One problem you will eventually run into in this line of thinking is that if you are dealing with a concept of god that:
A. Represents himself as all-honest
B. Represents himself as not all honest
and importantly:
C. Regardless of A and B, lies
You do a couple of important things: First, you create a god about who is inherently unknowable - i.e. He could be misrepresenting himself not just in that way, but many ways. For instance, once we've established that once a person dies after they have or have not done what god wants (in your model, simplified to "avoids sin"), he has no reason to punish them with hell, but he also has no reason to let them into to heaven, either; he's already established goal, and might as well eradicate them in that scenario as well.
Any motive we might assign to our model of god to try to prove that he wouldn't do that with heaven (But he says he lets us in! He is love! He is kindness!) is no more inherently reliable than claims that he'd send sinners to hell.
But within this model you also do something subtler: you set yourself up (practically, if not explicitly) as a controlling authority on morality that stands above whatever god you are modelling in the pecking order. I tend to think of models like this as, given enough time, resolving to sort of atheist-with-extra-steps. They pretty much all follow a model of:
A. I think people who do or believe X are bad or wrong
B. The God I believe in does or believes X
C. I will determine that on the matter of X, I am right and God must be mistaken or else has been relayed to me unreliably.
The Atheist's "Whatever I might determine my morals and beliefs to be, they come from my own reason, with me as the terminal decider of right for myself" doesn't really differ substantially from C. above. At least it doesn't absent some well thought out and reliable limiting principle, but if you've already determined that "on matters where I disagree enough with god, he's lying, wrong, or misrepresented", it's hard to think of something that could be.
I have long argued that the existence of God does not solve the problem of knowing right and wrong because you have to have some knowledge of right and wrong in order to recognize that the very powerful supernatural being you are interacting with is God rather than the Devil or some morally ambiguous being such as a Greek or Norse god. Once you have concluded that he is God, however, you can use what he tells you to improve your moral knowledge.
This is why I think the Mu'tazilites were correct in their dispute with the Ash'ari. It is also a response to the argument that Atheists can have no basis for their moral beliefs.
There's some ambiguity around that sort of "knowing what's right and wrong instinctually" stuff in Christianity as well. But your model goes a little beyond that in terms of implications.
Say Bob has moral instincts that he thinks are solid; they are influenced by the world around him, culture, etc. but he thinks they are more or less on point. And at some point he stumbles on the Bible and gets all the nice, easy sounding parts (God is a loving, be nice to your neighbors, etc.) and the correspond to things Bob likes, so he accepts them as true.
But say Bob doesn't like the concept of hell, so he does away with it - he can't accept any model in which hell exists whatsoever, so he goes to god and says "this is something you lied about - you would have never thought this way, so that's not who you are anymore.". And Bob gets *just a tiny step* deeper into thinking about it, and then considers what an injustice even destroying a soul is, just because it didn't pick the right god out of a hat. Or follow certain rules that seemed unreasonable, or had a bad upbringing, etc. - doesn't matter, he just eventually gets to the idea that the only fair heaven is one that a lot of roads get to, or all roads get to.
Bob is now established to know or believe three important things:
1. There's no risk of losing access to heaven
2. There's no risk of going to hell
3. There's no god who has solid enough knowable characteristics that he can contradict him or tell him what to do
And in all three of these he's identical to an atheist; there's window-trimmings differences, nothing substantial/definitive. Bob has nice rituals he likes to do, but these days atheists meditate and commune with soil just like druids. He has books he thinks are nice that he picks things he likes out of, but so do atheists - MacAskill writes a new one like every six months.
And I'm not really getting down on Bob here - like I have plenty of bob-type friends. I have plenty of atheist or agnostic friends, for that matter. Most of my audience is that.
The reason I respond to stuff like this with (what I hope is polite) disagreement is that often when Atheist/Agnostics come to the table to discuss something like this, they bring along a certain assumption that it doesn't matter if people believe it to be true - i.e. someone who would say "it's important to know if this incredibly granular and seemingly unimportant economic concept is true or false, because it has real-world implications" is often perfectly comfortable saying "There is no practical difference for a person who believes in a god if that god's words are reliable, or in fact even knowable".
In this case the incredibly granular (to you) distinction of "well, maybe god is just a liar, but only on this one thing; you should see no conflict in believing him just as much on any other thing once he proves unreliable here" is actually pretty big for anyone who accepts it and moves to believing god conditionally reliable, judged by what they are comfortable with at the time.
