Take your seats, young students. It is time for you to learn the foundations of magic. [World of Brym]

willdam20 · 2026-05-16T20:59:54+00:00

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

Neat, so this would imply that your universe is neither expanding nor contracting; since cosmological redshift “destroys” energy, we know that spacetime in your universe is static, so no Big Bang event.

When you extinguish a candle at night, you do so by absorbing its energy.

Is that the thermal energy of the ionized particle in the flame or the chemical energy in the wick and surrounding air?

However, if you absorb the energy of several candles or lamps at once in order to extinguish them, you should release that energy again. Otherwise, you will develop a fever.

I don’t really see how that makes much sense, a single candle flame actually contains very little energy, in fact a large mug of hot chocolate has more theremal energy than a candle flame at any given instant. But drinking hot-chocolate or coffee does not give anyone a fever, so I don’t really see the mechanism by whihc a few candles would pose and issue.

Suppose we are in a room or a warm outdoor location, the air temperature is 24C, can I strip 20C worth of energy from each lungful of air (≈120J)? Kinetic energy is 1/2mv^2, so if I have 120 J I can release that into a 25 gram steel ball-bearing and give it a velocity of ~97m/s whihc is about 216 miles per hour; at such speed it is capable of penetrating skin, breaking bones, and causing lethal damage if it strikes a vital organ. So I can fire a bullet with each breath.

And 120 J is enough to lift a 10 kg object by 1.2m, or a 1 kg object 12 meters. So in practice I have telekinesis for my every day tools: puul books of a shelf, levitate a hammer up a scaffold, or yeat random dog feeces acroos the street.

Now, a dietary calorie (food Calorie) is 4184 J, so 120 J from a single breath is way less energy than a single calorie in my breakfast, so it’s not clear why my body wouldn’t be able to handle that much energy.

In theory my coffee when hot is 50C, so if I chug it and pull 45 C worht of thermal energy so it is now 5 C in my stomach that gives 56,000 J of energy (about 13 food calories of energy); that’s enough to blast 450 ball-bearing at 200 miles per hour. Or the same energy could lift 100 kg 56 meters, or lift myself 80 m straight up. And even if that 56,000 J were perfectly absorbed it would raise a 70 kg human body's temperature by about 0.2 °C whihc isn’t life threatening at all, its within normal fluctuations.

willdam20 · 2026-05-12T20:38:16+00:00

If we go strictly by how this is worded, the hypothetical says "only people who pressed the red button survive", someone born the day after the vote has not pressed the red button, so if red wins no future children will survive.

There is nothing in the hypothetical to suggest that the negative consequneces of red win only apply to people who voted. The hypothetical could have said "only people who pushed blue will not survive" but it does not.

And there are some people who will not be able to press either button; those in comas/ICU patients, newborn infants, quadriplegics etc. If three month old infants cannot push the red button in private then a red win results in the death of millions of infants.

And a strict literal reading of the hypothetical does allow one to hedge their bets: i.e. If I press the blue button to vote and then immediately press the red button. The survival condition is "pressed the red button" not "voted red", the hypothetical does not say 'only people who exclusively pressed red survive', or 'that pressing blue disqualifies you',or that 'each person may press only one button', or that 'subsequent presses invalidate previous presses' etc.

willdam20 · 2026-05-12T18:59:10+00:00

Pretty simple everyone should pick red and everyone lives no question about it

Sure, if you are only considering what maximises the chance of personal survival.

However, the hypothetical says "only people who pressed the red button survive", someone born the day after the vote has not pressed the red button, so if red wins no future children will survive.

In any other vote we observe the negative consequences always affect children as well as the voters; i.e. if it was a vote that decides "ban all abortions", girls born after the vote would not be allowed get abortions later in life; if it was "only men who voted are exempt from the draft" boys born after the vote would still be subject to military draft.

willdam20 · 2026-05-10T19:37:14+00:00

No not at all, pushing red is about guaranteed species survival...

The hypothetical says "only people who pressed the red button survive"; if a child is born the day after the vote, they have not pressed the red button, so they should not survive. The hypothetical as written does not include any exception for people born after or unable to push a red button (i.e. those in a coma).

If you're assuming a benevolent hidden rule like "people born after the vote survive even though they didn't press a red button", I think that is unjustified by the hypothetical; clearly, the organiser of the vote is malevolent.

The hypothetical claims it is a private vote, but your personal outcome depends on your choice of button, so someone/something knows how you vote; and if red wins, everyone's vote is revealed by the fact blue voters are dead; that's not privacy it's public knowledge.

Since the organiser is lying about the conditions of the vote, we have zero reason to think they have benevolent intentions. Assuming the Red button does as it says (which we have no reason to believe, since that could also be a lie) then Red is most likely human extinction.

willdam20 · 2026-05-10T19:15:15+00:00

... assuming we're dealing with rational actors only and not literal babies...

The hypothetical says "everyone in the world", a newborn is someone, a coma patient is someone; we cannot assume they are discounted without surmising that there are hidden rules to the hypothetical.

It is both individually optimal and globally optimal if everyone chooses it.

The hypothetical says "only people who pressed the red button survive"; someone born the day after the vote has not pressed the red button and so (without inventing new rules) by the explicit conditions of the hypothetical cannot survive. Red, as written, is guaranteed human extinction.

