The Problems With Omniscience: Dilemmas Of An All-Knowing God 

One of my biggest problems I have never gotten a good answer from Christians is “why did God create Lucifer knowing he would fall”. Many Christians argue the suffering/pain of the world is a result of sin/evil/the fall and that the devil is at the pinnacle of all of that. The problem then to me is if God knew lucifer would cause all that evil/suffering etc, why create him knowing full well what would happen.

When I was 15 years old, I started having a medical condition called hemiplegic migraine attacks. My doctors frequently misdiagnosed and mistreated it. I can't tell you the amount of excruciating physical and emotional pain that I suffered year after year because of it and the multitude of losses I incurred. It bankrupted me because I could no longer work after I worked my butt off to get a Master's degree. Took away my driver's license thereby ending my frèedom. I frequently went unconscious for days sometimes because the pain was too great for my brain to handle. I lost friends and family members because I became unreliable and a burden on everyone. When I was still 15 years old, I was told that it was an extremely rare autosomal dominant condition that had no known cure. Meaning that there was a 50/50 chance my kid would have it. I was also told it was atleast partially hormonal and any pregnancy would be extreme high risk. And that taking birth control pills would put me at an extreme risk for a stroke. Knowing full well that if my kid had this disease, it would be my fault for being so selfish as to risk it. And, knowing there is absolutely no way I could watch my child go through the intense agony I have repeatedly gone through, I made the most responsible decision I think I could have made in never having children. I don't understand how a loving god could make me...knowingly watching me suffer and do NOTHING as I writhed in pain begging it for help to make these things go away. I didn't deserve that. NO ONE COULD! I think at 15 years old, I was more responsible than this god that is supposed to be all knowing, all powerful, and loving... if it existed!

He makes the statement "I regret" in several places. If he regrets, he doesn't know an outcome, and can not be omniscient.

One of the terrible things christianity does to people is it disables their empathy - they will excuse any amount of suffering in order to protect their god.

Another nail in the coffin for god's omniscience is that if he is all knowing, he can forsee the future. If he can forsee the future, he cannot change his mind. If he cannot change his mind, then his mind seems robotic and not conscious. If his mind is robotic, then all our actions are predetermined and we don't have free will

Nothing fails like prayer.

Excellent points. It's this concept that always gave me pause, even back when I was a devout little Southern Baptist boy. Why would you undertake an enterprise if you knew how disastrously wrong it would all go beforehand? And once it did, why not just erase it all and start over and spare everyone the turmoil? What even is the purpose of any of this; why did any of it need to be? You created a being to acknowledge and worship you, yet 95% of those beings you're going to send to Hell. I don't think there are really any sound arguments to defend this. They usually just end up being, "The Lord works in mysterious ways." or, "You don't have a right to judge God." Which I think is ridiculous. If I'm caught in the middle of this mess, I don't think it's unreasonable to pass judgment on something I cannot justify or even comprehend.

Brandon, I am blown away by your ability to clearly and succinctly say things that I've been struggling to articulate for YEARS. Thank you for these videos.

It becomes more and more horrific the more you think about god.

Hey all, thanks for all the support lately. Hope you enjoy this one!

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” -Epicurus Representing Atheism since 341-271 BCE

Once again, spot on! I often think back to questions I used to ask about god when I was a kid (like why pray if god already knows the outcome; I was told that he likes to be asked) I think my b.s. meter was going off loud and clear then, but the longer I was indoctrinated, the quieter it got. Why would I ever want to serve a god that would make throw away people as part of his “perfect” plan? “Because God’s ways are higher than our ways and it will all make sense when we get to heaven” 😂 Can’t wait to see the other video coming up!

Great points as usual. You could have added the issue of free will in heaven. If we are sinless in heaven, do we have free will? If we have free will in heaven, does that mean we can have free will without sin? Then why didn't god create us with that kind of free will to begin with?

My son was born 36 years ago with a genetic disorder that has prevented him from growing up mentally. In many ways he is still a toddler, but a toddler with 36 years of experiencing this world. It seems at times that his mind is superior to anyone I know, in that he has no vision of the future, no thoughts of what he will be doing next year, or next month. He lives entirely in the present. His concept of God is pure and untarnished by emotion. He sees God as just another fictional character on the same level as Poke' Mon. Through him I have come to understand more about the human mind than most will ever see. He taught me that every day is a new chance to get closer to my goal of a perfect knowledge of reality, without any of the false ideas of yesterday. Every morning I can see far more clearly than I did the night before. Every day, my mind is new.

Really well said. I started making a list of things I would have done differently had I been god and it quickly got so long I abandoned it. Just practical things about the world and life - we don’t have to be a god to recognize what could be improved to reduce suffering. A little compassion goes a long way.

I just found your channel and am very grateful. I've felt so alone for the last decade after my deconversion.

"Oh, god doesn't want robots, he values free will!" What's the difference between a robot with programmed actions for a desired outcome and a person being threatened with a gun to their head to do something?

I've always wondered why a god who's "perfect" needs a creation in the first place, considering by definition it has everything it already needs, otherwise it's not "perfect ". Perfection means it's whole, complete, not needing anything else. It can't be "more perfect".

