K

Taffy:

I'm perfectly fine with self-reliance. I'm so self-reliant that I don't need God at all. If He does exist and He does value self-reliance so much, why would He hold that against me?

[ October 04, 2002: Message edited by: K ]</p>

Dr. Retard

I think we should be very careful about this type of argument:

1. There would be immeasurably vast differences between God and we humans.
2. So it is unreasonable to infer that God wouldn't know of a good reason for something, from the fact that we cannnot think of one.
3. We may not infer there is no such good reason from our inability to think of one, so long as God might 'for all we reasonably believe' know of a good reason,


Here's why. I see a joke on "Mama's Family". It seems really lame. I can't think of any good reason why an intelligent writer would write it. I shall reasonably conclude that there is no such good reason, and that the "Mama's Family" writers are unintelligent. It would be silly for someone to say, "Hold on, but God might know of a good reason for that joke, a good reason beyond your limited ken. So you cannot infer that there isn't one, from the mere fact that you cannot think of one".

My conclusion is: it's not the difference between God and humans that should make us doubt our faculties. It's the difficulty, the 'deepness' of the domain under investigation that matters. We reasonably hold our faculties to be well up to the task of evaluating the intelligence of "Mama's Family", which is a quite easy and 'shallow' domain to investigate. The question is whether our faculties are up to the task of evaluating everyday moral decisionmaking -- is it deep and difficult or not?

(Incidentally, the same point is made in "God, Schmod, and Gratuitous Evil" by Daniel Howard-Snyder and John O'Leary-Hawthorne: "[W]hat is at issue is the extent of our access to a certain domain. That an omniscient being would know lots more than us in general shows nothing about whether we are ignorant of items in some particular domain.")

K

Dr.:

Along those same lines, we assign traits to God such as good, loving, omnipotent, etc. What does it mean to call God good if we can't know what His good means. In short, if we don't see God acting in a way that we would call good or benevolent, we have no reason to call Him good or benevolent. Human words have human meaning.

Dr. Retard

I certainly agree with the latter point, that divine benevolence must be benevolence, period, and not some special contrived sense of the term. I'll cite Hume, as usual. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion:

"The terms, admirable, excellent, superlatively great, wise, and holy; these sufficiently fill the imaginations of men; and any thing beyond, besides that it leads into absurdities, has no influence on the affections or sentiments. Thus, in the present subject, if we abandon all human analogy, as seems your intention, DEMEA, I am afraid we abandon all religion, and retain no conception of the great object of our adoration."

The point of skeptical theists, I believe, is that, though we cannot see how God is benevolent (in the human sense), if we knew all the facts about reality, we would see the benevolence. It's only our limited knowledge that prevents our granting God the epithet "benevolent", and not that God is benevolent in a completely different sense of the term.

K

Dr. :

I agree with you. But what I'm asking is how can we possibly know God is benevolent without seeing His benevolence? We can assume that if we knew all the facts, God would be shown to be benevolent, but that rests on no firmer ground than assuming that we would know that God was omnimalicious if we knew all the facts.

luvluv

Hi folks. I just wanted to apologize for being AWOL again, this time I was out of town. But it looks like Taffy has done a better job than I am capable of doing so I'll try not to step on his toes.

K:

Is there anything good about life? If so, does the good outweigh the bad? Does it outweigh the bad in your life? How about the world in general?

Is it possible there is an extraordinary amount of evidence for God's goodness that you are ignoring?

It is excellent to learn self-reliance in areas where you are capable of being self reliant. I'd applaud a 5 year old child for demanding to dress himself and demanding to tie his own shoes. I would not applaud him for attempting to swim the English channel himself. Trying to rely on yourself in order to accomplish something you cannot accomplish is not self-reliance, it is foolish pride. Overestimating your own abilities can be very dangerous.

[ October 04, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

K

luvluv:

Welcome back. I'd say the good outweighs the bad for some. The bad outweighs the good for others. Even if it were all good, that's hardly proof that the Christian God is responsible.

I only brought up self-reliance to counter Taffy's statement that God doesn't provide us with answers that would benefit humanity because He values our self-reliance. How can God value our self-reliance while at the same time demanding our total submission?

B. H. Manners

Welcome back luvluv. Good to hear from you again.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by Dr. Retard:

"I think there are other good reasons against indefinitely suspending inferences like this, but this Russell analogy works, I think."

I usually just use Russell's out of laziness, but are there other kinds of reasons? I hope you learned of other intuitively appealing analogies that demonstrate the problems involved with such skepticism while you were researching for your doctorate. In my experience, an apologist will often feel like a leaky leaf trying to cross the Atlantic if she's relying only upon the assertion of the possibility of some defeater -- but another useful anti-skeptic argument would take you to places to which you will have never been.

Dr. Retard

Now I understand you. This issue is kind of neglected. People are more interested in "can antecedent belief in the existence of a benevolent God withstand the evidential challenge of evil?" than "can belief in the existence of a benevolent God be justified in the first place?" This is a problem, since classic theistic arguments (cosmological, design, etc.) don't conclude anything about the moral attributes of the "God" they reach. Even if we could justify the belief "that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence", it would show nothing about the moral attributes thereof. And I think evil poses a bigger problem for justifying belief in a benevolent God in the first place, than for merely retaining justified belief in a benevolent God.

Hume, again: "Let us allow, that, if the goodness of the Deity (I mean a goodness like the human) could be established on any tolerable reasons a priori, these phenomena, however untoward, would not be sufficient to subvert that principle; but might easily, in some unknown manner, be reconcilable to it. But let us still assert, that as this goodness is not antecedently established, but must be inferred from the phenomena, there can be no grounds for such an inference, while there are so many ills in the universe, and while these ills might so easily have been remedied, as far as human understanding can be allowed to judge on such a subject. I am Sceptic enough to allow, that the bad appearances, notwithstanding all my reasonings, may be compatible with such attributes as you suppose; but surely they can never prove these attributes."

Edit addendum: I think philosophical theists today will maintain that they believe in God's benevolence due to religious experience. For most of them, God isn't inferred from the evidence; God is immediately known.

[ October 05, 2002: Message edited by: Dr. Retard ]</p>