First, ren, sorry if my ranting offended you - it was kind of a rant, but also meant to stimulate conversation on the subject, and some interesting points have been brought up. I was thinking about this subject in my car on the way home from work, and realized that without at least the possibility of suffering, we couldn’t have a whopping big chunk of literature, art, entertainment, etc. That’s not really a philosophical problem for me, since I don’t believe that I have to placate an omnipotent being who set it up like that. However, it is a novel thought (for me), that was stimulated by this discussion.
Second, pldennison, if you shoot someone in the head, there is a certain (low, but existent) probability that he will survive. After you pull the trigger, you no longer affect what happens to him, you don’t know for sure whether he’ll die. If he does, you’re sure as heck guilty of murder. I don’t see any difference in your example. It’s not like you built an otherwise useful object with a low probability of hurting anyone or something. You built a bomb! Its purpose is to kill, and if you leave it around people knowing there’s a 50% chance it will go off, you are at least reckless, and so you are responsible. Off with your head!
Does this debate bring to anyone else’s mind that little security droid (I forget his name now.) that Ford Prefect made permanetly happy? Maybe if god made us all happy we’d do everything he says, just like that droid with Ford, and that’d be another one of his goals solved right there.
<Shrug> I dunno. Just a though.
JESUS CHRIST IT’S WHAT TIME??? I’M GOING TO BED!!!
That’s pretty much the gist of it. The results of one’s own efforts are much more satisfying than a gift. Thus, in order to bestow the greatest possible good, it must come with some form of effort involved in receiving it…in this case, the effort of freely choosing righteousness over expedient evil.
Just read in the paper today that a man attending a religious conference here in New York with his family was beaned by a five-pound piece of concrete that fell off a building.
OK, Aeryn, that was the answer I was hoping for, that I am responsible.
Now let’s change the parameters. Let’s say I build a machine with the same sort of trigger. It has a 50% chance of spitting out Hershey’s Kisses for everyone, and a 50% chance of exploding and killing everyone. I have no way of affecting which one occurs. If it explodes and kills everyone, am I responsible for those deaths?
Um, folks, didn’t you know that “The Problem of Evil” has been solved?
The solution is simple. Why would a benevolent, all-knowing, all-powerful god create a world where there is evil?
The answer is that there is no such entity as god.
Let me point out that an uncaused first cause, or the sum of all physical laws of the universe is not what we are talking about. You could call those things god, but that’s a pretty radical redefinition.
There is no entity that marks the fall of every sparrow. We do not suffer because there is some point to it, because there is no extra-physical component to human consciousness. You are completely made of ordinary atoms. You don’t get rewarded with heaven or hell, or another life. When the pattern of atoms that is you breaks apart, that’s it.
Let me point out that, yes, it is possible that there is some as-yet-unrecognized physical property that gives material humans immaterial souls. Sure, it might. But you have to show me what that might be before I believe in it, right?
Sure, that may be an adequate explanation for human-caused atrocities, like genocide, sexual abuse, and lite beer, but in the OP, AerynSun was asking more about “natural” disasters. Is there anything more convincing than “mysterious ways?”
Actually, Lib, a sphere would appear as a line segment that never changes it’s length when viewed from any angle. Mr. Flatlander would be able to see around it and walk all the way around it, proving that it was not an unending line, but it would maintain the same apparent length. Line segment.
As Mr. Flatlander traverses the “circle” (sphere) there are exactly 0 moments in the traversal when he will see a single point. But if he traverses a line segment (or cross-section of a plane), there will be exactly 2 moments when he will see a single point. (For each time he goes round to the other side of the line segment.)
Libertarian, usually the voice of reason, I am surprised at your last few posts. (I reflexively checked your post count to see if you’d been impersonated, then I remembered the new vB version…)
Come again?
and then there’s this:
If “flatland” is a 2D plane , and a sphere (last time I checked) is 3D, I don’t see how you can intersect the two and get anything but A) a circle or B) a point.
Speaking of points, what do these statements have to do with the topic?
Lib, darn it, you described it perfectly in a different thread not long ago. The key words in your assertion are “would appear as”. Do you see that, to Mr. Flatlander, the circle that occurs as the sphere intersects his plane of existence would appear to him to be a line segment? I DID NOT assert that a sphere would look the same to him as would a line segment; I said that the sphere would look like a line segment when viewed from any of his available angles.
Draw a picture; it might help.
Now, on to the analogy: You used your Flatland reference in response to Phobos’ statement that life “certainly appears” to die. I presume that you mean appearance of death is not death of the spirit, which assertion I also presume is relevant in some way to the discussion here. Does the eternal spirit have bearing on our concepts of God’s will or human suffering?
Grim_Beaker, that’s essentially the Mysterious Ways argument restated. But even if humans are not able to completely understand a perfect being, there are still some things that must be true about a world created by a benevolent, omnipotent being: for example, it should not have unnecessary suffering. And it is difficult to justify things like natural disasters and babies being born with horrible diseases as somehow necessary, without resorting to “mysterious ways.”
I agree. So the question would be “what’s unnecessary suffering”? That was the question that interested me enough to get involved in this thread.
The posts here seem to provide strong evidence that the question of what is “unnecessary” is extremely difficult to answer without hindsight (I’m addressing “necessary” here, vs. “extreme”), and even with hindsight can often be a totally subjective matter.
That makes it hard to assess up front just how benevolent God is or isn’t.
Difficult it is. Frequently verging on the absurd, which I think was the original point…
I don’t have to draw it. I’ve seen it, in a book called The Fourth Dimension.
What you’re missing is that you don’t see a line segment the same way Mr. Flatlander does.
Once again, when he traverses the circle, he never sees it as a single point the way he does (twice) when he traverses the line segment.
Picture yourself traversing a long log at eye-level. When you reach the end of the log, as you look at it, you will see a circle (the log’s cross-section), representing the end point of the line-segment. It is at that analogous moment that the line-segment “disappears” to Mr. Flatlander until he passes that end-point and comes round to the other side.
Nothing of the kind occurs as he traverses the circle (spherical cross-section).
Well, of course it does. The Eternal Spirit is what God’s will (and ours) and human suffering (and His) are all about!