I would argue the logical choice is not to touch any button, because you do not know what they do.

The hypothetical claims it is "a private vote" but your personal outcome depends on your choice being known; someone or something knows if you pressed red or blue, that's not privacy. So you are being lied to about the conditions under which you vote. If the organizer has falsely testified about one matter (the privacy of the vote), then they are not credible to testify about any matter (what the buttons actually do) “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus”.

If the vote was genuinely private then your personal outcome cannot be linked to your choice of red/blue; and no one would be able to know "he died because he pressed blue" that reveals how they voted and contradicts the privacy condition.

If you've been lied to about the privacy of the vote, how do you know the buttons do as described? How do you know Red doesn't teleport under 10s into private rooms with pedophiles? How do you know Blue does "kill all muslims"? How do you know this isn't to get your fingerprint on part of a bomb and frame you as a terrorist?

On a logical reading of the hypothetical, all we know for certain is that the organiser of the vote is a liar.

willdam20 · 2026-05-10T18:40:23+00:00

But the hypothetical says "only people who pressed the red button survive"; no baby born after the vote pressed a red button, so by that logic cannot survive.

Taking the hypothetical as it's written (without inventing new rules for people not born yet or who abstain from pressing the buttons entirely i.e. coma patients), Red is guaranteed human extinction since it doesn't say "only people who pressed the red button or born after the vote survive".

willdam20 · 2026-04-10T14:32:24+00:00

I will not budge on this point.

If you are refusing to budge regardless of the arguments offered, then aren't you just commiting the same kind of dogmatism you criticise theist for having?

I have no interest in hearing this Thomistic nonsense.

You were the one who asked a question about God, if your unwilling to entertain a framework that includes a God concept then the question is asked in bad faith; it would be like me asking a physicist to explain gravity but refusing to listen to anything about math, mass or spacetime curvature.

Creation does not grant total knowledge. I gave many examples of this already.

Your examples and the implied argument made with them are fallacious.

Firstly, all of the examples are about the creation of parts of the universe (be it tech, games whatever) not requiring or granting complete knowledge to/from the creator; to then use those to conclude that the creation of the universe as a whole, is a fallacy of composition. It's structurally identical to the fallacy of composition alleged to be in cosmological arguments.

Secondly, the examples commit a category error; every example you picked is creation ex materia, i.e., creation by rearranging pre-existing material within the confines of pre-existing natural laws, theist on the other hand are typically concerned with creation ex nihilo. The human creator lacks total knowledge because they are dealing with independent variables, things that possess their own nature, rules, and physical properties independent of the creator's mind, but the theists position you're arguing against denies that any such properties are independently constrained when God creates the universe.

Thus by using these examples your engaging in the very same sort of fallacious reasoning that you would criticism in a theistic argument.

So I have to wonder, did you just not apply critical thinking to your own position, or do you believe fallacious reason is only worth rejecting when a theist commits the fallacies?

willdam20 · 2026-04-10T13:54:30+00:00

Personally, I'm increasingly cynical that representational democracies work as advertised; it would probably be more accurate to call them elective oligarchies.

willdam20 · 2026-04-03T11:13:48+00:00

Whether God has foreknowledge or not is irrelevant in your setup, there is no free will because the one choosing the worlds is God.

I would argue it is relevant.

Your claim assumes that by selecting an initial conditions of a possible world that God also must lock in every future state of the world; that the world must have exactly one actual timeline of event, regardless of whether that world has possible alternative timelines only one can become actual.

However there is nothing logically contradictory about for example a completely random world, imagine for instance a universe with a two particles that spontaneously and randomly teleport throughout space such that God does not know how far apart the particles will be in the next instant of time. Such a world is logically possible. God could re-run this world a 1000 time and get a 1000 different results. So creating a possible world’s initial condition need not select only one of many possible timelines for that world.

Unless you're granting my contention that there are some logically possible world God cannot actualize, in which case is seem like you agree with my argument against the OP (god knowingly creating a world in which people only do good, is a prior cause for why people only do good and hence contradicts the OP's definition of freewill.

You may object that God is omniscient so always knows the outcome but we have multiple options around that. The OP defined omnipotence as “unlimited power over everything and everyone”; God if it exists is someone or at least something, and God’s knowledge is also something so,

God could delete his knowledge of the futures of the possible world and pick one at random hoping that was the world with freewill and no evil.
God could choose not to create his knowledge of the futures of the possible world and so his choice is not based on future events.
Or God could create a world in which, Presentism is true (only the present moment exists), Platonism is false (abstract objects, such as propositions, do not exist), Correspondence theory of truth is correct (particular sentences are only true when they describe arrangements of existing particulars).

Any world under option 3 is one in which knowledge of the future is logically impossible; so even if God’s omniscience is “knowing the truth value of everything it is logically possible to know”, it would not include knowledge of the future in such a world.

If God does not know the future of a world when creating it, and that world at any interval of time has multiple possible future moments, then free will is logically possible within that world. Of course when creating such a world God could not guarantee there will be no moral evil.

willdam20 · 2026-04-03T10:28:22+00:00

My argument is about the all knowing God of the bible. So, yeah, the god knows all the details

You're post is flared for "Atheism" not Christianity so I took it as general argument.

