Silent Dave

I don't recall reading anything about it in the original book. I'm sure he's had time in the last three or four decades to address it, although lately he's seemed more concerned with epistemology.


Dave

mattbballman

My convo went pretty well with Metcaf here: http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...threadid=33430

matt

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by Tyler Durden :

I see no reason to suppose that:

If there were less intense suffering and premature death than there is now, humans would be robots.

For example, I can imagine fewer baby bunnies dying in forest fires, and it doesn't seem as if that situation would cause humans to be robots. I can imagine people experiencing 10% less pain from cancer before they die, and that wouldn't obviously lead to a planet full of robots. I can even imagine God preventing us from torturing babies more often, and again, that doesn't seem to cause humans to be robots -- we could still choose to torture the babies, but we'd fail more often.

SRB

LOL. I guess painkillers should have a warning on the packet:
DANGER. THE CONTENTS WILL TURN YOU INTO A ROBOT IF SWALLOWED.

SRB

Tercel

I have no trouble accepting that a desire for human free-will could well be a sufficient reason for God's lack of intervention to prevent human-caused suffering.

As far as naturally occuring suffering goes, the best statement I have seen on the subject is from Bede's website taken from his "A dialogue concerning natural religion"

"If we are to be free then the universe has to run itself. You need physical laws. Otherwise, God would have to personally move every atom himself. Now, I don’t doubt he can do that. But if he does, we are no longer free to make things happen for ourselves. All we are doing is thinking something and watching God do it for us. Worse, if we chose to act in an evil way God would have to carry that act out. He would have to sin. To the Christian this is impossible.

Given the universe is so fine-tuned, [here Bede is referring to the idea that if the basic physical laws which govern the universe had been only slightly different, no physical life at all would have been able to exist] it is very hard to thing of a way that it could be improved. Consider earthquakes. These cause enormous suffering even if we are partly to blame by building our cities over known fault lines. Now, think about what would happen if we didn’t have them. There would be no plate tectonics and so the Earth could not loose its internal energy. It would be stored up inside until the whole planet was turned literally inside out. Obviously, this would destroy all life on Earth. We know that this would happen because of studies of Venus. It has a solid crust that is completely torn apart by internal forces every 500 million years or so. Unless you are a creationist, that means that we would not be here.

No cancer? Well, if cells couldn’t mutate then evolution wouldn’t have happened and once again, we wouldn’t be here. I appreciate I am indulging in unsupported speculation. I cannot show we are in the best possible universe and that even God couldn’t do any better. But I do think that we might be. And if we are the problem of pain is solved. This is, I must emphasise, the single biggest difficulty with theism. I do not know the answer but I can imagine what it might look like."

Vorkosigan

There would be no plate tectonics and so the Earth could not loose its internal energy. It would be stored up inside until the whole planet was turned literally inside out. Obviously, this would destroy all life on Earth. We know that this would happen because of studies of Venus. It has a solid crust that is completely torn apart by internal forces every 500 million years or so. Unless you are a creationist, that means that we would not be here.

Tercel, Bede's argument is awful. The earth does not need to suffer from giant quakes to release stress, harmless tremors will work just fine. And there is absolutely no reason why god could not have installed an early warning system. It must enjoy the thought of small children maim, murdered and orphaned in quakes. The fact that quakes may be natural does not excuse the extra suffering that results from them.

Vorkosigan

Silent Dave

Heh. I can just imagine God laying out the ground rules for his brand-new Universe:

"Listen up, my godlings, for this is how you create the best of all possible universes: Nothing, and I mean nothing, is more important than that the Universe, and Earth in particular, run in a uniform Cartesian-clockwork fashion. Except, of course, that those cute little bipeds don't. That's key. Make it so."


Dave

Koyaanisqatsi

The problem, too, with tercel's (and bede's) apologetic is that it assumes God exists and everything we see around us is therefore somehow according to God's design.

Thus, instead of questioning why God would create the need for thermodynamics, they instead witness thermodynamics as evidence of God.

