Journal #9 | Beyond Epicurus (hopefully) | February 23 2021
Epicurus once posited a philosophy (wonderfully also figured out by Alexander Luthor as well in BvS) that if God is all-powerful, then he cannot be all-good, and if He is all-good, then He cannot be all-powerful. At first I thought of this as a sort of intellectual magnum opus by Epicurus that is until dipped my fingers in Jungian philosophy thanks to the courtesy of Jordan Peterson.
Of course Epicurus makes a compelling argument in which it asks the very human question of “If there is a God, why is there still suffering in the world?” Isn’t the duty of God to bring prosperity and joy and happiness to mankind?
Why I find Epicurus’ philosophy to be somewhat flawed is that it presumes the position of God to be dutiful, that God is something with a mission, when various religions and philosophies from all over the world posits that essence of God is that God is everything, God is all-encompassing (Though I know that most religious teachings entail that God is always intervening with the flow of the world and the story of mankind and that all his followers are entitled to the same righteous interventions as the mankind of old) — God can be both compassionate and destructive, in fact that’s what I find so charming about the Hindu gods, in which one of their trinity is literally the god of destruction, why people are fine with various cultures having a god of destruction and war like Ares and Mars while only criticizing and doubting the Abrahamic God I find to be somewhat…dumbfounding and lazy.
God is everything, in fact I believe the reason why the Greek and Roman cultures have so many Gods is because they figured out that God is so all-encompassing that God can exist as multiple personalities, one for the forces of nature i.e. lightning, ocean and water, fire. And for various human experiences such as war, love, fertility, even good crop yields.
Back to my thinking of the Epicurean philosophy, I came to this thought when I watched a Jordan Peterson video in which he was talking about nihilism and he said something that was an absolute banger of a quote; “Hopefully, if you’re suffering, you’re [doing something] wrong — because if you’re suffering, and you’re right, then you have nowhere to go” (as I’m writing this I myself am having difficulties tying it back to my personal revelation), but he followed that quote by a bible story of course, in which every single time the Jews got punished by God, it’s always their fault, and they never once thought that God is the one that’s evil and that the world that God created is corrupt, they always apparently realize where they were the ones who went wrong.
How I came to believe that what Epicurus posited is in the end, simplistic, is because it doesn’t consider the necessary preconditions for Good to exist, and that, of course, is Evil.
Peterson once said (and perhaps he was simply quoting from Jung) that God allows the possibility of evil, in order for good to be able to exist — how I thought about it is this way: “Why wouldn’t God be considered all-good if he created the world in such a way that it’s full of the possibility of Man doing Good”, this also goes back to the point about the story of Jews in the bible, I think that’s a completely brilliant story in that it enables the reader to come to the conclusion that 1) Good can only exist due to the juxtaposition and transition from Evil, and 2) By the Jews never coming to the conclusion that God is evil, it also implicitly posits that what would (even in the legal world in this day and age) count as acts of God do not count as evil, rather than tragedy, it’s simply things that allows mankind to make the climb to a higher ideal in the face of suffering, and perhaps the realization of one’s error is necessary for that in some (or perhaps most) cases.
(From here on I’m writing as I’m thinking it through) As we are human beings, allowing evil to exist is not the same as being evil, because it’s out of our control, but if God allows the possibility of evil in order for good to exist, and the allowing of evil is also in his control, well then I believe the answer to the very compelling and griping philosophy of “if God is all-powerful then he cannot be all-good” and vice versa, is that God is indeed all-powerful and all-good, but in such a way that he uses his all-powerfulness to allow Evil to exist first, in order to create a world full of the possibility of Good.
So in the end, perhaps how I would put it is; God is indeed all-powerful, and allowing the existence of evil in order to constantly allow the possibility of good, I believe counts as being all-good.