Why can't you believe that God is unconditionally good, may or may not sometimes lie when doing so is good?
We don't get certainty about things. I am imagining someone who concludes that God fits his moral intuitions well enough so his best guess is that God is good. If God tells him things that don't fit that he concludes that either he is making a mistake, not being nearly as smart as God, or God is lying for good reasons. It mostly doesn't matter which. Presumably if God tells people something God wants people to believe it so, whether or not it's true, he might as well act as though it is.
My argument doesn't imply that you shouldn't act as though Hell is real, although after hearing it it may be more difficult to do so than before.
There are lots of details of Christian (or Muslim or Jewish) belief that believers disagree about. That doesn't keep them from believing in and trusting God. They shouldn't expect certainty.
I think to have any clarity here we are going to have to be very, very clear on what's being argued. and the implications of it. So first, let's review your proposal:
1. A believer in a particular religion (here christianity) might sometimes run into aspects of god that, as stated, he or she is uncomfortable with.
2. When this happens, an easy way to resolve it is to decide that god was simply lying about whatever aspect of the religion they were uncomfortable with.
3. You can't prove god wasn't lying on many different instances - he's presumably good about it, and could have often "gotten away with it".
4. Inherent to 2-3 is an assumption that claims that god doesn't lie are essentually valueless to this conversation - if we are assuming a "dishonest god" it's very easy to create a rationale whereby he might get more good done while being thought honest than otherwise.
And here's some points that have been presented by you during the argument:
1. Nobody has certainty about god, because "we don't have certainty about things".
2. There are many religions, and disagreements within the religions - this means there is no "right answer" to be had here, and perhaps no definite truth to be grasped.
3. You should accept this uncertainty and feel it has few implications to your faith, if any.
Note that 1-3 are pretty much a concise description of an agnostic worldview - you've baked it into your argument and are subtly demanding I accept the premise of agnosticism as the correct way of things, which is part of what I'm bucking here.
Now let's assume that a religious believer who, however mistaken he or she might be on the particulars beyond that, believes three things:
1. There is a god with certain characteristics who continues having those characteristics even if others or the believer themselves doesn't like them.
2. This god is powerful enough to have communicated some amount of those characteristics accurately, and has done so in a way accessible to the believer.
3. The god has some amount of authority to tell them to do things.
Note that this believer is not an agnostic - he or she believer there to be a definite god, and that they know which one it is. While I am aware that this is not *very many believers in some parts of the country*, I'd like you to consider that believers in Christianity who are not effectively agnostics do in fact exist and that all practitioners of a particular religion aren't just being very coy and tricky.
Returning to our hypothetical believer. Let's say he or she is uncomfortable with some part of their religion. If they sincerely believe items 1-2 of their hypothetical belief set, they have a couple options:
1. They can more closely examine the text, trying to see if they are perhaps mistaken in how they have previously read it, or seek out arguments for how it can be more accurately read.
2. They can decide that where their opinions and their god's opinions on things differ, their god is right and due to his authority as stated in item 3, they should live lives reflecting that.
Note that both 1 and 2 preserve some level of authority - where confusion on some aspect of the god exists, the texts/communications from that god are the authority on settling them. Where the disagreement between believer and god still exists after 1, the believer can (should they wish to still make the claim) accept 1.
Note that even if we assume that all their beliefs are definitively wrong/fake/disproven, they still within the context of their beliefs have some controlling principles here; to the extent they are consistent with those principles, they are predictable; to the extent they don't, they can be criticized for it in a way they can only refute using the texts/communications from their god.
In the same way, if the believer found themselves in a housefire, they could either:
1. Attempt to put out the fire
2. Attempt to escape the home
3. Burn up
But they couldn't do:
4. Decide that fire wasn't hot
Unless the fire was just imagined, in which case they can assign it any characteristics they wish.
Your argument is outside of the believer's 1-2; it assumes they've run into a situation they don't like and simply decide that on that point the religion is wrong; that this was one of the perhaps many times god was just lying.
Where our believer before had two principles that could either be followed or broken, now they are really quite free - there's no aspect of who their god is, what he thinks is correct, or what he commands that they need to follow - in every case, he might simply have been lying within statement itself, or some other aspect of his communication on which the statement relies.
The very simple pithy way to point this out is that where you say "hell and benevolence are mutually exclusive", one could just as easily decide that the benevolence was a lie, or that the whole religion is. Unreliability cuts all directions.
