I didn’t ignore it. I’d already addressed it. Giving a being free will changes the equation; and puts limits on what you can force it to think. Wanting to create beings with free will means you can no longer strictly prevent them from choosing evil. and especially prohibits the bolded part of your statement…
And validates the analogy because both now are dealing with beings whose beliefs have to be shaped, molded and encouraged rather than built in.
(emphasis mine.)
People keep saying that. Doesn’t make it true. “Because he could make perfect automatons, and didn’t he must be evil.” Ignores completely the idea of even looking at what a good god might want to accomplish from creating the world as it is. It’s the easy way out without having to think about it.
Did not admit that. I didn’t say changing his mind would make him evil. I said being capricious. i.e. changing your mind impulsively, without thought or reason.
(emphasis mine)
So you do admit that God has limits? Interesting. If God isn’t omnipotent, then that raises a whole host of other questions. But since I’m sure you’ll deny admitting any such thing, let’s go through this yet again…
In case you’ve forgotten, God being omnipotent means that he can do absolutely any absurd thing we think up (flying pigs, growth without hardship, free will without the possibility of choosing evil). You seem unable or unwilling to think outside of the logic that binds us and realize that your supposedly omnipotent God would have no such logical limitations. Giving a being free will only changes the equation if God chooses it. Just to throw out my own idea, why even make evil a possible choice for us? If he really wants to give us free will, then why not make the only possible options various incarnations of good?
There’s simply no equivalent scenario in our own experience because no person has the kind of absolute control over reality that God has. God doesn’t “have to” do anything at all. Your continued use of these phrases (have to, prohibits, puts limits) only shows that you either don’t understand what omnipotent means, or you’re refusing to think about all the implications of it and are hoping the rest of us don’t think about them either.
If I had to come up with an analogy that’s sort of close to what God is supposedly doing, I might put it this way:
A father wants to teach his child how to tie her shoes. Rather than sitting her down and patiently showing her until she learns, he instead puts her through a Saw-esque series of tests where she’s forced to try to learn it on her own and is inflicted with severe pain on each failed attempt. When she finally gets it right, she’s then told that it was all necessary for her to learn properly and that she’ll appreciate the accomplishment all the more because of the misery she endured.
I call that evil. Perhaps you’re masochistic. Or, to use another analogy, perhaps you’re like a battered wife who just can’t leave and therefore makes excuses for her abusive husband and blames herself each time he beats her. I don’t know or care what your God might be trying to “accomplish” because all the pain is completely unnecessary if he is indeed omnipotent.
I think the part thats being missed here are simple facts about the nature of God, and furthermore simple facts about what he has told us about himself and us.
God certainly can do whatever it is he wishes, but your looking at it as if there are prediciments that are going to “happen” upon God and he is then forced to make some sort of decision based on a new turn of events. That then leads you to your statements that such a God who stands by why all these bad things are happening must be evil. But again, theres something essential your missing, and that is the fact that God knew all events that were to take place in this …well, existence, dimension, w/e you want to call it, and so therefore the same rules that apply to the way we make desicions do not apply in the same regard that they do to God. Now if God had made everything we think of as absurd in this existence the natural norms in another existence, you would be there arguing that God’s not omnipotent because he can’t implement absurdities such as inherent laws that demand an object to fall to the ground, and that he doesn’t make one drown in water.
As they say, your perception is your reality. It is perfectly conceivble that were we in another sort of existence with other sorts of logical norms, we would view the things we now view as logical as absurd. God cannot do certain things, such as make 2+2=5, because the laws he put into place, with the foreknowledge of all that is too happen, dicated that he would never need to make 2+2=5. So the reasoning you need to maintain is not so much that he can’t do things, but that he knew he would never need to, and made things the way he wanted them. When it comes down to freewill, we are also forgetting that God, in Genesis, said that he was making humans in his own image. Putting aside notions of phyisical traits, clearly God was claiming in some sort or another that he was imparting us with traits that he himself bore…the foremost being that of, freewill. Now if God can do anything at all that he wants, cleary he would want similiar beings that could also do anything at all that they want. Not of course in the sense that they could be omnipotent–for with multiple omnipotents you then have the ability to infringe on the anothers omnipotentness. Yet the freewill that we have obtained is in fact the ability to at any time make our choices, no matter what happens.(Now I’m sure some would be tempted to here tell me how someone could implant a chip in someones brain or something, of which took away that persons freewill…but that would obviously not be freewill, so lets stick to the point.) If God were to create an existence in which we had freewill, yet could only choose incarnations of good, then we would would have not been made in God’s image. God would have had to have said, “Let us make man in the image of…good.”