This is the same God, BTW, that allegedly arrested the sun in its orbit with no catastrophic events resulting from such an unnatural act. So, how is it that one can accept this kind of intervention and power over his own creation, yet he couldn't either figure out a way to create stable planets or, at the very least, afford protection against such cataclysmic events, such as making the human body impervious to molten rock, or the like? After all, it rains on the good and the evil, yes?

Even we are capable of developing artificial exoskeletons that protect us against most of the hostile environments that surround us and since those faux exoskeletons do not in any way, shape or form assist or prevent us from sinning, where does the FWD come into play? God wanted us to create deep sea diving suits so that we could be closer to God's deep sea creations so that we would therefore choose not to sin against God?

NCL. No Causal Link.

As for the "God chooses not to alleviate human suffering," why then does God choose to inflict human suffering? It's not a violation of our free will to cause human suffering, but it is to prevent it? Just by making his son's death a contingent quality to salvation he has intervened in our free will. The creation of hell intevenes in our free will.

In fact, there is nothing about God's actions in the Bible that points in any way to humans having free will to choose God, since we aren't ever given a choice! It's a threat. Do it or suffer eternally, either directly or indirectly.

Either way we are being dictated to and our "choice" is being proscribed to us. "I will either punch you or hug you" does not offer you a choice based upon your own will, since, ultimately, it is I who will be actively inflicting something upon you against your will; the only "choice" being in how I act against your will. The acting against your will part, however, is assumed to be true from the very construct of the faux "choice" presented to you.

The question is about one's free will, which means that God cannot act in any way against that will (including, especially, punishment, either directly or indirectly, as a consequent of exercising it), or it can't be considered free.

Again, "I will either punch you or hug you," means that, no matter what, I will be acting against your free will, since, in order for it to be a question of your own will, the answer must also contain, "I choose for you to do neither."

This isn't a question about whether or not there are consequences for one's choices in life; this is about whether or not individuals have free wills that are independent of God's will. If it is God's will that you be punished for not believing in him (either directly or indirectly), and you do not want that punishment for not believing in him, as it contravenes your own will, then how is your will in any way "free?"

"You're free to choose your torture, or to discard your intellect. What's it going to be buddy?"
"Um...Neither?"
"That's not a choice."
"Then there is no choice wherein I am acting out of my own free will."
"Now you get it. It's rigged and deliberately so and all of this 'free will' nonsense is just designed to fool you even further. Have a nice time burning for a thousand years in the lake of burning sulfur!"

And as for the "robots," thing, we are precisely robots to God. He created us and allegedly knows everything in our hearts and minds; knows exactly what we are going to do or say or practice or preach presumably the instant he has created us (including whether or not we will "choose" to believe or not). That is the ultimate definition of a robot!

Nope, sorry. No matter how you slice it, the god concept always rings false, which is, of course, why cult members are inculcated into believing in spite of all of this, so I find it endlessly fascinating that otherwise intelligent people (like terc and bede) chase after the apologetics with such fevered desperation, IMO.

The minute one deconstructs without the preconceived assumption of god's existence is the minute it all falls flat on its prima facia .

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by Tercel :

But our freedom of action is already considerably limited. What's, say, one more additional limitation?

I have to echo Vorkosigan. Bede's theodicy is particularly awful, and you have a particularly dim view of God's power if you accept it. It's logically possible for earth to run along fine without having earthquakes.

And logically possible for God to excise a few more cancers than He does now, or make the pain from them less severe. Maybe you have in mind an idea of God Who is limited by what's physically possible, too.

Tyler Durden

Good news- the engineer replied, much to my delight! I think you all would get a kick out of it too, so i am sharing it. My previous response is italicized and his is the plain. My response should be forthcoming within a few hours.


Without further ado...

Christian apologetics rule number one: reword what is obviously evil for us (natural disasters, terminal diseases, or any other kind of natural evil) to divine love.

Those things you listed are not evil by definition. They just are, like rocks. Rocks are not evil – it’s how they’re interpreted and/or used that acquires the distinction between good and evil.

