It’s been suggested in there and elsewhere in general that a good analogy for God’s interaction with the world and us is like that of a concerned, loving parent, and we his troublesome children. Just as we wouldn’t stick our kids in padded rooms and give them only nerf toys to play with until they’re 18, tempting as that might be at times, God does not want us unduly shielded from harm, recognising that through adversity we learn and grow as people.
The first idea for debate then I suppose is more of a question; would you consider God as parent an apt analogy? Pretty much mostly a question for the believers among us. And secondly, does the idea of growth through adversity justify the existence of that adversity (assuming we can assign responsibility for that adversity totally or partially to God, which is itself a question, really).
I personally would say that it would be an excellent analogy, but only as long as we’re talking non-omnipotent good deities. My problem with it is that I think omnipotence would mean the power to grant that which is gained by adversity without actually needing anything bad to happen. To be fair, I can think of a decent argument for this; it may be you think that what’s important is not the having of compassion, or whatever good quality gained itself, but in the use of it; to pile another analogy on, God doesn’t just want us to be fit, he wants us to run races, and in order to show our compassion or goodness that we have learnt, we need adversity.
Just as a side question in addition (pretty much only to believers who would accept this analogy); when do you think that we would be “adults”? To what would you say God is attempting to grow us to?
I’m not a believer, so I’m not sure how much of this OP is directed at me…
I’d say that the ‘parent’ analogy is appealing because it makes a sort of intuitive sense (especially to parents); however, I don’t feel that it works very well once we extend past the set of ‘small’ sufferings that many of us computer-owning folks have be fortunate in being limited to. Some troubles can be seen as growth and learning experiences. Starving and then getting shot for no apparent reason and largely through no fault of your own…not so much. Further, the ‘loving parent’ analogy seems to break down considerably when the hardship gets so harsh that no loving parent would wish for or avoid preventing such suffering in their children. Attempts to compensate for this flaw in the analogy tend to open up further troubling avenues of speculation without truly accomlishing their goal of compensating for the flaw (such as questioning whether one person might exist only to serve as fodder for another person’s test).
In short, I think the parent analogy is one that you’d only accept if you had a predetermined conclusion and you were looking for support for it - any support. being sufficient. I do not think that this analogy is applicable enough to the reality it attempts to explain to satisfy anyone not so inclined to be forgiving of its faults.
As for the second question (which might be directed at me), I can easily see posing your child problems to overcome in an effort to teach them things - assuming you also ensure that they have the tools to accomplish the problem. However this only works to the extent that the problem is not so heinous that it constitutes abuse in its own right. I also can’t see setting forth problems just to give your child a chance to show off their talents; at best that kind of toying with your kid is irresponsible, at worst damaging.
Athiest here, but I’ve thought about the God = Our Father angle for years. It is an appealing idea for two reasons. First, I think we tend not to want to be in control; that is, we want there to be something more important out there than we are, something wiser to follow. So we would invent such a being. And, second, a few authors have suggested that the great human need to learn during childhood has made us evolve a sort of window of gullibility for dealing with our parents, for accepting whatever they say as the truth, for being wide eyed and naive and just taking in everything they have to offer us, and that this window remains open in adulthood and finds God is a source that fits in that window in a satisfying and reassuring way.
I think that would make God a REALLY bad parent. The problem is, human existence has been one of extreme deprivation and suffering, especially historically. Human history is a nightmare from which we have only begun to wake up from, tyranny heaped upon atrocity upon disaster. It’s as if a parent handed his kids over to caretakers he KNEW would beat and rape and mutilate and starve them, while keeping them in cage in a dark closet. That is definitely not a good parent.
As I see it, if God could have done better he should have in order to qualify as a “good parent”. And if he couldn’t do better, he shouldn’t have created us at all. On balance, human existence has been a negative; for most of history, we’ve mainly contributed a higher quality of suffering and evil to the world than animals could achieve.
Giving any kind of hypotheticals or analogies with my God is rather difficult. By nature, no such analogy can be accurate. But at the same time, we’re trying to comprehend the infinite with finite tools, so it’s about all we have. As an analogy to that: it’s like using various sybols in mathematics for infinities.
God is like a parent in some ways but not others. Unlike a parent, He’s not afraid of us not meeting His expectations, exactly. He doesn’t want us to take after Him; by nature, we’re different than He. And there is neither shame nor sorrow in that. He is like a parent in that we are born from Him, but he is unlike a parent in that we were deliberately formed from nothing to exist. None of us is an accident, none of us is unintended, and none of us does not have a place in the universe. And there is no relative difference betwen those places, no pride of place to worry about. He does want us to be happy, healthy, and well.
Our sheer lack of resources and knowledge has been a cage; it has grossly limited what we can do or stop. A great deal of humanity’s suffering has occurred because because we lacked the knowledge or power to stop it.
Not to hijack, but perhaps god as pet owner is a better analogy. Our kids grow into adults, and eventually take care of us, but a god would be as far above us as we are to hamsters. We make our dogs suffer by taking them to the vet for their own good. We don’t do everything they want. My dogs are starving to death most of the day - or at least they look at me that way whenever I’m anywhere near food. And some people mistreat pets randomly. And many pets take it and keep loving their abusers.
