That’s what I mean by moving the goalposts. You just shifted it to support all-knowing and all-powerful by unchecking all-good. If god could have willed our world another way and chose not to, he created and continues to facilitate evil, and is thus malevolent.
I understand what you’re saying, but respectively I didn’t uncheck the “all good” box. I pointed out that there are two definitions of “good” in play and so the statement “god is all good” is meaningless without further inspection.
If we use god’s definition of good then the “all good” remains checked because god gets to define goodness itself and whether or not he wants pain to be necessary to achieve good.
On the other hand if we use our sense of good, then the question is begged because it establishes a hierarchy of values that does not have god at the top and then concludes god is a contradiction. But this is inevitable from our assumptions that there is such a thing as an infinite moral authority yet there is also our moral authority which is better.
In short, I think the Epicurean statement is a pithy way of saying god fails our human standards (which is true, by the way). But then religion doesn’t claim god follows our human standards in the first place, so it all seems a bit pedestrian.
Redefining ‘good’ to whatever it is you speculate may be cooking in Zeus’s noggin isn’t going to dodge the Epicurian paradox, it just changes it to god can’t be all three of 1) all-powerful, 2) all-knowing, 3) all-whatever-the-fuck-word-god-chooses-to-use-to-label-the-concept-of-the-thing-we-call-‘good’.
That’s like arguing that the thing you’re looking at right now isn’t a screen, because maybe god calls it a chipmunk instead.
That’s what I mean by moving the goalposts. You just shifted it to support all-knowing and all-powerful by unchecking all-good. If god could have willed our world another way and chose not to, he created and continues to facilitate evil, and is thus malevolent.
I understand what you’re saying, but respectively I didn’t uncheck the “all good” box. I pointed out that there are two definitions of “good” in play and so the statement “god is all good” is meaningless without further inspection.
If we use god’s definition of good then the “all good” remains checked because god gets to define goodness itself and whether or not he wants pain to be necessary to achieve good.
On the other hand if we use our sense of good, then the question is begged because it establishes a hierarchy of values that does not have god at the top and then concludes god is a contradiction. But this is inevitable from our assumptions that there is such a thing as an infinite moral authority yet there is also our moral authority which is better.
In short, I think the Epicurean statement is a pithy way of saying god fails our human standards (which is true, by the way). But then religion doesn’t claim god follows our human standards in the first place, so it all seems a bit pedestrian.
Redefining ‘good’ to whatever it is you speculate may be cooking in Zeus’s noggin isn’t going to dodge the Epicurian paradox, it just changes it to god can’t be all three of 1) all-powerful, 2) all-knowing, 3) all-whatever-the-fuck-word-god-chooses-to-use-to-label-the-concept-of-the-thing-we-call-‘good’.
That’s like arguing that the thing you’re looking at right now isn’t a screen, because maybe god calls it a chipmunk instead.