Why did Jehovah create Satan?

[Cheerful Charlie]

I assume you mean by "the book" the Hebrew and Christian Bibles? The name means "the adversary" or "the accuser"; such implies that his purpose in the court of YHWH is like that of a prosecuting attourney, one whose desire is to convict humanity of our misdeeds and weaknesses and lead us away to punishment. The New Testament built on this mythos by positing a "redeemer" as well, who defends us against his accusations.

If you mean "in the history of Christianity", Satan has worn a lot of different hats over the centuries.....

I wonder at what point the perfect all-good/all-present/all-powerful God was dreamed up? It seems atheists are always looking for an omni God in Christianity and are puzzled how he's not there in the mythology.

But then how could a philosophical omni-type character be in any mythology? The point of myth, I think, is to make a story of the world. Stories have only flawed characters, no perfect ones. But such is the expectation and keeps people scratching their heads over "plot holes".

1. God is one, supreme among gods and men, and not like mortals in body
or in mind.
2. The whole [of god] sees, the whole perceives, the whole hears.
3. But without effort he sets in motion all things by mind and thought.
4. It [i.e. being] always abides in the same place, not moved at all,
nor is it fitting that it should move from one place to another.
- Xenophanes

Greek perfect being theology starts with Xenophanes.

 

[Gnostic Christian Bishop]

This question has always seemed like a massive plot-hole to me. I find it interesting to discuss because it is such a massive plot-hole.

Did Jehovah not know what was in the heart of this creature? Does the story support that gap? Does god need this plot device so he adds it but refuses to take responsibility? Is Satan actually an equal god, but the book downplays his origin because that scares the shit out of them?

What’s the deal? Who created Satan, Why, and what did they know and when did they know it?

You found your OP. Nice.

Satan was created to be a Loyal Opposition, but Christians did not understand that when they changed the moral of the Eden story from the Original Virtue that Jews saw to their notion of the fall.

All while Christians cannot explain why they sing of Adam's sin being a happy fault and necessary to god's plan.

They run instead of saying/recognizing they would have to do as Adam did.

Regards
DL

 

[Gnostic Christian Bishop]

I suppose it all depends on whether god created satan or satan created god, and which is which anyway. They're not at all different except in one's assumptions. They're likely the same thing, religiously speaking.

How can you say that given gods murder rate as compared to Satan?

At least give the woman credit on the violence issue.

Regards
DL

 

[Gnostic Christian Bishop]

It's often said that the best way that satan succeeds is to have people think he doen't exist etc., mainly staying out of the focus in conversations while people discuss, critique and condemn God. Now we have this thread - who's up for critiquing satan?

Let's do.

I like her and think Christianity should have accentuated the fact that Satan is portrayed as female in Christian Eden art.

Regards
DL

 

[Learner]

Yes this is an interesting discussion, seeing varied points of views and of course your contribution.

(Glad you're ok and to see an old face from the old forums. PG, msm's The evidence for God. )

Regards
L

 

[Rhea]

It's often said that the best way that satan succeeds is to have people think he doen't exist etc., mainly staying out of the focus in conversations while people discuss, critique and condemn God. Now we have this thread - who's up for critiquing satan?

If you want a thread to critique Satan, please start one and don’t hijack this one.

This one is about Who created Satan and why.

 

[Learner]

Ah, quite right. Apologies Rhea, initially I was being a little sarcastic in that post - back to the topic.

 

[Rhea]

This response in another thread was a derail there but on topic here. So I am copying the my response here.

So you DO believe god knows before someone does wrong hat the are going to do wrong, and he creates them anyway?

Yes, he creates them anyway. What’s the problem? Are you angling for how could an all knowing, all powerful, loving God allow evil?

Not “angling,” asking straight up.

I’m an engineer. Whenever we create something we do a “Potential Problem Analysis,” and then we build in safeguards to eliminate risk. It is unfathomable to me to design and deploy something without this step. It does not compute. I would fire anyone who failed this step. So yes, I am indeed asking straight up what kind of designer would screw up like this.

