Enjoy!
Yep.
I remember chewing over this same stuff in my early 20s, in between popping into the walk-in cooler with my coworkers to drink the beer I’d stashed behind the big bucket of sourdough starter. We thought, as I suspect the OP does, that we were shooting exciting holes in the foundational underpinnings of western religion. Later I found out that we were retreading ground older than western religion itself. It was disappointing, but the discussions were still fun and the beer was still cold.
I think we ended up coming to the following conclusion - that God is in fact capable of creating a burrito so hot that even He Himself cannot bite into it. In other words, a truly omnipotent, omnipresent deity might feel inclined to hobble himself in order to give his creation meaning. Otherwise there’s no point whatsoever, and he’s following the predetermined script just as surely as we are.
It can be fun in a fan-fiction way. Obviously, there are no actual answers, since even experts disagree on the answers, sometimes violently.
And ofttimes the expert disagree as to whether some questions should even be asked at all…sometimes violently.
I had in mind both the suffering we cause if we do the wrong thing, and the uncaused natural suffering that we can make progress toward alleviating if we choose to work on it (e.g. by engaging in medical research).
Leibniz famously hypothesized that this is “the best of all possible worlds.” And he caught a lot of flak for that, because it’s easy to see how there are things wrong with the world, and to imagine ways in which it might be better. But I can’t be sure that he was wrong, because I can’t be sure that any of those imagined better worlds are possible (or that making those changes might not result in a world that was actually worse).
For example, what would have to change in order to have a world in which newborn babies never died? Would you have to change the way biology works? Suspend the laws of cause and effect?
Such an argument could lead one to believe that making any effort to improve a situation is a waste of effort.
Well, far fewer babies die today (as a percentage of total born), so his was obviously not the best possible world. You could fast forward 10,000 years to get those medical breakthroughs and have humanity already know those things 10,000 years ago.
Perhaps, but that would be to misunderstand the argument.
The claim is that this world as a whole is the best of all possible worlds, not that this world at this particular moment in time is better than at any other particular moment.
@Thudlow_Boink
IIRC, Liebniz said this was the best of all possible worlds because existence is better than non-existence, so by definition this world is better. Which ignores the infinity of other axes of betterness, so I am unconvinced.
If you make the argument that a world in which no babies die may be a worse world overall due to unintended consequences, the same argument could apply to say that our world may become worse overall if we try to make it better in any way, due to unintended consequences. Or perhaps that is not the argument you are making.
I see the point of a Creator causing non-lethal conditions, to inspire others (or even the victims) to improve medical treatment. But painfully killing babies a few weeks old seems unnecessarily cruel.
Also, babies were dying from these conditions for thousands of years before any treatment was even conceivable. What was the point then?
That depends on how they determine the rest of our lives as it may not be condemnation. We may be highly specialized beings (eternally speaking). It is our makeup if who we are that will have us seek out things, that can set the pattern of who we will become. Even if we first do it wrong, it is still leading us forward in it.
I had asked questions in previous posts which you have not adressed. I assume you do not wish to engage, and will not ask you any other questions.
God is the only thing there is and is here on purpose. So either the answer about “omnipotence” is “yes” or the question makes no sense in this context, depending on how you parse it.
The rest of your comment appears to me to constitute a failure to think through what I said previously, although I could be misunderstanding what you’re driving at. But to me it is as if you’re saying something that amounts to “Joe Schmoe decided to play football in the front yard with his friends. At 3:37 into the game, though, several people impeded his progress and slammed him down to the earth. Not only that but a couple of them threw their bodies down on him rather forcefully. The impact with the earth caused physical discomfort. The impact of their bodies caused physical discomfort. Clearly they aren’t really his friends, they interfered with his progress and they hurt him!”
