Ongoing Lucidity

Just a random thought:

According to most Christian beliefs, god is omnipresent, sovereign and benelovant right? In short he is the creator of all that is.

Buuut, an inclusive factor of this christian god is that he's pure, nothing but good, and people (many billions of them) wholeheartedly believe this.

However lucifer popped up somewhere along the way, and since he's not recognized to be any kind of external entity he is thus a product of the man upstairs.

Ergo god is evil, or at least has the capicity or knowledge to create evil.

Yet this infantile, logically fallacous belief system not only survives, but permeates.

How to break institutional foundations?

ManM

Freedom is good, yes? But freedom contains the potential for evil, and so why do we call it good? Come to think of it, freedom is the cause of all evil, for what could be considered evil that wasn't free? Why then do we insist freedom is good?

And if we insist on asserting that freedom is good, we should not find fault in Him who gave us our freedom. God is evil because he gave us freedom? Only if freedom is evil can we make this claim.

Anyway, I suspect the only way to break the institutional foundations is through morality. People know a good person when they see one. If they notice that you are a good person while the Christian is molesting children...

Bill

The problem with this discussion is far more basic: exactly who (or what) defines what is "good" and what is "evil," anyway? If mankind has "free will," then that must imply that we can freely decide our own versions of "good" and "evil," right? And clearly, declarations such as The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on December 10, 1948, by the General Assembly of the United Nations, must necessarily amount to a joint human declaration of what is "good" and what is "evil" ("good" is respecting and fostering the enumerated "rights" while "evil" is violating and/or preventing the exercise of said "rights").

Given that humanity's own "free will" allows us to decide for ourselves exactly what is "good" and what is "evil," then just how can you prevent the existence of "evil" things? You cannot, since it is within our power to simply declare X to be "evil."

Accordingly, the creation of "good" and "evil" is coincident with the grant of "free will" to humans. This is why apologists always use the "free will" defense against the atheistic "argument from evil." But of course, if God can't create humans in such a way that we would never declare anything to be "evil" and would never do any "evil" but would, within that constraint, still have totally "free will," then is God really omnipotent? Personally, I don't think so, and I think that the apologetic counter-argument (that such a creation would, in fact, be logically contradictory with the idea of "free will," and thus God is not obliged to create a logical contradiction) is really a lot of hogwash.

But of course, nothing prevents us from arguing about it until the cows come home (or Jesus returns; whichever comes first ).

== Bill

ManM

Bill,
I'm just as willing as you to toss omnipotence out. God is not omnipotent if we are free to oppose His desires. However, I am not so eager to agree that morality is simply a matter of social convention. I think it is something a tad deeper than that, something hardwired into human nature like reason. Just as reason can be blinded by passions, so can our moral sense. But if we take a dispassionate look at things, I believe we will know the right thing to do in a given situation in the same way we know the answer to a mathematical problem is correct. We just know it when we see it.

But I suspect any discussion along these lines would be best served in the morality forum.

Ranma Saotome

God's omnipotence can not be disproven simply by the fact that evil exists. I will agree that the origins of evil are a funny thing; after all, if God is all good, then where on earth did it come from? Well, it would then be described as "everything that God isn't," and how could that come along if it didn't even exist? It could be said that God had free will but always did the right thing. However, God never had other people to tempt him (or did he?) He also gave the angels free will, perhaps, because he felt they would be as good as he was. One of the angels was jealous, however (once again, where did that jealousy come from), and decided to destroy the humans he saw God creating. Why? To prove he was greater than God, perhaps? There are many questions to be asked here--why was the Tree of Good and Evil put in the Garden in the first place? To test temptation? The humans were obviously not tempted to eat from it until the serpent talked them into it. If Eve could be so easily talked into it, why would she have never even previously considered taking a bite? Why were these people not as smart and aware as God? And, where was God, when this deception was taking place? Why does he call out to Adam in confusion? Perhaps God is only omnipotent whe he chooses to be. Maybe he has his own stuff to work on when he's up there in Heaven. Or, maybe he really can't see the future unless he chooses to. The most creative way I can answer this is to say that God had the whole immoral human plan in mind from the beginning--perhaps he does know evil, and wanted to see what it was like, but didn't want it to happen to him, so he made test subjects and a new world and threw temptation into the mix. When the tree didn't work, he grew desperate and filled Lucifer with jealousy, then cast him down and let him lead Eve into temptation. God saw this, and thought that it was good, and decided to add sin and diseases and death to the world. Perhaps God was bored with the peaceful life his creations were leading in the garden and decided to set the boulder rolling.

Bill

Here, I think you are getting confused between "morality," which is a uniquely human way of thinking logically about behavior, and "instinct," the sort of hard-wired behavior that you can find even in much simpler creatures, such as the social insects.

I don't blame you for this error. I made it myself until I found myself corrected on this very point.

Let us approach the question of whether or not human morality is somehow "hard-wired" by first looking at the issue of whether or not our nearest biological relatives in the primate family have anything describable as "morality." The chimpanzees have extremely complex behavior patterns. A troop of chimps has a distinct social order, which humans are all too ready to compare to primitive human social organizations. Yes, there clearly are some parallels; after all, we are closely related to chimps. But do any of the parallels really have anything substantial to do with the question of morality? I don't think so.