Satan did not have to be created. The “tempter” did not have to exist. And if it was creaated accidentally or unavoidably, mitigation steps and guard barriers should never have been overlooked.

If so, Alvin Plantinga, renown philosopher, gave the answer, a free will defense, in his famed religious, philosophical work of, “God, Freedom, and Evil.”

“Free Will” is a terrible argument. There are all kinds of barriers against our “free will” in nature. If a god designed this, that being could have designed in plenty of barriers that do not inhibit free will, but they mitigate damage from said free will.

For example:
I have free will to jump off cliffs. There is a barrier to success at this, it is the interaction of my body with gravity.
I have free will to try to breathe underwater like a fish. There is a barrier to success at this, it is the interaction of my body with aspiration.
In the bible story, Lot’s wife had free will to look back. Consequence - immediate and terrible - die by instant petrification. No damage of free will. Complete mitigation of any problem to those around her arising from her choice.
My machine: free will to create a defective part, my barrier: defective parts are detected and diverted to waste bin.

So. Why not say, “yes you can choose to rape, but your dick will fall off as soon as you do it.” Or as soon as you think about it. Why not say, “yes you can murder, or steal, but your skin will turn blue as soon as you do it.” Why not say, “yes you can abuse a child, but you will asphyxiate within a week.”

This “free will” agument seems shallow and superficial since instant death is not a barrier to free will but it IS a Potential Problem Mitigator. Any engineer or designer knows this most basic premise. (Not to mention it is obviated by the parallel story that beings will someday go to heaven where nothing sad will happen, but they will still have Free Will and not be robots. Wait - won’t they?)


So. I have not been shown a reason yet that Satan needed to be created, and/or their effects couldn’t be guarded and localized. We certainly did not need tapeworms, now did we?

 

[James Madison]

This response in another thread was a derail there but on topic here. So I am copying the my response here.




Not “angling,” asking straight up.

I’m an engineer. Whenever we create something we do a “Potential Problem Analysis,” and then we build in safeguards to eliminate risk. It is unfathomable to me to design and deploy something without this step. It does not compute. I would fire anyone who failed this step. So yes, I am indeed asking straight up what kind of designer would screw up like this.

Satan did not have to be created. The “tempter” did not have to exist. And if it was creaated accidentally or unavoidably, mitigation steps and guard barriers should never have been overlooked.

If so, Alvin Plantinga, renown philosopher, gave the answer, a free will defense, in his famed religious, philosophical work of, “God, Freedom, and Evil.”

“Free Will” is a terrible argument. There are all kinds of barriers against our “free will” in nature. If a god designed this, that being could have designed in plenty of barriers that do not inhibit free will, but they mitigate damage from said free will.

For example:
I have free will to jump off cliffs. There is a barrier to success at this, it is the interaction of my body with gravity.
I have free will to try to breathe underwater like a fish. There is a barrier to success at this, it is the interaction of my body with aspiration.
In the bible story, Lot’s wife had free will to look back. Consequence - immediate and terrible - die by instant petrification. No damage of free will. Complete mitigation of any problem to those around her arising from her choice.
My machine: free will to create a defective part, my barrier: defective parts are detected and diverted to waste bin.

So. Why not say, “yes you can choose to rape, but your dick will fall off as soon as you do it.” Or as soon as you think about it. Why not say, “yes you can murder, or steal, but your skin will turn blue as soon as you do it.” Why not say, “yes you can abuse a child, but you will asphyxiate within a week.”

This “free will” agument seems shallow and superficial since instant death is not a barrier to free will but it IS a Potential Problem Mitigator. Any engineer or designer knows this most basic premise. (Not to mention it is obviated by the parallel story that beings will someday go to heaven where nothing sad will happen, but they will still have Free Will and not be robots. Wait - won’t they?)


So. I have not been shown a reason yet that Satan needed to be created, and/or their effects couldn’t be guarded and localized. We certainly did not need tapeworms, now did we?

To the contrary, what you’ve espoused does inhibit free will. A God creating an intervening causal act that physically prohibits or precludes some act by a person is not consistent with free will. This is tantamount to saying a person has the freedom to floor the car to go 180mph despite a governor pls ex on the car by the manufacturer that shuts it down at 100mph. The person doesn’t have the freedom to do 180mph in the car.