Please do note that none of this is actually an argument that my particular religion is true - if for no other reason besides it not being designed to acheive that goal and thus not doing it very well. What it *is* is an attempt (one I make all the time) to point out that some people really do believe things in a house-fire way, that they think they are real, knowable and exist despite their preferences in the same way you can't get the hope diamond to change color by thinking about it real hard.
If you were simply and clearly making an argument that the truth was unknowable and thus probably fake to a lesser or greater degree no matter what, and so it made sense just to edit the parts you didn't like, since it's all wrong anyway (which is sort of where you eventually got) I wouldn't have posted - I already know you are an agnostic, it's unremarkable to me. The nature of our disagreement on that front is that I actually believe there’s a specific knowable truth, which is a large part of why they have different names for our belief systems in the first place.
But you made a different argument at first - one that Christians (who, I assure you, often really do believe their religion is real and knowable) should feel very comfortable making those kinds of edits, the nature of their beliefs be damned. And that actually has huge implications for someone who house-fire believes - it changes the nature of their belief at it's most fundamental level, from something solid with authority to something maliable they can safely ignore when it suits them.
For your final alternatives 1 and 2 I can add a 3: Conclude that you know enough about God to be reasonably confident he is benevolent. When he tells you something that appears inconsistent with that conclude it is possible that what he tells you is true and you are making a mistake, also possible that it is a lie which a benevolent god would tell. In the particular example I gave it is plausible that a benevolent God would tell that lie, for the reason offered.
What reason is there to believe that benevolence and omnipotence imply never lying? Parents sometimes lie to their children for reasons that are at least defensible, perhaps correct, to keep the children from knowing something that would hurt them or lead them to incorrect conclusions, given their current limitations. Why shouldn't a God do the same thing?
Very nice, I'm an agnostic and you painted a fine picture of me. I just wanted to say that any image of God that I do have does not include one who could lie. But that is just my image.
I think there's a sense in which it's easy to mistake what I'm arguing as, specifically, an argument that my particular religion is right and that you should believe it. So when you encountered it, I think it's natural for you to basically say "But what are your specific beliefs, then? Can't we agree that they are wrong, and that you are wrong for holding them?"
But I'm not arguing that - I'm arguing a more fundamental point that has to do with the question of whether or not it *matters if something is true or false at all*.
Let's say there's a rock. It's a normal rock in all respects, and as such has various characteristics that I don't didn't determine - it's a certain color, a certain weight, has a certain mineral composition that in turn renders its X amount tough and Y amount hard. It's a rock, it exists. Just a normal rock. For the sake of this argument, we will say that this real, existing rock is entirely red except for one brown spot.
Now let's say that one day I decide that all rocks should be completely red, and that I'm profoundly disturbed by the idea that rocks might be any other color - I simply can't accept it. So I decide that the rock is *entirely* red, and has no brown spot. I explain to anyone who might listen how I came to that conclusion.
The rock, being real, is profoundly unaffected by all this. It continues being whatever color it was, serenely unconcerned about what's going in my head or essays.
Many people believe in god this way. They believe that god is an existing thing that actually exists, and they don't believe it in a way that requires a special carveout for "exists" that we only use for god and means "exists to the extent that he conforms with my preferences".
Note that *none* of this applies if the rock is imaginary. If the rock is imaginary, then your opinions on the rock do very much change what it is - it's your rock, one that you created; it exists to dance to your whims. If you were having a theoretical conversation about whether it would hurt if it were chucked at your head, you could just say "No, it wouldn't - I've imagined it as very soft indeed. And so it is; it is my imaginary rock - I am not it's actual human; it does not own me, I own it."
This is a difference of opinions regarding the way in which god exists that it's possible to have - that he either is or isn't a distinct thing. A god that exists in the way the rock exists has certain implications; a god that exists in the way the imaginary rock exists has another set of implications.
Another aspect that David's proposal interacts with is ideas of *knowability*. So now imagine that there's a box that is said to contain a rock. The box can never be opened, lifted, or shaken and as such the rock cannot be directly observed. Luckily (for some) the box has since antiquity been accompanied by a short certificate describing the contents of the box - one fist-sized rock, completely red save one brown spot.
Imagine there's a group of people who believe that certificate to be *reliable*. In doing so, they believe that the contents of the box are both knowable and known - that the box actually contains the rock. They think that if the box ever opens itself, it will contain a red rock with a brown spot about the size of a fist.