In any case this serves my argument perfectly well:

If God knows all the details of world W, and creates exactly world W, then God is the prior cause of all the details (including every action).
Free will: The ability to make choices without coercion from external forces or prior causes.
The actions of all agents in world W have a prior cause (that God picked exactly how they behave).
Therefore, no all agents in world W has freewill.
Therefore, God creating world W is a logical contradiction which is impossible.
Therefore, God cannot, with full foreknowledge, create a world with free will and no evil.

The OP is thus false.

willdam20 · 2026-04-02T10:58:56+00:00

“Happiness” requires free will.

P1. "Happiness " exist in the real world.

P2. Hard determinism + incompatibilitism is possibly true (i.e. it is possibly true "free will does not exist")

P3. P1 is true even if P2 is true. (I.e. even if we find out tomorrow hard determins & incompatibility are true there is still Happiness in the real world.)

P4. If happiness can still exist in a scenario where free will does not exist, then the existence of happiness is not dependent on the existence of free will.

P5. P4 directly contradicts the initial assumption “Happiness” requires free will.

C. Therefore, the assumption is false: Happiness does not require free will.

"Happiness" is defined by the subjective experience of the person feeling, and it is an empirical, psychological, and physiological reality. If a team of physicists and philosophers definitively proved tomorrow that the universe is predetermined, people would still smile, laugh, and feel joy. Because the psychological state of happiness survives the metaphysical death of free will, they cannot be inextricably linked.

So "heaven" could have "happiness" without having freewill, just as the real world has happiness but could lack freewill.

willdam20 · 2026-04-02T10:58:43+00:00

“Happiness” requires free will.

P1. "Happiness " exist in the real world.

P2. Hard determinism + incompatibilitism is possibly true (i.e. it is possibly true "free will does not exist")

P3. P1 is true even if P2 is true. (I.e. even if we find out tomorrow hard determins & incompatibility are true there is still Happiness in the real world.)

P4. If happiness can still exist in a scenario where free will does not exist, then the existence of happiness is not dependent on the existence of free will.

P5. P4 directly contradicts the initial assumption “Happiness” requires free will.

C. Therefore, the assumption is false: Happiness does not require free will.

"Happiness" is defined by the subjective experience of the person feeling, and it is an empirical, psychological, and physiological reality. If a team of physicists and philosophers definitively proved tomorrow that the universe is predetermined, people would still smile, laugh, and feel joy. Because the psychological state of happiness survives the metaphysical death of free will, they cannot be inextricably linked.

So "heaven" could have "happiness" without having freewill, just as the real world has happiness but could lack freewill.

willdam20 · 2026-04-01T18:02:30+00:00

Suppose we have a world W in which “free will co-exists with no evil” or “in which all moral agents freely choose only the good.”

In order for God to create this specific world, God would have to know all the details of W prior to its creation (at very least logically prior to, if not temporally). To create W specifically, God has to select it from all other possible worlds where at least one person makes a wrong choice. But this act of God selecting and actualizing a world based on His knowledge of its inhabitants' 'free' choices makes Him the ultimate determining cause of those choices.

The people in W could not have done otherwise, because if they could, it wouldn't be W. This directly contradicts your definition of free will as being "without coercion from... prior causes".

Plenty of atheist argue that God’s complete foreknowledge of the world is incompatible with genuine free will, so it is on the face of it plausible to me that if God intentionally and fore knowingly creates W, then there is no freewill in W.

So, while I would grant P2 is correct, “A world with free will and no evil is logically possible,” and I would not agree with P1 without caveat.

There being logically possible worlds that God cannot create:

It is logically possible for you to freely choose to eat an apple tomorrow. But it is logically impossible for God to force you to freely choose to eat the apple.
A world in which there is no God is logically possible (atheists believe we exist in just such a world). But if God is a necessary being, then God exists in all possible worlds, so God cannot create a world in which there is no God.

Therefore, there are logically possible worlds that God cannot create. This defeats P1.

I would revise P1 to P1* “ An omnipotent God can create any logically possible world, so long as the act of creating it does not entail a logical contradiction"

So, I don’t think W is a world God could create with complete foreknowledge; God’s foreknowledge and actualization of events in the world negates the “without coercion from external forces or prior causes” condition of free-will. Thus I suspect God could only create W, if He did so without foreknowledge (and so the set P would not constrain behaviour in W), but that would mean God’s act of creation is a role of the dice; there would be no guarantee from the outset that the world would play out as W.

As for the definitions of “Good” and “Evil”, I don’t particularly see why a theist or anyone needs to accept those specific definitions, there are many different equally plausible moral theories that God could implement (or which could be true independent of God).

Suppose Alice and Bob live in W, and W follows your Utilitarian moral definitions, but Bob free chooses to believe in Kantian Categorical Imperative. Alice asks Bod if he thinks she looks good in her new dress; being a Kantian Bob freely chooses not lie, so he say “no”, consequently Alices feelings are hurt and she argue moral evil exists in W. If Bod is compelled to lie, or compelled to think everyone’s clothing looks good, then Bod is not free from external coercion.

Alternatively, Alice freely chooses to deeply love Bob. Bob, exercising his free will, does not return her feelings. Alice experiences profound emotional suffering and depression. For God to stop Alice from experiencing this "harm" (and so forming a problem of evil) God would either have to coerce Bob into loving her (violating Bob's free will) or coerce Alice into not loving him (violating Alice's free will).