Maybe I would argue such a thing in this alternate universe, or maybe I wouldn’t. But if it caused no pain or other unpleasantness for objects not to always fall to the ground when dropped, then I doubt it would be a “problem” of any urgency to me. I’ll take the world where I don’t drown in water over this one, thanks. (Also, he could choose to make it such that we don’t view those things as absurd, since he’s omnipotent and all.)
What difference does it make whether he made that decision at the beginning of time or made it yesterday? The point is that if making 2+2=5 would mean less misery for us than having it equal 4, then he made an evil choice as far as I’m concerned.
Ok…so what’s your point? I don’t care to be made in God’s image if it means more unpleasantness for me than being made some other way. If God chose to make us in his image knowing that it would be a more painful existence, then that’s what I call sadistic vanity.
Yes, precisely! I want that. Screw being made in God’s image.
@MidnightFrost
Ha well, I guess I’m feeling the vibe here that one of your biggest problems with the concept of God is the problem of pain and evil and whatnot.
Admitedly this may be in an air of laziness, but I’m gonna call in a C.S Lewis airstrike here.(Moreover I’ve never heard, despite my searches, any real good critique of this point made by him.) One of the key ways he describes his bout with the issue of pain is one that essentially falls in line with various apologist’s theological explanations of pain/evil. Lewis claimed that the whole pain issue was his single biggest “proof,” when he was athiest, that God didn’t exist. Yet he couldn’t help himself questioning that if pain is so immiently apparent in our world, then how can we recognize it, and call it for what it is? How would you know a line is crooked, unless you had some idea of what a straight line is? Similarly, how would you know what a screwed up world is, unless you had some idea of a good world? Lewis then goes to assert that clearly we humans, who are so pissed off and aware of our messed up world, must then be designed for a world much greater then our current one–namely, heaven. A fish wouldn’t claim his world is all wet, because a wet world is what he’s designed for.
Because the real world contains both crooked and straight lines, just as it contains both pleasure and pain. We know suffering is bad because we can compare it to real-world times and places where suffering is minimal. I don’t need to have some secret knowledge of Heaven to recognize badness. Sitting on a park bench on a sunny day and watching children at play is quite sufficient.
And if you’re calling out Lewis as your big gun, you’re in trouble. The pompous old blowhard wouldn’t know a rigorous argument if it bit him on his fat Oxford ass … .
I actually misplacced the word “un-just” with “pain”. My bad. Un-just is the word Lewis used.
Haha, what an extrordinary statement. We have athiests claiming religious types are entrenched in the worst forms of double-think, and meanwhile your here essentially fabricating things. Look, love em or hate(I’m gonna guess hate em in your case) Lewis was a remarkeble intellectual who was loved by both Atheist and Christian co-workers alike as an extremely warm guy with an astounding mind. Now you don’t see me claiming that Richard Dawkins is a douchbag-idiot who wouldn’t know a good argument from a pound cake, now do you? So please, if you disagree with someone, by all means state why, but don’t fabricate fictional people with fictional traits in order that they may be ridiculed.
It makes no difference. I can recognize injustice in the world because I can see justice in the world. I don’t need some heavenly standard to compare it to.
One might as well argue that we can only understand the difference between rich and poor because in Heaven everyone is rich.
I’m sure he was lovely to sip tea with, but he was not a “remarkable intellectual”. His “arguments” tend to be sentimental sophistry: “God MUST exist because … well … wouldn’t THAT be LOVELY?!” A comfort to believers, certainly, but not convincing in the least to the rest of us.