This is in stark contradiction with the account of creation in the book of genesis. God told Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge. Then it stands to reason that He did not want us to “freely choose” but remain happy robots. True or False?

I do not think it stands to reason at all. I think He DID want us to freely choose. Freely choose Him. To do so would allow us to remain happy robots, which might have been great – who knows? In the beginning, God did prevent evil – it was Man who chose evil and thus earned the condition of sin in the world.

How is this inferior? God is omnipotent, and is capable of creating a better universe than this finite, dangerous one. True or False?

Granted we do not know how it would be to exist as robots, we cannot know whether it would be inferior to this existence or not. Perhaps it is not inferior. See previous green statement. I believe sometimes we act like robots, but that does not make us exist as robots.
True. God is capable of creating a better universe (I think that someday for Christians He will/has – Heaven) but at the same time, by His grace we have all that we need to flourish now in what He’s provided.

False. It is we, through our limited abilities, who are masters of the world today, no thanks to God.

If we are indeed masters of the world today, why are there still things that you call “evil”? Why are we trashing our planet? Why can’t/aren’t we making the world a better place for (all) humanity on our own? If we are indeed masters, and if it’s best for humans that evil not exist, why does it still abound?

There is no need for certainty when we are capable of achieving approximation. Probability is what we’re limited to, and our scientific progress functions entirely on shades of approximation, not clear and distinct knowledge. So the requirement of absolute knowledge is a strawperson and needs no further attention.

Let’s go talk to Dr. T about accumulation of errors and see how far approximation gets us. If everything is relative to everything else (i.e., there is no absolute), then we could logically rationalize anything at all. In fact, you and I both have dark hair and dark eyes. We both have 2 arms and 2 legs. We both love to dance. We’re both not rabbits. We’re pretty similar overall. We must be the same person. Or, 1 is pretty close to 2, you know, but 3 is pretty close to 2 also. 4 is only a little bigger than 3 ... pretty soon 1 = infinity.
One example from nature that is right on the top of my head is the Kelvin scale. If there are no absolutes, what happens below 0 K?
False. We did not create this universe, nor did we ask to be born in a 99 percent uninhabitable one. Therefore, the playing field of choosing an incompetent god is not quite free, for it is already slanted towards the darwinian account of survival.
This makes perfect sense to me except for the whole incompetent part. I think it displays supreme mastery to create a universe that consistently points towards the Creator every time, whether it be through Darwin or not. I say again, God has given us everything we need already. The other 99 percent is irrelevant in terms of what we need. Besides, (Rom 1:20) “For the invisible things [things that cannot be perceived by the senses] of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity; that they may be without excuse”

Here comes the platonic account of evil as a “lack” or “privation.” It's been around for nearly 3000 years.

To me, refuting an argument for its identity or age alone is not a valid reason. Indeed, aren’t we supposed to build on what greater minds than ours have already achieved?

This platonic account is poetic and beautiful, but utterly fails to explain away suffering as a result of evil. Have you ever told the terminally ill this platonic account for his suffering? “You are not really suffering, sir, but rather you lack the Good.”

Once again, illness is not evil. It is a condition of the physical world, sort of behaving the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: from order of health and physical life to disorder of systems not functioning and physical death. Physical conditions are not what matters here – the only thing that matters is the spiritual condition of being with or without God.

Did you just contradict yourself? Is evil a privation of the good, or is it a metaphysical substance?

It is both a lack of good and an active force. I say it is an active force because I believe spiritual beings work to forward the purposes of evil – ask any real follower of Satan (or any survivor of satanic ritual abuse). However, evil cannot withstand God just as darkness and light cannot exist in the same time and place together. If there is a light in a room, the darkness ceases to exist, just as in the presence of God, evil cannot abide.

2000 years of history do not reflect that assertion. Christians are among the worst people in the world. So, a membership in the religion has little to nothing to do with how people turn out.

