Question from an athiest: How would you respond?

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buffalo said:
God is almighty. There are things God cannot do:

He cannot lie
He cannot sin
He cannot do anything that is contrary to His holy character
He cannot do what is impossible by definition

So om(name removed by moderator)otence does not mean He can do all things. Omnipotence means He cannot fail at what He sets out to do.
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Hmm… so what prevents God from curing every person with HIV right now? How is that impossible by definition or contrary to his holy character?
 
ribozyme said:
Hmm… so what prevents God from curing every person with HIV right now? How is that impossible by definition or contrary to his holy character?
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Nothing, except for the fact He loves us so much He keeps free-will intact. Without free will we would be reduced to robots without any choice.

But as God is perfect good and death is the abscence of good, Jesus died thereby filling the empty glass with perfect good cancelling out death.

One other point - God loves as a father loves his children. Do you solve everyone of your children’s problems? Would a loving father fix everything for his children all the time? He already gave us preventative instructions as a good father should.
 
buffalo said:
God is almighty. There are things God cannot do:

He cannot lie
He cannot sin
He cannot do anything that is contrary to His holy character
He cannot do what is impossible by definition

So om(name removed by moderator)otence does not mean He can do all things. Omnipotence means He cannot fail at what He sets out to do.
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Just to add to this point - one of the best responses I ever heard to the old puzzle of “Can God make a rock so heavy that He Himself can’t lift it?” was… No. Because God does not create paradoxical systems such as that. The universe behaves in a fundamentally rational manner (even on the quantum level, I think it’s been demonstrated). Even if there are certain things we will never figure out and which therefore remain as a mystery, it’s still a testament to God that we see it operating in the way that it does.
 
buffalo said:
Nothing, except for the fact He loves us so much He keeps free-will intact. Without free will we would be reduced to robots without any choice.
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So how is eradicating AIDS from the human population a violation of free will? In fact, many people wish AIDS will be eradicated.

Look at my profile. I hope it is obvious that I do not have any children.
 
ribozyme said:
So how is eradicating AIDS from the human population a violation of free will? In fact, many people wish AIDS will be eradicated.

Look at my profile. I hope it is obvious that I do not have any children.
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We wish a lot of things would go away. That is the human condition. God could zap AIDs and all sickness from the world and make it a panacea. That would be heaven. We know we are not in heaven, most of us are trying to get there.

We can ZAP AIDs as well as many STD’s that are plaguing society with self-discipline and obedience to God’s laws.

We humans arrogantly put ourselves above him convinced we know better than our Creator. That is where many problems start.

Again it is helpful to focus on the soul. How does the soul benefit from suffering?.
 
buffalo said:
We wish a lot of things would go away. That is the human condition. God could zap AIDs and all sickness from the world and make it a panacea. That would be heaven. We know we are not in heaven, most of us are trying to get there.

We can ZAP AIDs as well as many STD’s that are plaguing society with self-discipline and obedience to God’s laws.
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How about cancer? Not all cancer patients are smokers though. Some cancers are the result of heredity, not the result of person choices.
 
ribozyme said:
How about cancer?
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So, it seems, after moving from the fantasy that the Resurrection is sensibly explained as a grief-induced hallucination (a proposition for which there is no evidence) to the fantasy that this or that scientist has demonstrated (or might one day demonstrate) that God is unnecessary (yet another proposition for which there is no evidence), you’ve now moved onto merely listing ailments as questions because, presumably, if there really was a benevolent God, he’d obviously have to agree with you about how things like cancer and AIDS ought to be handled?

– Mark L. Chance.
 
ribozyme said:
How about cancer? Not all cancer patients are smokers though. Some cancers are the result of heredity, not the result of person choices.
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Quite a simple answer, you have neglected to read the earlier posts about what God CAN do. God can only, of course, do that which can be done, as in he cannot make a married bachelor, such things are foolish. God created a universe in which there are living things. For a purpose which we cannot comprehend, he created it so that these biological units expire. He also created myriad other processes which occur according to some incomprehensible structures, which we call the laws of physics and natural laws. These processes are what ought to occur, so much so that they appear to our limited capacity to be the only way “Things can be”, however, why did God not make up, down and yellow, green? Why did God “Make” or “allow to happen” AIDS, cancer and the like? These are all irrelevent questions because they all are the same as saying “Why did God make these living beings to die?”

When you come to the point where you can make a universe, make it, since you cannot, admit that you cannot and understand that a house cannot tell the Architect where to place its walls.

Please feel free to message me on AIM or Yahoo about this, I’d really enjoy a conversation on this topic.
 
vz71 said:
It would be hard to consider it a gift. Unemployment is not fun.
My new job starts in a couple of weeks, but until then, I’m all here.
Accept for the occasional hour or two for appointments.
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I learn often that I should choose my words more carefully. I mean only respect, as I see so many people on this forum, like yourself, that are much more clever than me, and to see how often they can respond with truth and wisdom to many difficult problems impresses me.

I hope to contribute so worthily, if not so often. I am impressed that you are able to write so much, and so well, though I will now pray as to one of the causes of what is certainly to others a great blessing.
 
Snowflakes occur due to the nature of our physical world. It is not a good argument for the absence of a god, because there are no good arguments for or against gods. Once one starts to argue one way or the other, one tries to put limits upon infinity. If it is possible that a powerful god exists, then it is also possible that only a weak god exists. This god could have been adequate to get things going and could have expired. Or the “thing” that always existed could have been an unintelligent assortment of things that after infinities of time finally sparked some order out of the chaos, and then LIFE. Maybe humans are not the “purpose”. Maybe “life” is not the purpose. Maybe there is no purpose.
 
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