You’re the first person responding with anything close to the perspective I was questioning, so thanks. The rest of you, I was addressing the issue of if there is a purpose, what is the cost?
So to a certain extent your existence is accidental? Any one of a million things throughout history could have happened to prevent you from being. Whether or not anyone planned the famine (another great example of what I’m talking about,) without it you wouldn’t be alive today. I think the corollary is that God might have known you’d be born, being omniscient, but God did not do anything to cause you to be born - because if he had, he would have been responsible for the evil (and the good) throughout history.
So, is your position that God has a purpose for us after we exist, not that we exist for God’s purpose?
As for the free will stuff - we are not made totally free as it is. I can’t fly, for instance. Personally there is stuff that I can’t do psychologically (most of which I’m happy not to be able to do.) There is plenty of latitude for free will without being free to be a mass murderer, for instance, which most of us couldn’t do anyhow. But that is another discussion entirely. My point was that if there was a reason for us to be born, and us being born was part of god’s plan, the freedom of the past would have to be severely limited.
Fiction is an excellent example of what I was really talking about. Consider an after the war novel like Pangborn’s Davy. To create that character, and the world that he lived in, Pangborn had to kill billions of characters (off-stage, of course.) No moral issue there, since they are not real. Now if God directly created us, or caused the circumstances by which we were created, he did it by killing many not so fictional non-characters. I can imagine a God who considered his creations as no better than fictional characters, but I’d rather not live in a universe with such a god. If we were created for god’s purpose, though, I don’t see how to get around this.
It’s not all that different from someone saying that God works in mysterious ways when there is an earthquake or tsunami.
Not exactly. I could easily have been born under completely different circumstances, with a different family, which would make me pretty different than I am now, yes. More on this in a moment.
Not exactly, again. All my thoughts on this pretty much hinge on the fact that I’m LDS, and we have some kind of different ideas about where we come from and so on. Mormons believe in a pre-mortal existence; before we were born, we existed (though bodiless), had personality and individuality, chose to be born into this world, and so on. Thus I could be born into any circumstance and still be ‘me,’ if you see what I mean. Though our spirits were created by God, those spirits house an even more integral thing which we call intelligences. That is that part of us that exercises free will, and which is uncreated. God, according to LDS thought, took already-existing intelligences and gave them a way to grow and develop. So, we exist, period, and God’s purpose is to help us grow to our full potential–or to let us hang ourselves by our own ropes, so to speak.
Well, I think the important part of free will is what we do with our minds and characters; of course there are many things we can’t do, but the point is that we can choose what sort of people to become. I can choose whether to work on becoming more kind, or more angry. Even prisoners and slaves have freedom of thought and can choose how to react to their circumstances.
But I disagree that the freedom of the past must be limited. (Does that mean that we are limited, because we are really only a stopping-point on the way to the next generation?) There is reason for everyone to be born, it is part of a plan, but the plan does not necessarily have a lot to do with controlling how history has gone so far and the various ways people have made choices and exercised power. In a way, I guess I would say that God works with the situations we give him, some of the time.
As long as I’m talking, I might as well give my perspective on this too. I think we have to realize that God is not necessarily inside time; he is probably outside of it. Think of us and time as a 2-dimensional line segment, for example. An observer, not being in the line, can see the entire thing at once. Perhaps God can see us enacting our choices at all times; he is watching the Crusades and me typing on the computer at the same time, and he can also see my life in 10 years or so. If he observes me making choices at the time that they occur, then he is not dictating them; only I’m living my whole life on a line segment while he is the observer of the whole thing at the same time.
I figure all that is probably beyond human comprehension, anyway, like in Flatland. But that’s the best my 2-D mind can do for the moment.
I’m not a “divine plan” fatalist because I’m an atheist; I don’t believe there is a divine plan. If there is a purpose to us, there is a plan and we have no freedom. Fortunatly, I see no evidence this is true.
Re the OP : No, I don’t think it was worth it. In balance, I think it would have been better if Earth had remained lifeless. And no, that’s not an arguement for suicide or anything like that; the past is past, and nothing we do now will undo any of it’s suffering. I wouldn’t have created the present world, given the cost; since we are here, we might as well make the best of it.
I disagree with how you’ve framed the debate. You’re stating that, in order for your existence to be something other then random chance, God is directly responsible for some of the horrendous historical events that harmed your ancestors. To say that is to deny free will: it’s to say that those evils resulted most directly from the will of God and not the will of man. But free will is one of the defining characteristics of humankind.
A “why” (in the sense of a motive, as opposed to an explanation of a physical process) for your existence is independent from the immoral choices made by the people who opressed your ancestors.
Imagine a universe where a creator creates two beings (motive? Who knows–perhaps a simple longing for things to love) and gives them free will. One kills the other. Was the motive of the creator in creating the murderer to kill the one who died? Of course not.
I’ve asked myself some of the same questions that you have. Just looking at the lives of my grandparents and great-grandparents, I am the product of four second marriages. Four people died and their partners remarried before I came into the world.
How can I know what the cost may be for you?
Maybe the most important part is the journey of looking for your purpose every day. But I could be wrong.
What is the cost if you don’t ask the questions and take the journey?
How would you explain clearly genetic personality similarities. My daughter clearly had some of my habits when she was a month old! But I see how god inserting a personality, a download as it were, would resolve the issue. I just don’t believe it for reasons of evidence.
That is an after existence purpose, which does not seem to have any issues involved with it.
My objection to the free will argument is twofold, and doesn’t really correspond with your defense. First, there is an argument that if god gave reasonable evidence of his existence, we’s somehow be coerced into believing in him. The Exodus story gives evidence against, and I see no claim that everyone who witnessed Jesus’ miracles followed.