Your use of the word “Christians” here is inaccurate to me. I’m sure you know that Christian means Christ-like, so another word for “Christians” could be “followers of Christ”. True followers of Christ are not the “worst people in the world” who label themselves as “Christians” inaccurately. True followers of Christ try to be like Him – the best person in the world.
I agree that membership in a religion has nothing to do with how people turn out. In some ways, I do believe religion is a crutch that some people get so used to using that they never learn how to walk with God on their own. I don’t think Jesus ever intended us to start religions. The whole idea was not to GO to church, but for His people to BE the Church (as a body).

This is not correct either. Satan was originally free of sin and had a ‘spirit nature,’ and not a ‘sinful nature.’ So satan had free will. Your theology can’t deny free will as the derivation of original sin, otherwise God by default will inherit the problem of evil. The ability to sin requires a free will, not a tempter. If that is what you think, then I must ask you who was Satan’s tempter? It was his own free will that lured him into the sin of pride.
Furthermore, not all evil stems from free choice. Some acts of suffering has nothing to do whether one accepts God or not, and some people are unable of making the choice- such as newborn babies, those in different cultures where the concept of God is nonexistent.

I don’t think that free will is the derivation of sin. Sin is the condition of being separated from God. All the bad behaviors are just symptoms of this problem. Originally, there was God, and there was not God from which to choose. Satan and Man obviously did not Choose God. Sin came about through free will, not because of free will.
I agree that the ability to sin requires a free will, not a tempter.
I agree that some suffering has nothing to do with whether one accepts God or not. As equals, we humans live here on Earth having to deal with the consequences of others’ actions. Yes, some don’t live here very long (like aborted babies, etc.) and I believe that people like these and others who are still innocent (have done their best to follow what’s right in their hearts but were never presented with God) when they die are redeemed by Jesus’ death and will be saved. We cannot help or control what another person does, but we can decide how we as spiritual beings will deal with what’s before us. That to me is the practical application of this spiritual issue.

The eschatological argument is easily defeated by the Disneyland argument: the father, promising his children he will take them to Disneyland in spring, has a full license to sexually molest them throughout winter.

This argument is not an accurate reflection of what has transpired. If, and only if, the children and the father enter into a contract does the father have license. First of all, that is not the type of contract (promise of punishment) that God offered Man at first. God offered the promise of eternal reward and benefit. There is a distinct difference. When Man broke that contract, the rewards and benefits no longer applied. The new contract, or covenant, is another type of promise of reward and benefit offer. The rewards and benefits are made available through true belief and acceptance of Jesus’ sacrifice.

Christianity has been living in its final days since the day of the apostle John on that island.

So what’s the problem with that? If you live every day like it may be your last (making sure you take care of your top priorities), you might find over the course of your life-span that you’ve had a great life. After all, today just may be the last day we ever know.

Then you have done away with all possible means of defining God and evil if they are “outside” of our human experience. If you means literally outside, then you have contradicted yourself with the assertion that it is not a spatial location, nor a temporal position. No offense, This is why I despise apologetics- their inability to really analyze what they are saying, and the constant violation of the principle of significance- anything bereft of empirical worth (lacking in spatial or temporal properties) is a byproduct of the reasoning faculties, and should be condemned as the logic of illusion. The positing of an entity beyond human ken is tantamount to denying all means of possible understanding.

I have no problem with doing away with means of defining God. Within the realm of my human experience, it is impossible for me to completely define something that is larger. That is why He is God. I can only describe what I know using what’s available to me. Spatial locations and temporal positions are only relevant to us. If God is bigger than our human experience, then He must not be able to be contained in something created within human experience.
If we understood God, then He wouldn’t be God. This is a reason for me that God cannot be a product of Man because if He was, everyone would understand God.
I have a question – what are your views on love? It has no spatial or temporal properties (manifestations, yes, but not properties), but cannot be a product of the reasoning faculties because it is so unreasonable. Is love an illusion?

A God that is independent of our finite perspective is as meaningful and significant as the invisible pink golden retriever Toorahloo who intervenes occasionally whenever we are not following its incoherent doctrines.