There is another group of people who believes the certificate is *not* reliable, but who carefully explain to the certificate-believers that despite this they are willing to accept that the box contains a rock. They also explain that, as a group, they have decided that *it doesn't make sense to them* that a red rock might have a brown spot (they explain that brown spots are gross), and that by simply deciding it doesn't have a spot, that it stopped having it. They have decided that it is soft - so it is. They have decided that it's the size of a thimble, and it is now.
The certificate believers are very careful to explain that while they don't believe the rock is under their command (who would say that?) and that it's definitely real (who would doubt it?) that it nonetheless corresponds to whatever they decided it is.
What I'm making here is not an argument that the certificate believers are right. I'm saying that the nature of a certificate-believer's and a rock-imaginer's beliefs are fundamentally different, and that David's proposal actually has a pretty big hidden ask: that people who believe in a god in the same way people in a rock begin to treat him as if he's imaginary.
Or that people who believe in god in the same way they might believe in boxed rock if they believed that a certificate describing the box's contents was genuine and reliable begin to act as if there's no reliable source of information about the box's contents at all, while still claiming to believe (now based on no information they believe reliable at all) that they still totally believe the rock to be real, to have certain characteristics just the same as they did before.
Whatever the appearances are, I'm not interested in arguing here that you or David should abandon your various religious beliefs and admit that mine are right. But accepting David's solution would require that I abandon mine and adopt his (agnosticism, a general assumption that the Bible is an unreliable discriptor of God,).
This might seem like a very specific nitpick, but I still I don't feel like it's unreasonable to really highlight what someone is saying when they make an argument that boils down to "I have a perfect solution to problems with your religion - switch to mine.".
My argument accepts the claim that God is good and argues from that. A good God would want people to go to Heaven quite aside from the incentive that expecting that provides. But his only reason to claim people are going to Hell is the incentive it provides, and that doesn't require him to actually carry out the threat.
I think the whole edifice is a mass of strategic lies, or fortunate errors: fine-tuned by evolutionary processes to confer advantage to believers. It formed the operating system for a civilization. Maybe we can construct a new OS based on reality someday, if we survive long-enough.
Pretty good analysis David. The problem is that all mainstream Christian religions are false. The true Church is the Church of Jesus Christ, of Latter-day Saints, sometimes known as the Mormon Church. Any devoted fan of South Park understands that as it was plainly proclaimed as such my L. Ron Hubbard from a stage in Hell in one episode. Latter Day Saints do not believe in "Christian Hell", instead they believe in degrees of glory for all, somewhat similar to what CS Lewis enivisions in The Great Divorce, where all are happy where they are. Please consider studying my Church, it is the only one that makes sense. Earth is an incubator for those who will be gods in future worlds. You are a child of God, so you grow up to be a god.
First, nobody deserves Heaven. You can't deserve Heaven, it's too good for you, full of divine light. You'd find it to be a divinely tortuous experience, far worse than Hell, without divine intervention to make you good enough. And, with those versions of Christianity with purgatory, it still isn't enough on its own - you're still on Earth, your soul still will have impurities that will burn in the light; you need to be exposed to a lower dose of light for a while first to get you really good and ready.
Second, Hell is distance from God. It isn't eternal torment, excepting that existence without God is itself torment. (Also, plausibly, existing with all those other people, without God intervening, might be torment in itself.)
Then Christianity makes slightly more sense: You're opting in to divine intervention, for God to tinker with your soul to prepare you for purgatory. (Or, for those without purgatory, to just tinker with your soul to prepare you for Heaven). You don't have to agree to that! Your soul is yours, you can choose not to let God tinker with it, in which case you go to Hell as a mercy.
God has a credibility problem. No one knows what truly happens in the afterlife. If Hell truly exists, it seems only useful as a deterrent, and morally repugnant as anything more than a deterrent. If God is known to lie, then Hell seems very likely to be a lie. Of course the Old Testament God is quite morally repugnant, and likely delights in delivering His Wrath via Hell.
do you have a view on the scriptural case for hell? my (moderately informed, not deeply studied) impression is (a) it isn't mentioned all that often (b) it's never the point of the story, more used to illustrate the seriousness of the topic (c) the language used is more "humans being figurative" than "divine pronouncements of a specific place or actions that happen in that place" and finally that the popular image of hell is more Dante than anything else. to my mind, there isn't really a hell problem to be solved, at least not in a theological reckoning sense.