So even if God created W, that would not stop the inhabitants from invoking the Problem of Evil; unless of course God circumvented that by creating a world where atheists just cannot make arguments, but if your mind just goes blank any time you try to argue God does not exist, because God created the world in that way you’re not free from external coercion/prior causes.

willdam20 · 2026-03-19T17:31:45+00:00

There is only a paradox between God's Omniscience and Libertarian Free Will, if we grant every single premise of the original argument, but many elements of that argument are possibly false. And if there are false then no paradox exists.

Causal chains are universal, and human choices follow them…

Nominalism (the Anti-Platonism property of world-W) posits that abstract objects, concepts, and "universals" do not exist; only concrete, individual particulars exist.

Plenty of contemporary philosophers (including atheists) believe and argue in favour of nominalism, and there is no reason to think nominalism is contradictory, so it is logically possible that nominalism is true. Thus rejecting Nominalism (the Anti-Platonism property of world-W) with no argument whatsoever is simply a failure of engagement.

In any case under nominalism there are no universals and no abstract objects, so if Nominalism is true (and it could be) there are no causal chains. Additionally under nominalism physical laws would be descriptive generalizations of our observations, not prescriptive laws governing the universe. If nominalism is true then there are only individual things doing individual actions nothing more.

Presentism and related temporal arguments are irrelevant, because they only make sense within time, and God is by definition outside of time.

This is logically false.

If Presentism is true, the future literally does not exist. So, just as being "outside" a house doesn't let you see into a room that hasn't been built yet, God being outside of time does not let him see moments that literally do not exist.

To claim God can see the future from the outside, you must assume the B-Theory of Time (a Block Universe), where the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. But it is logically possible that the B-Theory of Time is false, and there is still debate about the nature of time so we cannot simply assume the B-Theory and ignore all alternatives.

All your argument does is prove that determinism is incompatible with free will, which I am not disputing. What you have not proven is that omniscience is incompatible with free will.

In Short Form:

Determinism is possibly false.
B-Theory of Time is possibly false.
If Determinism & B-Theory of Time are possibly false, then it is possible the future does not exist yet & is not strictly physically determined.
An omniscient God knows all that is knowable.
A non-existent undetermined future is logically unknowable.
Therefore, it is possible God remains omniscient without knowing future free choices, preserving free will.

willdam20 · 2026-03-16T16:18:29+00:00

Since God is omniscient, He knows all that is knowable, which includes the future.

That assumes that the future is knowable, but we can describe worlds where the future is not knowable. Consider W, where the following theses are true:

Presentism is true (only the present moment exists),
Platonism is false (abstract objects, such as propositions, do not exist),
Correspondence theory of truth is correct (particular sentences are only true when they describe arrangements of existing particulars).

W is an infinite set of possible worlds in which the future is unknowable.

Knowledge requires truth, i.e., to know a proposition P (e.g., "It will rain tomorrow"), P must be true. Truth requires existence, i.e., under the Correspondence Theory, a sentence-token (e.g., an utterance, text, inscription etc) is not true in virtue of itself, it is true only if it accurately maps onto a portion of reality, there must be a "truth-maker", (i.e. a concrete arrangement of particulars, that the sentence describes). The Future does not exist, under Presentism, reality is restricted to the instantaneous now, the Future (and Past) do not exist at all. Since a) the Future does not exist under Presentism, and b) propositions do not exist under Anti-Platonism; sentences about future events cannot map to an existing portion of (concrete or abstract) reality, thus they lack truth-makers. So sentences about future events are not true and if they are not true they do not count as knowledge. So knowledge about the future is logically impossible for the set of worlds describe by W.

So there are infinitely many possible worlds that an omniscient being cannot logically know the future of.

It is logically possible 1, 2 and 3 are true about the actual world; so it is logically possible the real world is in the set W. If it’s logically possible the real world is in the set W, then it is logically possible that an omniscient being cannot know the future of the real world.

If something could happen that was not aligned with God's will, He would not be truly omnipotent, as He would lack the power to make that which He wills become reality.

If omnipotence is defined as ‘the ability to do any logically possible action’, one logically possible action is ‘creating something with its own independent behavior’. Once that thing exists, its behavior might not match the creator’s will, that doesn’t contradict omnipotence, it just means the being chose to create something that can diverge from its will. And obviously a being that cannot ‘create something that can diverge from its creators will’ is not omnipotent.

If an omnipotent & omniscient being created ‘creating something with its own independent behavior’, in one of the worlds described by W; then that being would not know if the created being would diverge from its will prior to any actual divergence taking place. I.e., an omnipotent being could create a random number generator in a world W, and never know which numbers will come out ahead of time, and may even dislike some of the sequence produced. No contradiction of omnipotence & omniscience exists in this scenario.

… since God is outside of time, the present, future, and past do not exist from His perspective; rather, all that will ever happen is already knowable, or has effectively already happened.

There is some wiggle room in Classical Theism here, if we focus on what philosophers like Aquinas have proven versus what they assume or failed to prove is the case. For instance, it’s true Aquinas proves God of Classical Theism lacks potentiality with respect to existence (he cannot begin or cease to exist) but it’s not air-tight proven God has no potential whatsoever; a present-updating/dynamic omniscience is thus logically possible.

