I have a feeling that’s precisely why they put it in. One could make a “pirate edition” rework of The God Delusion audiobook or, as was my first thought when I saw this, gangsta-rap Dawkins.
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Time to fire-up Melodyne and Audition and start isolating.
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Yes, they ate from a tree after god told them not to, and it gave them knowledge of good and evil. I.e. at the time of disobedience, they were completely incapable of knowing what “wrong” even meant. And thus they and their descendents were, by default, damned for eternity. Nice guy. I’m with @ghostly1 - all humans seeking to be good have a moral duty to oppose any being that vile (Note: this does not prevent us from following good commands he happened to also agree with. Even Stargate got that idea right - “I don’t doubt that there’s morality and wisdom in it. That’s what made it such a powerful lure for so many people.”).
Anyway, there is only one “solution” to the theodicy problem I’ve ever found satisfying. Oddly, it is one I encountered all the pieces of while reading an atheist’s attempt to explain why anything exists at all. Basically, 1) There is more than one possible world. 2) Many of those possible world contain net positive value (good minus evil). 3) A God could make more than one world. 4) (And this is the non-obvious one, like Euclid’s 5th postulate) It is not clear that 2 identical beings (truly identical down to the most fundamental level) have greater (moral or spiritual or whatever) value than one such being. Given 1-4, suppose God made the best of all possible worlds. He could then make Creation even better (sum of all good minus all evil) by also creating a slightly less perfect world, and iterating until just before he got to worlds where good does not exceed evil. Since there are many many ways to add a tiny amount of evil to a big universe, nearly all beings will find themselves in worlds where good is only slightly greater than evil (and that need only be true on balance across all of time, so most of the good might lie in the distant past or far future).
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Sure. But the question was about St. Peter and the Pearly Gates; would Fry have time to make a point if he insists on making a pivot to talking about the Prime Mover and Ground of All Being and other such capitalized theistic noun phrases?
The question was about God at the Pearly Gates, which is silly because God doesn’t answer His own door, that’s Peter’s job.
David Attenborough said the same thing, far more eloquently:
“I don’t know [why we’re here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate…”
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Point taken, probably not.
I think that presuming to know the mind of God and being adamantly sure of his non-existence are both expressions of faith. We’ll know for sure when we’re dead. Or know nothing.
Maybe best not to worry too hard about it and just try and keep our guttering little lights safe for as long as we can in the here and now, because they’ll go out soon enough on their own …
I think at our current level if understanding this is exactly correct. (May have a touch of tautology, but with pepper and lemon I quite enjoy it).
I think that presuming to know the mind of God and being adamantly sure of his non-existence are both expressions of faith. We’ll know for sure when we’re dead. Or know nothing.
[Father Jack voice] That would be… an epistemological question!
No idea where Fry locates himself on the gnostic/agnostic or theist/atheist continuums. Merely affirming that god doesn’t exist doesn’t mean that one expects to prove a negative, after all.
Maybe best not to worry too hard about it…
The apatheist perspective! 
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But you see, its in the nature of evil to injure the innocent.
God is the origin of all goodness.
Where are you getting the idea that he thinks this is an original thought? His exact words as he began answering the question were, “I will, basically… what’s known as theodicy, I think”.
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I mentioned severely lacking dodges, and that claim would be the champion. Because yes, people injure others all the time, but it’s not just from deliberate action or even callous disregard. It’s often from being entirely well-meaning but not able to puzzle out the exceptionally complex ways the world operates.
Those ways are complex minefields of suffering. They need not have any connection to morals; anti-semitism can go with a long life, while eating the wrong bread can punish you with ergotism. They aren’t in any way explained or obvious, and the only way to keep on the right side of them is guesswork.
You could imagine otherwise. Long ago many people used to believe in the doctrine of signatures, that since a loving God provided nature for our aid, he would have made it easy to tell what to use as medicine. So tooth-like plants would help teeth, and liver-like plants would help livers, and kidney-like plants would help kidneys. That would spare a lot of problems, right?
Turns out no! It’s almost impossible to tell. So you end up with lots of cases where say women felt ill, and their doctors gave something they were really hoping would help, and surprise! you end up with deformed or suffering babies. Hey, that’s what those children get! I mean, if people really wanted to be good about it, they should have…guessed what medical research would later determine, you know, after enough damage was done to tell?
Not that they weren’t trying, but whatever. And this continues today; a lot of ailments are caused by pollution or whatnot, but we also get cases where someone is born or suddenly develops a condition that will lead to them suffering the rest of their now-short life, and nobody knows why. Good or evil, we simply haven’t been able to figure out what to avoid.
And of course there is suffering we do know what causes, but simply don’t have the ability to avoid. Genetic disorders, or natural disasters, that we even today we may only the slimmest chance to detect in advance and not much opportunity to do anything about, with much worse for our ancestors. But hey, maybe you can in some way accuse people of the suffering those cause too, because maybe we could be better escaping them, who knows.
Except by this point, holding people actually responsible is completely unreasonable. If it takes thousands of people to die of something before we can avoid it, blaming people for those deaths is like faulting a hamster for losing at Trivial Pursuit. The real reason is plainly the game mechanics, which again are unexplained and much too complex for anyone to be expected to figure out. So yes if there were a designer, the responsibility could only be on them.
To try to abrogate that by faulting the hapless people is dumb sophistry. This is the sort of “nuanced theodicy” that makes a mockery of the concept; held up in comparison “it’s all an inscrutable mystery, but I trust my bible” looks like deep philosophy. I mean, at least that’s an honest take.
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Omniscient + omnipotent = anything, anytime, anywhere.
Only the devil himself would hold back on the slightest benefit to his flock.
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As the Quirmian philosopher said, “Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it’s all true you’ll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn’t then you’ve lost nothing, right?”
When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We’re going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts…”
Totally agree.
Omnicient = no unintended consequences, only intentional ones. Omnipotent means = no limits, no tradeoffs, no worries about paradoxes or logical absurdities.
If there is a god that is both of those things, it could have made the world without suffering that lasted for eternity without anyone having to lose out on anything. It chose not to make such a world.
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That’s an earlier form of Pascal’s Wager. Although Pascal also phrased his more mathematically using probability and early decision theory.
Although just as flawed.
Really? He went with “allowing the existence of cruelty and pain in the world”?
I’d go with, for starters:
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Why did you surround yourself with absurdly obtuse dogma and allow an almost uniformly uninformed clergy to represent you?
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Why did you involve yourself minutely in the affairs of primitive man (who couldnt understand you) and then back off completely when we actually became [somewhat] more civilized?
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Why do you hate women so much?
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How could you have allowed Russell Wilson to throw that interception? Have you no sense of decency?
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