I always struggled with this one. The version I settled on was basically thinking that instead of knowing all my choices He knew the outcomes for each and every possible choice and that each time we went down a different branch. Kinda like a super complicated tree branch thing. That way I could have my free will by making the choice and he'd have omniscience by knowing my actual choice and every possible alternative web. The only thing with that was that it created mental gaps with him having a plan which I squared by thinking he pretty much just set everything into motion and mostly left it all alone as long as the sum total was everything ending at his plan. Occasionally he'd have to intervene with a small nudge pushing someone in the right direction so we all get there. That then created mental gaps on prayer then. Does it work which i then squared with saying I'm so small and insignificant and the plan so complicated that whatever small nudge he made for me wouldn't be enough to throw off the whole plan anyway. The mental gymnastics you've got to use to keep your faith once you take a few seconds to think about it is astounding.

Like Michael said in an earlier comment, you have a great gift in articulating the very things I have pondered for so many years. My ADHD mind often has a difficult time putting thoughts and ideas into a coherent dispute, so thank you for sharing your words. I look forward to every video you put out.

The problem with omniscience is that it's logically impossible! It's a consequence of set theory and a lot of difficult logic. There are many technical terms involved, but I'll try to explain while keeping it brief. First is the notion of Cardinality, which essentially captures the "size" of a set. Cardinalities are a way of putting each set into different buckets, where each item in a bucket has the same cardinality as any other item. Finite sets are easy: A set with three elements has a cardinality of three, as you would expect. So we'd put this set into the bucket labelled "three". All other sets with three elements would also go into this bucket. And it's clear to see that a set with four elements is fundamentally different to any of these sets, so that thing goes in the bucket labelled "four". Infinite sets also have cardinalities, but it's a lot more counterintuitive. Different infinite sets can have different cardinalities. (In terms of buckets, then different infinite sets go in different buckets. This is one situation in which the infinite behaves similarly to the finite - you can put the finite into different buckets, and you can put the infinite into different buckets.) The set of Natural numbers (1, 2, 3,...) has a cardinality labelled aleph 0. On the other hand, the set of Real numbers (put simply, the set of all decimals) has a cardinality called aleph 1. This is a larger cardinality than the Naturals. If you've ever heard the expression "some infinities are bigger than others", this is where it comes from. In addition, there is also a notion of a Power Set. Given a set S, the power set of S is the set containing all the subsets of S. There is also a mathematical theorem known as Cantor's theorem, which states that the cardinality of the power set is always greater than the cardinality of the set you started with. If you want more information about any of these terms, the wikipedia articles are good starting points. Now, let us consider "The Set of All Truths", or SAT for short. What do we expect from the SAT? Well, it must contain every last possible truth, and it must contain no falsehoods. Some examples: - "2 + 3 = 5" is true and so belongs to SAT. - "All giraffes are coloured blue" is not true, and so does not belong to SAT. This is fine so far, but what about the following statement: - "SAT contains truths about the number three" The Set of All Truths certainly contains truths about the number three, and so this statement is true, and therefore belongs in SAT! This is the fundamental problem: SAT is self-referential. Self-referential objects are extremely dangerous in logic! The key insight is that SAT must necessarily contain truths about subsets of SAT! As an analogy, imagine you are on a gameshow, and you can choose to answer questions from topics like Sport, Art, History. You might think 'Hmm, I know very little about sport, but I do know things about history, so that's the topic I'll choose.' Do you see what happened here? Your own knowledge contains knowledge about your own knowledge! You KNOW that you do NOT KNOW about sport, and you also KNOW that you KNOW about history. The same principle occurs with SAT. So SAT knows about what SAT contains, and what SAT does not contain. In particular, SAT knows about the subsets of SAT. This essentially means that SAT contains its own Power Set. But Cantor's Theorem shows us that the power set of SAT must have a larger cardinality than SAT. So the set SAT is bigger than the set SAT. Uh-oh! This is impossible! This is like saying a set can have three elements and four elements at the same time! No it cannot! So one of our assumptions about SAT must be false: either it omits some truths, or it contains some falsehoods (or both). Either way, the Set of All Truths cannot logically exist! Now, back to theology. God is supposed to be omniscient, which is usually defined as "knowing all true things, and knowing no falsehoods". Wait, this is SAT! And SAT cannot logically exist! So an omniscient being cannot logically exist! QED.

Jeff Beck played guitar on a song that addresses this question in a pointed way: "Whatever God Wants, God Gets." I heard that song and chills ran up my spine.

I remember when I was a kid asking a question about the effects of one choice or another, and someone said something along the lines of “God can see all different possibilities of people.” He knows when someone makes one choice, but then he can see that person making the opposite/alternative choice. With that logic, God sees people make a good choices or better choices, good choices or bad choices, and/or bad choices or worse choices. If he can see all these possibilities then this makes God even worse than you think. If God is omnipotent and omniscient (of all possibilities), then he can witness a world where people aren’t discriminatory, prejudice, murderous, pedophiliac, sexist, or evil and can change that. He can see a world where “his children” are making good decisions. One the flip side he sees and knows the worse possibilities that someone can be in. He sees a woman about to be rapped, a man committing suicide, a kid being bullied. He witnesses a holocaust, a war, slavery, a wave of societal violence. Whether or not it happens _he sees it happening._ God is either: - omnipotent and omniscient AND cruel, - or he’s omniscient but NOT omnipotent, - or NEITHER omniscient or omnipotent, - or he doesn’t exist. And if someone says “god’s ways are mysterious and beyond our understanding,” if that were true then we wouldn’t have an entire book about him. And God giving people free will to make decisions is pointless because if an all powerful being meddles with mortal beings then there’s interference. And if God knows what’s going to happen, if he knows the choices we’ll make then people are just following a divine spreadsheet. There’s no significance in what people do if God sees what’s going to happen.