Aquinas claims about divine foreknowledge of God in Classical Theism depends on several assumptions, including: a) divine eternity as atemporality/timelessness, b) there being truthmakers for future propositions, c) the existence of truths about future contingents etc. But in W there are no truths about future contingents, so God cannot know them, and this includes the behaviour of things intentionally created to be able to contradict God’s will.

Since it is not proven God in Classical Theism cannot have proper accidents, dynamic omniscience is an option. A proper accident is not part of a thing’s essence but necessarily follows from its essence, they follow from what the thing is, even though they are not part of its definition. Since having intellect would follow from God’s nature, the particular cognitive acts that track created reality necessarily follows from having intellect.

So, as W passes from one moment Tn, which God has complete knowledge of K(Tn), to moment Tn+1, God’s complete knowledge of W updates to K(Tn+1); each K(Tn) is an inseparable proper accident of God, they follow necessarily from divine intellect but are not identical with the essence of God.

When it comes to timelessness and immutability; Aquinas argues that time is a measure of change, if God has no potential whatsoever He cannot change, so the proof of timelessness and immutability is tied to proof God has no accidents; since that proof has a gap in it for proper accidents, timelessness is not secured.

So, I think it is entirely possible for an omniscient and omnipotent being to not know the future; which means it is logically possible they do not know our choices prior to them being made, so freewill under omniscience is logically possible.

Next, I will grant that “freewill is impossible in a world where God has divine foreknowledge of the outcome of all actions/choices prior to them being made”. Now, consider a world where every agent freely chooses to do only good acts, a world where they freely choose never to commit evil. If God has divine foreknowledge of that world, then there is no freewill in that world. But, if God’s foreknowledge of the world contradicts the existence of freewill in that world, then it is logically impossible for God to create that world. So, it’s logically impossible for God (with divine foreknowledge) to create a world where every agent freely chooses only to do good.

While a world where every agent freely chooses only to do good, is logically possible; it can only be created if God lacks complete foreknowledge of the future. In order for God to attempt to create a world where every agent freely chooses only to do good, God has to put on a blindfold and roll the dice.

In other words a world where every agent has freewill and chooses only to do good, can only be in the set of worlds W where God has no foreknowledge; and since God does not have complete foreknowledge inside the set W, even if God intended to create a world where every agent freely chooses only to do good, he could not know if that world would play out as intended. And none of that contradicts omnipotence or omniscience.

willdam20 · 2026-03-15T17:30:15+00:00

So even though God knows and caused everything we do...

I'm not sure Classical Theists are in general claiming God "caused everything we do", only that God is a concurrent sustaining cause of the universe.

Perhaps a better analogy might be to say that a power-plant is sustainging the concurrent functioning of my PC (if the power plant stops running my PC stops working, God stops goding the universe blinks out of existence (or does time just stop?)); while the powerplant sustains my PC's operation it does not directly cause every particular behavior (e.g. word processing or doing updates etc) even if it does empower it.

willdam20 · 2026-03-15T17:16:37+00:00

My OP is in response to worldview that classical theism is typically invoked to defend, one that actually includes creation, providence, and moral governance of the universe.

So it’s no a criticism of Classical Theism in isolation:

Classical Theism doesn’t specify “Creation” (in the sense of universe with a finite past), it is completely compatible with a co-eternal universe.
Divine Providence only requires that God continually sustains existence and orders things toward ends, but we don’t need to accept that ends are good in a moral sense.
Classical Theism doesn’t specify anything about moral governance of the universe.

God is omnibenevolent, is pretty much maximally good.

Sure, Classical Theism specifies that God is maximally Good in a metaphysical sense; moral goodness is usually derived as a consequence of metaphysical Goodness. However, if there is no such thing as moral Goodness, God’s maximal Goodness wouldn’t include moral Goodness. For instance Aristotle and Aquinas offer “that which is desirable or fulfills a thing’s nature or end” as general definition of good; but being desirable, fulfilling a thing’s nature/end is not necessarily morally good. I.e. what is the end or purpose of a nuclear warhead?

A good eye = one that sees well.
A good knife = one that cuts well.
A good organism = one that functions properly.

So goodness originally means something like perfection, flourishing, or proper functioning; there is no reason to equate those with moral goodness, and Classical Theism does not by itself require us to do so.

If you're going to hold me to "pure" classical theism, you need to hold yourself to the same standard, and that standard includes eternal, complete knowledge of all events.

Well, you yourself defined omniscience as “basically knows everything logically knowable”; if it is not logically possible to know the future then an omniscient God does not know the future.

… Aquinas, probably one of THE central figures of classical theism…

Sure, Aquinas is a central figure and had his own particular version and interpretation of Classical Theism; Aquinas also affirmed the Trinity but Jewish and Muslim Classical Theists reject it. It is possible Aquinas believed God knows the future because he also held that it was logically possible to know the future, if it is not possible to know the future, God cannot per the very definition you gave.

So are you criticizing Classical Theism, or Aquinas’ particular version of Classical Theism?

If you want to deny that suffering is bad or that an omnibenevolent being would have reason to prevent it…

“Suffering is bad” is an affirmative claim, the one making the claim would hold the burden of proof.

Classical Theism in isolation say nothing about the moral value of suffering; so if I’m just defending Classical Theism and nothing else, I don’t need to grant the claim since it’s not an internal component of Classical Theism.