Given that no one has proven the existence of a god of any kind to be true, it’s kind of a moot question.
However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume a god exists. Let’s then examine the history of his/her/its relationship to humanity from a parent/child point of view.
If we do, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that our god is a sick, sadistic practical joker.
As parent to whom? Humanity as a whole? To specific groups of people? To individual human beings, and if so, to all of them, or just to some of them?
In an attempt to see what a Christian answer to that question might be, I searched on appearances of the word “Father” in the gospels, and I found something that may or may not be interesting: Jesus frequently refers to God as “Father,” but sometimes, he says “my Father,” sometimes “your Father,” and sometimes “the Father”—and one passage that certainly implies that Jesus would not have said that God was a father to everyone:
I’m not so sure this is true. I think there may very well be things which could be gained by adversity or struggle which could not be granted by omniscience: things that have to grow organically rather than suddenly appearing poof as if by magic. Think of memories and experiences we look back on: There’d be something false and bogus about God implanting memories in us. And love: if God made us love him and/or other people, would that really be love, of the freely given sort that we and, presumably God, cherish?
To be like Christ, is I think the best Christian answer.
Revenant Threshold said “omnipotence”, not “omniscience”, which by definition CAN just poof anything into existence. And there’s no reason to believe that God would have to place false memories to create any aspects of personality he liked in his creations. And as for love, the love people have for God is obviously not freely given. By your account, it’s tortured out of us; by mine, it’s a form of insanity.
It is NOT sane to love God, not when even according to his believers he has inflicted immense suffering on us “for our own good”. If some mad scientist dropped children on an island as an experiment and let them grow up in a “Lord of the Flies” scenario, while inflicting plagues and ‘natural disasters’ on them, would you call him a loving foster parent ? Would you think he deserved the love of his victims ?
If God is a God, he’s evil, or uncaring. If God is a parent, he’s evil, or uncaring. If God is a pet owner, he’s evil, or uncaring.
Exactly! To teach them responsibility, turn the heat off in winter and turn it up to full in summer. Throw them out of the house entirely once in a while. Put liver flukes in their drinking water, malaria mosquitos in their rooms. Give them 2000 calories of food between them occasionally and let them share it, or if they get too hungry, fight over it. It’s for their own good.
It’s our choice whether we help each other out in this harsh world, or add to our own problems. Arguably it’s also our choice if we live on flood plains, earthquake zones, volcanic slopes, maleria regions, tornado belts, hurricane regions. Not a good argument, but you can make it. But parasites, genetic diseases, birth defects? Unavoidable, undeserved awfulness helps us grow up?
I cannot see God as a good parent because first of all he hides from his children and they must just believe He exists or they are punished. He makes them beg for their daily bread etc. To me a Good parent (who would know ahead a time what his children would do) does not need to have them beg for favors,he would know their needs and provide then if they asked or not, nor would he grant anything to them he knew would be harmful. He wouldn’t expect the younger child to be brought up by the elder, but would communicate with all his children, not just pick out a few and expect the rest to do as the older one said was what he wanted them to do,knowing he had created a flawed species who would teach them falsehoods.
Bill Cosby has been doing a routine for twenty years now where he says that, now that he’s been a parent, he understands God better. He imagines God as a parent, talking to Adam and Eve as 3-year olds.
“Didn’t I tell you not to eat that fruit from the Tree in the middle of the Garden?”
“Yes.”
“Well, they WHY did you eat it?”
“I don’t know.”
On a more serious side, I’ve read a suggestion that we are neotenous apes, in a perpetual childhood, as domesticated dogs and cats (and, potentially, domesticated foxes) are neotenous versions of wolves and cats, retainiong childlike features and psychology. Dogs and Cats look up to their human masters as if they were parent wolves and cats. Domesticated Humans look up to … what? Leaders, one supposes, and the concept, it is suggested, of a super-parent god.
Have you ever actually bothered to read any history ? Genocides, plagues, short lifespans, natural disasters, rotten food, no food, birth defects, ignorance, and on and on. History is a horror show. Your wonderful God dumped his “children” into the wilderness with no education and stone tools, leaving them to claw themselves up to where we are now. No thanks to him, even if he exists. Assuming he exists, we owe him nothing but hate.
Gee, I don’t know.
How about sticking the equivalent of a loaded gun in the middle of the Garden of Eden, then making a point of pointing at it and telling two young innocents “Don’t touch it!” How about the flood, where all the guilty as drowned, including all those sinful babies and evil wild animals. How about God hardening the heart of Pharaoh. How about making a specific point of telling a group of people fleeing a city that is being destroyed not to look back at the home they’ve lived their whole lives, knowing damn well that some would be compelled to do so(“Don’t think of elephants for the next 30 seconds”), thus bringing death to Lot’s wife, and grief to Lot.
You want more?
An omnipotent being could have created us at 5:00 this morning, complete with implanted memories of what we think we remember from before that time. But there’d be something profoundly unsatisfying and fraudulent about that (or so it seems to me).
My point is that I think there are some things that an omnipotent being cannot simply poof into existence—memories of things we have done and experienced being perhaps the clearest example—without being fraudulent and unsatisfying.