logical impossibility.
* The limitation is grounded in divine preference, plan, or essence.

Which again confirms my claim: the restriction comes from theological commitments, not from logic itself.

* Logic alone does not rule out multiple O–O beings.
* The impossibility arises only after importing necessity, uniqueness, or essence.
* Once those are added, omnipotence is no longer “all logically possible states of affairs”.
* Therefore, classical omnipotence survives only by being redefined.

That’s the position. If we keep the terms clean, there’s no contradiction here - only a choice between unqualified omnipotence and theologically constrained omnipotence.

Thanks for such a thoughtful response - I agree with much of your spirit, especially the call for humility and the refusal of simplistic answers.

Where I’d want to draw a careful line is this: I don’t think omnibenevolence requires the elimination of all suffering, but I do think it cannot be indifferent to involuntary, non-consensual suffering that serves no necessary role in flourishing. Human love may require suffering because we are finite and constrained; an omnipotent being is not bound by that trade-off in the same way.

I also don’t deny that shared suffering or divine empathy would be morally meaningful - only that it removes responsibility if the suffering was knowingly and avoidably actualised. Compassion mitigates cruelty; it does not cancel authorship.

On forgotten suffering, my intuition is that suffering matters because it is experienced by a sentient being at the time it occurs, not because it is later remembered or redeemed. Modern trauma research, if anything, suggests that harm can persist even without conscious recall.

I share your sense that we may never fully grasp objective truth - but I think that very humility obliges us to take our deepest moral intuitions about harm seriously, rather than setting them aside when they become inconvenient.

Thanks for laying out the classical theist position clearly. I agree that, on Thomistic metaphysics, omnipotence is not defined as a magical ability to actualize anything we can conceive, but as innate actuality - pure act - constrained by metaphysical possibility. I’m not attributing the straw-man view to classical theism.

However, once omnipotence is defined this way, premise 2 is not so much refuted as replaced. The claim that God cannot create another omnipotent being follows from additional commitments - act-potency metaphysics, divine simplicity, and the identification of omnipotence with pure actuality - not from logic alone. Within that framework, uniqueness is guaranteed by definition.

The cost of this move, however, is that God no longer has alternative possibilities or deliberative choice in the ordinary sense. A purely actual, necessary being cannot do otherwise than it does. As a result, moral predicates such as responsibility, permission, or justification apply only analogically, not literally.

In that sense, classical theism preserves internal coherence by stepping outside the moral framework that gives rise to the problem of evil, rather than resolving it within that framework. That may be a defensible metaphysical position - but it is importantly different from a personal, morally accountable deity.

I agree that foreknowledge by itself does not imply responsibility. A meteorologist who predicts rain is not responsible for it. But that analogy breaks down once foreknowledge is combined with authorship of the system in which the outcome occurs.

An omniscient creator who intentionally actualizes a specific world - knowing in advance every choice that will occur within it, and having the power to actualize a different one - stands in a fundamentally different relation to outcomes than a passive observer. Coercion is not required for responsibility; origination is.

Likewise, appealing to “permission” does not remove moral responsibility when prevention was possible without contradiction. Permitting foreseeable, preventable harm while setting the conditions under which it occurs remains morally significant.

Finally, coherence depends on which notion of free will is in play. Compatibilist freedom may preserve divine foreknowledge and control, but it weakens ultimate moral responsibility. Libertarian freedom preserves responsibility, but conflicts with exhaustive foreknowledge and providential world-selection. My claim has been that the omni-attributes cannot all be retained simultaneously without qualification.

That objection only works if omnipotence is already constrained by the being’s necessary nature. But in that case, omnipotence no longer means the power to bring about all logically possible states of affairs - only those compatible with a specific essence.

The existence of multiple omniscient and omnipotent beings is not logically contradictory in itself; it becomes “impossible” only once additional theological assumptions (such as uniqueness or simplicity) are imposed. Those assumptions are not part of logic, but of a particular model of God.

So premise 2 is not invalidated by necessity alone. Rather, necessity is being used to redefine omnipotence in a restricted way - which concedes the broader point that classical omnipotence cannot be sustained without qualification.

I think we’re now largely aligned on the metaphysics. You’re explicitly rejecting omnibenevolent theism in favor of a naturalistic, pantheistic view in which morality, agency, and empathy are evolutionary products, and nature itself is not morally accountable. On that picture, the classical problem of evil no longer applies because there is no moral agent to whom it could apply.

Where I’d draw a careful distinction is between human attitudes toward reality and properties of reality itself. Awe, reverence, and moral concern are powerful and meaningful human responses but they do not entail that the universe is benevolent, morally trustworthy, or oriented toward flourishing. Evolution explains why we value empathy and cooperation; it does not imply that the structure of reality shares or supports those values.

So I agree that a new framework has emerged here. My point has simply been that this framework resolves the problem of evil by relinquishing omnibenevolent theism, not by reconciling it with suffering. And that, in itself, is a philosophically respectable conclusion.

If an omniscient–omnipotent being is necessary, then its existence and actions are not contingent or chosen, but metaphysically fixed. In that case, whatever world exists - including its suffering - exists necessarily as well.

That move does not resolve the problem of evil; it dissolves moral agency altogether. A necessary being cannot meaningfully be praised for goodness or blamed for harm, since no alternative was possible.

Whether there is one such being, many, or infinitely many is irrelevant to the ethical issue. The presence of involuntary suffering remains unchanged. What results is not classical theism, but a form of necessitarian or pantheistic metaphysics in which moral predicates no longer apply in the usual sense.

Thank you, J. I appreciate that framing, and I agree that subjective suffering carries immense ethical weight. Where I’d want to keep a distinction clear is between responding to suffering with mercy, and explaining suffering within a metaphysical framework.

The problem of evil operates at the level of coherence between claimed divine attributes and observed reality. Compassion and mercy guide how we treat those who suffer, but they don’t, by themselves, resolve that explanatory tension. If anything, the moral pull toward mercy highlights how inadequate many justificatory theodicies feel when confronted with lived experience.

Thanks for the thoughtful engagement - I appreciate the discussion as well.

I’m explicitly using the classical libertarian definition - the ability to choose otherwise under identical conditions - because that is the version required to ground ultimate moral responsibility in traditional theistic frameworks.

If “free will” is instead defined as acting in accordance with one’s nature or cognitive architecture, then choices are fully explained by prior causes, and alternative possibilities do not exist. That may preserve a colloquial sense of freedom, but it cannot absolve a creator from responsibility for the outcomes of the system they designed.

So yes, if free will is determined by nature, then classical free will does not exist - and with it goes the standard moral defense against the problem of evil.