So what? We sometimes see actions we praise as just. We sometimes see actions we criticize as unjust. Some of us quite reasonably strive to make the world a place featuring more of the former and less of the latter. That’s pretty much THK’s point with how folks often react to sometimes experiencing painful suffering and sometimes experiencing its opposite; if that doesn’t give rise to a belief in God, why should this?
The point I think Lewis was getting at was the fact that we as human beings, if we had to classify our world as just or un-just, would pretty much unamiously select the latter. Yes, we see instances of both justice and injustice, but we would not be able to select one as the good one and one as the bad one unless we had some tertium quid with which to judge which is greater and which is lesser. I’m sure you would now be tempted to try to convince me of some moral nilihism, that pain and pleasure given by either is what causes us to name things as good or evil. This sort of thinking is one of the worst cases a a priorori viewpoint on morality–for you will see even the most hardened relativists, if they come upon some situation such as someone taking their seat or cutting them in line, will proceed to argue against this person that when they were cut in line, a certain inherently-unjust action had just occured. The line cutter may then start explaining how an un-just action had not occured–but all these two would be doing is explaning to the other as to how their argument better fits the tertium quid, (which would be a greater, all-being morality) and that they are in the right.
Furthermore, to assume that the earliest forms of mankind would start to label things as just and in-just due to the nature in which actions inflicted pain or pleasure is simply absurd. There are plenty of actions that(the specific actions varying by society) would aid that society greatly if they practiced those which the whole of mankind has labeled un-just. If men raped women whenever they wanted, then their early farming society could grow and strenthen extremely well due to the number of births occuring, and the greater number of workers to plow the fields. As Doestevsky said, “Without God, everything is permissible.” Without God, or even a greater, all encompassing morality, then everything in existence would be depleted down to the lowest common denominator, or “Might makes right,” and we would more then likely be here praising Thrasymachus instead of some creator who we had devised. Every single society that has even grown apart from others, and maintained some form of codified law, explains in their law why people need to be punished for things such as murder,rape,stealing,lying, etc. Certianly cultures vary on specifics and times of application, yet the fact still remains that at some point or another, they all would qualify some action as one of the above mentioned.
By the simple understanding that we must have some universal concept or morality within us, coupled with the fact that we all view this world as un-just, it is not in any way unreasonable to claim that this world is not the existence we were meant for. Certainly you would have to be coming at this with the a priorori that theres a heaven, but the concept doesn’t nullify the facts.
Since justice is a human construct and exists only to the extent that we make it so, then yes, the universe will tend by chance to arrive at states we consider unjust. Just as the universe tends by chance to arrive at forms that we do not consider suitable for shelter (the existence of the occasional cave notwithstanding).
Justice is a thing humans *build *to serve human needs. It’s like a house or a hammer. Do we build houses and hammers because there are houses and hammers in Heaven?
No, the degree to which an act satisfies or thwarts our moral instincts causes us to label it as good or evil.
If humans were the simple automatons that Christian theology assumes we are, then, yes, we would need some external “programmer” to teach us good from evil. Using a completely rational calculus you can justify the most monstrous act.
But human beings are not purely rational automatons. We are animals who evolved to live in small social groups and as such possess instincts governing our relations with other members of our species as part of our basic mental machinery. So we all have deep impulses toward fairness, kindness, and reciprocity. These impulse play themselves out in different ways in different cultures. And they can be trumped from time to time by other impulses – desires for hunger, sex, or power. But they are there, nonetheless, forming the basic substrate of our moral conscience.
It is pleasurable unto us to see justice done, not because it benefits us directly, but because the desire for justice itself is hardwired into us by the evolutionary pressure on our hunter/gatherer ancestors.
I don’t see why such a tertium quid needs to be anything divine; can’t it just be enlightened self-interest, maybe combined with a healthy amount of sympathy, or something? I mean, really consider this:
. . . and why, specifically, would that be bad? I think you can explain that in terms even an atheist could get behind; that’s why I think an atheist could do likewise, without making reference to a deity. I don’t think you want to live in an everything-is-permissible world regardless of whether there’s a deity; I don’t think atheists want that, either. Do you agree?
