I would say that this is true to some degree. We construct many idols and false gods. There is no reason why that god could not be ourselves. However, we don’t become our own God, because God is more than just being responsible for his own spirituality (omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent). So, we do become our own gods in the sense that we can place our own importance above God, and become responsible for our spiritual lives. Being responsible for our spiritual lives would mean taking the punishment for our failures and going to Hell. That is why when we turn to God we call him Lord or my god, because we elect to serve him over ourselves.

Hey there, this an interesting argument and I think my sister actually brought something similar up once. It sounds like your argument might go like this:

1) God always has authority over our lives.
2) If it is moral to release authority over a being who is capable of their own survival, then God always having authority our lives is immoral.
3) It is moral to release authority over a being who is capable of their own survival.
4) ⸫ Gods authority over out lives is immoral (2,3 MP).

I would challenge the soundness of the first premise. I believe that God does create us without our consent and sustains us (spiritually) until we are of an age when we can spiritually take care of ourselves. God grants us the free will to do and believe whatever we want, and he holds US completely responsible for those choices. He does not say that we must do certain things, he simply makes us aware of the natural consequences of our choices.

So, I would argue that God behaves in a similar way to your parent-child analogy. A possible concern with my argument would be that God seems to decide the “natural consequences” of our actions. My support for this will go a bit beyond the scope of this argument, but I would claim that God is light, and sin is darkness. The two cannot exist in the same space, God did not “make it so,” the two necessitate the absence of the other.

This is probably not the best counter to this argument, but I believe it gets us in the proper mindset of understanding God’s relationship with us as something that, to some extent, is beyond God’s control.

As others have said, this argument, even with free will, does not account for gratuitous evil. These are evils that do not serve a higher purpose and are unjustified, such as natural disasters or kids with cancer. I would like to support your argument by saying that the evils we see are never gratuitous. We can say that they do not serve a higher purpose, but we cannot say they are unjustified. My argument is based on the account of the Fall of Man given in Genesis 3:

1. If humans choose to eat of the fruit, then we will suffer death and Hell (spiritual separation/death).
2. Humans did choose to eat the fruit.
3. Therefore, humans deserve to suffer death and Hell. (1,2 MP)

I think this argument shows that humans are deserving of great evil just on the basis of being fallen creatures. Furthermore, I think that God is a gracious being and as such, he allows us to live in a world of sin, as opposed to instant judgment and punishment, with the chance to amend our relationship with him (i.e. belief on Jesus as the sacrifice for our sins). This is payment for our spiritual death, but we still must pay for our physical death and suffering. So, our free will combined with our deserving of worse sufferings, eliminates the possibility of gratuitous evils, because they came from the free decision to become fallen creatures.

I realize that this argument is one that many Christians would not be willing to accept, but the Bible does say that everyone is a sinner and that the wages of that sin is death. So, on that alone we can conclude that any suffering we experience is less than we deserve. I also would like to say that this argument is not comfortable, and I think that is because when we see horrible things, we do not want to be the cause of those things. I think that a major part of understanding the greatness of God is understanding the vileness of humans.

This is an interesting question and one that I think is of great importance for modern Christians. First, I would like to say that your conclusion just follows from your first premise, but if your intended conclusion was that Christians should be compassionate towards animals then that’s modus ponens from 1 and 2. I would like to say that I believe this is a sound argument and to understand what it means I would propose this argument:

1. If you want to treat something with compassion, then you have empathy for that thing and do as little evil to it as necessary.
2. Christians want to treat animals with compassion.
3. Therefore, Christians should feel empathetic towards animals and do as little evil as possible to them. (1,2 MP)

I can see that this argument will take some unpacking. Starting with what empathy exactly means. In this argument, It simply means that you relate to the feeling of the animal and can yourself in its position. This directly ties into the second condition, because if you were in the animals’ position, you would want as little evil to be done to you as possible.

The boundaries of this evil are given throughout scripture. First, we are told that humans are above animals and that we can use them for meat. So, clearly killing animals for food is not what Jesus had in mind, as he also ate animals. Jesus even killed a herd of pigs to dispel demons in Mark 3. From these, I think we can safely say that if the suffering of the animal serves a higher and morally good cause, then we are still being compassionate towards the animal. This would cover instances of animal abuse/neglect but would still be consistent with the religious practices of Judaism and Christianity. I could see how one might then ask if Christians should adopt all dogs, to end animal cruelty. I do not think that is the case, and to summarize why I would say that, because it would be better for Christians to use their resources to stop greater evils than homeless animals.