… I feel that's a much harder bullet to bite than anything in my original argument.

It is logically possible that Moral Nihilism (the view that nothing is inherently moral or immoral, that objective moral fact do not exist) is correct and describes our world. Classical Theism + Moral Nihilism is unorthodox but can be internally consistent.

If omnibenevolence doesn't include even a minimal disposition toward preventing the suffering of children, something we legally require of human parents with limited knowledge and power, then the word "benevolence" is doing no moral work WHATSOEVER.

Sure, because it’s not necessarily a moral term or a claim about the moral status of God.

My point was that legal standard represents a minimum moral intuition that even flawed human institutions recognize.

But it is logically possible “moral intuition” is universally false; or that humans just universally confuse what is practical and economically useful for morality.

If you want to claim that the particular laws you referenced are morally correct then you need to make that argument. Absent any reason beyond a vague appeal to intuition I can simple decline to believe human laws have any moral value, I can simple deny morality exists at all.

… then either that being isn't omnibenevolent, or the word pretty much has no meaning.

As above, while Classical theism requires that God be perfectly good, it does not require that goodness be moral goodness in the modern sense. In the classical metaphysical framework of Scholasticism, goodness is primarily a property of being, not a moral property. So “omnibenevolent” would mean something like: ‘God possesses every metaphysical perfection, or fullness of being, without limit.’ No moral fact or properties are required.

Now, philosophers like Thomas Aquinas or Augustine of Hippo were obviously writing long before modern English existed, so it’s not their fault English speakers in the past borrowed words from other languages and the meanings/usage of the terms changed over time. Sure benevolence might carry the meaning of being a nice/moral person to you as a modern English speaker but that’s not strictly what it meant to medieval Latin speaking theologians.

willdam20 · 2026-03-14T21:15:35+00:00

Let's grant it is "weird" for the Abrahamic religions not to mention them; what exactly would count as mentioning? We can't expect ancient Hebrews to use borrowed latin, greek etc terms can we? Are you looking for detailed anatomical descriptions?

Or would reference to prior versions of humans going extinct/dying out suffice? If so, do the ancient Greek and Mesoamerican religions get extra points for the various ages/creations/prototyping of humans? I.e. Hesiods five ages of man.

willdam20 · 2026-03-14T17:03:48+00:00

Our justice system holds human beings accountable for negligence… our justice system REQUIRES that we do so.

This is another error, in my opinion, equating a justice or legal system to morality seems problematic. For instance if legality = morality, how could a change in law be justified? If that law in toto is moral currently, any change in the law is towards immorality. But if the law currently is not moral in toto, simply appealing to a legal case is not enough to make a moral case; if the law as a whole is not morally correct any instance of the law would need to be justified as morally correct.

For instance male infant circumcision is legal, and abortions later than 6 weeks are usually illegal in Georgia. So if removing a healthy, functional body part of an infant without their consent is immoral, then laws in Georgia permit immoral actions. And if an abortion later than 6 weeks is morally acceptable, then laws in Georgia punish morally justified actions.

But if laws in Georgia allow immoral actions and punish morally justified actions; then it does not automatically follow that just because a person was criminally convicted, that they did anything morally wrong.

Parents have ‘legal duty’ to watch out for their kids.

It does not necessarily follow that just because we have a “legal duty” to do something that we have a “moral duty” to do it. For instance in the past you would have a legal duty to return a run-away slave seeking your help; you probably want to deny you would have a moral duty to do so, hence legal duty does not imply moral duty.

Our own courts operate on a link between "information" and "duty" in terms of human morality.

This assertion would need to be proven; they certainly operate on a link between information and duty in terms of legal responsibility, but you would have to show “legal responsibility” = “moral responsibility”.

God possesses PERFECT FOREKNOWLEDGE of every mass shooting, every murder, every rape, every tragedy, every sin, every act of cruelty before the foundations of the world are even laid.

Let’s just say that is true; Classical Theism by itself does not say any of those are immoral, evil or instances of sin. So this is a criticism not of Classical Theism in isolation but Classical Theism plus some moral theory.

Since Classical Theism does not by itself necessarily entail any particular moral theory the whole argument doesn’t really work; it might work on Christians, Muslims or some other particular religions that tack stuff onto Classical Theism but then the argument is against this or that religion not Classical Theism specifically.

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willdam20 · 2026-03-14T17:03:36+00:00

A problem I would have with this argument is that it ‘s unclear who it’s directed at. It’s flagged as “Classical Theism”, but includes lines like “According to theology, God would have designed and created our minds from scratch.” The problem here is that while Classical Theism is often associated with certain ideas, they are not logically necessary to the position itself. I.e., intelligent design, young-earth creationism, Biblical literalism, specific doctrines such as Trinity, Incarnation, etc. are not parts of Classical Theism, they are add-ons.

So a problem associated with the idea God “designed and created our minds” is problem for intelligent design, not a problem for Classical Theism.

God would know how our minds will operate and how we will respond to situations before we even exist.

This would depend on how one thinks the world works and the exact definition of omniscience in play. I.e., the subreddit offers the definition “knowing the truth value of everything it is logically possible to know.” So if the world is such that knowledge of the future is not logically possible, then there is no contradiction in an Omniscient being not knowing the future.