God cannot create people with free will and then, consistent with free will, build in your “safety” points that physically make it impossible for a person to freely do something.

 

[Rhea]

To the contrary, what you’ve espoused does inhibit free will. A God creating an intervening causal act that physically prohibits or precludes some act by a person is not consistent with free will. This is tantamount to saying a person has the freedom to floor the car to go 180mph despite a governor pls ex on the car by the manufacturer that shuts it down at 100mph. The person doesn’t have the freedom to do 180mph in the car.

They don’t have “freedom to succeed” but they have Free Will to try. They have Freedom to floor the accelerator. There’s no guarntee it’ll go the way they hoped.
You would probably argue that we have “Free Will” right now, right?
Why don’t I have the freedom to breath under water, then?

I do. I just won’t survive it.

God cannot create people with free will and then, consistent with free will, build in your “safety” points that physically make it impossible for a person to freely do something.

Yes they (the god) can. They (the god) can create anything they want.
The world we currently live in has all kinds of restrictions. They aren’t “safety” restrictions. They are completion restriction. There are built in brakes that prevent completion. Your safety is not assured.

 

[Rhea]

Indeed, the Christian Theology has one MASSIVE one built right in. You’re free to do what you want in belief, but if you choose wrong, you’ll die. If you choose right, you get everlasting life.

How can you say the god couldn’t create this? It already has!

 

[Wiploc]

To the contrary, what you’ve espoused does inhibit free will. A God creating an intervening causal act that physically prohibits or precludes some act by a person is not consistent with free will. This is tantamount to saying a person has the freedom to floor the car to go 180mph despite a governor pls ex on the car by the manufacturer that shuts it down at 100mph. The person doesn’t have the freedom to do 180mph in the car.

God cannot create people with free will and then, consistent with free will, build in your “safety” points that physically make it impossible for a person to freely do something.

If god can't give us freewill in a goodworld, then, by the same logic, he can't give us freewill in a badworld either.

Before he created, he knew every choice that would be made, in this world and every other. If you don't count our choices as free in the worlds where we always choose good, then you can't -- for exactly the same reason -- count them as free in the worlds where we don't.

If you do consider our choices to be free in this world, then, to be logically consistent, you must consider them to be free in other worlds too.

There are possible worlds in which we have free will but do not sin. We always freely choose the good. God knew which worlds those are, and he could have chosen one of them.

 

[DBT]

In terms of freedom, the rub lies in how and why our thoughts and decisions form....the result of which may not be in line with what Christians consider to be good or holy in the eyes of God. That we are born sinners. Yet we did not create ourselves, our world or the environment in which we are born.

For this, our condition, the God of Love and Tender Mercy condemns us as sinners and requires a blood sacrifice in order to redeem our souls.

 

[ideologyhunter]

As Lenny Bruce said, "The fault lies with the manufacturer."

 

[Jarhyn]

So, maybe off topic... But when you think out into the borders of sane thought, asking questions we are told never to ask, that have nonsense answers like: What is a god? Why is a god? What is a devil? Why is a devil?...

When you spend time staring into those questions and letting yourself come to new answers, even if they are wrong, this always comes up. "If I were to write a story, why would god create a devil?"

Inevitably, the god character is always flawed in some way: They don't foresee the consequences.
, Or worse yet they 'Play God' and create a play thing they will eventually throw away.

If you want to twist the story into an actually useful allegory (though you probably shouldn't, but when has that ever stopped me?): Once upon a time something happened, and as a byproduct of that something, laws came into existence that implied from their function on a broad scale that we ought be good to one another, if we are capable as we are... Though we didn't exist yet. Something far simpler was born, and was inevitable from whatever happened. And while things that rode on the winds of entropy were an inevitability, so too was the birth of evil: survival of the fittest, the right of might and the law of strength was then born.

And so people throughout time have seen glimpses of truth buried in the depths of the ignorance they and we too swim in: that there are better ways than treating each other like garbage, ways that yield benefit to us all. That this is not magical but rather we can see the benefit with our eyes, of treating each other well.