As an (ex) catholic, I do remember oftentimes the question of unjust suffering being a hot topic in a few groups I was active in (I was fairly involved in a catholic discord for a while that had a very active debate/apologetics channel.) From what I can gather, the most reported conclusion/excuse for things like animal suffering in particular was this: "Suffering only came into the world when the sin was committed and the trust between god and his creation was broken. By sinning against their creator, Adam and Eve brought death and pain into the world, not only for humanity, but for *all* creatures." They would often point to descriptions in the bible about the serenity of the garden of Eden, and symbolism about lions and lambs resting together peacefully after the second coming of christ created the new perfect earth. This of course cycles back into questions of **why"" exactly an all-loving, all-knowing and "merciful" god would cause such a domino effect to affect arguably completely innocent animals due to the mistakes of two humans, but also notice that it plays directly into the guilt narrative that perpetuates almost every aspect of christian/catholic philosophy. Because humans are so despicable, all the innocent pure animals of the world were thrust into chaos and violence-- we bear the guilt of quite literally every instance of pain on the planet on our shoulders simply by being born--something we did not even ask for in the first place. It's all so tiresome, and so very mind numbing to wrap your head around. Glad I started critically analyzing my beliefs and presuppositions Love your channel too, by the way. I have been on a binge going through every atheist/agnostic philosophy channel I can find as I deconvert and deconstruct my religious convictions. Thank you for your dedication to presenting your perspective in such a concise but clear and informative manner!

The problem isn't omniscience. It's not even omnipotence and omnipresents (they have some paradoxes, but you could work with that), but the real problem is if you mix in omnibenevolence. That implies that all good come from him. However what to do with all the evil in the world (or just things that are not good)? Yeah you could just blame a devil figure, but who created the devil figure with the knowledge that he would do such a thing. Not to mentioned that what someones finds good is evil in the eyes of others. Someone can claim he is 100% good, but someone else could say he is 100% evil. Is god good because he knows what good is (which implies goodnes came somewhere else) or is good good because god says so (which implies he can say anything and it would be considered good). If a higher being exist that created the universe, it probably doesn't really care that much about us (100%) or is asleep/passive for alot of time

I have studied this subject for a long time and your exposition of the issues is brilliant and top notch! Continue your amazing work.

The only thing I would have added was the interaction between omniscience and omnipotence and furthermore omnibenevolence: you cannot be both omniscient AND omnipotent, and arguably you cannot possess more than one of these three traits as they all necessarily cancel each other out. If you are all knowing then you know every action you will ever take and when you’ll make them. If you know every action you will ever take and when you’ll make them then you are subject to determinism and thus have no power to make any decisions. Free will is the power to make decisions(there are many definitions of free will and I would argue most of not all fit this syllogism’s purpose) Therefore omniscience is incompatible with free will. Conclusion A: If you lack free will you cannot be all powerful. Omniscience is incompatible with free will. Therefore omniscience is incompatible with omnipotence. Conclusion B: If you lack free will your actions cannot be motivated by morality even if they are congruent to what is to be considered moral. Omniscience is incompatible with free will. Therefore omniscience is incompatible with omnibenevolence. And just round things off it’s not hard to understand why being all good means you powerless to perform evil and therefore prevents an all good being from being all powerful. I’m sure there is a shorter, simpler, and more elegant version of this argument but this is generally how I tend to present it.

I have additional problems with the "All Knowing" concept. 1) Being all knowing is a prison from which there is no escape. If you have absolute knowledge to the smallest detail as to what you are going to do in the next minute, hour, day, and decade... what choice do you have? Nothing happens, inside or outside of time, that you can control. You are trapped in a movie. A terrible fate even for a god. 2) Where does god get all this knowledge? How does he come by it? Why is it assumed that he can just get it... like something that is a trivial exercise? How does one start from nothing and then suddenly have all this knowledge. I am aware of the "begotten not made" excuse, but being "begotten" does not mean you have all knowledge. Anyway, two more point that bug me about omniscience.

What does it even mean to say that an omnipotent and omniscient being “wants” something? I want things I don’t have or can’t have. There’s a temporal component as well. What does it mean to say that a being outside or above time “wants” something?

I think a better way to put the conflict between omniscience and free will is this : Omniscience is only possible if everything is already determined. It's not that knowing what we will do forces us to do it, it's that if what we will do is not already decided, there is no way to know, because we could decide either way at any point. You can't know what i'll do if i'm able to change my decision on the fly. The only "omniscience" compatible with free will is a probabilistic omniscience, meaning knowing that i have XX% chances of choosing something. But then, you just know the odds, so your plans can go awry.

Such an excellent video Brandon. I’m constantly amazed that this isn’t more of a sticking point for most Christians. Especially theologians who have done the hard work to dissect the nuances of the biblical text.