One problem you will eventually run into in this line of thinking is that if you are dealing with a concept of god that:
A. Represents himself as all-honest
B. Represents himself as not all honest
and importantly:
C. Regardless of A and B, lies
You do a couple of important things: First, you create a god about who is inherently unknowable - i.e. He could be misrepresenting himself not just in that way, but many ways. For instance, once we've established that once a person dies after they have or have not done what god wants (in your model, simplified to "avoids sin"), he has no reason to punish them with hell, but he also has no reason to let them into to heaven, either; he's already established goal, and might as well eradicate them in that scenario as well.
Any motive we might assign to our model of god to try to prove that he wouldn't do that with heaven (But he says he lets us in! He is love! He is kindness!) is no more inherently reliable than claims that he'd send sinners to hell.
But within this model you also do something subtler: you set yourself up (practically, if not explicitly) as a controlling authority on morality that stands above whatever god you are modelling in the pecking order. I tend to think of models like this as, given enough time, resolving to sort of atheist-with-extra-steps. They pretty much all follow a model of:
A. I think people who do or believe X are bad or wrong
B. The God I believe in does or believes X
C. I will determine that on the matter of X, I am right and God must be mistaken or else has been relayed to me unreliably.
The Atheist's "Whatever I might determine my morals and beliefs to be, they come from my own reason, with me as the terminal decider of right for myself" doesn't really differ substantially from C. above. At least it doesn't absent some well thought out and reliable limiting principle, but if you've already determined that "on matters where I disagree enough with god, he's lying, wrong, or misrepresented", it's hard to think of something that could be.
I have long argued that the existence of God does not solve the problem of knowing right and wrong because you have to have some knowledge of right and wrong in order to recognize that the very powerful supernatural being you are interacting with is God rather than the Devil or some morally ambiguous being such as a Greek or Norse god. Once you have concluded that he is God, however, you can use what he tells you to improve your moral knowledge.
This is why I think the Mu'tazilites were correct in their dispute with the Ash'ari. It is also a response to the argument that Atheists can have no basis for their moral beliefs.
There's some ambiguity around that sort of "knowing what's right and wrong instinctually" stuff in Christianity as well. But your model goes a little beyond that in terms of implications.
Say Bob has moral instincts that he thinks are solid; they are influenced by the world around him, culture, etc. but he thinks they are more or less on point. And at some point he stumbles on the Bible and gets all the nice, easy sounding parts (God is a loving, be nice to your neighbors, etc.) and the correspond to things Bob likes, so he accepts them as true.
But say Bob doesn't like the concept of hell, so he does away with it - he can't accept any model in which hell exists whatsoever, so he goes to god and says "this is something you lied about - you would have never thought this way, so that's not who you are anymore.". And Bob gets *just a tiny step* deeper into thinking about it, and then considers what an injustice even destroying a soul is, just because it didn't pick the right god out of a hat. Or follow certain rules that seemed unreasonable, or had a bad upbringing, etc. - doesn't matter, he just eventually gets to the idea that the only fair heaven is one that a lot of roads get to, or all roads get to.
Bob is now established to know or believe three important things:
1. There's no risk of losing access to heaven
2. There's no risk of going to hell
3. There's no god who has solid enough knowable characteristics that he can contradict him or tell him what to do
And in all three of these he's identical to an atheist; there's window-trimmings differences, nothing substantial/definitive. Bob has nice rituals he likes to do, but these days atheists meditate and commune with soil just like druids. He has books he thinks are nice that he picks things he likes out of, but so do atheists - MacAskill writes a new one like every six months.
And I'm not really getting down on Bob here - like I have plenty of bob-type friends. I have plenty of atheist or agnostic friends, for that matter. Most of my audience is that.
The reason I respond to stuff like this with (what I hope is polite) disagreement is that often when Atheist/Agnostics come to the table to discuss something like this, they bring along a certain assumption that it doesn't matter if people believe it to be true - i.e. someone who would say "it's important to know if this incredibly granular and seemingly unimportant economic concept is true or false, because it has real-world implications" is often perfectly comfortable saying "There is no practical difference for a person who believes in a god if that god's words are reliable, or in fact even knowable".
In this case the incredibly granular (to you) distinction of "well, maybe god is just a liar, but only on this one thing; you should see no conflict in believing him just as much on any other thing once he proves unreliable here" is actually pretty big for anyone who accepts it and moves to believing god conditionally reliable, judged by what they are comfortable with at the time.
