the question of ‘evil’ is diffrent when your god. I don’t know why I never hear the very logical arguement that if your god in heaven that you can be good and allow death.
say the after life is kick ass awsome. and your god controling everything. say a storm kills 8000… awsome! lucky 8000! hitler kills a million jews, awsome, they get to go to heaven.
if there is an after life, god presumeably knows that and the whole definition of evil is diffrent, if death isn’t so bad, its not really all that worth avoiding.
Nonsense. They know perfectly well what free will is. Free will is the ability to make moral decisions for oneself – as opposed to, say, having such behavior deterministically pre-programmed or randomly generated.
Not if evil is merely the absence of good.
Put it this way. If someone creates light, do we also say that that person created darkness? Darkness is nothing more than the absence of light.
HayekHeist:
Hayek - in order for a duality to exist at all there are two conditions that must be satisfied: 1) That there are 2 things that exist and interact and 2) That their interaction is governed by existant rules or laws.
So no duality can be prior to the sum of all that exists.
JThunder - if I am wrong in inferring the following point from your post, please correct me. You seem to be saying that if God created good and (if) evil resultantly came into existence, then God did not create “evil”. I don’t quite see how that follows unless you redefine “not created” to become “not created directly”.
Metagrumble–
I’m not a theologian, so I’m no doubt in a muddle on both concepts and jargon. But it would seem to me that the traditional monotheistic vision is that God is Timeless. The universe and time didn’t exist before God created them.
Couldn’t a dualist say that the duals are Timeless and that that the universe and time didn’t exist before their interaction? Unless you’re claiming that
2) That their interaction is governed by existant rules or laws.
implies that some being superior to duality existed to create the rules.
I don’t see how that follows. I say this not in a confrontational way, but simply in a confused way. Couldn’t the rules have been produced by the interactions of the duals, or couldn’t the rules simply be The Way Things Are? Just as in monotheism, there’s just one God–it doesn’t call for an explanation, it’s just The Way Things Are. A brute empirical theological fact.
Admittedly, if you only have one omnipotent being running around the universe, you won’t have the problem of what happens when two omnipotent beings throw their powers into conflict. But you’ll still have the old ‘Could God create an object that God couldn’t destroy’ problem–which pits one omnipotent being against itself at two points in time.
Hayek - you’ve got me there, I can’t say whether the rules “just always existed” or not.
The question of the duals producing their own rules: i’m not sure if rules in general are a consequence of the properties of things (eg a good or bad God) or not. If they are, then thats a rule in itself thats not the consequence of any property, so theres an apparent contradiction there. That seems like the only conclusion if you accept that neither duality is in a position to create rules that affect either or both duals.
I would question your other point too:
A dualist could indeed say that the duals are timeless, however time is a measure of change and insofar as a cardinal feature of duality is constant change, I would have to say that he would be wrong.
What if God is 50% Evil and 50% Good, God is conflicted by this, and cannot herself tip the ballance one way or the other. God creates beings with free will that can be either good or evil, and allows them to tip the ballance. Thus allowing God to be completely Good or completely Evil, as the created beings choose.
This mythology could be expanded to say first God created angels and devils each either 100% good or 100% evil, hoping they could battle each other to determine the way the ballance of good and evil should tip. But the angels were forever evenly mached, and being pure goo or pure evil were unable to have the free will that would allow them to break their own rules and defeat the ballance between them.
Though this leves man with the ability to tip the ballance, God remains the creator, unlimmitedly powerful and the source of all Good and Evil.