This is 4 months late, but I'd certainly like to give an opinion on 3 parts, (though I think I may be repeating myself from your other videos): the property of omniscience and how it relates to free will (I have not watched your Thursday video on free will yet), the problem of evil, and the mentality of Christian apologetic reasoning. I think for theists and atheists, we tend to focus a lot on how God's omniscience affects us, but I don't think we stop to think how it affects God himself. We can apply a very similar situation to God and we can sort of show that God doesn't have free will as well: 1. God knows all 2. God has choices available to him 3. God has a range of actions available to him in regards to those choices 4. God knows what consequence will come out of all action in regards to all choices 5. HOWEVER, God knows what choice and action he will ultimately make While this won't invalidate omniscience, it would invalidate his free will. If you know all, then even though you know have choices laid in front of you, you already know what choice you are going to make ultimately, forevermore. You become a puppet who can see the strings. We can also do a thought experiment with omniscience. Let's say human beings evolve enough over the next few billion years that we are able to know and demonstrate literally everything in the universe instantaneously. Everything that can be known about the known universe is somehow able to be achieved. Not only that, but let's say somehow, since we are able to model what human behavior in a group setting now, we are now able to model it down to an individual level due to new technologies. We augment ourselves with these technologies to know what each and every single quark is doing. No thought escapes us. Nothing can escape without us knowing it in this universe. But from here a question remains: Would we still ask if a higher power exists? Would we still ask of any unknowns? Would we still ask about abstract concepts like "the meaning of life"? Christians tend to argue that God has limited this world according to the rules he set. So no matter how hard humans try, they cannot escape the "bounds" of the universe and enter the realm of God on their own (even though Genesis 11:6 exists) But to conceive of a higher power, would require an unknown, thus it would require curiosity. If human beings are able to consider, create and visualize concepts supposedly higher than ourselves, is God capable of conceiving of a concept higher than himself? Is God capable of being curious? As babies, we are often curious first (taking a "leap of faith" into the unknown, which is where a lot of Christians try to level the charge of faith against atheists), before moving on to being rational (seeing how things work together), to being trusting (seeing how things work together consistently), to being knowledgeable (demonstrating and explaining with high confidence how things work together consistently). An all knowing god is only knowledgeable. He does not need to be curious, rational or trusting. But the first 3 still requires us to consider a concept we call "the unknown". Now none of this on its own disproves anything, like I said it's a thought experiment. But let's say we humans can imagine a concept of a higher being HIGHER than a god. Is it possible for this super-god to create an environment where an entity we call god is omniscient and omnipotent ONLY in the environment he is created in? If God cannot consider a concept higher than himself, it could be possible the super god has made it so that he cannot demonstrate things outside his own omniscience within his environment. Because of that, god only THINKS he is omniscient and omnipotent. If God CAN consider a concept higher than himself, he is then capable of becoming curious. But if he can become curious then that must mean there is an unknown to god, and then that might mean he becomes subjected to unfalsifiable propositions. But he can't falsify those propositions because the super god limits his omniscience and omnipotence to ONLY his environment. In his realm, in his environment, it is true that he is omnipotent and omniscience, just like how we are limited by what we can do in this environment we call the universe. If there was anything God cannot know, he couldn't know it, because he doesn't know there's an unknown. And the same would apply to the super god too. I do find it funny though how Christians like to say God didn't make us as robots, even though the word robot means "slave" and Romans 6:20-23 calls Christians slaves. On the problem of evil, I basically just state heaven as a counterargument, and wrote this: www.reddit.com/r/exchristian/comments/15l9c6u/doesnt_the_idea_of_heaven_go_against_the_reasons/ On the mentality of Christian apologetics, I have a hypothesis that Christians are not attracted to goodness, but to power and authority. I don't have a sufficiently strong case for that yet, but I do have a few reasons for saying so and that is when you mentioned that "are you saying that you are god now? That you know better?" If goodness is tied to knowledge and expressed through actions, then power and authority should not be factors. If a proposed god came along and stated that he gives charity for all, or his religious proposition is based on universalism, prevention of evil or rehabilitation of people, similar to our systems, then why don't people move towards that? No one has got to be punished, everyone gets to live in harmony eventually in the afterlife after rehabilitation. Yet Christians will reject that because there is no "punishment for sins". An authority dictating objective morality is suspect because an authority that claims goodness but is unknown could be lying to you about its goodness if it doesn't have to be transparent. The truth however IS transparent. But power and authority ARE tied to rewards and punishments. And I personally think Christian apologetics are more hung up on "punishing evil, receiving justice, and divine retribution". You see it all the time with words like "God's vengeance", "taking accountability", "satisfying god's wrath", "punishment for sins". Ray Comfort's "did you lie?" is an example that he is only interested in the lie being punished. Or how about words that inspire fear like "What if you're wrong" or "going to hell". It doesn't matter if it is good or not first. It only matters that your self-preservation comes first. You even have terms like "free from fear", "meaning in life" in Christian lingo. Christianity is not comfortable with uncertainty. This is where you get the "if no one is around to judge for it, you can sin all you want" charge that Christians like to say. That probably says more about the Christian then it does more about the atheist, because if they can be convinced that there won't be a god around to judge them for it, then they might "sin all they want". It reminds me of when Muslim apologists tried to make fun of people for having open marriages, like how they perceive open marriages as weaknesses, and in doing so show what they're afraid of. They perceive that a man must feel slighted and unhappy if their wife has close relationships with another man, and thinks it is always the fault of a man or a weakness on their part if they wife cheats, even though the man has done literally nothing wrong and has been faithful and it has always has been the wife's decision to cheat. So rather than control their actions based on their emotions, they control what the wife gets to do. You can't make fun of a man for being bald if he chose it. I suspect that Christian apologetics' focus is on an inherent fear of retribution for being sinful, as opposed to focusing on being good. Because remember, the Christian doctrine isn't about the promotion of good deeds as its focus, the Christian doctrine is focused on retribution for sins, and how you need Jesus to remove those sins. Christians can say all the "saved to do good works" all they want, but that only tells me that they are still focusing on their own sense of self-preservation. Would Christians still do good works, if proposed that they are all going to hell anyway? There is a song called "The Impossible Dream". And in one of the lyrics, it says: "To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause", and although this is anecdotal, I still distinctly remember my dad catching himself singing it and was like "crap I don't wanna do that". But the thing is, that is what a good person would do? Don't Christians accept that Jesus went to hell for a period of time? There's probably a lot I am still missing here, but I would love to see a video on this attraction of power and control over goodness, if you haven't made it already.