Bolding mine. Yes, outstanding explanations which have nothing to do with the existence of a deity can be offered; such rules are of obvious value if we’re out to keep a society up and running, such that our collaborative efforts let us enjoy the benefits of civilization. How else to enlist the cooperation of others, except by moving from specific talk to general ideas? Or, as Hume put it:
Hume didn’t take that to mean ideas of justice gave us a special insight regarding heavenly entities; he merely thought it was the sensible end-product of earthly deliberation, since justice is useful to society and “the rules of equity or justice depend entirely on the particular state and condition in which men are placed, and owe their origin and existence to that utility, which results to the public from their strict and regular observance. Reverse, in any considerable circumstance, the condition of men: Produce extreme abundance or extreme necessity: Implant in the human breast perfect moderation and humanity, or perfect rapaciousness and malice: By rendering justice totally USELESS, you thereby totally destroy its essence, and suspend its obligation upon mankind.”
Or, if you prefer,
I could swap in my own words instead of his, but why bother? They pretty much agree.
Not if that universal concept of morality can reflect purely down-to-earth concerns.
If the only thing God wanted from us, after graduating us to a higher existence, with more possibilities and giving us much greater power,) was for us to praise Him and bask in His glory for His own narcissistic pleasure, (or some such similar purpose,) then, yes; you could easily do that by creating automatons… And that would be good. The intended use of such automatons.
But, you assume that there isn’t anything important for us to do there, with more possibilities and greater power. Ridiculous. Even some religious people fall into this belief, and I call it childish for them, too. And you also assume that 100 or so years of suffering outweighs the suffering that could be caused by letting evil people into eternity. Also ridiculous.
It’s one of the silliest arguments I’ve ever heard. And I despair for you, because, as I said, I’ve heard this before, and every time, it’s followed by other silly arguments that make it clear the holders of these beliefs have a juvenile world view.
Oops. too late. more silly arguments.
One: i don’t know if I’ve specifically suggested omnipotent. More on that later.
Two: you can’t even tell when a limit would be self imposed.
A self imposed limit doesn’t negate omnipotence. Granting someone free will means that you choose not to restrict their thoughts. Not that you couldn’t.
But, I did suggest something against strict omnipotence…
If I create a world in a computer program, I can determine the rules, I can know every possible choice and outcome, and I can set it up so that I am not bound by them. I can run it one instruction at a time and know every choice as it is made. I am outside that system and manipulating it from outside. Wow, in that world I am omnipotent. I know everything, I control everything, I am a god. Does that mean that if I were to desire to bring a being I created in that world into this one, (by downloading its thought program into a robot for instance,) there would be no reason I might want it to have free actions, actions other than ones I had specifically programmed? And wouldn’t I want to know what it was likely to do before I give it that robot body? I don’t want it going on a killing spree once I let it loose in this reality, once I’ve given it more possibilities and power. Yes, one possible solution is to dictate all the actions it can take. But, what if I had other purposes in mind for it?
Now, atheists have chosen not to ask for help from any god there might be. But some of them sound like children…
I regularly deal with a 10 year old who previously, (she’s getting much better, now,) would scream at me not to help her; scream as she struggled, unable to do what she wanted to do; then scream at me that it was my fault she couldn’t do it and demand that I do it for her; (and scream “why didn’t you do it in the first place? You’re evil and I hate you.” even though she was the one who told me not to help.) She suffered greatly through these interactions, even though I was willing to give instruction or help. And doing it for her as she demanded was not going to do any good, either. She would grow up with a sense of entitlement and become an evil person.
