Gratuitous Common Sense

A wonderful demonstration of the logic of monotheism (only the names have been changed to protect the guilty)…

I hope it’s not too subtle.

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If you click on this link…

The God Simulator

…you, too, can know what it’s like to be an all-loving all-powerful all-knowing being. What choices would you make? Can you do a better job than the “real” God? I bet you can, if you use a little common sense.

Now, without a doubt, someone will try this and think/say something like…

‘We are merely human beings, far be it from us to try to understand God’s reasons.’

Or, maybe that someone will go with the more simplistic and mystical explanation…

‘The lord works in mysterious ways…’

But, to that, I say you don’t have to understand God’s reasons. In fact, the very possibility of a simple/ignorant/sinful - and therefore humble - human like yourself being able to use common sense to create a more perfect universe than God, when given the choices that he had available to him, speaks to the absurdity of the Christian story of creation and all of existence. The story becomes even more absurd if you’re one of those people that think Adam and Eve were the only humans who had free will.

But I don’t want to be accused of setting up strawman arguments, so let’s probe some other possibilities.

How else is it possible that someone could use The God Simulator, and not come to the conclusion that the god of the bible, if true, would have to make some seriously shady choices to get things to happen the way the story (i.e. God) says they did?

One possibility is that they made all the same choices as God. However unlikely it may be, I do suppose it’s possible. But then again, that person would have to be lacking some serious sense. The meaning of “benevolent”, and “omniscient” for that matter, would have to be completely foreign to them. And even then, they’d still have to screw up pretty badly.

Another possibility is that they are just inherently evil. It is possible that someone would make the same choices as God supposedly did, if they were the type that enjoyed toying with minions over whom they have unlimited control and power. This would be the person who seeks power for power’s sake, and instead of using it to benefit many, uses it to benefit himself.

I suppose there is always the circular reasoning trump-card similar to one that many our parents were so fond of… ‘because God said so’. There is no response to that, because any response immediately traps you in an endless exercise in futility. At that point it’s just having faith because someone said to have faith, without any objective criteria for choosing who to believe.

Anyway, I certainly don’t claim this to be an exhaustive post on The God Simulator and it’s implications. I just found it to be an amusing, yet particularly poignant exercise in common sense. So if I’ve left off something sensible, feel free to leave a comment and let me know. Be careful, I could be doing this on purpose, but everything happens for a reason, right?

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This couldn’t be any more true if Jesus himself had drawn it. I have a feeling that I’ll be linking to I Drew This more in the future.

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“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”

- Bertrand Russel

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