I know that’s what you stated, but I’m curious what kind of support you have for the idea. Imagine that we’re all living in a video game. Are we aware of the video game creator? How could we be?
…I would have to conclude that I am at present in Hell, but don’t know about it.
Koxinga’s not the only one failing to follow you; I have no problem imagining “an omnipotent (and I’m assuming you are eliding over, omnipresent and omniscient) god” who prefers to remain out of sight (and who succeeds, since “excels at remaining unknown and unknowable” is a subset of “omnipotent”).
But even in the Bible … even within the story of God’s big reveal at the foot of Mt Sinai, the people built themselves a golden calf to worship. So, it seems (if we’re taking the Bible as true, along with the existence of God) that free will also includes stuff like denial, rebellion, willful ignorance, distrust, etc, etc.
If we’re supposing that the Bible was given by God, as CS Lewis believed, then God-the parent did tell the world what he wanted: 10 Commandments; love they neighbour; do not do unto others… and so on. But even if the Bible is not a God-given document, you could argue that humans have at least been given the tools to figure out the basic rules that allow society to work properly - intelligence, conscience, empathy, sense of justice …
Sociopaths can and do still follow societal rules that were made by people who have an understanding of good and evil. Most sociopaths don’t become serial killers despite their lack of empathy. All our rules are, in some way, meant to mold our individual free wills into a workable society, no? I guess a Creator could have created a Stepford humanity, but why would he bother?
He could have simply created a species that had instincts that were built for civilized, moral behavior; instead of creating a species that has to constantly fight itself to behave in a moral and civilized fashion.
I see this said all the time, and it’s awfully short-sighted.
Consider, if you had the ability to give your child absolutely everything he could possibly need, never want for money, never get injured, never suffer a broken heart. Would you really want to do that?
A new movie, book, or show comes out, but every character in it is perfect and flawless and has no lessons to learn. So it basically just ends up being a story about all the characters hugging, having picnics at the park, and singing happy songs around a campfire. Do you really want to watch or read that?
The point is, there is no point to existence if there’s nothing to do. If something is perfect, the only thing it can do is nothing, lest it become less than perfect. What is “perfect” about it is the journey it takes from a state of imperfection toward perfection. This is part of the reason why most who believe in an omnimax God assert that he must exist outside time, but also why his creations that exist inside time aren’t perfect now, because it is not yet the end.
Perfection, in time, isn’t an end point, it is a process.
As for the point specifically in the OP, I’d tend to agree with C S Lewis. In the same way that I’m not going to be very interested in watching a game when I know what the final score will be. If we know exactly what’s going to happen, regardless of our choices, it’s tantamount to not even having free will. So all we can do is envision a perfect goal to achieve, and make the best steps we can toward it. But, then, how is that not a process toward perfection?
You can have variations, lessons and free will without constructing a universe with pediatric cancer or pregnant women burning to death in cars.
So an Omnimax God is utterly impossible in this universe. If a God exists, It either has limits on what It can do, or just doesn’t give a shit that cystic fibrosis exists.
So what you’re saying is is that existence is a game, and we’re players in this game, and the objective of this game is to perfect ourselves by playing the game to the best of our abilities and seeing what “score” we get at the end. Is this close to correct?
It’s a compelling idea, but consider this. The hands we’re dealt span the gamut from fantastic to horrible. “Free will” implies that the choices we make are truly free. But they aren’t. Its easy, for instance, to never steal if your community tells you not to do so and you have plenty of money because you were born in affluence. Its considerably more difficult if that isn’t the case. So largely as a product of circumstances beyond your control, the road to “perfection” is gonna be hard to come by.
The game “theory” you’re expousing falls apart because it ignores reality. We don’t come into this world lined up shoulder to shoulder at the same starting line and finish at the same point. People are born into hellish homes and die young after enduring abuse, illnesses, trauma and ignorance. What lessons can a 3-year old who was raped and killed by their father take away from their earthly experience? And then there are people (like me) who have never really suffered anything in their lives. If we were to create a game like this in real life, it would be deemed unfair from to outset.
There is probably no way we can really relate the reason for our existence and God to any human-created analogs. If existence is a game, it’s a game that I can’t imagine any soul would have volunteered for knowing all the risks entailed. If we had no choice in playing this game or were kept in the dark about what the game entailed, then we really don’t have free will and so there goes the whole point of the experiment.
Are you making the case that you will be bored in heaven? If there’s an afterlife, is it like your regular life, or is it perfection? If it’s perfect, then the 80-100 years you spend on earth not knowing the ending will be like nothing after the first trillion years or so in heaven.
I never understood the free-will defense. Do you have free will in heaven? If not, why not just create souls directly in heaven. Bizarre.
Which demonstrates my point. Even with this evidence people were free to reject God. Lewis makes the same point himself in The Last Battle where he has people not seeing Aslan right in front of them and being condemned. If people have enough free will to reject the evidence, you can’t justify the lack of evidence because it will diminish their free will.