Why can't you believe that God is unconditionally good, may or may not sometimes lie when doing so is good?
We don't get certainty about things. I am imagining someone who concludes that God fits his moral intuitions well enough so his best guess is that God is good. If God tells him things that don't fit that he concludes that either he is making a mistake, not being nearly as smart as God, or God is lying for good reasons. It mostly doesn't matter which. Presumably if God tells people something God wants people to believe it so, whether or not it's true, he might as well act as though it is.
My argument doesn't imply that you shouldn't act as though Hell is real, although after hearing it it may be more difficult to do so than before.
There are lots of details of Christian (or Muslim or Jewish) belief that believers disagree about. That doesn't keep them from believing in and trusting God. They shouldn't expect certainty.
I think to have any clarity here we are going to have to be very, very clear on what's being argued. and the implications of it. So first, let's review your proposal:
1. A believer in a particular religion (here christianity) might sometimes run into aspects of god that, as stated, he or she is uncomfortable with.
2. When this happens, an easy way to resolve it is to decide that god was simply lying about whatever aspect of the religion they were uncomfortable with.
3. You can't prove god wasn't lying on many different instances - he's presumably good about it, and could have often "gotten away with it".
4. Inherent to 2-3 is an assumption that claims that god doesn't lie are essentually valueless to this conversation - if we are assuming a "dishonest god" it's very easy to create a rationale whereby he might get more good done while being thought honest than otherwise.
And here's some points that have been presented by you during the argument:
1. Nobody has certainty about god, because "we don't have certainty about things".
2. There are many religions, and disagreements within the religions - this means there is no "right answer" to be had here, and perhaps no definite truth to be grasped.
3. You should accept this uncertainty and feel it has few implications to your faith, if any.
Note that 1-3 are pretty much a concise description of an agnostic worldview - you've baked it into your argument and are subtly demanding I accept the premise of agnosticism as the correct way of things, which is part of what I'm bucking here.
Now let's assume that a religious believer who, however mistaken he or she might be on the particulars beyond that, believes three things:
1. There is a god with certain characteristics who continues having those characteristics even if others or the believer themselves doesn't like them.
2. This god is powerful enough to have communicated some amount of those characteristics accurately, and has done so in a way accessible to the believer.
3. The god has some amount of authority to tell them to do things.
Note that this believer is not an agnostic - he or she believer there to be a definite god, and that they know which one it is. While I am aware that this is not *very many believers in some parts of the country*, I'd like you to consider that believers in Christianity who are not effectively agnostics do in fact exist and that all practitioners of a particular religion aren't just being very coy and tricky.
Returning to our hypothetical believer. Let's say he or she is uncomfortable with some part of their religion. If they sincerely believe items 1-2 of their hypothetical belief set, they have a couple options:
1. They can more closely examine the text, trying to see if they are perhaps mistaken in how they have previously read it, or seek out arguments for how it can be more accurately read.
2. They can decide that where their opinions and their god's opinions on things differ, their god is right and due to his authority as stated in item 3, they should live lives reflecting that.
Note that both 1 and 2 preserve some level of authority - where confusion on some aspect of the god exists, the texts/communications from that god are the authority on settling them. Where the disagreement between believer and god still exists after 1, the believer can (should they wish to still make the claim) accept 1.
Note that even if we assume that all their beliefs are definitively wrong/fake/disproven, they still within the context of their beliefs have some controlling principles here; to the extent they are consistent with those principles, they are predictable; to the extent they don't, they can be criticized for it in a way they can only refute using the texts/communications from their god.
In the same way, if the believer found themselves in a housefire, they could either:
1. Attempt to put out the fire
2. Attempt to escape the home
3. Burn up
But they couldn't do:
4. Decide that fire wasn't hot
Unless the fire was just imagined, in which case they can assign it any characteristics they wish.
Your argument is outside of the believer's 1-2; it assumes they've run into a situation they don't like and simply decide that on that point the religion is wrong; that this was one of the perhaps many times god was just lying.
Where our believer before had two principles that could either be followed or broken, now they are really quite free - there's no aspect of who their god is, what he thinks is correct, or what he commands that they need to follow - in every case, he might simply have been lying within statement itself, or some other aspect of his communication on which the statement relies.
The very simple pithy way to point this out is that where you say "hell and benevolence are mutually exclusive", one could just as easily decide that the benevolence was a lie, or that the whole religion is. Unreliability cuts all directions.
