Ha, fair enough. But if you want to save calories, grabbing the non alcoholic alternative is actually a decent choice. (And if you want to get drunk on the least calories possible, pure gin/vodka/schnaps/white rum are your best options. Beer is reeeally energy dense.)

Alcohol has a lot of calories, so that would have to be non alcoholic as well.

Why doctors? Filming patients would be a nightmare in terms of privacy and data policy.

In my line of work (psychotherapy) it would be equally impossible. People are having a hard enough time as it is opening up to medical professionals, I don’t think that the additional barrier of being actively filmed would help anyone.

It asserts a paradox of infinities, rather than a non-existence of God.

It never attempted to prove non-existence. This is what you misunderstood from the beginning.

The paradox assumes a much more substantive understanding of philosophy in its axioms.

How is that an counterargument? Epicurus says: Those axioms create a paradox, they must be wrong. You’re saying: Yeah well your axioms are too substantive. You are agreeing that the three premises can’t be true. Everything else you’ve talked about was simply missing the point.

The Epicurean paradox does nothing else than to discuss if the premises as phrased can be true. If you talk about an idea outside those premises you’ve already missed the mark.

The premise written from the perspective of a bunch of Bronze Age shepherds, yes.

Which is precisely what the Epicurean paradox is about.

Mate I’m sorry but if you still don’t understand what the paradox says in the first place this is a waste of time. Obviously you want to talk about something that hast nothing to do with the paradox itself. I’ll leave you to it.

You don’t need to be omniscient to appear to be to a sufficiently limited observer.

Yeah, but the premise of the abrahamic god says he is, that’s the point.

The insistence that nothing should ever be unpleasant at any time for any reason is the mentality of a toddler.

Back to the insults? That’s weak. Maybe you’ve never experiences anything truly horrible in your life. Good for you! Bad for you for forgetting about the rest of us though, really, that’s actually pretty rude. You’re reinforcing the notion that the only way christians can get out of the paradox is by becoming very, very ignorant.

Imagine a young child that painfully dies of cancer. The parents ask: How could god let that happen? How can he be all powerful and not save our sweet child from all this unnecessary pain?

What would you answer them?

And that’s where you get into questions of degree.

Not at all. The premise is “all-knowing”. That is in fact a mechanic who’s able to account for every particle within the engine block.

I wander carelessly through the yard.

You are not all-powerful. The premise says: god is. If you were easily able to spare all those small insects, deciding to kill them anyway would make you a psychopath.

Suffering is a consequence of our human condition.

Our human condition, within the scenario of the thinking exercise, was very consciously created that way by god.

I would not consider a world devoid of feeling one that was compatible with an all-loving god.

An all-powerful god would have been able to create a reality with feeling, but without suffering. And religion already claims that he can - that’s the idea of heaven or paradise.

We’re talking about a concept of god who’s omnicscient, don’t forget that. In your metaphor I knew perfetcly well beforehand were you would build your house and consciously put my bulldozer there, knowing it would one day destroy your home.

Using my power and knowledge to so something that will harm you is mean spirited. The same must be said for god. Exceptions would be if god didn’t have another choice or didn’t know better. Both of those are addressed in the Epicurean paradox.

An omnipotent god would have been able to build a world without suffering. His volcanoes would maybe spray rainbows.

God didn’t build a world without suffering. Therefore we can conclude: It is not possible for him to be at the same time fully able and willing to do so. Or to put it more formally: A omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving god is incompatible with a world that includes suffering.

If I suddenly acquired a million dollars and your home address and use them to bulldoze your living room, would that be evil?

You’re arguing the process of plate tectonics is ontologically wicked.

Not at all. You’re still fighting a strawman. The existence of volcanoes and cancer isn’t evil. If it was however consciously created by an omnipotent and omniscient being, that would be evil. The paradox doesn’t relate to our reality itself, only to the claim of said characteristics in a god in relation to said reality. You still seem confused about that part.

But this sounds like Perdition. Absolutely nightmarish. An eternal hellscape I would wish to escape at any cost.

If you truly cannot a reality with less suffering than ours you are truly unimaginative, mate. Or completely ignorant to the suffering that exists in this world. Or maybe both.

But it is also perfectly possible that all of this exists without a Singular Perfect Entity at its origin.

Right, which is why this is the most obvious answer to the Epicurean paradox: This singular perfect entity doesn’t exist. Congratulation, you’ve now arrived at the same conclusion as Epicurus 2.5 thousand years ago.

Then why would god create our minds and logic in the first place? Seems like he’d be setting us up for failure if he gives us tools to determine the truth which in turn seem to disprove his existence. Also not something you’d expect from an all-loving deity.

You’re discounting enormous processes that provide enormous benefits over the order of millennia to marginal discomforts experienced by tiny minorities over the course of months. Why stop at volcanoes and cancer? We could claim that teeth are evil. We could claim that fire and salt are evil. We could claim that emotions are evil.

If you’re seriously arguing that there is no unavoidable suffering in this world you’re very ignorant towards your fellow human beings. An omnipotent god could create a world without volcanoes and without sickness. Yet he didn’t. You’re sill not understanding even the starting point of the Epicurean paradox if you don’t get that.

With the conclusion that such a deity does not deserve to be worshiped, presumably because an immensely powerful but flawed being is not worthy of reciprocal love and devotion. But that’s not an argument against God, its an argument against Parents.

Again, you’re misunderstanding the conversation. It’s not about judgment or whining, it’s not about arguing if it’s okay for god to be how he is, it’s not about any conclusions from gods nature to anything. It’s a logical thinking exercise about the premises of the abrahamic idea of god’s characteristics and whether they make sense or not.

