TooBad

A3
You misunderstand me, on two counts.

(a) When I suggested that evil and suffering are (arguably) inevitable consequences of the way the world is, I meant exactly that: not that anyone specific will inevitably do evil, but that evil will inevitably occur. Just as when a teacher sets an exam, he can't be certain who will pass and who will fail, but it's a foregone conclusion that there will be some failures.

(b) And of course we don't hold Ford responsible for traffic accidents, any more than we hold the teacher responsible for having some poor students in his class. The difference between these cases and the responsibility of God is that God is supposed to have created ALL the conditions in which things happen.

If God created people, he is responsible for their powers and capacities, and he is also responsible for the limits to those capacities. Finite life span, finite capacity to reason, finite capacity for compassion and empathy... these are all limits inherent in our human nature. They are certainly not limits that we have chosen for ourselves. But it is with these limited powers that we are forced to make the choices that we make, and it is these same limitations that ensure that some of us, somewhere, somehow, will make choices that inflict pain and suffering on ourselves and others. An all-powerful and all-knowing God must have known all along that this would happen. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence and foresight would have known it.

So in what sense does God not bear responsibility for the outcome?

[ July 03, 2002: Message edited by: TooBad ]</p>

TooBad

Actually, I'm not sure why I'm pulling my punches. The case can be made a lot more strongly.

First, let's lose the term "evil", because it muddies the waters. The crux of the moral problem is the existence of suffering. People suffer; they (we) suffer in a great variety of ways, in highly varying degrees, from the trivial to the profound, and as a result of many different proximate causes, but suffering is an undeniable fact of human experience.

The causes of suffering are not exclusively the actions or choices of humans. Much suffering is the result of purely natural events: earthquakes, floods, avalanches, and other natural disasters routinely cause painful death, injury and deprivation on a huge scale. When suffering which does result from human actions, those actions are often inadvertent: human error, as we say. It is in fact relatively rare to find cases of large-scale suffering which are the deliberate and intended result of one person's desire to harm others.

This is why "evil" is the wrong word; it only covers a small part of the panoply of human ills.
Pain and suffering would still exist even if we were morally perfect; they are a necessary consequence of the physical nature of the world, the fragile physiology of our bodies and the finite nature of our mental capacities.

So when we are told that all of these things are "God-given", we're entitled to a few answers.
Couldn't an all-powerful God have made a more stable, robust, user-friendly universe for us to inhabit? Couldn't an all-knowing God have foreseen the predictable consequences of life in an imperfect world? Wouldn't an all-loving God be more inclined to avert the disasters that regularly inflict mass suffering on innocent people?

So how can the fact of human suffering be compatible with the existence of a God as just described?

[ July 03, 2002: Message edited by: TooBad ]</p>

Bill Snedden

Your attempted rebuttal of my original argument used exactly the line of attack I raised as a possibility myself. It fails for the reasons I mentioned in the first post.

Your argument can only succeed if it is possible that the existence of evil has no causal connection to the initial state of creation. However, this is clearly impossible. Even completely random, or chance, events can be linked causally to the pre-existing state out of which they arose. The only manner in which evil could have come into existence was if the conditions prior to its origin were such that it could come into existence. As God is directly responsible for those conditions, he is, at the very least, indirectly responsible for its existence.

As we also know that God has perfect foreknowledge of future events, we can therefore hold him directly responsible for creating a universe in which evil could not have failed to exist.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

