Deconstructing, subverting, and playing with God is Evil

Yeah, just because you know something is completely unrelated to your ability to DO it.

I KNOW how to make a fire without matches/lighters, but that doesn't mean I have the ABILITY to do it, at least not without some practice.

In fact, Mythbusters is a hilarious example of "knowledge =/= ability." There's countless ways to make a fire without matches/lighters, but no matter how hard the team tried, they somehow sucked balls at it.

edited 22nd Nov '14 6:46:05 PM by Sharysa

and No, I'm talking about the reverse: A being who is Omnipotent can create Omniscience for himself, because by definition he can do anything. Therefore, if a being is not Omniscient, either he is also not Omnipotent or he chose not to be Omniscient. I can't think of any reason for the latter to be true. I mean, I guess you can argue that he doesn't have the knowledge required to create Omniscience, but again, by definition of Omnipotence, he can create the required knowledge (yes, yes, I know creating knowledge about something you don't have knowledge of sounds stupid, but if you put limits on Omnipotence then it's no longer Omnipotence).

EDIT: There's also the possibility that he just won't create Omniscience for some reason, but I can't think of anything good there.

edited 22nd Nov '14 8:23:08 PM by Elfhunter

What if God is too bumbling to realise that it can make itself Omniscient? as well as too stupid to not prevent evil in the first place?

That kiiiiiind of makes sense, but I do still need to think about it for a minute.

It might be worth noting that, if I recall correctly, more than one definition of "omnipotence" has been given (and probably for "omniscience" too; I'm not sure—I just happen to remember the argument for the former offhand). Specifically, there's the question of whether it means "the ability to do anything at all, regardless of whether it makes sense", or whether it means "the ability to do anything that makes sense".

For example, consider the old paradox of whether God can create a rock too heavy or Him to lift.

Under the first definition, this is indeed a paradox: If He can do anything at all, then he can surely create such a rock—but if He can do anything at all, then surely He can lift such a rock?

Under the second definition, the paradox disappears: A rock that God cannot lift isn't a sensible idea, so He can't create one.

Wikipedia's article on the topic provides fully six definitions of "omnipotence", and has further discussion of the topic, I believe.

[edit]
I seem to have been unusually emphatic in this post—I blame tiredness! ^^;

edited 23rd Nov '14 5:22:09 AM by ArsThaumaturgis

Ok, so I shot Ars Thaumaturgis a PM regarding the Omnipotence paradox he mentioned, since I was worried this might be a derailment. But I've decided to post the contents of our brief discussion here. If the OP thinks this is off-topic, I'll restrict further conversation on this topic back to P Ms (though I'm not sure I'll have much else to say on the topic after this post).

Ok, so I asked:

To which Ars Thaumaturgis replied:

Well, personally, I prefer that "being able to do" should mean "strictly doing it themselves", mostly because it would be more thematically significant, I think. It would show that humanity's ability to use tools to solve problems beyond our physical capabilities is something we inherited from our creator, further enforcing that we were created in His image.

PS: I keep referring the Christian God despite being a Hindu, so please forgive me if I'm doing a bad job at it.

edited 23rd Nov '14 6:47:04 AM by Elfhunter

And that is exactly why those paradoxes are useless as any sort of theological argument: They're all semantics — word games. They have some use as thought experiments, in that they force you to clarify your definitions and beliefs, but that ultimately have no "real" or "right" answer.

I think that discussion is interesting, so it can stay.

I was actually thinking about this while driving in the car this morning. I'm not sure if its been brought up before earlier in the thread, but what if God (the Abrahamic God I'm assuming) is just beyond such notions of good and evil. By all accounts, he/she/it/they are so mind boggling alien and eldritch that we can't even hope to understand his/her/it's/their true nature and if there is some kind of plan, its one we can't possibly hope to understand.

edited 23rd Nov '14 1:20:42 PM by J.G.Crowne

That could work.

Once again, I should note that it does not specifically have to be the Abrahamic god that we are speaking of.

I think the God Is Evil trope can be played around with a bit in stories when they reveal that the Omnipotence/Omniscience of said God is an elaborate lie to keep people scared.

So, I'm bumping this up, because I just found out that the game Disgaea4 has the main hero Valvatorez calling out God on being a dick (due to creating a device that can destroy planets if there is too much Malice). The Vita port takes it one step further by apparently having him actually punch God in the face while doing so.

Considering Disgaea is one of the few games where Angels aren't all uniformly evil with the exception of (male)Vulcanus in the first game, and considering that Disgaea is rather lighthearted on the whole, I find it disappointing that the first (and likely last and only) reference to God is him being an evil dick who needs to have his face smashed in, no questions asked.