If the premises are: god is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, the existence of human suffering creates a paradox. (And if you’re unsure why just look at the guide above.) What you’re saying has nothing to do with that. You don’t resolve the paradox by insulting those who find it interesting to think about, you’re disqualifying from the conversation. If you believe in a god without those characteristics the Epicurean paradox says nothing about your faith at all.

Hardly convoluted.

While you’re arguing about all the parts of human suffering that can easily be attributed to humans, other forms of suffering exist as well. Think volcanoes. Think cancer. You’re not making a good argument if you’re conveniently forgetting that not all suffering has to do with our free will at all.

At the point, you’re not arguing against the existence of a deity. You’re arguing against the existence of Buddy Jesus and the big smiling sun baby from Teletubbies.

I think you’re misunderstanding the Epicurean paradox. It specifically argues against a very specific idea of god with the characteristics of being omnipotent, omniscient and all-loving at the same time. Call him “buddy jesus” if you will (some call him “God”), but that’s exactly the thought exercise we’re talking about here. No one is arguing against deities in general. The term is way too broad to have a single conversation about every potential divine entity anyway.

Suffering without purpose. And that’s where things get sticky. Because the argument from Evil needs to assume the recipients of suffering are innocent and undeserving. Otherwise it’s not evil, just karma.

There’s plenty of undeserved suffering in our world, I don’t think we have to debate that. Either evil is the consequence of our free will in some convoluted way - then the same will be true in the afterlife - or a paradise without suffering is possible - then an all-loving and omnipotent god would have been able to create just that. It simply disproves the idea that our suffering was somehow unavoidable to an all-powerful god, because that doesn’t make sense withing the ideological framework of the abrahamic religions. It must be avoidable. Otherwise paradise would be unthinkable.

You’re describing part of the paradox: religion promises relief from suffering based on certain characteristics of god (in this case: all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving), while suffering continues. The nature of the promise and the nature of our reality don’t seem compatible. That’s what the Epicurean paradox is about. Obviously something can’t be right about the promise that god loves you, has exact knowledge of what must be done and is literally omnipotent. Because evidently he doesn’t follow through with it.

I don’t know how exactly other religions promise to alleviate suffering. Maybe those create their own paradoxes, who knows. We’d have to look at the actual claims of those religions. The Epicurean paradox very specifically criticises the idea of god as proposed by the abrahamic religions and in my opinion does so very convincingly.

So children getting cancer? That’s clearly god’s will, and is therefore good.

This answer to the Epicurean paradox is nothing but semantics. Let’s just rephrase the question:

• Can god be all powerful, all knowing, and all loving by human standards?

–> No. It creates a paradox. So, using human words and human concepts, god cannot possibly be all three things. Therefore, by human standards, we cannot expect love, omniscience, and omnipotence from him. That’s all the paradox proves.

It’s not a “gotcha” to claim that there might be other standards, which are meaningless to us, but somehow mean something equivalent than the concepts we already have words for. Those foreign concepts have obviously nothing to do with what we humans call power, knowledge, and love. They don’t mean anything and there’s literally no way to fill them with meaning either, since they are by definition independent of human concepts.

Claiming that god is something, but this something cannot be understood, is in all consequence an empty claim without any meaning. Easy to make, but at the end of the day says and proves nothing.

There are many good arguments against God. This is not one of them.

It’s a slightly more complicated version of whether God can create a rock so big he cannot lift it.

It’s a very good argument against god, and your second statement is a great addition to it. Omnipotence in itself is impossible, as proven by the rock paradox. An omnipotent being can therefore not exist.

Your free will idea however has a very easy counter argument: If free will is the problem, then god has nothing to offer us - since in the afterlife the same rules would apply. Either a world without suffering is possible, or it isn’t. Since the afterlife isn’t known to work by taking away our free will, suffering would therefore continue to prevail there as well. If the idea of an afterlife must be possible (as seen in most organized religions) than the idea of a world without suffering must be possible, without taking away something so valuable as our freedom.

see horrible things they don’t like and then want to judge God for them

I wonder if there are things you’d judge god for. Is there suffering so great that you would ask “how can he let that happen”? Or is your god compatible with even the worst realities imaginable?

If the former, all we’re debating is if the suffering prevalent in our world is great enough to justify the question. And I’d personally argue if you’re not entirely ignorant to the suffering of your fellow human beings it definitely is.

If the latter, the categories of “good” and “bad” become completely meaningless. The term “god” becomes meaningless. At this point there’s no connection between our reality and whatever idea we might have of a divine power, since the two do not interfere. He is just an idea with no tangible effect on this world, I am irrelevant to him, he is irrelevant to me. The question of his existence becomes pointless.

Why would a super entity be bound by “love” which only humans understand ? Why would “it” have the concept of “evil”, something that humans invented out of fear.

It doesn’t. That’s the point. The Epicurean paradox doesn’t say god doesn’t exist in some way or form, but the idea of god as someone with a relationship to humanity based on love, omnipotence and omniscience (in any way that’s meaningful to us) is apparently false.

Or from your perspective: God loves us in his way; he doesn’t love us in our way, which means we can’t expect the same mercy, the same support, the same commitment from him as we humans are capable of.

Epicurus refuted one very specific idea of god, which was prevalent at one point in time, but is today only believed by very devout evangelicals. What we today conclude from the fact that apparently no god will alleviate the suffering in this life is up to each individual.