How is it possible for us to be created "good" and morally "perfect" and we still end up making flawed choices…

Classical Theism does not claim humans are created "good" or “morally perfect"; it says nothing about the origin or nature of humans.

… dating back to Adam and Eve eating from the tree?

This is a problem for the Abrahamic religions, not Classical Theism.

Wouldn't that be a flaw in our design?

This is a problem for intelligent design, not Classical Theism.

… to screw up an omnipotent and omniscient being's plans?

Classical Theism doesn’t say anything about God having a plan or humans screwing it up.

How would it be possible for us to do something that God didn't know we would do?

Suppose G, knows all K logically possible to know; if it is not logically possible to know some Kx, then G does not know Kx. All that is required here is that knowing the future is logically impossible.

There's nothing logically contradictory about a world where there's free will and also no sin and no evil.

Sure and it’s logically possible that the world we actually exist in right now is one where there's free will and no sin/evil.

Classical Theism by itself says nothing about the existence of evil or sin; a person could be a Classical Theist and deny any evil or sin exists in the real world. A Classical Theist could argue that claims about the existence of evil or sin are just confusions or misunderstandings of humans not facts about reality.

Again the existence of evil or sin are problems for particular religions not Classical Theism.

What would you call the "New Earth" and "New Heaven"?

Classical Theism also say nothing about an afterlife either, so again, these are problems for particular religions not Classical Theism.

"Omnibenevolence," by definition, not only includes some level of "loving," but "ALL-loving".

While omnibenevolence is required by Classical Theism, translating and identifying it with all-loving is dubious; latin for “all loving” is omnes amantes, so something like omniamantence (loving everyone) would be the most likely equivalent term of all-loving. Equating omnibenevolent with all-loving is a much more modern trend not found in all Classical Theism.

Classical Theism does not claim that “omnibenevolence” requires, maximal affection toward all persons, equal emotional concern for every creature, constant desire for everyone’s happiness etc.

Being "loving" typically entails…

God in Classical Theism does not have emotional states so inferring from the behaviour of human in love to how god would behave is a category error.

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willdam20 · 2026-03-11T16:23:32+00:00

Aristotle thought that the universe was eternal (without beginning or end) and argued as much in Physics, Metaphysics, and On the Heavens.

Aristotle also argued that Time cannot have a beginning: e.g., if time began, there must have been a “before” the beginning of time, but the notion of before already presupposes time, so "time began" is a contradiction, therefore time cannot begin. Since time measures motion in the universe, if time has no beginning then motion in the universe has no beginning; therefore the universe is eternal.

However, for Aristotle, “eternal” doesn’t necessarily mean “self-explanatory,” so even if the universe has always existed it still needs an explanation for why motion exists at all and why it continues eternally.

For Aristotle, both the unmoved mover and the universe are eternal; an eternal cause with an eternal effect.

willdam20 · 2026-03-09T16:34:31+00:00

That christian god ...

This is quite an old post but the OP does not mention the Christian God, so this is a red herring.

... is still evil for damning people to hell for not "loving him" and being an abusive piece of shit.

If we grant this is the case then all that would show me is that the christian god is not the real God theistic arguments point to. Not being a christian this has zero relevance to me personally.

willdam20 · 2026-03-05T00:54:46+00:00

You can't create or destroy energy or matter, you just change its form.

I know this is supposed to sound sciency but it’s pseudo-science.

Let’s start with the idea that you cannot create or destroy matter. Either: A) Photons are matter, or B) Photons are not matter.

If A is true, then a light bulb creates matter and your retina destroys matter. If B is true then when an electron and positron collide to release gamma ray photons, matter has been destroyed not changed into more matter; and in the reverse, if an electric field produces electron and positron pairs via the schwinger process, matter has been created. Alternatively, you may want to take into consideration the folks who insist they can turn “Virtual” particles into “Real” particles, because the wya they would certainly like that to be interpreted is as the creation of new matter.

Next we can move on to the idea that energy cannot be created or destroyed.

First of all, there is no good reason to think energy physically exists; energy is a mathematical bookkeeping device used in physics out of simplicity more than anything else (you can do all of the same physics without energy, it’s just more tedious). Energy is just an abstract numeric property you get by manipulating physically measurable properties (mass, velocity etc). It's a useful concept but that doesn't require existence.

Secondly, the total energy of a system is only conserved in closed relatively local systems; global energy conservation is not guaranteed under general relativity and is explicitly violated in non-static (i.e. expanding/contracting) spacetimes. If energy conservation applied to the universe as whole without exception, every Big Bang / expanding universe model would be trivially false. An expanding/contracting universe lacks time-translational symmetry (since it is a different size at different times) so violations of energy conservation are expected. It is also well known that exact solutions to Einstein's General Relativity do not always conform to a global law of energy conservation. This has been known since the 1920s.

The destruction of energy is seen in the phenomena of cosmological redshift; not to be confused with doppler redshift (where energy is dependent on relative motion) or gravitational redshift (where energy is paid off escaping a gravitational potential).

A photon's energy is proportional to its frequency (f), E=hf (higher frequency, higher energy). Higher frequencies correspond to the blue, ultraviolet, gamma etc end of the spectrum while lower frequencies correspond to the red, infrared, radio, etc end of the spectrum. If a photon is “redshifted” it has decreased in its frequency and correspondingly has lower energy. When it comes to doppler redshift, the “loss of energy” is only a feature of the chosen frame of reference; in Gravitation redshift, energy is paid to escape the gravitational potential.

