Toilet paper good. Leaves and corn cobs bad. 
And in terms of education and an exploration of an array of ideas I like my computer and the internet as well.
Comforting supposing, I suppose. Somewhere along the way I think we realize that any eternity we might imagine only exists in the here and now , so while supposing may be interesting and sometimes entertaining, it ain’t progress.
Not intending to be rude, but you still haven’t given an answer more complicated than “have faith that there is a higher purpose.”
I haven’t said that. I’ve said I don’t know and was just tossing out some ideas. I don’t insist god exists either. Considering some of the things I’ve discussed I don’t find the POE to be so insurmountable if we start by supposing an omnipotent creator who sustains the universe.
This whole argument started as a hypothetical. We started this conversation with the hypothetical propositions: if God exists, and if there is an afterlife, can he be benevolent given the state of the world. I already know you don’t believe in God or an after-life. I already know there is no objective empirical evidence. That’s beside the point. I’ve been proposing hypothetical situations that may suggest it is possible. But apparently, you can’t keep the fact that this is hypothetical in your mind if I don’t explicitly state it for one entire sentence.
My previous sentence and my next sentence stated it explicitly.
But, you’re not the only one who can’t follow the hypothetical.
um, if an afterlife exists: hypothetical. can be likened to: hypothetical. I’m just speculating.
I guess I should have known already from this…
Simulator. When you are in a simulation, or a video game and see your body get shot up, you don’t expect to see bullet holes when you shut it off. You don’t expect to be dead when you shut it off, even if your body in the sim was killed. You do seem to have such a fixation with this being the REAL world that you can’t grasp anything that might be outside it. You’ve mentioned it more than once. Did it confuse you that I proposed a hypothetical simulation that included more sensory input than those that we use today? That this real world might be like a simulation with more sensory inputs. That you could step out of the “simulation” and not be shot, or beaten, or dead, and still carry on skills learned in it.
Except, we do expect to be full of bullet holes and dead after we’re shot up. Ergo, we’re not beings playing a simulation; at best, we’re the in-simulation avatar of a being playing the simulation. You know, the thing that suffers horribly and does die at the end of the simulation.
Sure, watching pac-man shrivel up and disappear doesn’t hurt the player, but we don’t have the perception of a player. We have the perception of a pac-man. And boy, the makers of the game were unfair, unjust, and unloving to that poor little game character.
No. At best, some other entity, with an awareness both of the events of the simulation and of their life outside the simulation, can get up and walk away. Entities with our perception, the perception that’s restricted exclusively to the game world, are the avatars and simulated characters for the game itself. They don’t get to step out of the simulation and walk away.
Ok, like someone suggested, I haven’t read the entire thread, to see that people are admitting that free will allows for the existence of evil. And I understand the claim that it doesn’t account for natural evil.
So, the claim is that God made humans depraved. Why is that a necessity? Der Trihs suggested he should have made them better. Well, God may have previously, (using a hypothetical, {one possible, but not necessarily the only possible,} scenario.) created a perfect being named Lucifer, who then rebelled, the only necessary requirement apparently being free will, which allowed him to choose evil. I don’t believe humans are created depraved, we just aren’t created perfect.
So, then, was it God that made the natural world dangerous? The same scenario suggests that Lucifer is the god of this world, and then the implication can be that he made it dangerous, and it is Lucifer that is responsible for that suffering. I previously made that argument, (was that in another thread?)
Then, Free Will would still be responsible for our suffering.
Der Trihs also tried to suggest that I’ve
That I was suggesting God would inflict evil and then have compassion. That we could inflict evil so others could then have compassion. That we should commit evil deliberately.
It’s ludicrous. And it’s a position that’s been discredited for nearly 2000 years. (Most of the book of Romans discusses it.) It’s not the same being that inflicts the suffering that experiences the compassion, (except when it’s an accident.) And I can propose a scenario in which it isn’t the benevolent, compassionate God that inflicts any of the suffering. (I just did.) The evil is attributed to the being who committed the evil act. I’m not suggesting that a benevolent God would inflict evil, only that he might allow it.
