Who's left?

[_Themis]

There are possible alternative explanations, but they all involve the non-existence of God, and I refuse to believe in the non-existence of God.

This just shows you are not open to any evidence. The rest of your post EAllusion covers very well.

[_Themis]

KevinSim, how do you know that the experience that you interpreted as God confirming the truth of the LDS church to you really was God confirming the truth of the LDS church to you?

Are you sure that there are no possible alternative explanations? If so, on what grounds are you sure?

Here we go again...

Seeking for signs.

I know you wont want to accept the obvious here, but sign seeking is exactly what the church ask you to do. Moroni's promise is about sign seeking.

It is very difficult to explain the taste of salt to someone else. Even when you have no doubt that that was what you tasted.

I would have thought you have been around here long enough to know this is a terrible analogy. Try reading some church materials and you may see that they describe what they think spiritual experiences are like all the time. The taste analogy is really just a dodge. Not very smart to try this with people who grew up in the church and have been on missions probably using they same analogy from time to time.

[_Themis]

I think that the fact that it appears that God doesn't intervene in the world when we THINK HE SHOULD could very well be a/the root cause for choosing the atheistic/agnostic path through life. Choosing to believe "that it's in God's hands" is the tougher way to travel, to be sure. It takes faith and trust in a God who is a lot bigger and maybe even a bit more intelligent than us.

Regards,
MG

A more accurate way of putting it is that God, if God exists, does not intervene in the world in circumstances where God reasonably would if he existed as is claimed. But that's not important for the point at hand. Kevin is reasoning that it only stands to reason that God would answer prayers about the truthfulness of a religion. But that isn't something he can assume while simultaneously believing that it's OK that God does not prevent any of the world's inscrutable suffering. The fact remains that even if his religious beliefs are true, God doesn't intervene in circumstances were it would be reasonable for God to intervene. You say as much yourself. So you cannot assume that any prayer's "answer" comes from God because you'd expect God to intervene in such a circumstance. You've already gone ahead and adopted an argument that says we cannot follow our expectations for when God would and would not intervene because of God's superior knowledge. So you are putting the nail in the coffin of Kevin's argument.

As I said above, in addition to it being an artifact of how the brain works, it could simply be other spirit beings. Indeed, you'll have no trouble finding evangelicals who think Satan is playing a role in such events.

Great points EAllusion.

[_Themis]

That's it??? That's your whole argument? No children genetically linked to Joseph Smith through his 30 some-odd "extra wives"? Therefore, he didn't have sex with them?

Sad.

He is just lying again. He has already admitted Joseph had sex with some of his wives. He is just trolling for a reaction.

[_EAllusion]

1) The taste of salt is intersubjectve in a way spiritual experiences are not, which is where the analogy most fundamentally breaks down.

2) If it were not possible to describe the content of spiritual experiences in such a way that a person can hear about it and map it onto their experiences, then a religion centered around receiving revelation via spiritual experience would not be possible. You can't build a religion around ineffable experiences because those experiences have to be effable to the extent that people know they are talking about the same thing.

[_Darth J]

I think that the fact that it appears that God doesn't intervene in the world when we THINK HE SHOULD could very well be a/the root cause for choosing the atheistic/agnostic path through life. Choosing to believe "that it's in God's hands" is the tougher way to travel, to be sure. It takes faith and trust in a God who is a lot bigger and maybe even a bit more intelligent than us.

Then you have surrendered any basis for asserting that the Mormon god is omnibenevolent---which is in fact what the LDS Church asserts. E.g.,

Gospel Principles, (2011), Chapter 1: Our Father in Heaven

God is perfect. He is a God of righteousness, with attributes such as love, mercy, charity, truth, power, faith, knowledge, and judgment. He has all power. He knows all things. He is full of goodness.

If you don't understand how your deity decides when to intervene to alleviate human suffering---particularly human suffering that your omnipotent deity either allowed to happen or caused to happen, which amounts to the same thing---then that means your deity's sense of morality is inscrutable to you. You don't have this deity's perspective. You only have your own perspective, which by your own argument is incapable of measuring your god's morality. Since your perspective of morality is incapable of evaluating your god's, your god is not righteous or good in any sense that you can perceive. Instead, according to your own arguments, your god follows a blue and orange morality.



Unfortunately, Mormon theology holds that our sense of morality comes directly from the Mormon god: the Light of Christ.

Gospel Topics: Light of Christ

Conscience is a manifestation of the Light of Christ, enabling us to judge good from evil. The prophet Mormon taught: "The Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God. . . . And now, my brethren, seeing that ye know the light by which ye may judge, which light is the light of Christ, see that ye do not judge wrongfully; for with that same judgment which ye judge ye shall also be judged" (Moroni 7:16, 18).

Under Mormonism's own terms (at least, the LDS version of Mormonism), Elohim has given people just enough divine spark of conscience to perceive him as acting in ways that are inconsistent with being omnipotent and omnibenevolent (which is exactly what the problem of evil is). Why would Elohim give us a divine sense of justice in just the right amount to be bothered by his allowing and/or causing to happen wholesale suffering, in various degrees, all over the world? Did he do this because he's incompetent, which contradicts the dogma that he's omniscient? Or because he's trolling us, which contradicts the dogma that he's omnibenevolent? Or because he has a sense of right and wrong that we can't comprehend, which contradicts the dogma that he's omnibenevolent because we have no basis for determining whether he actually is all good?