Just thought of the hymn where we'd sing the quiet part out loud: "trust and obey, *for there's no other way*, to be happy in Jesus, than to trust and obey". Willful ignorance and blind obedience is what kept me (relatively) happy in Jesus for 35 years. Then "I did some research, some thinking" the famous last words if anyone as a christian😅.

There is the viewpoint of open theism which i adhere too, basically god doesnt know the future but influences the present in an all powerful way to fulfill his words and promises.

Knowing everything, god became angry when events happened that he knew about beforehand and could have prevented.

wow another fascinating expose and major Mindshift !!! I have been checking out a few videos on your channel and plan to check them all out as time permits. you do a wonderful job of bringing clarity to so many issues that have plagued me since I was a child but could never quite come to terms with. I hope this content reaches many people . this channel of yours seems to really get to the heart of the matter. tks Brandon I thoroughly enjoy listening to you!!

You really hit this one out of the park, holy smokes!

Well done, Brandon! I was looking forward to this video and you nailed it. I may not be omniscient, but I most definitely know that you and this channel will do great things in the future. Much success to you man. Oh and nice name by the way 😉

When I was a believer I always thought of time as happening for God all at once, e.g. not experiencing time linearly. I think that reduces some of the free will issues, at least in my mind.

7:29 While predestination explanation is a good reply, you do not need to even go there. If by omniscience you also mean, 'has the discernment to determine the truth or falsehood of all propositions', it is not merely that God know a possible outcome, but he knows the exact outcome this is true. Meaning he knows what you will do, not just the choices that you have.

If god is all knowing, does he know how to feel scared, the feeling of pain? Suffering? Torture, etc?

Thanks for mentioning Dan Barker.. i felt his heart.. thirsty for the truth..i didnt know of him before

Totally true on all the points. Suppose humans had to suffer to know good from bad. But what about animals? They do not choose, they live totally natural lives -- no painkillers, no wound treatment, the worst meaning of the "natural" nightmare. Why? For what purpose? Why not creating them without pain receptors, or without a chance to suffer for days before they die? Because of what happens to them, I've struggled through depressive episodes since my childhood. I would never understand (or forgive) such a god =(

Great presentation. It remains problematic how & why God foresaw every suffering creature’s agony - the experience of every tortured prisoner, the despair of every slave, the tears of the abused, psychological and physical pain in man and beast, the torment of animals in the animal industrial complex and in vivisection labs - and yet went ahead with his creation project anyway. We seem not to have the capacity to really grasp the catastrophic depth and breadth of creaturely suffering. The current agony of the Jews and Palestinians is but one example of the nightmare God signed off on. Of course we assume God - if there is one - is good. The heretic Marcion believed the creator was evil: this goes a long way to answering a lot of the questions.

Isn't it possible that omniscience and omnipotency were later additions that came from greek philosophy and eastern spirituality? Because if you imagine God as not being all-knowing nor all-powerful then the old testament starts to make more sense.

I was told angels didn't have free will, yet Lucifer and those 1/3 of all angels had enough free will to defy god. If angels have no free will, then god created Lucifer and 1/3 of the angels specifically to rebel and be kicked out and to later torment and tempt humans that he created to live on earth where he hurled Lucifer and 1/3 of the angels. He set us up to fail and then created us to follow a path that we have no choice over and then sends a majority of us to hell for not choosing him. That sounds beyond evil to me.

i saw the flaw in an all knowing god when i was ten and left at ten, i then thought, revamped and often cane to the same conclusions, with not much altercation

Awesome content. Early off you touch on the Jesus never list. This is where I’m at. Abused in childhood, scapegoated and abused in marriage, alienated in divorce and I have to have Christian guilt because I escaped and omit these ppl? This guilt and shame kept me Married 15 yrs longer than needed. If there was a god that wanted me to follow him, then take away my molester(s) and the stain they left me with- but Jesus couldn’t know that and didn’t. Thank you. Helps.

In church circles, God always gets the credit for our righteous behavior, but not for our unrighteous behavior. But Natures don’t just pop out of thin air, and as I see it, choices can’t be made without a nature. Even if God came to us individually and let us choose our own nature, the person choosing their nature would already have to have a nature to weigh pros and cons, desires, etc. Choosing a nature presupposes a nature. And where did that come from in this hypothetical? They just don’t want to say it, “God created sinners.” As I said in a previous comment, Adam and Eve couldn’t have desired evil, unless they already were evil. The evil in this case being something that is a disobedience towards God.

Hey Brandon Your videos are clear cut and well organized. Great content. Way to walk the viewer through the faulty mindsets of Christian dogma step by step. I do have one request.can you highlight how the Christian religion sets up people to be placed in a victim mentality. Thank you for the content!