Sounds just like…
The one thing I can’t think any being, (human or god,) would want to deal with for eternity, is that kind of juvenile feeling of entitlement, that demand to make them happy without their lifting a single pinkie to achieve anything on their own. Personally, I would not bring such a person into a higher reality and give them any kind of responsibility, they aren’t worthy of it, and wouldn’t do anything good with it. It would lead to great evil, and I would be evil to have given in to their demands. That attitude of entitlement that you evidence that a god MUST do everything for YOU or he’s evil. I don’t buy it from a 10 year old, and I certainly don’t buy it from any (supposed) adult. It’s not an adult belief.
Strawman-no one here has suggested that we get whatever we want without lifting a pinky. Having the same world without pain would be better than the same world with pain, wouldn’t it? Of course, I’m just a lowly human who has experienced his share of unwarranted pain over the years, not a high and mighty god that has never and will never experience pain and yet thinks a painful path that he never trod is the right path for the rest of us.
I have friends that I trust. Through many interactions, they have never betrayed me, and do things for my benefit. I have faith that they will continue to do so. But, I could be wrong. You, who haven’t met my friends, don’t have a good idea of what they might do.
And without studying the, (and I’ll admit, to you they are supposed,) words of the Judeo-Christian God, you can’t know what He is likely to do either. You took THE quintesential story that describes that God as not wanting human sacrifice and decided it meant the exact opposite. So, you have very little idea of what the stories actually say or mean. So, your judgement on what He would or wouldn’t do is basically meaningless. Strike that; [del]basically[/del] meaningless. I have studied it much more extensively and found that God to be trustworthy.
I could be wrong. He could be an evil bastard intending to screw us later. But, I don’t go around accusing every human of being a serial killer simply because I can’t prove they aren’t. Any individual human may be a serial killer. My best friend may be. I might be completely wrong about him. But I don’t treat him like a serial killer simply because he might be. I go on what I actually experienced; what he actually has said and done.
I have been convinced that God exists. I have been convinced that He wants good for humanity. When I didn’t understand the intructions of my human parents, but being convinced they wanted good for me, I took the world as it was and tried to determine what purpose there could be in this intruction that to my juvenile mind seemed evil. (well, sometimes. Sometimes, I just sulked, or screamed. I was a juvenile after all. I grew out of it.) And guess what? My human parents had reasons. They didn’t prohibit me from things because they were evil and wanted me to be unhappy. And I’ve found the same thing with the instructions of the Judeo-Christian God.
A child says, “my parents say they want me to be happy. I would be happy if I went to this unsupervised party. They won’t let me go. This is contradictory, so my parents don’t actually want me to be happy. They must be evil.” A more mature person looks for the way to reconcile these facts and comes to the conclusion that their parents see further ahead to the possible dangers and actually wants their happiness for longer than just the night of that party.
…
you keep asking essentially “but, what if…” I don’t think he would, but what if he did? what if my god was actually evil? Actually, I’ve already described what I would do… Exactly what I did when you suggested it. And, to try to get out of this endless hijack, exactly what I suggested a logical atheist should do if they wish to believe in good and evil; in absolutes. Believe in a good god.
I would continue to believe in a good god. I would assume that the entity who suggested this (capricious, and contradictory) evil thing was evil and not the good god I believe in. And I would continue to try to determine what purposes a good god would have for creating the world as it is. And what he would want me to do as a result. I would do this, even if I’m wrong and my god is capricious and evil. I would continue to believe in good. Having studied it quite closely, I think it is very unlikely my god is evil. You, who get the stories wrong, think you see evidence that it’s true. Funny, but such a childish misinterpretation doesn’t persuade me.
You want Sunshine and Lollipops. I see a purpose in finding something is hard to do, and trying to do it anyway. If there is something for us to do in eternity, I think god would want people who truly find it rewarding to do difficult things and keep going rather than those who have never faced a tough job in their life and are likely to fold at the first sign of pressure. What is your true character? True character is what you would do when it’s painful to do the right thing. You, and others espousing this belief, seem to want to be able to do difficult things, but without it seeming actually difficult. You don’t want true character, you want it implanted in you.
So what if God “could” give us happiness all the time. If that doesn’t suit the true purpose, and if true character is more in line with the purpose he has for us, then it would be wrong to give us that “illusion” of character. It wouldn’t work out.