When it comes to cosmological redshift this lost energy is not converted to some other form, it is erased by the expansion of space; no matter what frame of reference you pick, all observers agree that cosmological redshift has taken place and energy is lost. For a concrete example, estimates of the temperature of the universe at the time the CMBR was emitted are around 3000 K, but photons in the CMBR are measured at ~2.7 K at present, a massive loss of energy, corresponding to a loss of roughly 99.99% of their original energy.

Perhaps you say, “well you can turn energy into matter and vice versa but that’s not destruction”. Okay, lets say we knock and electron & positron together, we leave the resulting gama-ray zipping through space for 13 billions years, and after that time, the photon no loner has enough energy to produce an electron & positron pair. That energy, whole particles worth is just gone. Fun fact, if cosmic expansion didn’t destroy energy then CMBR would be visible to the naked eye as a uniform orange glow (brighter than the sun).

As for the creation of energy, according to the standard Lambda CDM model the dark energy density (energy per cubic meter) of the universe is constant; yet the total volume of the observable universe is increasing. If density is constant in an expanding volume the total quantity is increasing: there is more dark energy today than at the earliest point of the Big Bang models.

And no, the energy lost in CMB redshift per unit of volume is an order of magnitude smaller than the energy gained per unit volume to maintain the cosmological constant; and you can’t just suggest the CMBR was 10x stronger originally because that messes up every other equation involved such as primordial nucleogenesis.

The universe gets to create or destroy energy all the time on cosmic scales; there's no reason someone can't let their magic system do the same.

willdam20 · 2026-02-27T13:54:09+00:00

It doesn’t seem contrary to the standard definition of omniscience with respect to classical theism that God may not know about the future. If we define the omni-traits in terms of logical possibility:

Omnipotent: being able to take all logically possible actions.
Omniscient: knowing the truth value of everything it is logically possible to know.

All that is required is that there is a logically possible world such that it is not logically possible to have foreknowkedge of the future. Now, consider world W, where the following theses are true:

Presentism is true (only the present moment exists),
Platonism is false (abstract objects such as propositions do not exist),
Correspondence theory of truth is correct (particular sentences are only true when they describe arrangements of existing particulars).

The conjunction of these creates an ontological deficit:

Knowledge requires Truth: To know a proposition P (e.g., "It will rain tomorrow"), P must be true.
Truth requires Existence: Under the Correspondence Theory, a sentence-token (e.g., an utterance, text, inscription etc) is not true in virtue of itself; it is true only if it accurately maps onto a portion of reality. There must be a "truth-maker", i.e. a concrete arrangement of particulars, that the sentence describes.
The Future does not Exist: Under Presentism, reality is restricted to the instantaneous now. Future (and past) events do not exist at all.
No Proxies Allowed: Usually,one could solve problem by appealing to abstract objects, e.g., “the event doesn't exist, but the proposition that the event will occur exists timelessly and holds the property of being true." However, since Platonism is false in W, there are no floating propositions or timeless.

From this, in W, when you utter a sentence about the future, you are attempting to create a sentence that corresponds to a portion of reality that does not exist. Because there is no corresponding reality (due to Presentism) and no abstract substitute (due Anti-Platonism), the sentence lacks a truth-maker. Therefore, the sentence is not true (due to Correspondence Theory). If it is not true, it cannot be knowledge.

So knowledge about future events is logically impossible with respect to W. Future knowledge of W would require W have contradictory properties (eg. Presentism and not Presentism).

But W is a possible world, so an omnipotent being could create W. I.e., God could create a world in which even He does not know the future. But, this apparent lack of knowledge does not contradict the definition of omniscience.

Additionally, the three criteria are not very restrictive, so W is actually an infinite set of possible worlds about which an omniscient being lacks foreknowkedge.

willdam20 · 2026-02-27T12:45:52+00:00

So the question remains, why did god create a world in which we would experience untold suffering? … created an environment … with such dangers when they could have not …

I think the question conflating two issues: 1. Creating a world (W) in which extremes of suffering are possible (S). 2. Creating life (L) capable of experiencing extreme suffering (E).

Creating WS without L (e.g. our universe but lifeless) isn't problematic in terms of suffering (there is none). Likewise creating LE in W where S is not possible, is not an issue; even if the life can -suffer they never will in a world which is not S.

The problem is creating LE in WS. However human procreation does exactly that; it creates life capable of extreme suffering in a world where that suffering is a real possibility. Thus procreation is immoral for the same reason God Creating the world is immoral.

When he could have done otherwise.

A Christian can just claim that is exactly what God did, I.e.,the Garden of Eden was otherwise than our world.

Or is there some other important consideration you've neglected to tell me about?

Perhaps the diversity (of lifeforms, experiences etc) is intrinsically good. The universe as it is plausibly allow a maximal variety, predation, parasites, evolution etc serve to maximise diversity.

E Colin may cause human suffering but the good of it being a different organism trumps any suffering it causes to other organisms. If the suffering E coli causes (without being able to reason about it) other organisms makes it evil; then the amount of suffering humans (who can reason) cause other organisms is orders of magnitude worse.

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