A3

TooBad
All I really get out of this is that you are p’d off that you are not omniscient, omnipotent etc in short that you are not god. Nothing less will do. (Have you maybe read a lot of superman comics in your days The sooner we get over the fact that all of us have our limitations, the sooner we can get on with a loving and meaningful existence.
Because where would you start? It is too late to become uncreated. Would then everybody else also become omniscient and omnipresent etc. ?? Would some may be more omniscient than others? As you can see, the problems would only escalate if in the Middle-East everyone became omnipotent.
If we are not spiritually free to be human, we would be like animals in the wild or in a zoo. You want to just lie around all day and do nothing meaningful, like my cat?
================
Let’s not. Let us call a spade a spade. A human act motivated by love of self or of the world is an evil act, pure and simple. You seem to agree, however, that suffering caused by such an act is thus caused by humans.
As you say there is “Much suffering” small- and large scale, caused by nature and by humans. As they say s.. happens! I don’t know why some people are spared by missing a flight or walking on the other side of the street, I am not God. There is one thing we all know, however, at one point we are all going to die. Even that single point is often construed as a negative, as a bad ‘design.’
If this life was all there is, yes that would be the right conclusion. We are born and from ‘day one’ we learn millions of things. As we get older we learn to love to do things and learn to do them the bedt we can, we might even fall in love and be with someone we would die for. As soon as you say “all this ends at death” I would fully agree that if there is a God, He would be a cruel God.
This natural life, however, is only the preamble of something spiritual. In short, there is nothing in this life that we are in this life for. (If you think there is please let me know.) We are spiritually shaping ourselves in this life for the next, just like a fetus in the womb is being shaped for this natural life.
Another thing, human suffering is primarily based on ignorance. Ignorance about this life and the next. Not knowing who and what God is or the laws of his divine providence. We did suffer the loss of our daughter last year, no question about it, but even though we mis her very much we also see it as a promotion. Now she is an angel.

So when you let go of your glass it will hang there in mid air? When you decide to jump of a bridge you will not fall but again just hang there? We are using the laws of nature to their fullest extent to dive, fly, space walk etc. Nature and its laws are ‘hold on of fall, kill or be killed,’ as humans we do have the ability to rise above that and look down from our spiritual ‘perch.’ Then we can see how people, despite their suffering, decided to do good, kind and considerate things on September 11. And that’s the basic premise of the existence of suffering, it is to bring out the bad and the ugly to activate the good and the just. If nothing good could come out of something bad, it wouldn’t happen.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Snedden

Bill, would you see a baby as good or as evil? Neither, maybe?
The creation of humans or one baby are very much the same. Neither will have a full human existence without the freedom to chose and realistic options to chose between.
It seems you are presenting the same argument as just above, I can chose evil so my design is faulty. In other words, I want to be perfect like God.
Well Bill, now you are God, how would you have designed this baby differently?

BTW I am not arguing for the sake of arguing, I am arguing for the sake of human life and the way it is. You mention “the initial state of creation” is this because you believe in creation or is this just for the sake of arguing?

Regards
Adriaan

HelenM

...and then gets tortured forever according to the will of the Father?

Seems like this child gets more than his comeuppance.

What do you think?

If a human parent tortures his/her child for a finite length of time for disobedience, we call them abusive, don't we?

But hell - that's different, I suppose?

I'm just asking...

Blessings back to you, anyway

love
Helen

TooBad

A3:

With the best will in the world, I honestly can't see how this could remotely be thought to follow from what I said. Perhaps some kind individual would care to enlighten me on this, because I admit I'm baffled

My motive for dropping the word "evil" was so that we could include things like natural disasters and accidents, so that we could talk about all the suffering in the world and not just an artificially determined subset of it.

Ah. Okay. But even if there were such a thing as another "life" after this one (and there is no reason to think that the idea of an afterlife even makes sense, let alone any reason to believe it exists), how is this relevant? Cruelty is cruelty, pain is pain, and no amount of "extra time" changes that.


No it isn't. If a doctor tried to remove my left leg without first administering an anaesthetic, I wouldn't be screaming "Please give me a religious education!" And neither would you.

I'm very sorry about the loss of your daughter.

Regards

TooBad

Bill Snedden

Neither. Human beings have the potential for either good or evil.

An interesting question, but it has nothing to do with the issue at hand. I'm not arguing that God could have or should have done things any differently than He apparently did. I'm simply saying that, as the creator of all that exists, He is ultimately to be held responsible for all that is, including the existence of evil.

To answer the question, however, with the exception of eliminating obvious biological and anatomical design flaws, I'm not sure that I would have necessarily designed humanity any differently than as we currently exist. However, I don't lay any claim to be omnibenevolent, nor do I intend to try to weasel out of my responsibility for the existence of evil.

