“Spin-doctoring” is a term of abuse:
The techniques of spin include:
Code:
Selectively presenting facts and quotes that support one's position (cherry picking)
Non-denial denial
Phrasing in a way that assumes unproven truths
Euphemisms to disguise or promote one's agenda
"Burying bad news": announcing one popular thing at the same time as several unpopular things, hoping that the media will focus on the popular one.
You need to substantiate your allegation with
facts.
The absence of all the suffering (even that of innocent animals) caused by human beings…
These are the very things you claim are impossible for your god, since he chose to create a physical world!
False! God created autonomous beings.
Moral integrity and unselfish love.
Yet we see these exampled by unbelievers, and unexampled by believers.
Irrelevant.
What’s going on there? Upon what basis do you claim that such attributes are spiritual rather than physical in origin? Are you an ultimate authority on the capacities of physical beings, such that you must claim a level “higher” than the physical in order to account for altruism, discipline and devotion?
Only physicalists claim that privileged knowledge because they claim there is nothing else!
With equal facility I could ask:
“What’s going on there? Upon what basis do you claim that **all **such attributes are physical in origin? Are you an ultimate authority on the capacities of physical beings, such that you must claim there is no “higher” level than the physical in order to account for altruism, discipline and devotion?”
I am not the one denying the value of physical existence - by contrast, you seem to be claiming that anything worth wanting must be nonphysical.
Non sequitur.
A perfect creator is capable of creating perfection, else is an imperfect creator.
Absolute perfection would be equivalent to being God!
I fail to see how goodness, freedom, justice and love can have any meaning whatsoever absent their physical realisation. Without that, they are mere fantasy.
Goodness, freedom, justice and love are meaningless in a physical world composed of machines programmed by “antecedent conditions acting through… physiology, heredity and environment”. (Dawkins - The God Delusion)
To spell it out once again - perfection is something believers claim to be possible, and claim to have a monopoly on defining.
Your implication that perfection is impossible destroys your argument that the imperfection of the world is evidence against a benevolent Creator!
Because they claim their god is perfect, and originally created the world in a state of perfection, which humans compromised through disobedience.
A straw man. We do not claim the world or anyone was perfect - simply that our first ancestors were not evil to begin with.
The entire exercise of justifying the apparent lack of (anthropocentric notions of) perfection in the world - as evidenced by the degree of suffering, the exercise of malice aforethought, for example - appears to be one of deflecting responsibility from the god who is claimed to have created all of this, in full knowledge of how it would all turn out.
You imply you prefer everyone to be a robot incapable of virtue or malice.
Ideals of love and altruism, for example, are things that we work towards - not things we foolishly cast off at a time when we had them free to hand.
Love and altruism have no rational foundation in a mechanistic universe.
The questioning of nonbelievers is directed at the painfully obvious doublethink exercised by believers (and by me, when I was a believer) in their insistence that the omniscient, omnipotent creator god had excuses for creating a less than perfect - by believers’ standards - creation.
The painfully obvious doublethink exercised by you is evident in your insistence that people are merely animals which are not responsible for anything yet capable of working towards ideals of love and altruism which have magically appeared in an accidental universe!
Yet you claim to understand the full scope of omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence.
I merely take the actual meaning of these words - without trying to fudge them to fit observed reality.
Your argument implies that you know not only their meaning but their full scope.
What exactly does omnipotence imply? Inconsistency? Arbitrariness?
You are declaring that it is no different! That everything is exactly as we should expect a physical world to be, because the nature of physicality constrains the very nonphysical god who is claimed to have invented it.
To attribute physical necessity to the world is a dogmatic act of faith. It amounts to asserting that
things must be as they are and could not possibly be different. How would you justify that assumption?
Yet we are suffused with subjective value and purpose. Why is that not enough?
“suffused” requires explanation given that animals are not considered to **understand **value and purpose.
“There are more things in heaven and earth …than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.
Such an admonition may with at least equal justice be applied to the perspective of those who consider certain aspects of our experience to be impossible under the auspices of physical reality, only because they can’t imagine how they could be so.
Equal? Do you genuinely believe heaven is possible on this earth?
“justice” is another illusion as far as materialists are concerned…
Not unless it is the lesser of two evils…