But ignorance isn't banished in a lifetime. Or in a thousand lifetimes. And it took great sacrifice to put together a view of truth. And Darwinist Ethics are a persistent thing! Because it is a model that fights for it's own existence and holds us hostage to elements of it!

And something (if there is anything) that isn't just older but not necessarily bound within our dimension of causality/entropy put this here: a way to treat each other that is better than that, and we just had to figure it out.

The question is, why should we have to figure it out in the first place?

Unless maybe these rules are just another function of math. And they might be, if something so esoteric as 'the universe is a pure consequence of the intersection of the axioms of math' turns out to be the answer.

In this story, things are less abstract. Satan is more Darwinistic Solipsism. God is a big absentee question mark. But what cannot be denied is that being good to each other is not Darwinistic Solipsism, and absolutely works better than.

 

[Learner]

To the contrary, what you’ve espoused does inhibit free will. A God creating an intervening causal act that physically prohibits or precludes some act by a person is not consistent with free will. This is tantamount to saying a person has the freedom to floor the car to go 180mph despite a governor pls ex on the car by the manufacturer that shuts it down at 100mph. The person doesn’t have the freedom to do 180mph in the car.

They don’t have “freedom to succeed” but they have Free Will to try. They have Freedom to floor the accelerator. There’s no guarntee it’ll go the way they hoped.
You would probably argue that we have “Free Will” right now, right?
Why don’t I have the freedom to breath under water, then?

I do. I just won’t survive it.

God cannot create people with free will and then, consistent with free will, build in your “safety” points that physically make it impossible for a person to freely do something.

Yes they (the god) can. They (the god) can create anything they want.
The world we currently live in has all kinds of restrictions. They aren’t “safety” restrictions. They are completion restriction. There are built in brakes that prevent completion. Your safety is not assured.

Did the engineer design the machine to have a purpose; being an all-in-one like: diving in deepest oceans getting the catch of the day, making your wine, whilst being the bottle and corkscrew, capability to play the piano, flying high being a plane?

 

[Rhea]

Did the engineer design the machine to have a purpose;

I see you have never met an engineer.

 

[Rhea]

So,

I had to read this a couple of times to suss out what I think is your meaning. Paraphrasing here for feedback on whether I got it?

And so people throughout time have seen glimpses of truth buried in the depths of the ignorance they and we too swim in: that there are better ways than treating each other like garbage, ways that yield benefit to us all. That this is not magical but rather we can see the benefit with our eyes, of treating each other well.

But ignorance isn't banished in a lifetime. Or in a thousand lifetimes. And it took great sacrifice to put together a view of truth. And Darwinist Ethics are a persistent thing! Because it is a model that fights for it's own existence and holds us hostage to elements of it!

[...]

The question is, why should we have to figure it out in the first place?

Unless maybe these rules are just another function of math. And they might be, if something so esoteric as 'the universe is a pure consequence of the intersection of the axioms of math' turns out to be the answer.

In this story, things are less abstract. Satan is more Darwinistic Solipsism. God is a big absentee question mark. But what cannot be denied is that being good to each other is not Darwinistic Solipsism, and absolutely works better than.

I think I hearing you say that treating each other well has always been a good idea, but in primitive ways, we are too consumed with survival to plan three steps ahead. But over time, over generations, the data starts to pile up and we can identify success and emulate it, and then feel it, and then adopt it.

But this is not even and universal and some still don’t have enough perspective to see it (and some are psychologically impaired from appreciating it, and we still have to dwell among them)


... interestingly, religion gets in the way of this, by demanding obedience to caring about others as an act of faith, instead of explaining why it’s the better idea and bringing understanding and internalized ownership. By bundling with faith, they risk losing caring at every crisis of faith or threat to faith.

 

[Jarhyn]

So,

I had to read this a couple of times to suss out what I think is your meaning. Paraphrasing here for feedback on whether I got it?

And so people throughout time have seen glimpses of truth buried in the depths of the ignorance they and we too swim in: that there are better ways than treating each other like garbage, ways that yield benefit to us all. That this is not magical but rather we can see the benefit with our eyes, of treating each other well.