Please do note that none of this is actually an argument that my particular religion is true - if for no other reason besides it not being designed to acheive that goal and thus not doing it very well. What it *is* is an attempt (one I make all the time) to point out that some people really do believe things in a house-fire way, that they think they are real, knowable and exist despite their preferences in the same way you can't get the hope diamond to change color by thinking about it real hard.
If you were simply and clearly making an argument that the truth was unknowable and thus probably fake to a lesser or greater degree no matter what, and so it made sense just to edit the parts you didn't like, since it's all wrong anyway (which is sort of where you eventually got) I wouldn't have posted - I already know you are an agnostic, it's unremarkable to me. The nature of our disagreement on that front is that I actually believe there’s a specific knowable truth, which is a large part of why they have different names for our belief systems in the first place.
But you made a different argument at first - one that Christians (who, I assure you, often really do believe their religion is real and knowable) should feel very comfortable making those kinds of edits, the nature of their beliefs be damned. And that actually has huge implications for someone who house-fire believes - it changes the nature of their belief at it's most fundamental level, from something solid with authority to something maliable they can safely ignore when it suits them.
For your final alternatives 1 and 2 I can add a 3: Conclude that you know enough about God to be reasonably confident he is benevolent. When he tells you something that appears inconsistent with that conclude it is possible that what he tells you is true and you are making a mistake, also possible that it is a lie which a benevolent god would tell. In the particular example I gave it is plausible that a benevolent God would tell that lie, for the reason offered.
What reason is there to believe that benevolence and omnipotence imply never lying? Parents sometimes lie to their children for reasons that are at least defensible, perhaps correct, to keep the children from knowing something that would hurt them or lead them to incorrect conclusions, given their current limitations. Why shouldn't a God do the same thing?
Very nice, I'm an agnostic and you painted a fine picture of me. I just wanted to say that any image of God that I do have does not include one who could lie. But that is just my image.
I think there's a sense in which it's easy to mistake what I'm arguing as, specifically, an argument that my particular religion is right and that you should believe it. So when you encountered it, I think it's natural for you to basically say "But what are your specific beliefs, then? Can't we agree that they are wrong, and that you are wrong for holding them?"
But I'm not arguing that - I'm arguing a more fundamental point that has to do with the question of whether or not it *matters if something is true or false at all*.
Let's say there's a rock. It's a normal rock in all respects, and as such has various characteristics that I don't didn't determine - it's a certain color, a certain weight, has a certain mineral composition that in turn renders its X amount tough and Y amount hard. It's a rock, it exists. Just a normal rock. For the sake of this argument, we will say that this real, existing rock is entirely red except for one brown spot.
Now let's say that one day I decide that all rocks should be completely red, and that I'm profoundly disturbed by the idea that rocks might be any other color - I simply can't accept it. So I decide that the rock is *entirely* red, and has no brown spot. I explain to anyone who might listen how I came to that conclusion.
The rock, being real, is profoundly unaffected by all this. It continues being whatever color it was, serenely unconcerned about what's going in my head or essays.
Many people believe in god this way. They believe that god is an existing thing that actually exists, and they don't believe it in a way that requires a special carveout for "exists" that we only use for god and means "exists to the extent that he conforms with my preferences".
Note that *none* of this applies if the rock is imaginary. If the rock is imaginary, then your opinions on the rock do very much change what it is - it's your rock, one that you created; it exists to dance to your whims. If you were having a theoretical conversation about whether it would hurt if it were chucked at your head, you could just say "No, it wouldn't - I've imagined it as very soft indeed. And so it is; it is my imaginary rock - I am not it's actual human; it does not own me, I own it."
This is a difference of opinions regarding the way in which god exists that it's possible to have - that he either is or isn't a distinct thing. A god that exists in the way the rock exists has certain implications; a god that exists in the way the imaginary rock exists has another set of implications.
Another aspect that David's proposal interacts with is ideas of *knowability*. So now imagine that there's a box that is said to contain a rock. The box can never be opened, lifted, or shaken and as such the rock cannot be directly observed. Luckily (for some) the box has since antiquity been accompanied by a short certificate describing the contents of the box - one fist-sized rock, completely red save one brown spot.
Imagine there's a group of people who believe that certificate to be *reliable*. In doing so, they believe that the contents of the box are both knowable and known - that the box actually contains the rock. They think that if the box ever opens itself, it will contain a red rock with a brown spot about the size of a fist.