If we’re talking about the evidence, we can’t suppose the Bible is true. It is very old, written by people who did not directly witness the supposed events, is full of historical events we now know did not happen, and of contradictions. Unchangeable God changes his mind all the time. Is it okay to eat shellfish or not? Look at all the people who have totally different moral views based on the same book. Clearly not all of it is true, but how do we figure out which parts?
If you read the Torah you will see that it is far more than the Ten Commandments and simple guidance. It contains very detailed rules and regulations. The Ten Commandments is not even the most important passage - The Sh’ma is usually considered this - “Hear O Israel the Lord is your God, the Lord is One.” (See, I remember it 45 years after I stopped going to services.)
There are different levels of sociopath, and some don’t get the opportunity. But are you denying that some people don’t get good and evil? If they follow the rules, it is to avoid being punished, not because the buy into them. And some clearly can’t think ahead well enough to even get that they will get caught. And I reject your contention that the only choices are total free will, including sociopaths, or robots. We have lots of needs and aversions baked into us not from free choice - all you have to do is make fear of killing lots of people universal so it is like some of the phobias people have already. I think both you and I have this particular phobia already - why not everyone?
Hell yes I would! My kids are smart, good looking, and healthy. I have never for a second thought that life would be more interesting if they had serious health problems. That’s sick.
Watching King Lear is a lot better than living it would be. We read and watch fiction to vicariously experience stuff we wouldn’t want to experience. Now, since this world is far from perfect, lots of people do experience tragedy. While I understand that people cope by saying this or that tragedy was for the best, I think it is bullshit, and that they would universally not have their house burn down or their child killed by a drunk driver no matter how much personal growth it causes.
Being God isn’t easy. If you do too much, people become dependent on you. Do too little, they lose hope. If you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.
Yes, I get most of my philosophical guidance from cartoons, what of it?
Well we do know, right? It’s not like it’s a secret. It’s just that most people don’t remember being there, the reports we have are inconsistent, and we have no reliable transit back and forth or machine compatible communication relays.
Seems kind of similar to where we go when we sleep.
Or maybe to large construction projects. We need transportation and communication infrastructure.
I am not trying to make a case for or against the existence of God. The OP posits that an omnimax God exists. While I don’t agree with you that pediatric cancer and pregnant women burning to death in cars makes that impossible, I didn’t really intend to explore that because it doesn’t seem to be within the scope of the thread and it’s been done a bunch of times already.
Close, but not quite. If we’re going to make the game analogy, I’d say it’s much close to something like poker than chess. The point being, chess is a complete information game, both players know all the same information about the states and, theoretically, a perfect move can be calculated if given enough time. As such, a perfect player would be expected to make exactly the same move and get exactly the same result every time. In poker, it’s a partial information game and involves chance. As such, even if a player can correctly deduce his opponent’s hand and determine he has strong odds, he can make the correct move every time, but get different results. Similarly, even the best players can lose to amateurs if they’re card dead and the other player just keeps getting great hands.
But it’s a bit more than that, in my view. In poker, the goal is to maximize your own “score” at the expense of your opponent. There is a limited number of chips in play, and you want to redistribute them in your favor. In life, there isn’t a limited number of chips in play, at least not in such a way that it limits how we interact. That is, one person can improve his own situation without necessarily impacting others negatively by the same amount, or one can help others improve their situation without such a loss in their own. So, unlike poker, the goal isn’t so much to improve my score, as it is to improve our score.
This is part of the complexity, but it’s also important to realize that these aren’t the same decisions. A poor person who steals may do so to feed himself. A wealthy person won’t be choosing between stealing and starving, probably doing it because they’re seeking a thrill or compelled to do so. So the point isn’t that we’re going to face the same choices, simply that, when faced with a choice, we seek to make the best one.
I agree, but I think if we see the lessons as to humanity as a whole. That is, though we experience our existence on an individual basis, an omnimax God sees all of creation. Is it not reasonable that he oversees humanity or perhaps life or even the universe as a whole? When we look back, we become aware of the sufferings of others, under terrible regimes, slavery, genocide, and that is part of what drives us to make those changes. Sure, we remember the names of some of the major players who affected history, but these are the heroes and villains of our own tale. And just over recorded history, much less all of time past, we can see how far we’ve come, technology, science, exploration, arts and literature, culture, etc. There’s an undeniable upward trend in all of these things and I expect we’ll continue to see those trends for a long time yet.
What if we really aren’t all separate souls? Even without appealing to the super-natural, there are trends in human consciousness, societies, and cultures that transcend the individual. But when the existence of an omnimax God and an afterlife are a given, I think it would only really make so much sense if our experiences in life are shared in some way. Sure, we don’t so much have choice in being born, but it is essentially an ever-present choice to end our lives at any moment, and yet so very few people actually do so. Sure, continuing to live is merely a passive decision, but by having the ability to opt out at virtually any time and not, we are effectively choosing to exist and to play the game of life.