I love the way you summed up your video, it beautifully encapsulates the obvious glaring issue with trying to circumvent objection by side stepping to some concept of a challenger having no basis, right, or understanding of some supposed divine being. You brought it back to the actual issue, which is as it is claimed, in using all the concepts and language of humans, by humans, to argue a concept as we understand it - it fails. Any one of us could do better. To me there is simply _no_ outcome that justifies a world where children are literally tortured, starving, or infected with horrifying parasitic organisms, unless the justification, the actual reason to proceed _is_ for the cruelty. I find it sickening, but there could not be any other reason to proceed. My soul, yours, anyone's is _not_ worth that horror. _Nobody_ should be Ok with the idea their eternal happiness is worth that.

Thank you, MindShift! 🎉

He made us just for that reason that we worship him, while he tortured us and set us up for failure. He does all these horrible things while he claims that he is the source of morals. That's 100% the same reason my father wanted to have children. Sky daddy is a malignant narcissist.

If god is omniscient and knows what he will do before he will ever do it to the end of time, does god have free will?

Everything you have said here perfectly explains why I feel that if there was a God, he doesn’t deserve to be worshipped and he should be begging us for forgiveness, not the other way around. Any god worthy of worship would certainly do better than this world. I have a lot of other reasons why I don’t believe but this is the big one.

I turned away from the abrahamic god as a teenager and became an atheist for a few years. Then I became agnostic because I couldn't reason how the universe couldve started, as in what was before the big bang, or how is anything gere to begin with? These were questions that not even science could answer (not that I think that's a problem, it's just the limitations of observability). So that made me think that there could be something, but what that is, nobody knows.

I've heard many people describe the relationship between omniscience and free will in a way similar to what you do here, but I think it is logically possible to envision a reality where you can retain both things. Imagine the flow of events as a single, if textured, line on a page. The way you describe things, it seems that you are picturing just a single line that god observes, and so we don't really have free will in an ultimate sense. But if instead, you imagine that line forking each time someone makes a choice, splitting off into the infinite combinations of interactions and outcomes, making an extremely complex tapestry that is now the thing that is observed and known. In this way, god would know what would happen both if you chose A or B, rather than knowing that you will choose A (though god would obviously know if you were more likely to choose one over the other, and to what extent). Then you can imagine adjusting starting conditions to try to, overall, have a better tapestry. Now, god would still know that assuming I was even born, I'd be more likely than not to be an atheist, but none of it would be a sure thing, at least assuming I at some point made choices that brought about my atheism. Presumably there would be plenty of people who would have had no free will regarding knowledge of god's existence, but they would have still had free will. Where the Christian argument about all that falls apart is, in my opinion, the purported benevolence, and how that interacts with direct intervention in the world. If direct intervention was permissible, and the end goal was to produce the best outcome for the most people, it really seems like there would have been more interventions, both in the past and now. Why did the Native Americans have to wait until the 1500s to even have a chance at making it to heaven? Why now, when a simple demonstrable appearance of god would dramatically reduce the number of atheists, do we not see one or more happening? God wouldn't even need to do anything, just show up as a pillar of fire or whatever, quote some bits of the bible or whatever, and tell people they should repent their sins... with all that time on god's hands, you'd think it would be worthwhile. Of course, that is where it becomes subjective, and where a Christian can argue that we can't know, and that only god could determine the optimal plan to get the best of all possible outcomes, and that is obviously the one that was followed. But here, I side with you in saying that it just doesn't feel like this is as good as it gets, given infinite power and knowledge.

another classic, man! when are you just gonna blow up?!

"Suffering defines this world", that reminds me of the Matrix. Originally, the machines had created a the matrix so as to be exempt of suffering but people rejected it, on some level being unable to internalize it as reality precisely because suffering defines the real world of lived experience. So the machines added suffering.

Your opening is the perfect example of the death that results from the knowledge of good and evil. The knowledgeable man now is so self-righteous that he is comfortable judging God and God's motives. If that's not enough, he becomes so self- enamored that he can decompose omniscience.

3:17 I think the boulder argument can be reframed for omniscience by saying "Could God think of a solvable puzzle so hard, even he couldn't think of a solution?" It would still probably be dismissed as quaint wordplay, but I think that's a more accurate analogy to the boulder argument. 7:09 I agree with your counter rebuttal, but I would just say: it doesn't matter if God doesn't determine your actions. The fact that he can know what our actions will be shows that _something_ determines our actions, otherwise God couldn't know it. Thus, we wouldn't have free will. 18:30 I would have tied it in to The Problem of Evil differently. Basically, even if we assume _human_ levels of potency rather than omnipotence, and even if we assume _human_ levels of benevolence rather than omnibenevolence, we still aren't seeing a world that reflects omniscience because of all the evil and suffering. I think that's the point you were making, but just rephrased a little.

Wow, love this! Thank you, good job.

Phenomenal! learning a lot, thank you!

Yep, if I were god I’d rather create robots without free will to worship me, if that meant that souls don’t suffer eternally. It seems immoral and selfish to enjoy being worshipped at the expense of the suffering of others

My atheist view is this: if god is omniscient, then what the heck is the point of the world? God can just put as all where we belong, heaven or hell, without having to let us go through it all.

Great video, thanks for your well stated thoughts.