Think of God as playing a game called “being Creation”. God enjoys the activity as a whole as thoroughly entertaining. The experience of suffering is largely (if not exclusively) tied to not sensing the connection, so you aren’t seeing the football game, you’re just in the immediate moment of trying to go somewhere and being stopped, or the immediate moment of being body-slammed and feeling pain. Like all analogies, this one is limited and has non-accurate comparisions as well as fairly accurate ones, but I think it conveys a bit of how I think we’re viewing the whole matter, respectively. I wouldn’t say “being Creation” is quite exactly vapid entertainment and without serious purpose but I would say it is entertaining and fun. I would also keep steering you back to God as a sense of identity. If you cut off your left hand with your right hand it must have made sense to do so or you would not have done it. More usefully, perhaps, you sometimes opt to get into a passionate and hurtful argument with someone you love because it clears the air and achieves communication and makes the two of you happier in the long run even if there are hurt feelings and anger and a sense of betrayal in the short run during the argument.
The whole of creation is not static and unchanging, but rather it is always in process, going somewhere, working on its own issues if you want to think of it that way. There is progress towards more joy and happiness and overall betterment but the progress is sometimes an effort, a struggle.
If they slammed him into the ground during a tackle, that’s one thing. If they slammed him into the ground and then repeatedly slammed his head into the ground and punched him, then I think you can infer that they are not his friends. That is what god does to us all the time.
Which ignores various types of mental illness that might impel someone to do this for no reason. Why did van Gogh cut off his ear? From reason?
An interesting refutation to the best of all possible worlds argument is that it can also apply to a god who has created the worst of all possible worlds. Just as evil can be explained as leading to a greater good, in the worst of all possible worlds good can be explained as leading to a greater evil.
So you have good reason not to be convinced. And it is about the best argument for an omnibenevolent god I’ve seen.
I’ve read this at least four times. Can somebody translate it for me? Some of the phrases make sense in themselves but I can’t make sense of them together or as a reply to the question; others (such as “it is our makeup if who we are that will have us seek out things”) don’t make sense to me even in themselves.
I’m sorry, it is complicated and life is short, I will endeavor to do better.
We are each a soul, an eternal being. Each one of us is unique, each soul has a longing in their heart which will guide them. its a primal drive that we can deny for a time but it will eventually overwhelm us and guide us (over time) to exactly what we (our hearts and thus us) really want to be. As scriptures state ‘God has set eternity in the human heart’.
So though we don’t know exactly how it will work out, we know that in the end we will love what we are and what we do. It is part of who we are that is ultimately irresistible.
However at first we don’t have a moral compass and trying to follow those desires do so sometimes in a bad way and hurt others in the process, and also hurt ourselves. It is for this reason I believe that we are given temporary bodies and limited time. We need to figure out we need to achieve out progress via ‘good’ methods and reject the bad methods.
Sorry, sometimes life gets in the way, and I do find my time somewhat shortened to ‘engage’ then I had in the past.
Entirely aside from whether any of that is so, I don’t see how it’s an answer either to
which is what you were quoting; or to the OP.
The “free will” answer is laughably bad. What percentage of suffering is due to free will? It’s not 100%. I’d guess it’s less than 50%. I haven’t thought about it in significant depth, but it wouldn’t shock me if it was a tiny minority of suffering. That’s the answer of privilege.
I see what you are saying up until here.
There is no empirical evidence to support this assertion about the world. You seem to be assuming everything makes sense, then using that premise to prove that everything makes sense.
To continue the football analogy, I see it is as if several people beheaded Joe Schmoe, then kicked his head across the field and awarded themselves a million points. It appears that sometimes the world is callously cruel and follows no rules.
My OP is asking for a defense of that apparent callousness. Your response seems to be negating the callous cruelty because callous cruelty can not exist in your philosophy, almost by definition. Is that an accurate interpretation?
Pardon the irreverence, but this seems to be how you would expect a conversation to go:
“Hello”
Punch
“Why did you punch me in the face for saying hello?”
“You are just not sensing the connection, don’t worry about it.” Punch
The dead baby is not “happier in the long run even if there are hurt feelings”