It depends on the nature of heaven. I personally don’t believe in the idea that heaven is a magical place where everything is perfect and everyone is happy. I object to that interpretation for the same reason you do. Rather, I think it is more one of two possibilities. As mentioned with the idea of perfect process, we could simply see it as some existence where we are in an absolute perfect process, facing choices, but learning that though we can make poor choices, we only bring suffering on ourselves and choose to make the right ones. Or, if it is perfect, it exists in some state not unlike the given omnimax God, that is in some way outside of time. As such, it could be perfect, because nothing is changing because there is no time. And so, with no time, there is method to make choices, so free will would be an inapplicable concept, similarly, one couldn’t be bored, as there is no way to do or not do anything.
You’ve missed the point I was trying to make. I’m not saying anyone would necessarily wish terminal cancer on their child but, at least for me, I wouldn’t wish for my children, to face no struggles in their lives either. Yes, though I have no children of my own, I know that no parent likes to see their child’s heart broken, they hate to see them suffer, but I also know that it is part of growing up and learning what love is. I know for myself, looking back at my own heart breaks, though I suffered at the time, I recall them fondly, and I appreciate what I learned.
I also know that in parts of my life where I haven’t struggled directly, I had difficulty learning to appreciate their value. The things I had to work to accomplish, I had much greater appreciation of. Sure, there are some lessons I was able to learn and appreciate well with little effort, but it seems that the majority of lessons require something more than it simply being handed to us.
But why do we watch these things? We don’t watch them because we like to see people suffer. We watch them because we see them grow and learn, and often we grow and learn right along with them. We relate to a character who struggles where we struggled and we gain greater appreciation for it. Sometimes a character struggles in a way we never have and perhaps never could, but we can often still relate and learn to appreciate it. It’s not about a tragedy being for the best, but about making the best out of a tragedy.
If we share experiences, they only shared in some vague, ill-defined way that is pretty much meaningless to us in our fleshly, fractionated states. The 3 year-old who is raped everyday is still stuck playing a crappy game for as long as he/she is alive, and for what? So that the collective organism called Humanity can perfect itself through that individual’s suffering? I just can’t accept that.
“Sorry kid that your dad is abusing you like a Stephen King monster, but sometimes you just gotta take one for the team!”
If God limited the drama in our lives to that of, say, the typical university department, there would still be plenty of struggle and broken hearts and conflict. You can’t have anything resembling free will without heart break and politics. But we can do without the cancer. God is not a monster because only one candidate can win an election. God is a monster when one of the candidates loses by getting shot in the head by an assassin.
We don’t watch them because we like to see people to suffer? Check out the box office for the Saw series some time. I don’t like that, so I don’t watch slasher films - but plenty of people do. Some fiction helps you to grow, but lots let you do things you wouldn’t do otherwise, in your imagination. When my older daughter was little she was perhaps excessively well behaved. She loved the Ramona books, because, as she said, “that Ramona is so bad.” She could misbehave through the character. As wonderful as those books are, I’m not sure they led to any growth.
And yeah, we make the best out of a tragedy because we have no choice. But why must there be tragedies in the first place?
The great tragedies also contradict your premise. Who is better off at the end of Hamlet? Othello?
Fiction writers can kill billions for the sake of the plot. If God treats us with the same care he is not someone I want to be involved with.
This! Blaster Master suggests that we can’t have perfection without losing our free will. Perhaps so. But we can damn well have a better world than this one without losing free will.
As Lobohan notes, this business of pregnant women burning to death in car crashes is excessive. It goes far beyond the level of challenge that we need to keep ourselves morally fit.
Why does everybody assume that the omnipotent God reveals Himself as soon as you are in afterlife?
Assuming that we are in a play is an interesting thought experiment. “When the author walks onto the stage, the play is over.” But if you assume that the author keeps himself backstage, we can eliminate him from the thought experiment. He can be there, which will never be proven, or not be there, which will never be falsified. Stop thinking about it if you can’t beat Spinoza.
If there is an afterlife, is should be part of the game. There is no reason to assume that the author walks on the stage as soon as we enter the next level. So if the debate concerns afterlife, there is no need to involve God. If God has a reason to reveal us heaven and hell, he’d better not reveal it Himself.
Which the OT didn’t actually. Christians assume that Elijah was taken to heaven in 2 Kings 2:11-14, but the Bible text didn’t even give a hint of afterlife; it only describes that Elijah was taken away. If the OT mentions afterlife, it is mentioned in a way chritians don’t want to be remembered of: 1 Samuel 28. It was the NT that introduced heaven and hell as a result of the neo-platonic philosophy.
So I reduce the question to: is it best that we don’t know about afterlife? I’d say: fight ignorance.
My apologies for the misspellings. I had connection problems when I tried to edit my post, and when the connection was fixed, the time frame had expired.