I disagree with your first premise. To counter this implication, I would refer to the Garden of Eden. In the Garden, Eve refers to God as masculine, but there is commonly believed to have been no immorality in the Garden. So, my counterexample would run something like this:

1. There was no morally impermissible behavior in the Garden of Eden.
2. If God is referred to in exclusively masculine terms, then there is morally impermissible behavior.
3. God was referred to in exclusively masculine terms in the Garden of Eden.
4. Therefore, there was morally impermissible behavior in the garden of Eden. (2,3 MP)

I used your natural conclusion, that referring to God in masculine terms LEADS to morally impermissible behavior because I agree that implications of gender inequality are morally impermissible. From this argument, we can see a clear contradiction in the first premise and the conclusion. I also understand that many people would argue that Genesis is not to be taken literally and so there was no actual “garden”, but even if it is a metaphor for a time before sin, the contradiction remains. The fact that God is referred to in masculine terms, before the Fall of humanity, shows that these morally impermissible conclusions are not caused by how we refer to God. You also say that “gender is a socially-constructed identity and this is one of the many ways we perceive ourselves as social beings” and heavily imply that gender how we identify ourselves. Throughout all of scripture, God is only referred to in masculine terms, even when identifying himself. Furthermore, Jesus calls God “our Father” and never “our Mother”. My counterexample can be used again here, by replacing “the Garden of Eden” with “Jesus”.

There are, again, people who could say that the bible should not be taken literally or that Jesus was just doing what was culturally acceptable. However, I think that because of the overwhelming number of times God is depicted as masculine and the fact that people all throughout the Bible go against cultural norms, that these two objections hold little water.

Hello TheMadFool, it seems that you are countering the idea that free will solves the POE. I think the argument you are countering goes something like this:
1. If we have free will, then there will be evil (POE).
2. God gave us free will.
:. Therefore, there is evil. (1,2 MP)

Your rebuttal seems to be challenging premise 2 and I think your reasoning goes something like this:

1. If God greatly punishes the bad with Hell and rewards the good more than adequately with Heaven, then Hell is unacceptable, and Heaven cannot be refused.
2. God punishes the bad with Hell and rewards the good with Heaven.
3. :. Therefore, Hell is unacceptable, and Heaven cannot be refused. (1,2 MP)
4. If Hell is unacceptable, and Heaven cannot be refused, then God has made it mandatory for us to be good.
5. Hell is unacceptable, and heaven cannot be refused. (4)
6. :. God has made it mandatory for us to be good. (4,5 MP)
7. If good is mandatory, then we don’t have free will.
8. Good is mandatory. (6)
9. :. We don’t have free will. (7,8 MP)
10. If we don’t have free will, then it cannot explain the POE.
11. We don’t have free will. (9)
:. Freewill cannot explain the POE. (10,11 MP)

I would like to offer a rejection of this argument based on the first premise. The first premise of this argument is “begging the question”. By stating that Hell is “unacceptable” (i.e. not able to be accepted) and that Heaven “cannot be refused” (i.e. not able to be refused), this argument necessitates, from the beginning, that we assume the conclusion (that we do not have the ability to choose) is true, rather than proving it. I think I understand what you were trying to argue though. I believe you were meaning to demonstrate that Hell is a greatly undesirable or unreasonable option and that Heaven is a desirable or reasonable option, rather than literally “not able to be accepted” or “not able to be refused”.

With this revised understanding of the argument, I would like to offer a denial of premise 4. Just because one option is undesirable or unreasonable and the other is desirable or reasonable does not mean that the one offering the options has negated the ability to choose. They have simply made two different options. An example of this would be law enforcement giving people the options to either break the law and go to jail or obey the law and stay free. The first option is clearly undesirable and unreasonable and the second is desirable and reasonable, but the presenting of those options clearly does not take away people’s ability to choose the undesirable or unreasonable option.

I realize that my counter-argument does not prove that free will is the solution to the POE. I was only trying to demonstrate that your argument, as it is, does not show that we do not have free will, which would make our freewill a possible explanation for the POE.

Finally, I would like to suggest a possible reason why, if the above options are their choices, people choose the undesirable or unreasonable option. Possibly, because people do not believe that these are the choices they are given, they choose to do things that are “evil” and indirectly choose the undesirable option.