There is another group of people who believes the certificate is *not* reliable, but who carefully explain to the certificate-believers that despite this they are willing to accept that the box contains a rock. They also explain that, as a group, they have decided that *it doesn't make sense to them* that a red rock might have a brown spot (they explain that brown spots are gross), and that by simply deciding it doesn't have a spot, that it stopped having it. They have decided that it is soft - so it is. They have decided that it's the size of a thimble, and it is now.
The certificate believers are very careful to explain that while they don't believe the rock is under their command (who would say that?) and that it's definitely real (who would doubt it?) that it nonetheless corresponds to whatever they decided it is.
What I'm making here is not an argument that the certificate believers are right. I'm saying that the nature of a certificate-believer's and a rock-imaginer's beliefs are fundamentally different, and that David's proposal actually has a pretty big hidden ask: that people who believe in a god in the same way people in a rock begin to treat him as if he's imaginary.
Or that people who believe in god in the same way they might believe in boxed rock if they believed that a certificate describing the box's contents was genuine and reliable begin to act as if there's no reliable source of information about the box's contents at all, while still claiming to believe (now based on no information they believe reliable at all) that they still totally believe the rock to be real, to have certain characteristics just the same as they did before.
Whatever the appearances are, I'm not interested in arguing here that you or David should abandon your various religious beliefs and admit that mine are right. But accepting David's solution would require that I abandon mine and adopt his (agnosticism, a general assumption that the Bible is an unreliable discriptor of God,).
This might seem like a very specific nitpick, but I still I don't feel like it's unreasonable to really highlight what someone is saying when they make an argument that boils down to "I have a perfect solution to problems with your religion - switch to mine.".
My argument accepts the claim that God is good and argues from that. A good God would want people to go to Heaven quite aside from the incentive that expecting that provides. But his only reason to claim people are going to Hell is the incentive it provides, and that doesn't require him to actually carry out the threat.
I think the whole edifice is a mass of strategic lies, or fortunate errors: fine-tuned by evolutionary processes to confer advantage to believers. It formed the operating system for a civilization. Maybe we can construct a new OS based on reality someday, if we survive long-enough.
"a strategic lie" is all of religion as well.
Pretty good analysis David. The problem is that all mainstream Christian religions are false. The true Church is the Church of Jesus Christ, of Latter-day Saints, sometimes known as the Mormon Church. Any devoted fan of South Park understands that as it was plainly proclaimed as such my L. Ron Hubbard from a stage in Hell in one episode. Latter Day Saints do not believe in "Christian Hell", instead they believe in degrees of glory for all, somewhat similar to what CS Lewis enivisions in The Great Divorce, where all are happy where they are. Please consider studying my Church, it is the only one that makes sense. Earth is an incubator for those who will be gods in future worlds. You are a child of God, so you grow up to be a god.
My understanding of Hell is twofold:
First, nobody deserves Heaven. You can't deserve Heaven, it's too good for you, full of divine light. You'd find it to be a divinely tortuous experience, far worse than Hell, without divine intervention to make you good enough. And, with those versions of Christianity with purgatory, it still isn't enough on its own - you're still on Earth, your soul still will have impurities that will burn in the light; you need to be exposed to a lower dose of light for a while first to get you really good and ready.
Second, Hell is distance from God. It isn't eternal torment, excepting that existence without God is itself torment. (Also, plausibly, existing with all those other people, without God intervening, might be torment in itself.)
Then Christianity makes slightly more sense: You're opting in to divine intervention, for God to tinker with your soul to prepare you for purgatory. (Or, for those without purgatory, to just tinker with your soul to prepare you for Heaven). You don't have to agree to that! Your soul is yours, you can choose not to let God tinker with it, in which case you go to Hell as a mercy.
God has a credibility problem. No one knows what truly happens in the afterlife. If Hell truly exists, it seems only useful as a deterrent, and morally repugnant as anything more than a deterrent. If God is known to lie, then Hell seems very likely to be a lie. Of course the Old Testament God is quite morally repugnant, and likely delights in delivering His Wrath via Hell.
do you have a view on the scriptural case for hell? my (moderately informed, not deeply studied) impression is (a) it isn't mentioned all that often (b) it's never the point of the story, more used to illustrate the seriousness of the topic (c) the language used is more "humans being figurative" than "divine pronouncements of a specific place or actions that happen in that place" and finally that the popular image of hell is more Dante than anything else. to my mind, there isn't really a hell problem to be solved, at least not in a theological reckoning sense.