I really think the prevalence of this trope is as much laziness as it is kinda logical.

One of the problems I have with this trope is that they rarely develop God as an actual character, instead they entirely rely on the supposed shock value of "LOOK THE ABRAHAMIC GOD IS EVIL!". The writer almost never does an effort to develop him as an actual, characterized villain. Instead he's pretty much a Generic Doomsday Villain draped in the Abrahamic figure.

It's rare for people to actually think through the concept of the creator of the universe turning out to be evil.

edited 21st Dec '14 4:05:09 PM by Gaon

This is true.

Why is he evil? What does he want? Was he always this way, or is it something that happened?

Did he choose to be this way, or was it due to circumstances outside his control?

First, I think you need to decide right now whether you'll use Yaweh or not, so we can either put him out of our minds or focus on him. Second, the trope God Is Evil is only dramatic in the context of monotheism; God of Evil can work in polytheism and he can even be a Satanic Archetype, but some of the tension will still be lost.

If I remember correctly, your intent is to show the supposedly evil god as simply misunderstood. That isn't very difficult at all; a monotheistic god's morality is best described as transcendent and if he's omnipresent, he's an Eldritch Abomination as well, at least in a superficial kind of way. To treat him as a character rather than a plot device, I'd suggest giving him a goal to reach and an obstacle to overcome - maybe his desire is to populate the universe starting with Earth and free will stands in the way but he can't subvert it because he doesn't understand it.

The trick would be in deciding which way you want to subvert or deconstruct the trope.

The depictions of gods in general, including the Abrahamic one, in various holy texts are not particularly pleasant - they come across as having many of the worst traits of humanity turned Up To Eleven: anger, envy, capriciousness, hatred, wrath etc.

So you need to decide why the depictions are the way they are - are the gods so alien that they cannot be accurately described? Did the prophets and visionaries contaminate the divine inspiration with their own petty human fears, angers and prejudices? Are all the things attributed to the gods actually the gods' responsibility/actions or did the writers just blame the gods for every little thing? Were those people actually doing the gods' work or were they just doing what their own fears and prejudices led them to do and claiming that they had divine sanction?

And if you do go with Unreliable Narrator route, what then does that mean for the omniscience and/or omnipotence of the gods? If people can get the message wrong, then surely the gods have failed? If people can successfully commit terrible acts in the name of a given god and then get away with it, why didn't/couldn't that god prevent it?

Truthfully, I'm mostly afraid that any explanations that I could come up with will seem like weak excuses.

Maybe I'm worrying too much.

For the omniscient God, he knows everything, but does not have the wisdom to use what he knows for good. A lot of people KNOW how to control their emotions, but don't. Self-control could be a flaw in the God character.

Perhaps he has no concept of good yet either. He could even be jealous of one of the mortal characters since they have ignorance as an option, and cannot learn what he has learned involuntarily.

An all-powerful God with weak justifications is not a bad thing. Showing even those on top cannot escape remembering and knowing all of your flaws as a being, and having the gift of omniscience be a plague.

edited 22nd Dec '14 11:27:21 AM by Aespai

Yeah, in polytheism if there's an "evil" god, we just make sure to treat them with HEAVY caution. There's also the problem that very few pantheons have the black-and-white morality in the first place. "Chaos," "death," "darkness," and other concepts are often viewed as simply part of the world instead of things that need to be vanquished.

Loki, for example. He's not the Norse version of Satan, but going from my ancestors' interaction with him, he's just such a douche that they're very reluctant to leave me alone with him. He's actually given some pretty good advice now and then, but he's also crashed my meditation without warning to drop me in the middle of a very dangerous place, which made the Morrigan go "YOU IDIOT MOTHERFUCKER" before she backhanded him across the room.

Thor has also told me that if Loki's being too dickish (his words) and the ancestors or Irish gods can't deal with him, I can always call him to throw Loki out. No question.

So yeah, the tension between "evil capital-G Abrahamic God who rules everything" and "evil lowercase-g god in a pantheon of good and less-evil gods" is a significantly different kind of tension. Instead of "we must defeat Evil God," it's "we need to deal with Evil God and figure out how to minimize the damage."

Similarly, "Evil God is actually misunderstood" would have a solution more like "oh, we've been completely misinterpreting Deity's actions. We need to overhaul our communication and figure out a way to confirm or disprove his teachings/prophesies/etc. Also we might need to placate him now and then so he doesn't burninate everyone."

edited 22nd Dec '14 11:45:53 AM by Sharysa

That's also why many believers don't try to justify or explain their deity's/deities' behaviour.