The second is that people have to be allowed to be evil in unlimited ways, or they have no free will at all. That was what I was addressing. We already have limitations on our actions, adding one against the greatest of evils would seem to give us plenty of opportunities to screw up. We have plenty of people to become even if two of them are not Hitler and Stalin.
Omniscience and free will together are not contradictory, but omniscience, omnipotence and free will together are (and maybe just omniscience and omnipotence.) If there is free will, god is limited. And, unless you believe there never has been godly intervention, there is not an absolute ban on intervention, just some point beyond which god can’t go and preserve free will.
I think I’ve covered this point in my just now completed response to dangermom.
I’m considering only one answer to the “why” question, which is that we are here for a purpose. If we are here to test ourselves against some godly standard the issue I’ve raised doesn’t exist. If we are here accidentally, and given a purpose after we are born, it also does not exist. However if we as sets of genes and personalities are the result of some sort of a plan, then that plan must involve the evil I mentioned, since we are the result of the actions of evil people as well as good people.
My purpose in life is derived from the thought that I (like all of us) am a lottery winner, of both the genetic lottery going back a billion years and the sperm lottery that led to the sperm with my genes winning, and the environmental lottery that had my parents meeting and marrying and having sex at just the right time to have me. Just like Earl, I want to use the results of my winning ticket to make the world a better place. Personally I find that a lot more inspiring than thinking the lottery was fixed by god.
After reading the section on Whitman in Freethinkers, I need to read his poetry. A new part of my project to read all the stuff I’ve missed amongst the thousands of books I have read.
I hope my last post indicates that I am not searching for purpose. I am a very happy and content atheist, thank you very much. (I’m downright smug at times. ) Rather, I’m making a theological and philosphical point, inspired by thinking about some versions of deism in a different way. I had always bought the notion of being here for a purpose as, if not true, at least morally neutral. Now I don’t think it is.
It is astonishing that every time I dig deeper into the moral consequences of the existence of a standard western-type god, the worse it gets. I’m not talking about human misuse of religion, but the impact of a god with no human misbehavior at all.
For me, our purpose for being here is to make aesthetic decisions, i.e., to decide what we value most — and to pursue it. The reward and the punishment are the same: we get what we want.
I’ve heard that the purpose of life is to accelerate the rate of increase of entropy in the universe, and therefore hastening the final steady state of existence - an ultimate heat death. Makes as much sense as anything else I’ve heard.
If I started looking for a meaning in a personal existence, I could argue that the whole evolutionary process has led to the state of being that is me, and the chances of that happening are so astronomically high that it may be assumed that I’ve been chosen for some Divine Purpose, being the pinnacle of creation that I am. Of course that’s just so much horseshit, and the stark truth is that I’m just the product of a sequence of happy accidents.
Wind back evolution to pre-hominid times and let the tape of time run again, and you certainly wouldn’t get Homo sapiens again. In fact, it’s doubtful whether any intelligent species would arise at all. We really are one-off freaks of nature.
Am I the only one who opened this thread thinking about Navin Johnson’s “special purpose” in The Jerk?
As I think dangermom has already pointed out, believing that there is a purpose to our lives does not necessitate believing that we are the Protagonists of the World’s Story and that everything that has happened throughout history did so to contribute to our purpose.
Oh sure, we have those too. (Heck, I am practically my mother’s clone.) But you probably also noticed that your daughter had her own personality as well as some of your habits, right from birth. Our physical bodies certainly have a lot to do with how we act; part of the issue is how we deal with the things our bodies throw at us (not just habits, but also physical desires, diseases and destructive tendencies). But you can read C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity rather than listening to me about that; I agree with a lot of what he says about it.
I’m not actually sure what you mean by that. Do you mean you’re not going to argue about that point? OK. But I’ll point out that ‘after existence’ has no meaning in this case, as these intelligence thingys are eternal.
Good point; and neatly illustrates one reason why proof is not (often) given; when it is, it rarely results in permament faith. People have to want to follow God; they can’t be forced into it, even by proof–but furnishing that proof may well put a responsibility on them that they cannot handle. People who should know better have more responsibility to act correctly than those who do not.
We* aren’t* allowed to be unlimitedly evil. We can’t blow up whole planets with our minds, for example. The limit might be set further away than you would like, but it is there. As a guess, I would say that we are limited by our physical abilities; while we can’t do many evil things, we also can’t be forced not to do things we can figure out how to do. God isn’t going to exert mind control upon us, and a good thing too IMO.
IMO God is limited–by his own rules, which he will not break. Naturally I believe that he has intervened in human affairs; but not to the point where he forces people to do anything. He asks, he invites, he informs, he pleads; but he will not force anyone to come to him.
My own post said nothing about God or religion, but I am delighted to know that you are very happy and content. I confess to having totally misunderstood your original post. I apologize.
No, I don’t believe that God arranged these horrors and I wouldn’t dream that I am worth it either. Such massive human suffering is the greatest mystery of my life. No, I can’t make it fit and deliberately choose not to try to anymore. It became too difficult for me to handle when I realized that I too was a source of the world’s problems.
I’m missing it somwhere. I can easily see the misuse of religion. But explain the moral consequences of a god (that you believe doesn’t exist) without human misbehavior. Are you temporarily buying into the existence of a god long enough to say, “If he exists, how can there be tsunamis and hurricanes and death in childbirth?”
The question is not if there is a purpose, but if we are here for a purpose. If the world were designed so that you, me, and everyone would get born, then no one is necessarily the star - but we are all important players.
What I’m hearing is that even theists think our births were random, and not designed.
Theistic evolution, by the way, has the same issue. Theistic evolution, not intelligent design. If god structured things so that humans would someday evolve, god is at least indirectly responsible for all the great dyings. Seems wasteful to me.
