[This is hopelessly off-topic here, by the way! Well…]Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Apr 01, 2024 5:59 pmSo God is the prototype of all goodness. Man is a palid copy, and is only partially and occasionally possesed of borrowed, reflective goodness. And when he recognizes goodness, and gets it right, what he really recognizes is the nature of God.
What is it about God that makes him "the prototype of all goodness", the paradigm of moral commendability?
Didn't he do some pretty nasty things?
"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficient and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars."
(Darwin, Charles. "The Origin of Species—Reviews and Criticisms—Adhesions and Attacks: 1860." In Selected Letters on Evolution and Origin of Species: With an Autobiographical Chapter, edited by Francis Darwin, 236-258. 1892 [different title]. Reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover, 1958. p. 249)
"[T]he trouble with divine command theory is that in order to articulate that theory, in order to defend it, in order to make it sound plausible, you have to already commit yourself to there being some normative facts or moral facts about the moral rules that make them right independent of God saying, “You do it or you go to hell.” There is a rightness about moral norms that cannot be exhausted by the mere fact that they were handed down on a mountain to Moses from God.
……
Of course the killer argument against God’s existence is the argument from evil. It’s enough to show that theism is unreasonable and it is, of course, the principal reason for apostasy from the Christian faith and the Jewish faith and Islam all through the centuries. The argument is simple and terrible. And it goes like this. If the theistic God exists, He is omnipotent and benevolent. A benevolent creature eliminates suffering to the extent that the benevolent creature can. Therefore, if there is a God and He is omnipotent and benevolent, He eliminates all suffering. As we know, it’s obvious that there is plenty of suffering in the world—both man-made and natural suffering. So, if there is a God, then He is either not omnipotent or neither benevolent nor omnipotent or benevolent and theism is false. The problem of evil is theism’s problem from hell."
(Rosenberg, Alex. "The Debate: Is Faith in God Reasonable? – William Lane Craig vs. Alex Rosenberg." In Is Faith Reasonable? Debates in Philosophy, Science, and Rhetoric, edited by Corey Miller & Paul Gould, 13-39. New York: Routledge, 2014. pp. 22+23)