But, why would you consider it evil if a lion attacked and ate a human? You wouldn’t consider it evil for that lion to attack and eat a zebra would you? Are you suggesting that it’s evil for a God to create a world that could run on it’s own after being created? That he would have to micro-manage it ever after for eternity? And keep us as children for eternity making sure no one ever suffered? Why would he want to do that? Why does it even make sense to suggest that? Or why would he want little robots incapable of making their own decisions?
When the standard is perfection and you add free will and immortality… I’d say you don’t have to be omnipotent to know which way it will go. Sooner or later, a mistake will happen.
You don’t have to suffer to grow to adulthood, or to learn to make your own decisions. Claiming these as benefits or justifications of suffering indicates that there’s something wrong with your argument.
And I think that what’s suggested is that it’s evil for a god to set a lion to attack a person, which is a seemingly inevitable conclusion if you have a god that created the world and is both omnitient and omnipotent. If you line up a long set of dominos and then push the first one, you can’t claim innocence in the fall of the last one, after all.
If you want to argue for an apathetic disisnterested deist god, of course, that’s another matter.
Ack! [DEL]omnipotent[/DEL] omniscient
(I will read ‘omnipotent’ as ‘omniscient’, as you wish.)
Exactly!!! I know this. I believe God would have too. If this is the way it happened, he knew and allowed it anyway for his own purposes. Der Trihs and others would claim it has to be an evil purpose because they can concieve of nothing else. I don’t concede that.
I love a good debate and all. I have no problem challenging my beliefs. Do it all the time. But, I’m getting tired of the vitriol and hatred being perpetrated by people who insist that I shouldn’t believe something because they have seen no evidence for it. (Anomolous isn’t one of those, and seems to be someone who can be debated with. But, I think most of you can figure out some of the people I might be talking about.)
relevent post in another thread.
Did I see a hawk swoop down and catch a squirrel yesterday? Nobody else saw it. It can’t be verified scientifically that I had that experience. So, should I believe that it happened? Should you?.. It either did or didn’t happen, even though it can’t be proven… What if it’s more of an out-of-the-ordinary experience? Something you’ve never seen yourself, or that is outside your view of what is possible. Does that mean it didn’t happen to me?
I guess if you have complete scientific knowledge you could claim to know everything that is and isn’t possible in this world. Perfect Flatland knowledge, so to speak. But, even then, (and we aren’t there yet,) would you be sure of what was possible one dimension up?
One last thing for the ‘debate’ with Der Trihs. His proposition as I see it, is that it is impossible for a benevolent God to exist given the state of the world.
My proposition is that the solution set of "possible gods that can exist with the state of the world’ is infinite. Since the solution set is infinite, one or more of them could still be benevolent. Many of them would be evil. If you wish to convince me that all of them must be evil you are free to work out a rigorous proof for the whole set. I, however, no longer wish to try to convince you that any one specific example is benevolent. Since I am not a higher being myself, I could never explain the motives and actions of one fully. Is there a set of circumstances that would allow a benvolent God to exist along with this world? In an infinite set, I’m pretty sure it’s possible. From my own experiences, (which you haven’t had and can’t verify,) I’m quite certain it’s the case. From there, I make the small leap to, “I’m willing to accept it.” If you haven’t seen it, it is quite reasonable for you to not believe it.
I have seen a hawk swoop down and catch a mouse, and I’m sure others have done the same. If you haven’t seen this, it is easy to find and view videos of this event. While it can’t be varified scientifically that you had this experience, it can be scientifically varified that this event has occured multiple times. Therefore, your claim that you have observed an event is plausible.
If on the other hand I make the claim that I observed a mouse swoop out of the sky and catch a hawk, how willing would you be to accept my claim at face value? The claim is certainly out-of-the-ordinary and outside your view of what is possible(or at least I hope so-if not, this conversation is a complete waste of time). Does that mean that it didn’t happen, or do you accept it without trying to find out more?
I don’t expect real, agonizing pain from a simulation either. No do I expect people to be driven insane by it.
No, it disgusted me that you handwaved all of the REAL suffering that happens with “it’s just a simulation”. It doesn’t matter if it is or not. As begbert2 points out, we are IN the simulation, not detached observers.
And a “hypothetical simulation that included more sensory input than those that we use today” would most certainly not torment it’s users. Unless created as an instrument of torture, which rather rules out benevolence.