See previous green statement. A God Who Is independent of anything finite at all is God – the MOST meaningful and significant being ever.

Ahum, do you know what the definition of ‘omnipresence’ is?

Yes. Ever-present/present everywhere. The thing is, He is present everywhere to our point of view (space/time/reality). So it’s true.

These sentences are analytically incompatible:
God is omnipotent
“ “ omniscient
“ “ omnibenevolent
Evil exists.
So it is incumbent on the apologist to deny the status of evil or find a way to remove the apparent contradiction while upholding the first 3 sentences. And like clockwork, the unwieldy metaphysical explanation of reality is introduced.

Another way of (accurately) posing those sentences is:
God is omnipresent to us.
God is omniscient to us.
God is omnibenevolent to us.
[and yet]
Evil exists separate of God but independent of our perspective.

A lot of assertions and very little reason to accept such ugly dichotomies. I must ask you, why is this necessary to repeat the mistakes of the past 2000 years by dividing the human being into privileged and inferior components, without using the following reasons. The division of the human being into a hierarchy of values leads to repression of what is human, such as mental castrations like Christian morality.

Let me ask you this: why do people get physically ill from stress? Mental/emotional stress has no physical cause, but can cause physical reactions. This says to me that mental/emotional/spiritual and physical conditions are separate. Why can it be beautiful weather outside but you have a crappy day mentally/emotionally/spiritually?
Why would it be wrong or inaccurate to divide the mind/spirit and the body? You lost me on that last sentence. What is human that is being repressed? To me, having Christian morals does cut down on what I’ll call for lack of a better phrase “animal instincts”, but how human is that?
How do you know that the mind is not, in fact, superior to the body? What about all this “mind over body” stuff where people can drive their bodies beyond what should be physically possible? Why is strength of will/mind so much more powerful than strength of body? After all, it is your mind that controls your body anyway. I believe that the body is in fact inferior to the mind/spirit.

How is it man’s choice if Evil existed long before man?

Evil did exist long before Man, but the world was originally created without evil. Evil entered the world with Satan, but did not take dominion until Man Chose evil over God.

Smile, The silly Lamarckian account of hereditary sin is painfully apparent. The imperfection is entirely of God’s creation, choice, since he is blessed or cursed with Divine Foreknowledge. In his divine omniscience, He has foreseen all of this needless suffering and has engaged in the enterprise of playing games with the immaterial souls of his creation with his alternate personality, Satan.

Perhaps not hereditary sin in genetic terms, then, but as I mentioned before: we live with the consequences of not only our actions, but also the actions of others. And what exactly is Lamarckian about it? I thought Lamark (sp?) was the guy who said that if you exercise your biceps and they grow really big that your children will naturally have big biceps. That’s not what I’m saying. Everyone starts out on equal footing before God, regardless of genes and regardless of others’ actions.
I would not say that imperfection is of God’s choice. I would say that He provided us the opportunity to choose Him OR imperfection. Inherent in the concept of divine foreknowledge is the prefix “fore-“ which connotes pre-existent knowledge or knowledge that exists in a time before the present time. This is somewhat accurate from our point of view, but then again, God is outside of time, so He’s bigger than anything we can build with time (we cannot contain Him to having knowledge before or after any certain point that we define). He Knows “now” (to us) everything He knew before “now” (to us) and will know later “than now” (to us), independent of when we come into the picture and make our Choices. It is true that God knows who will choose Him and who will not, but knowledge here does not confer responsibility because the actual Choice is our and ours alone to make. God does not overrule or disregard our Choices.

Why did you choose the Pauline account of Christianity as opposed to Jesus’?

Paul’s (not Saul’s) entire life after Damascus was testament to Jesus. They are consistent.

With that confession of skepticism, then how do you manage to believe in your limited account above any other?