But ignorance isn't banished in a lifetime. Or in a thousand lifetimes. And it took great sacrifice to put together a view of truth. And Darwinist Ethics are a persistent thing! Because it is a model that fights for it's own existence and holds us hostage to elements of it!

[...]

The question is, why should we have to figure it out in the first place?

Unless maybe these rules are just another function of math. And they might be, if something so esoteric as 'the universe is a pure consequence of the intersection of the axioms of math' turns out to be the answer.

In this story, things are less abstract. Satan is more Darwinistic Solipsism. God is a big absentee question mark. But what cannot be denied is that being good to each other is not Darwinistic Solipsism, and absolutely works better than.

I think I hearing you say that treating each other well has always been a good idea, but in primitive ways, we are too consumed with survival to plan three steps ahead. But over time, over generations, the data starts to pile up and we can identify success and emulate it, and then feel it, and then adopt it.

But this is not even and universal and some still don’t have enough perspective to see it (and some are psychologically impaired from appreciating it, and we still have to dwell among them)


... interestingly, religion gets in the way of this, by demanding obedience to caring about others as an act of faith, instead of explaining why it’s the better idea and bringing understanding and internalized ownership. By bundling with faith, they risk losing caring at every crisis of faith or threat to faith.

Yes. By virtue of how life originates, it is born ignorant of better ways to live, and this ignorance seeks to maintain itself against the new paradigm (like a biologically inspired Ludditism, a Selfish Gene). We are each born with this natural "satan" because we must have been given the provenance of life before us, even as there is a better truth baked into the universe governing how we ought behave for our own sakes!

This is the true meaning of revelation, of prophecy, of "talking to god": seeing more of the strategy and stripping away the ignorance and seeing more of this true shape of how we ought be for our own sakes.

I just wish most of those assholes could be arsed to have shown their work.

 

[James Madison]

To the contrary, what you’ve espoused does inhibit free will. A God creating an intervening causal act that physically prohibits or precludes some act by a person is not consistent with free will. This is tantamount to saying a person has the freedom to floor the car to go 180mph despite a governor pls ex on the car by the manufacturer that shuts it down at 100mph. The person doesn’t have the freedom to do 180mph in the car.

They don’t have “freedom to succeed” but they have Free Will to try. They have Freedom to floor the accelerator. There’s no guarntee it’ll go the way they hoped.
You would probably argue that we have “Free Will” right now, right?
Why don’t I have the freedom to breath under water, then?

I do. I just won’t survive it.

God cannot create people with free will and then, consistent with free will, build in your “safety” points that physically make it impossible for a person to freely do something.

Yes they (the god) can. They (the god) can create anything they want.
The world we currently live in has all kinds of restrictions. They aren’t “safety” restrictions. They are completion restriction. There are built in brakes that prevent completion. Your safety is not assured.

They don’t have “freedom to succeed” but they have Free Will to try.

Then they do not have free will if God is intervening to make it physically impossible to do what they’ve freely chosen to do.

Saying Michael Jordan has free will to dunk a ball through a basket but then making it impossible to do so because God has the basket disappears before he can dunk means he does not have the free will to dunk a ball through the basket. It does not matter he has free will “to try.” They are still lacking the free will to do it. Free will to do something includes being able to do it.

Yes they (the god) can. They (the god) can create anything they want.

God cannot do what is logically impossible. God cannot create round circles or have 2+2=104, or a square triangle.

The world we currently live in has all kinds of restrictions. They aren’t “safety” restrictions. They are completion restriction. There are built in brakes that prevent completion. Your safety is not assured.

God creating intervening causes that make it physically impossible for someone to freely do something isn’t a mere “restriction.” It is God taking away free will as they aren’t free to do something. Free will is important because to God created beings in which their freedom to do things is morally significant and has great value to God. Hence, he cannot do, as you suggest, consistent with free will, keep people from freely doing something.

Now, to provide a answer to your question of whether Satan is necessary. It is possible, Satan’s existence led to some morally significant outcome(s) of great importance to God.