A troop of chimps is generally led by a so-called "alpha male," who is the toughest male in the troop (driving away any serious competition and tolerating only very weak males to remain in the troop; such as young and immature males). This male is, to all intents and purposes, both dictator and "god-figure" to all of the members of the troop. Chimps clearly have learned behavior patterns, but just as clearly, they have nothing in their behavior which corresponds with human morality. Chimps live in the "dog-eat-dog" world of Mother Nature, and they compete against every other animal who lives in their territory. While chimps may well be more intelligent than other mammals, they do not display any more morality than do any species that runs in herds, flocks, or similar groupings. They instinctively band together for protection, and they behave towards their fellow troop members in ways that any human would recognize as "immoral" animal-like behavior. For instance, the females will sneak off into the bushes with any male that they take a liking to rather than remaining in any way loyal to the alpha male.

Morality involves an act of the conscious mind in overruling animal-like behaviors. This presents the first problem with those who assert that animals might display morality, or that morality might be somehow "inbred" in humans. Morality is, at best, a meme. Moral conventions are passed on by memetic means, NOT by genes. So far as we now know, no animal has the ability to pass on memes nor to make conscious moral decisions.

Accordingly, I take the strongest possible issue with your assertion that morality is "something hardwired into human nature." I also take issue with the next two words you use, "like reason." Reason is also NOT in any way whatsoever "hardwired into human nature."

The distinction here is demonstrated by modern science. To the extent that our human brains are in some way "hardwired," those genetic abilities are mere potentialities which, without further development, will not ever mature into reasoning nor morality. This is a classic issue of nature versus nurture, and the clear answer is that BOTH are necessary!

I saw a television documentary about brain development. The exposure of the fetus to music, its mother's voice, and similar environmental conditions actually causes the synapses to grow and connect inside of the brain. This process continues after birth. All this makes it quite important that young children be exposed to certain environmental conditions in order to foster later brain capabilities. In other words, raising a child inside of a sensory deprivation environment will lead to the development of that child as a "wild animal."

So, without that early brain development, due to environmental exposure to certain sorts of stimuli, the brain does not even develop the potentiality for moral behavior. The reality of this fact eliminates all possibilities that there is any sort of morality that is "hardwired into human nature." Thus, in his seminal book on the distinctions of human development, <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=625" target="_blank">The Symbolic Species</a>, Terrence W. Deacon doesn't hesitate to say this: Deacon has clearly proven that neither reason nor ethics (or "morality") are in any way "hardwired" into human nature. So, I believe we can dispense with further discussion of that point and others which hinge upon it. This does not in any way challenge the point I've just made. In fact, I tend to believe that this assertion of yours tends to illustrate my point!

It is only when we are rational and dispasionate that we can exercise our symbolic mode of thinking about ethical matters. And both symbolic thinking and ethical ideals are acquired through environmental exposure rather than being in any way "human nature." Perhaps. Would you suggest that this thread be transported over there?

== Bill

Laurentius

AVE

Is free will supposed to manifest itself only on the morality field?

If so, the Bible story being true, then God cannot be held responsible for his creature's making the immoral choice.

If not - I mean, if free will represents a faculty allowing Man to make personal selections from a multitude of potential choices - then, God is responsible for all his creatures' mistakes. Say, one wants to get 30 silver coins fast. He can either work for it, borrow it, steal it or delate for it. Juda is said to have delated Jesus and he'll get to hell because of this. However, if God had endowed Man with an inborn universal moral sense, almost no one would have committed a sin without knowing it, like no one gets into a freezing room without sensing it. Being endowed with this inborn moral sense, Juda would still have had several options among which to choose: earning the money, saving it, borrowing it, begging for it, whatever. My opinion is that there is still free will, even if people are equipped with an inborn moral sense as acute as sight. The fact that it does not exist makes me once again think that the biblical God is a nonsense.

AVE

owleye

Though the problem of evil is an important one for theists, and if I feel inclined, I might add a few thoughts to it, I think what's going on is that God is constructed from the powers we believe we have, except that they are enlarged to a perfection we don't have. God may be omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent, and omnipotent, but God also has a completely free will that is not bound by the desires and fears that humans are.

Now, in order that God be omnibenevolent, God must be presented with a choice between good and evil, just as is the case for humans. Of course, God cannot be blamed for evil, so we construct another agent, who impinges on our soul causing us to give in to temptation. God, then, acts through our conscience, urging us to resist, and to serve as a judge on whatever choice we do make.

owleye

Laurentius

owleye

That's a good idea: God cannot be blamed for anything turning out bad, so humans must automatically bear all blames.

However, what do we do with the gods of politheism, who may commit blunders from time to time?


In the end though, all these imperfections reveal man's logic's inability to device a sacred system where the absolute could fully explain the manifold earthly inconsistancies.

[ April 23, 2002: Message edited by: Laurentius ]</p>