It's odd how a perfect god admits he was wrong about making Saul king. So does tha mean this god didn't know Sual would fail or did he just let it happen without warning

The whole prayer issue is moot when prayer is more so aligning with the will of a god rather than putting in your quarter and waiting for your prize. I hated that prevalent approach in Christianity of the divine vending machine.

You are making all the arguments and saying all the things I would say if I could articulate as well as you. If I believed in such a thing, I would say you were reading my mind. 😉

Do you know Pinecreek? I ask because you have the same take on the problem of evil, and it’s not a common one. According to him the actual problem of evil is “why did god create in the first place if he knew all the suffering that was going to happen?”. As an example he asks a question like “if you knew for certain that your child would be born with a terrible disease that would make their life short and painful would you still choose to conceive that child?”

"Love is not self-seeking." God be like: "Existence has nothing to do with you puny peons" It's all about & for MEEEEEEE."

Another great video. Always laugh at god not being able to look after 2 people and then I’m the next instance not looking after 4 ending up with 1/4 of the population getting murdered. He’d have been sacked in any walk of life 🤷🏻

Great video, Brandon. As always, extremely well put together. I can't imagine the work that goes into these. There is a line argumentation that you use, and that many atheists use, that I have always had trouble understanding: You say that if God knew that the world would contain evil, he is cruel to have made it. My problem with this line of argument is this: The world was made (or came into existence, by chance or otherwise), and it does contain evil. Do you consider existence to be cruel? The only difference between an atheist's and a theist's treatment of this issue is the nature of the cause of existence. Whether this cause is a mind or just a cause. Also, I would love to know your opinion on the nature of 'good and evil'. Do these things exist in the natural world, are they merely mental adaptations that we have evolved. Is there anything resembling absolute morality? I don't know if you've already made a video on this. I will take a look through your channel.

Why would a perfect being create anything? It wouldn’t benefit from the glory of its creations. Nothing it could do would make it any happier.

Thumbs up before even watching, because I already know I'll like it 😂

RE: The deer analogy -- Believers will excuse god at that point by pointing to The Fall and that Adam and Eve's sin not only impacted them but destroyed the creation too. How just is a god that allows the decision of two people to destroy a creation too that he had proclaimed "good". How fair is that to the creation? The plants and animals had nothing to do with the choice to eat of the tree of good and evil. We see injustice in punishing someone for something they had nothing to do with. But there is god punishing all of creation for a mistake two people made. Not justice. Not loving. Just messed up.

I think you should slow down a bit. You have a good personality, a fine and well-placed voice and you are not obnoxious as Dillahunty is. It is pleasant to listen to you; a beer would be fun with you. Because you are the best I have heard and seen I hope you consider an easier, less frantic delivery. You really are the best at this.

100 % agree

To be fair, it's not an atheistic argument, it's a logical problem. There really is no middle-ground in the determinism vs free will debate. Either I have the free will to choose A or B or God already knows I'm going to choose A and my "free will" is just a deterministic illusion. You can't be all-knowing and not know the future, that's a contradiction. And if you know the future, then you already know I'm going to choose A. There was never an option of choosing B. It's been predetermined. If we were to imagine a situation in which God does know the future and he knows I'm going to choose A, then I choose B instead, that means God isn't all-knowing. It's a logic problem. Altho I will check out that other video you mentioned. You have a very rub-able head. I like looking at it.

If God was all knowing and new what would happen in the future, then why did he create Satan Lucifer or the devil knowing that he would have rebelled and tempt the humans of his creation? That story of that alone made absolutely no sense to me at all growing up. However, I was assured with phrases such as God's ways are beyond man's reasoning or that God's ways are better than ours. what a cop out.

Most people aren’t vain or weak enough to need people to worship them. It’s like an abusive boyfriend who sometimes tells his girlfriend that he loves her, just keep worshipping him or else she’ll get punished

It'd be easier to believe in God's omniscience had the Bible revealed some previously unknown truth like germ theory, or even like, "hey, ya'll may get to the point where you might wanna split an atom, so here are some warnings about that." The lack of any new knowledge in the Bible is one of the greatest literary disappointments of my life. I expected to have epiphanies while reading the Bible, and the seemingly most important thing is not boiling a baby goat in its mother's milk. WTAF?? "He couldn't warn us about atomic reactions because free will..." If he can tell us women to marry our rapists, and that we gotta toss gay people off rooftops, and not to eat pork, then couldn't he have warned mankind about nuclear disasters? As for "free will," that concept went out the window the moment God removed Pharaoh's free will by hardening his heart when he was about to allow the Hebrews to go free. I'm fairly certain that he gave ADAM free will, not necessarily everyone else. Anyway, all "free will" arguments ended with Pharaoh's hardened heart.

It's so obvious God is clearly an evil loving monster or doesn't exist at all

I'm talking from a Muslim perspective here. We are taught that God is All Knowing. And in His infinite wisdom He knows what's better for us even though we make our own choices and go thru many tests. The next life will be better than this one. We find this belief consistent as it applies to our daily lives as everything essentially is a test. Our work, family, health etc. We don't blame God for our conditions because we realise thru patience and steadfastness the reward will be great in this life and the next. Look at our bodies, our brain. Our ability to even make this video, that are God given talents. It's not a random occurrence. So yes we shud question everything, this is encouraged and is normal behavior but ultimately we are created to worship God as he has given us many blessings. This is how we find peace. One cannot blame the car maker for creating cars when accidents happen. No we need to value the vehicle and live according to the rules of the road. In the same way we have to live according to God's rules and respect our minds and bodies. Be aware of our choices but always keep asking questions. God is Just and All knowing and we are limited. He set a plan in motion having infinite wisdom but we make our own choices and ultimately we are going to be responsible for them unless events happen that are out of our control but God will understand and reward accordingly.