For the purpose of debating this question, it is granted that God exists and is the creator of all that exists (except himself, of course). This is not my personal belief, but rather the assumption granted for the purpose of the argument.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

[ July 04, 2002: Message edited by: Bill Snedden ]</p>

ManM

"P2) Evil exists"

I would say that evil has no positive metaphysical content of its own. Evil does not exist as a created thing. The relationship between God and evil is analogous to light and darkness. Darkness has no positive content of its own, but is simply the absence of light. It is misleading to say that light creates darkness. Likewise it is misleading to say that God creates evil.

Brahma's atheist

In response to Toobad "not sure why I'm pulling punches".
Finally someone has got what I was trying to say originally. Thank you.
The bottom line is the gods are omnipotent, everything that has happened they have caused,assuming they existed.They are omnipotent.Not omnipotent when it suits, all the time.
People have worshipped these beings since we had the capacity to, 30K, 40K or more years(sorry a bit of anthropology). How many gods have 'existed' and been worshipped. Almost all societies that have ever existed are defunct including their gods. They were worshipped yet what use were they.People with other gods destroyed them, their own gods allowed them to be destroyed. And it goes on now.
Read some books and find out about the world. Open your minds and eyes and see what the gods have done and let happen.
All the gods I'm referring to are or were 'real' by way of them being worshipped and simply believd in.That is all that makes the gods 'real'.

Van Agon

Hi HelenSL,

In response to your post dated July 04, 2002 11:54 AM, thank you for your response.

[You said:]
I can certainly understand your point. First, I do believe that hell is a real "place" of some sort that people "go to" in some way, and that it is undesirable in some ultimate sense. Second, I don't believe that hell is an eternal torture chamber where God inflicts pain and agony on a person because the person has failed to "measure up".

tor·ture n. - Infliction of severe physical pain as a means of coercion.

Torture is certainly wrong, yes.

I think so, yes. I suppose my definition of hell would be in order. I believe God is The Good, and evil is a privation of good. Therefore, evil is not the presence of a thing, but rather it's absence - good. I believe God has given us free will to choose to accept Him or to reject Him, and in so doing, to accept The Good or reject The Good. That is, to accept the presence of good, or to reject the presence of good, IOW accept the privation of good (which is what evil is). Therefore, hell is the absence of God. God does not use coercion to force one to accept Him. Ergo, He provides a "place" for people to go where He is absent. For to require one to be in His presence would be to force His Love on one, and forced Love is a contradiction in terms. That is, forced Love is intrinsically impossible.

Now, regarding the assertion that hell is fire, darkness, etc. These terms are a reflection of the use of phenomenal language, in an attempt to represent what hell is like. I do not believe they are literal terms. For instance, if fire is in hell, how then could hell be dark? I think the solution is that these are just attempts at analogizing hell. The bottom line is, being absent God's presence is in an ultimate sense undesirable. However, one who chooses to be absent God's presence, would no more find Heaven desirable. In fact, I know many who have testified that were there a God, they would prefer to have none of Him, even were they to come face to face with Him, in some sense in which they would regard undeniable. (Personally, I believe I have come face to face with Him in a sense which I may regard as undeniable.)

Some questions this may raise are.

Why would one reject God even when faced with the alternative (remaining eternally absent God's presence)? I don't fully comprehend this, but some of my thoughts include: (1) For one to choose God in the afterlife would likely result in coercion, which we discussed earlier. One cannot be coerced into Loving, for this is intrinsically impossible. (2) I observe some who choose prison over freedom even in this lifetime. I observe some who choose a lifestyle of pathological crime over a reasoned lifestyle. (3) Psychologists say that it is far more prohibitive to unlearn a bad habit than to learn one. So it would seem that our former choices limit the latter. And that there is in free will almost an entropic principle at work in which some tend towards those things that culminate in the baser instincts.

Personally, I've discovered that overcoming destructive tendencies were realized by placing my faith in Jesus Christ. This of course is no empirical test, and is only a personal experience. No doubt others testify to encountering victory over bad habits through crystals, meditation, or other means. I am not here attempting to cast aspersions on their experiences, but only testify to my own.

Thank you for listening.

Blessings, -Van