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Epicurus was not an atheist, although he rejected the idea of a god concerned with human affairs; followers of Epicureanism denied the idea that there was no god. While the conception of a supreme, happy and blessed god was the most popular during his time, Epicurus rejected such a notion, as he considered it too heavy a burden for a god to have to worry about all the problems in the world.
God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. ––And we––we still have to vanquish his shadow, too. [17] Still in The Gay Science, the expression is stated through the voice of the "madman", in "The Madman", as follows: God is dead. God remains dead.
Epicurus was a hedonist, meaning he taught that what is pleasurable is morally good and what is painful is morally evil. [ 62 ] [ 63 ] [ 64 ] [ 7 ] He idiosyncratically defined "pleasure" as the absence of suffering [ 63 ] [ 7 ] and taught that all humans should seek to attain the state of ataraxia , meaning "untroubledness", a state in which ...
The wise decision is to wager that God exists, since "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing", meaning one can gain eternal life if God exists, but if not, one will be no worse off in death than if one had not believed. On the other hand, if you bet against God, win or lose, you either gain nothing or lose everything.
For some thinkers, the existence of evil and hell could mean that God is not perfectly good and powerful or that there is no God at all. [62] Theodicy tries to address this dilemma by reconciling an all-knowing, all-powerful, and omnibenevolent God with the existence of evil and suffering, outlining the possibility that God and evil can coexist.
One resolution to the problem of evil is that God is not good. The evil God challenge thought experiment explores whether an evil God is as likely to exist as a good God. Dystheism is the belief that God is not wholly good. Maltheism is the belief in an evil god. Peter Forrest has stated:
The theme of God's "death" became more explicit in the theosophism [clarification needed] of the 18th- and 19th-century mystic William Blake.In his intricately engraved illuminated books, Blake sought to throw off the dogmatism of his contemporary Christianity and, guided by a lifetime of vivid visions, examine the dark, destructive, and apocalyptic undercurrent of theology.
Omnipotence, they say, does not mean that God can do anything at all but, rather, that he can do anything that is logically possible; he cannot, for instance, make a square circle. Likewise, God cannot make a being greater than himself, because he is, by definition, the greatest possible being. God is limited in his actions to his nature.