Wouldn’t you think that since the fall of man is pinned primarily on the woman (Eve) that a woman would have to come and live a perfect life and to ultimately become the ritual sacrifice for our salvation?

I find the concept that someone is self-sacrificing out of expectant pleasure... iffy; it devalues, I think, the full extent of the human experience. We are fully capable of sacrificing up to our lives without the expectation of pleasure, or reward, and indeed even with the expectation of the opposite. There's some greater, outside and perceived within us (I'm getting very Platonic here), that moves us to act in such ways without any consideration of costs and benefits in the long or short term (or at least, as they apply to us). The same may be applied to religion and belief--in it's purest form, it exists and is acted upon without a materialist, 'grounded' desire for pleasure and reward. It's the sort of "right is right because it is right, no other reason". Also, while I know this is more of a summary video, the idea that "God could have -- somehow, someway -- made a version of free will that avoids the problems of it" seems rhetorically identical to saying "Can God make a rock that he is not strong enough to lift?". It just feels like begging the question in reverse.

Try frank turek Football match analogy to understand determinism free will and omniscient

Thank you very much for making this really important video. There are many Bible verses that indicate predestination by God e.g. "According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: God chose us before he created the world. Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will," - Ephesians 1:4,5. (KJV). If the Bible is true, then the Biblical God is real and evil. If the Bible is false, then the Biblical God is imaginary and evil. What the Bible says does not match what we know from astronomy, physics, geology, biology, medicine and neuroscience. That's why I think that the Bible is false and unethical.

It's interesting hearing you bring up Lucifer so much in all of your videos as if it's clearly written there as a fundamental story of the devil. (I assume this is somewhat ingrained from your fundamentalist background). The bible doesn't even mention Satan in this way as Satan is just the oppposer (there are many satans). And Lucifer just means Morning Star (Venus). These Lucifer as the devil ideas are mostly post biblical and comes from later neo-platonic authors and then authors such as Dante etc. Although I imagine most Christians have this view of Satan from being taught extra biblically from dante/paradise lost etc

Funny that we are given free will, but the only way we can be saved is if we surrender it.

Alex has another scenario I think is better with the baby deer that is not eaten by predators so its death serves absolutely no purpose. It is simply trapped and dies slowly, in agony, alone. No other being sees it or benefits from it. There is zero purpose for that suffering. Zero.

The only reason I could come up with, that god would need to sacrifice his son in order to forgive his creation, is because there was a bigger god that him that he needed to tithe to. Add to that the bible mentions other gods, and also that the abrahamic religion was polytheistic and Yahweh was supposed to be a war god (anyone for blood?) Which tend to be all about glory and sagas and conquest, and praising the victor for eternity....... Now I think about it, there is a lot of parallels with norse and greek mythos.

Like the way u break things down

If I had the power to create sentient beings, and I knew that doing so would lead a single one of them to suffer for eternity, then I would not create because an eternity of suffering is not a price anyone should pay or a cost any creator should accept. Further, no one would miss out on the glory if they never existed in the first place.

A few issues but not detrimental to the overall points made. Fair? About what? To whom should we be fair? The arguement? A god? The theist? Your feelings? Weak? In whose eyes? Weak or uninteresting? If an all-powerful and all-knowing god actually existed I would expect it could reconcile human constructed paradoxes and semantics. I'd argue most christians don't analyze scripture. Logically anyway. So I think it falls on deaf ears mostly when you use it as a counter or definitionally. But trying to reconcile logic with the supernatural is always the rub. You either believe in magic or you don't. I had more issues with the first third of the video but hope are addressed in later videos. The last two thirds of the video about the problem of evil, was rock solid and very similar to many arguments out there. Keep up the good work. Sunday vids are always fun.

An evil god explains the suffering in a material existence better than an all loving good god. And a material cosmos working in a state of nature is a more reasonable explanation than the other two. Asunder

free will and judgement are flawed concepts if an omniscient creator knows our every thought and action before we are even born .this makes no sense because its not as if he is waiting to see how we behave as he already knows in advance and condemns us or rewards us accordingly

Omniscience is certainly a concept that we have a hard time wrapping our heads around. How does that work with a God that is also love? That is also good? Of course, scholars have come up with other possibilities than the standard linear model of Godly knowing, such as Molina's Middle Knowledge and the later Open Theism. Even analogizing modern scientific theories, in which a God might know all possible universes of all possible A and B choices, like an infinitude of Schrodinger's cats, comes to mind. God doesn't tell us how it works. He reveals his character and insists that we must trust. That is why it's called faith, and not knowing (though knowing is promised at a future time). Whether we trust or not will, in the end, come down to personal experience of living in this version of reality. It will be a choice.

I really don't take the philosophical path but the scientific path rather. The problem is the natural laws do not take a break to allow any of these miraculous tales to occur and even if any of it is true, it would have a reasonable explanation rooted in the law of nature that were wrongly interpreted by any of these witnesses.

The only way for a god as described by Christianity to exist is if everything that exists is exactly what it wants. There is no alternative. It doesn't matter if you add free will choice. The entirety of existance is exactly what it wants or it wouldn't exist. Period.