The only defences to "God Is Evil" that fully work - for any god - are:

"it's just a fairy tale written by fallible fearful and control-obsessed humans and no such entity/entities exist(s)" a.k.a. Atheism

"a creator does exist but everything we've heard about it is bullshit written by fallible fearful and control-obsessed humans, because the creator does not interact with, or care about, any part of creation" a.k.a. Deism

The only problem is: those concepts rather bugger the idea of having the deity/deities in question as active characters in a story.

In order to get non-evil deities as characters, you would have to dial them down to merely "more powerful/capable than humans" - for which, thankfully, there's plenty of scope (there's an awful lot of emptiness between "human" and "infinitely omnipotent" in which they could sit and still be suitably "god-like") - and curtail their spheres of influence to the point that they can do just enough to satisfy the demands of the plot but not enough to thwart the nastiness perpetrated in their names - rather like Thor in the Marvel 'verse.

Which, incidentally, seems to be how a lot of Neo-pagans view their deities.

Then you can write off all the reported atrocities in holy texts as the fancy of the writers and all the apparent callousness and neglect as inability to influence the outcome of certain events.

But then you have the nightmare of deciding exactly how much power to give the deities without breaking the internal consistency of the story, like "enough power over mortals to influence the average cop to be inattentive in the presence of a person praying that the cop won't notice his vehicle licence has expired but not enough to influence the actions of a die-hard despot determined to harm other humans no matter what (or some zealous control-freak truly determined to create a religion that serves his needs)" or "enough power to help a handful of humans at one time, but no more".

Have you considered the thought experiment of your character-God relating to the people of your universe as being like how we humans relate to our animals?

I don't mean "looking down on the ants" or "grooming the cattle for slaughter" but about how we relate to the animals we LOVE. We do a lot of things to our pets that they find incomprehensible, often out of something neutral (HOLY CRAP! THEY'RE RUNNING THE DEVIL-VACUUM AGAIN!) or out of trying to help. (I'm sorry, little kitty, but you're sick and we need to take you to a person who's going to poke you, look in your mouth, stick you with things and put uncomfortable things where the sun don't shine! BECAUSE WE LOVE YOU)!

You try explaining the concept of vaccines to a puppy.

Suppose your God of Good sometimes has to "run a vacuum" over the Earth. He/She/It knows that is cares the willies out of us little creatures, but it has to be done so that we do not live in our own filth. (We'll say this is literal filth, not filth in the moral sense... like how science says that certain destructive earth-processes are necessary for Life to exist). Maybe your God of Good has to do some painful things to the people/humans/human equivalents in order to maintain their health or to heal them of things, and like a cat being carted up and taken to the vet, these humans cannot see their caregiver as anything but an evil entity of pain-bringing.

As to how the system of pain got to be there in the first place: Be creative. Maybe it is a "bug in the system" that your god-character messed up on or couldn't have prevented and has to work around. Maybe pain exists because your resident God of Evil is just as powerful as the God of Good and is a counter (if you want to go Black and White). Maybe pain and suffering are just a necessary program for the running of the "Free Will" program, which is so important that your god-character is willing to do the work-around.

In any case, their healing-arts and doing good for the people in the greater, metaphysical sense is seen by them as evil because humans cannot see on that scale. They wind up striking back in a bid to "grow up" and free themselves from the Horrible Cosmic Entity of Doompain like a dog biting a vet who is trying to clean a wound.

Just ideas for a fictional construct. (Please, please don't mistake me for doing actual apologetics here. I'm trying to help a person with story-ideas).

That's very good. I like it.

Agreed, that idea is amazing.

I am recalling some things I've seen in fiction before. I remember watching some of the anime Chis Sweet Home - which is a Slice of Life from the perspective of a kitten. She has flashback nightmares after she visits the vet for the first time and she's all "I hate Dad" for a while since he carted her off to go there and she associates him with pain and betrayal (until the kitty/Dad relationship is eventually mended).

I also recall in Happy Feet one character or another describing their "alien abduction" (that is, being taken and tagged by researchers).

So, I think it's a pretty natural analogy... to think of some greater cosmic entity we do not understand as being, in some ways, how we must be to animals.

edited 1st Jan '15 10:21:15 AM by Shadsie

You can't have a good story if you have a character that is either omnipotent or omniscient because in general they win automatically.

A possibility is having a mostly hands-off God that starts opposing Utopia implementation schemes because they are trying to collect worthy souls and people can't become worthy without overcoming suffering and fighting against evil. The god acts as an enforcer of the balance between good and evil that the protagonists are trying to overturn.

edited 7th Apr '15 9:06:04 PM by MrCogmor