gerfinch

One universal thing ive never seen a theist explain is a motive for a deity.Or more to the point a motive that would give the diety a high moral standing.When posed with the question why would god bother to create the universe populate it with worshipful creatures and then judge them based on how they preform.Especially considering an all powerful god would be able to see the outcome of such an endevour and fufill any gratification the endevour would provide without actually undertaking the endevour.Ie if it gets satisfaction from providing an eternal haven for humans then why not create the feeling of satisfaction and dispense with the humans.Which leads to the question.Can an all powerful being actually exist.Not in the convertional human sense where our actions always have a motive.For instance i wouldnt be typing this is the ignorence surrounding religion didnt bother me.If i could get the satisfaction (whether deserved or not) from this posting withouting actually writing it,there would be no cause for me to write it.Can an all powerful being actually accomplish anything without pleasure neurons ,desires ,whims etc? If somehow these problems were addressed and some deity actually accomplished the things that has followers ascribe to him what could his motives be ? When "higher " beings keep "lower" beings around and care for them and revel in the affection they seem to have for us we call them pets.Theists do not like this line of reasoning at all.The classic defence is either about "gods love" or the classic "god works in mysterious ways".If the motive is "love" for humans,its is certainly dubious given the existence of hell.The other motive of a bored deity in a mice in maze type scenario is frigtening.I apologise for the wandering nature of this posting.I hope it helps spark a few ideas.

Jobar

Gerfinch, you have a good topic here- but please break up longer posts into paragraphs, with a line spaced between them. It makes for easier reading.

Oh, and welcome to Internet Infidels.

Philip Osborne

"When posed with the question why would god bother to create the universe populate it with worshipful creatures and then judge them based on how they preform."

According to Calvinism, anyway, it's not the case that God created things, watched how they performed, and then decided to send them either to heaven or to hell. Calvin wrote that God has already chosen who will be saved and who will not, based not on merit that he perceives into the future, but solely on the basis of his will (This is called "Unconditional Election").

"Especially considering an all powerful god would be able to see the outcome of such an endevour and fufill any gratification the endevour would provide without actually undertaking the endevour."

On the Calvinist interpretation I have provided above, God actually has fulfilled his endeavour of how people will be judged, without having to undertake the process of observing everyone and deciding who gets saved and who doesn't.

"When 'higher' beings keep 'lower' beings around and care for them and revel in the affection they seem to have for us we call them pets.Theists do not like this line of reasoning at all.The classic defence is either about 'gods love' or the classic 'god works in mysterious ways'."

Since I believe that God is as "high" above us as any being could ever hope to be, I'm not really bothered by the idea that we can be thought of as God's pets. As for why God chose to create, it might be said that a perfectly loving being with nothing to love is a contradiction in terms. It's not clear to me why a perfect being cannot have any needs or wants. Granted, any need or want of such a being can be instantly fulfilled by that being, but that a being can have no such wants in the first place does not obviously seem true.

Sincerely,

Philip

[ July 28, 2002: Message edited by: Philip Osborne ]</p>

Jobar

Phillip, do you think perfection implies unchangingness? (Many theists do.)

Typhon

Nice post, and welcome to the II boards.

You are right. Motive of course, aside from the pernicious Problem of Evil and the difficulties inherent in the volatile theoretical mix of omnipotence, omniscience, "free will," and the supposed omnibenevolent and "perfectly" just nature commonly attributed to the Christian god, is as you point out, a thorny subject indeed.

I too once created a world, populated it with living organisms of my own choosing (albeit perhaps, not of my own design), and was engaged and involved in their actions, for a time.

It was called an ant farm.

Eventually I dumped the whole thing in the yard outside when I wearied of it, there to be preyed upon by other ant colonies, birds, and anything else that might desire a small invertebrate snack. This was fairly merciful treatment by the dubious standards of my own motives, as this was around the same time in my life as when I regretfully still found the age old ant + magnifying glass + noon-day sun, to be an "enjoyable" equation. By comparison, my former possibly worshipful subjects got off easy perhaps, I could not say, having neither witnessed nor cared about their continued survival.

The point of this meandering childhood narrative is that even from a casual examination of life, the universe and everything in it that we can presently observe, one has to wonder, and perhaps worriedly so, about the potential motives of any supposed creator who would have set up the cosmos, a creation far greater than any construct of glass, plastic, and earth.

It seems highly doubtful to me that such a being would be even as interested in us, as I was once in my ant farm. Compared to the universe, we're far more insignificant and smaller in scale than any ant. If a fictional creator had set up this huge, vastly larger than needed one might argue, backdrop for the exclusive purpose of our own small dramas and nickel passion plays, what reason do we have to trust that creator's true interests and motives, especially considering that the world, let alone the universe, is generally more hostile and seemingly capricious to our rather fragile lifeforms than even a six year old with a magnifying glass under a hot sun?

I'm not a "perfect" creator figure, but personally, I would find the adoration, petty sufferings, and longings of humanity to be beneath me, or at the least, of trivial import. I can't imagine if I was somehow a being on this level why I would act the way that Christians most often insist their god does, an opinion which seems to have no more basis in reality than the suspect writings of their own self-admitted penmanship (however much they may likewise insist upon the even less tangible notion of "divine inspiration").

Then again, I rarely have to worry about this in truth, as there remains such a dearth of evidence for the existence of any god or gods, let alone one so anthropomorphic in its motives and desires as the Christian trifold deity, around the question of which is ringed a veritable wasteland of evidential scarcity, that I for one am not overly concerned about the lack of any plausible explanations by theists for god's supposed and rather suspect motives in the case.

I think it no coincidence, that god's supposed motives are eerily and uniformly small in scope, petty in nature, and curiously human in type. This fits very well with a fictional being created by humans to mollify human needs and wants, but not nearly so well for one supposedly as expansive as suggested by the many omni-s customarily attached to the definition of its nature.

.T.

"Gods are made, not born."

[ July 29, 2002: Message edited by: Typhon ]</p>

gerfinch

Thank you Typhoon for every line of that.You write brillantly.