The god that gave His faithful the ten commandments and has His church promise heaven or hell depending on behavior exists outside of morality ? He literally defines it.
He/it creates and defines concepts of morality, but may not be a part of that system, or bound by those definitions. If we’re imagining a being of some kind that is (nominally) omnipotent and omnipresent, the I don’t see how we could realistically apply morality based on a mortal existence to it. How could you apply, for instance, a rule that says “don’t murder” to a thing that is incapable of death in any way that we would understand it?
I’m absolutely not a theist, but I think that exercises like this are ultimately futile. When I was a believer, this kind of mental exercise wouldn’t have made much of a dent in my belief. The nature of evil has been a study point for religious scholars for >2000 years, and mostly people ahve shrugged and said that they don’t understand, but they have faith, and that’s good enough. OTOH, I’m a sample size of one, so maybe there are people that would see this argument and question how rational their belief was.
The question whether god may understand or be bound by moral standards is irrelevant though. Apparently he doesn’t act on it. Either he doesn’t care enough to do or he can’t.
Of course one can imagine god in a way that’s compatible with our world - for example an evil god, a god that doesn’t care about humans, a god that has no relationship with the world, or a god that’s incapable of interference with it. Epicurus doesn’t say god doesn’t exist, merely the (formerly prevalent) idea of an all loving, all knowing, omnipotent creator god. That one is apparently impossible and therefore most likely doesn’t exist.
And going one step further we can say: Well okay, maybe god doesn’t exist, but apparently not in a way that’s relevant to this world. At least not beyond the idea itself. There is no tangible influence of god in this life - he doesn’t interfer (for whatever reason). And since the formerly prevalent idea of god is obviously wrong it’s hard to say if humans were ever justified in thinking we know something about god at all. (Would be a feat anyway, giving the fact that god apparently doesn’t interfer with our reality.) This however leaves very little room to justify or explain the need for religion.
When I was a believer this was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. I understood that we know nothing of god, cannot know anything of god, and cannot claim to say he does exist - and that religion therefore made no sense. Back then I called myself an agnostic, taking into account the possibility that, as unlikely as it might me, god could yet exist in some form. Today I don’t even believe that. The term “god” stems from a tradition of groundless and increasingly refuted attributions, and there’s just as much reason to assume the existence of such a concept as every other work of fiction out there. If you’d experience the world without the predenomination of religion you wouldn’t arrive at anything close to their idea of a god in the first place. This was my conclusion from the Epicurean paradox.
So, n=2, now we have a tie.
(Exercise like this might feel futile to you - I find them immensely interesting.)
How could you apply, for instance, a rule that says “don’t murder” to a thing that is incapable of death in any way that we would understand it?
What??!? Murdering is about ending other’s lives. If I were immortal, how does that prevent me from killing someone else who is mortal???
It’s ok to have faith which literally means you believe in something without a shred of evidence (or worse, evidence to the contrary). But again the epicurean paradox is not about the existence of god, is about defining his character
The actual “answer”, which is no answer at all, for this paradox is “god acts in mysterious ways”. That has been the cop out all religions have come up with
Murdering is about ending other’s lives.
But murder is also something that really only applies to rough equals; you wouldn’t call it murder to squish a mosquito. ‘Don’t murder’ is fundamentally a golden rule issue; you don’t want it done to you, so you shouldn’t do it to other people. If you can’t die, then that principle breaks down. (Unless there are other gods, and ‘death’ means something different to them? I think that’s getting into fantasy even more than religion usually does.)