To be fair, mentalgymnast, neither your religion in general nor your denomination in particular have given you any particular insights or answers to the problem of evil. If only there were some kind of living spokesman for God who could receive some kind of answer to these questions.

Oh, but we do have Alma the Younger indicating to Amulek that the Mormon god lets helpless women and children get tortured to death so that he will be justified in his anger against the people who are torturing them to death. Right before the Mormon god uses his mighty power to save Alma and Amulek from the same fate. So there's that.

[_SteelHead]

I have a mancrush on Darth's brain and rapier wit.

[_Runtu]

Then you have surrendered any basis for asserting that the Mormon god is omnibenevolent---which is in fact what the LDS Church asserts.

I had lunch with my parents today, and my mom started talking about my brothers. I mentioned how I had really struggled with it because, before the accident, I was sure that whatever happened was God's will and part of His plan. My mom shook her head and said she had to let go of that belief, too.

Then she reminded me that less than three months after my brothers were killed, our bishop (who spoke at my brothers' funeral) and his family were in a terrible accident that killed their 15-year-old daughter. The bishop's wife had asked my mom to go to lunch with her because she had no one to talk to who could understand. She was distraught because she had been driving and had fallen asleep at the wheel. She was feeling tremendous guilt, of course, but also confusion as to why it was God's will that she fell asleep and killed her child.

My mom talked to her about how we live in a world of natural processes, human behavior, and simple random accidents. No one meant for my brothers or this young girl to die. These were, simply, accidents, and it does no good to blame yourself or God for an accident.

[_EAllusion]

If you don't understand how your deity decides when to intervene to alleviate human suffering---particularly human suffering that your omnipotent deity either allowed to happen or caused to happen, which amounts to the same thing---then that means your deity's sense of morality is inscrutable to you. You don't have this deity's perspective. You only have your own perspective, which by your own argument is incapable of measuring your god's morality. Since your perspective of morality is incapable of evaluating your god's, your god is not righteous or good in any sense that you can perceive.

For what it is worth, I've never seen anything resembling an adequate attempt to reply to this particular theological objection to the unknown purposes defense.

Here's a post I wrote from 2008 bringing up this argument using one of my favorite quotes from an MB conversation:

"I think that the case against theism can be made even more compelling here. Believers always retreat to the claim that God is inherently "ineffable". We can't understand his motives, and we can't judge God by his own standards. So the existence of evil may not be explainable in human terms, but it certainly doesn't rule out the existence of benevolent God. Nonbelievers can only retort that evil is to be expected in a godless universe, but it remains a mystery in the theistic universe. So theism requires greater mental effort. So what?

On the other hand, theists also argue that we can understand God, and we know this because humans are allegedly made in "his own image". That explains the obvious anthropomorphism in our perceptions of the behavior of deities. (Non-theists see it the other way round--that God is made in our image.) When you juxtapose God's humanity (which entitles you to label him "benevolent") with his ineffability (which absolves him of "blame" that humans with power over evil would incur), you end up with a glaring inconsistency. God is partially ineffable and partially "effable". God is conveniently ineffable, in the same way that God conveniently "explains" all the gaps in our knowledge about the universe."

This is a well-known objection. To say that the professional responses to it have to date been unsatisfactory is an understatement.

[_Runtu]

For what it is worth, I've never seen anything resembling an adequate attempt to reply to this particular theological objection to the unknown purposes defense.

Here's a post I wrote from 2008 bringing up this argument using one of my favorite quotes from an MB conversation:

"I think that the case against theism can be made even more compelling here. Believers always retreat to the claim that God is inherently "ineffable". We can't understand his motives, and we can't judge God by his own standards. So the existence of evil may not be explainable in human terms, but it certainly doesn't rule out the existence of benevolent God. Nonbelievers can only retort that evil is to be expected in a godless universe, but it remains a mystery in the theistic universe. So theism requires greater mental effort. So what?

On the other hand, theists also argue that we can understand God, and we know this because humans are allegedly made in "his own image". That explains the obvious anthropomorphism in our perceptions of the behavior of deities. (Non-theists see it the other way round--that God is made in our image.) When you juxtapose God's humanity (which entitles you to label him "benevolent") with his ineffability (which absolves him of "blame" that humans with power over evil would incur), you end up with a glaring inconsistency. God is partially ineffable and partially "effable". God is conveniently ineffable, in the same way that God conveniently "explains" all the gaps in our knowledge about the universe."

This is a well-known objection. To say that the professional responses to it have to date been unsatisfactory is an understatement.

Well said. It is interesting that the positive things we attribute to God are the parts that are "effable," and the parts that are problematic are "ineffable." I always go back to Blake Ostler's statement about God's sense of morality being more "expansive" than ours. It struck me then, as it does now, that this is really just another way to hold God to a different standard than He holds us. He commands us to be faithful to our spouses and to be totally honest in our dealings with our fellowmen, but at the same time He not only allows Joseph Smith to sleep with married women (and conceal it from Emma and the husbands), but He commands it.

I find it hard to worship a God who believes that honesty and sexual fidelity are situational and that, when God says so, everything is negotiable. In fact, I don't even want to worship a God like that.