luvluv

K:

Well, somewhat. It deals more with the issue of how free will might apply to the afterlife. It will be more fun, probably, than the Problem of Pain. I can guarantee you that much. It is a work of fiction and pretty decent, though not (I'd argue) his best. (Which is the book Till We Have Faces... if you give me a chance I'll keep reccomending Lewis books until the cows come home).

Well, again, I see humanity learning to live as an enterprise that comprises all of us. I think we may be thinking too individualistically on this thread. It may be that individual human progress is dependant on a consistent social fabric. If God simply took care of all infants, then that would eliminate much of our moral responsiblity and would eliminate the possibility of our being able to construct a society that took care of children. That is merely to address your comments about children being abandoned or abused.

However, in terms of disease, my argument is that a consistent natural environment will entail some forms of disease. Diseases, after all, are simply predatory organisms. I was going to say this to ex-preacher but I don't see the reason to put most diseases in a category any different from other predators. They are (usually) organisms that feed off of other organisms. They serve, generally, the same function of other predators. Obviously outbreaks occur when predation gets out of balance, but this is naturally self-correcting. But I don't see any reason to treat an outbreak of the flu any differently from an outbreak of predation. Microorganisms, like any other animal, can be introduced into an environment where their newfound prey does not have the ability to resist their predation that was present in their former population. This happened, for instance, when the Europeans brought their diseases to the Native Americans. It is perhaps more horrible to see, and more easily attributed to God, because we do not make the connection that disease is simply an instance of predation similar to when a lion eats a gazelle, and it can have some of the same purposes.

Beyond that, when we are talking about diseases that do not involve organisms, like genetic disease, I see this as a case to appeal to the necessity of a stable environment. Just like matter can be arranged in inconveinent ways on a macro level, so it can be arranged in inconveinent ways on the genetic level. It's part of the laws of physics that things ocassionaly break down and tend to disorder (entropy) so there cannot be a world in which a process as intricate as sexual reproduction does not break down ocassionally. On a certain level, genetic information is just matter and occasionally matter gets into states that we don't like, but it is impossible that our likes should be forever and always the criteria by which matter arranges itself. It would make free human interaction, as Lewis said, impossible.

K

luvluv:

I got the book. I'm a little over a third of the way through. I'll let you know what I think when I'm finished. It'll probably be in the philosospy area.

Back to the problem of pain issue. The things you've described make perfect sense - in a perfectly naturalistic world. But if God is truly omnipotent, what possible reason could He have to make a world where diseases prey on people and animals? And when we wipe out some of those diseases, is the world less perfect because we've removed an agent of free will that God Himself created? Couldn't an omnipotent god have created a world where matter assembles, not necessarily the way we want, but at least so that suffering isn't caused by pure chance? He wouldn't have to intervene, he could have just created things that way to begin with.

I think you mentioned a while ago that you think predatory behavior is needed to keep the populations in check. That is definitely true if we live in a natural world. If God was truly omnipotent and omnibenevolent, what would prevent him from doing away with sexual reproduction and replacing it with a special creation of each individual human and animal he intended to live on earth? That would eliminate the chance of breeding to overpopulation. If He was worried about interfering with free will by making His presence known, an omnipotent diety could surely find a way to hide His hand in our births while still controlling the number of creatures on the earth.

jdawg2

I'm curious about this part too...are all the vaccines that humans have come up with somehow "violate" free will? By making the world a "better place", is that intruding on god's plan somehow if suffering (from his perspective) is some required thing in his universe? Is creating a vaccine for smallpox now considered bad because we could've learned some lesson from struggling with it?

Mark_Chid

This is the old question about free will being incompatible with God having a 'plan'.

If we can act against God's will, then his 'plan' is not perfect, and can be thwarted. If we can't, then free will seems worthless (in fact its an illusion).

Calvinists believe that whether we are saved or not is God's will and we don't even get to choose THAT (which explains why some never get to hear the gospel, others hear it from priests that abuse them or Crusaders that slay their families etc). Calvinism is the bleakest most evil theology I know of - it totally devalues humanity. A LOT of American Fundamentalism is closely related to this foul misanthropy unfortunately.

Jack the Bodiless

From the Bible, it can be inferred that God is (in D&D "alignment" terms) Lawful Evil: constrained by a code of conduct, but capable of great malevolence within that code. God continually seeks to give himself excuses to "legitimately" be malevolent: like hardening the heart of Pharaoh to justify the Plagues, or setting up the Forbidden Fruit trap, or that "I can't forgive you all without killing somebody" ritual, or killing innocent babies and animals in the Flood because some people "deserved it", or including Lot's wife in the massacre at Sodom and Gomorrah just because she looked back.

Incidentally, according to Christian tradition, this same constrained malevolence applies to demons: "pure" evil, yet unable to appear without being called, requiring a contract to take a soul, and so forth. The Biblical God (if he existed) would be an Arch-Demon.

Luvluv, your description of Ebola, dysentery and suchlike as mere "predators" is a demonic justification: yes, they are, so the horrible and useless suffering they cause is "legitimate".

Why is God's omnimalevolence constrained? I can use the same BS handwaving that supposedly justifies the need for the crucifixion: God is "perfectly evil and perfectly just". Just as the "omnibenevolent" God cannot simply forgive, the "omnimalevolent" God requires an excuse. It's "in his nature". God is beyond human understanding, he is not like us, we should not expect his behavior to be fully explicable in human terms.

ex-preacher

luvluv, I have two reactions to your argument on disease.

First, I congratulate for being the first Christian to ever attempt to answer this for me.

Second, are you kidding? Is your god so weak or evil that he couldn't design a less painful system? Your post has so many problems that I have a hard time believing that you even meant it. Are you so desperate to believe that you can so easily explain away AIDS, cholera, the plague, malaria, spina bifada, Alzheimer's? Do you have any compassion?