It’s not a confession of skepticism, it’s a profession of faith in Someone larger than myself that He is the One who is truly in control. For me (or anyone) to be able to understand all the mysteries of God completely is to be equal with God, and that is impossible. I cannot define or even fully describe or explain God because the part can never be greater than the whole.
I believe in my account above any other for several reasons. One is similar to why I study Wing Chun Kung Fu. Wing Chun is a complete system. It entails everything I need to know about martial arts. It is a master key able to unlock any martial arts problem. I have not completed the system, so I am still imperfect in my knowledge and execution of the art. Similarly, this account of God offers everything I need to know about Him, life, and the world.
Another reason is that it works for me. Since I started taking my walk with God seriously, my life has blossomed into greater fullness than I could have imagined. The past three years are phenomenal testament to this compared to the three years before that. The past three years I have had the privilege to live with brothers in my faith and they have encouraged me and taught me and shared fellowship with me. Since moving in with them I have become a better, more full human being. I can give you specific examples later if you want. The three years before that I lived in the residence halls (once as a freshman, then twice as an RA). During those years I did not have a strong base of friends in my faith, and my personal, emotional, and spiritual growth was very stunted.
What do you believe in, and does it work for you (meaning are you a better person for believing and following it)? And if so, better by what standards if there is no absolute? Without God’s benchmark, I believe there is no such thing as morality. For people who have never been “exposed to God” who still act morally: Rom 2:14-15 “The Gentiles do not have the Law; but whenever they do by instinct what the Law commands, they are their own law, even though they do not have the Law. Their conduct shows that what the Law commands is written in their hearts. Their consciences also show that this is true, since their thoughts sometimes accuse them and sometimes defend them.”

Easy. Our ‘creator’ is a reflection of our teleological beliefs. So, all our attempts at reconciling the divine with the human ends in creating religious texts and inventing insipid attempts at apologetics to further the confusion.

If that’s the case, then why are we here? Are we some sort of accident? If so, why not skip all the unpleasantries and just kill yourself? You’ll just end up dead in the end either way if that’s what you believe. Good experiences may be worth living for, but if they pass away with your life, why not just avoid all the unpleasantness that comes with them? If reincarnation is your thing, then what happens when the universe experiences heat death (the eventual absence of any temperature difference)? And how did it start?
I believe our Creator is bigger than us, the creations (obviously), so there again is no way we can completely understand or explain God. That’s fine with me – I have everything I need to know and grow.

By growing up. The adult will comprehend his parents, akin to how the formerly religious person understand the true meaning of his childhood beliefs.

Okay, I’m curious as to the “true meaning” of my beliefs according to you.
It doesn’t make sense to me that a child begotten by parents who were created would understand the original Creator. To me, that’s almost like saying that an AI spawned by AI’s would understand the programmer.
When I made the statement about the baby, it was under the condition that the baby never grows up. Are you saying that when we “grow up” we become like God? When does that happen? Do you belong to the church of latter-day saints? I believe we’ll never “grow up” and be like God. If we did, then why don’t we know about it? Where’s your empirical evidence that leads you to believe that we’ll “grow up” to be like God?

Yet this doesn’t help your case in the least- how do you manage to privilege your explanation above any other thoughts of “god?”

It doesn’t hurt my case. Again, it works for me. I am a better person (closer to God – that’s my comparison) for believing what I do.
Indeed, these discussions have helped me grow. I am happy to find that I’m still growing closer to God by finding Him to be self-consistent.

Eh. To be honest, it's all redundant. All appeals to the free will defense to solve the problem of evil opens a new can of worms-the problem of divine foreknowledge. God’s decision to create man with free will is tantamount to the programmer who introduces an element of random behavior in his robots in order to give them the illusion of choice, either to obey his programming or not. Yet the programmer is responsible for the robots if they go on a rampage, and God isn’t for our behavior. Nice illogic.

You said foreknowledge again.
Your analogy is inaccurate at the points of the element of random behavior and the illusion of choice. I believe God truly gave us actual free choice, so the responsibility lies on us. True, God knew what would transpire, but again, knowledge does not equal responsibility. As for the ENGR 195 ethics part of it, what God did with His knowledge to fix the problem was offer His Son Jesus to bail us out of the breach of contract we earned.