And all the traumas. A simulation that left it’s user insane or wishing for oblivion is a bad design. And certainly not a just or benevolent design.
It’s evil because it’s evil by human standards, and evil is a human word. And claiming that we can’t accuse God of evil because he’s beyond human standards ALSO means that you can’t claim he’s good either - a little logical problem the religious tend to ignore.
No, it’s a straightforward implication of the claim that God put evil and suffering in the world so we’d learn compassion. If you claim that, you are essentially claiming that God tormented humanity in order to foster compassion.
That doesn’t follow at all. The fact that the world is what it is can rule out whole classes of hypothetical gods, and still leave an infinite number of possible ( using “possible” very loosely ) ones. Postulating an omnipotent or even merely very powerful god rules out still more.
I and others are saying that the state of the world rules out any God that is both just, compassionate, etc AND capable of helping us; I personally add the personal belief that if this is the best he can do, he shouldn’t have created the world in the first place. You use of the simulation hypotheisis simply underlines our point, since if the universe is a simulation you can’t even claim he had practical limits on what he could do to make the world better. And since we can and have made our world better, we know that it’s possible.
More than this, with the example that he used, no one else saw the hawk swoop down, right? So why would anyone be making the claim that a hawk swooped down yesterday and caught a squirrel? Especially if you’re talking about a specific area (i.e. your backyard).
No one has any reason to think that a hawk caught a squirrel in your backyard yesterday. Ergo, no one has any reason to believe that a hawk caught a squirrel in your backyard. You’d have to first make a claim that it happened. Before that point, it doesn’t even make sense for it to come into consideration.
What might make you make that claim? Well, maybe you saw part of the capture, or maybe you found a little blood and fur in your yard. Then you start to ask theoretical questions.
Where we split, however, is where the reasonable person selects one of the possible theories from the evidence available, and where the other person deduces that it was a UFO.
Some people look at the balance of happiness and misery in the world and address it with the evidence at hand. They look to human nature, to physical implications, to geography and socioeconomic stimuli. Other people look at the same thing and, without any discernible reason, extrapolate that into a system supportive of the idea of God.
They theorize that that which is hateful, humanly evil, unfair and completely unjust in the world is actually the product of an all-powerful, all-knowing, compassionate being. And the theory goes further by saying that this omniscient being gave us “free will” (which is itself debatable) and that the being isn’t at fault, it’s us. Meanwhile, they’ll play off the argument about God not needing to put us through all of this by saying that he’s so infinite and omniscient that his reasons are above our understanding.
All of this, had it a shred of evidence to support it, might be something worth thinking about. In reality, however, all we have is the evidence at hand. And the evidence at hand does not paint a shiny picture of a compassionate God.
(On a side note, these arguments remind me a lot of when I was in college. Up until my Sophomore year in university, I was extremely religious. I loved God, Jesus, etc. But I gradually became increasingly aware of the hedging and flexibility of these so-called divine decrees. Still being very religious, I decided that it would be better to just believe in God at the core and to see a path to God from all aspects of the world. Through violence, greed, Buddhism, etc. Every path would lead to God, and this made me feel better.
What it ultimately made me do, however, was to have me end up in the university library debating heatedly with some Southern Baptist friends of mine. What we were debating? We were debating my belief at the time that reincarnation was viable as a part of Christian faith.
Through this debate, I quite suddenly, shockingly realized just how ridiculous my own argument sounded. There was nothing to my belief. No reason for it. Not even a snippet of an ancient storybook. This experience was the frayed thread that would unravel the entire mantle of my belief.)
As it comes down to it… what reason do we have to believe that some Earth-based predator caught the squirrel, resulting in said blood and fur? Opposed to: What reason do we have to believe that a UFO abducted said squirrel? Or a troll? Or Big Foot?
One of these possibilities has merit. The others, should you be inclined to argue for them, have no supporting evidence.
To apply it directly to the argument at hand, let’s say you already believe in UFOs. Theorizing that God has a deeper plan at work to make all of this suffering worth it is equal to theorizing that the UFOs are abducting squirrels to fit them with impressive 1920s style ray guns. Even from the basis of belief, there’s no reason for that extrapolation. Even if you already believe in UFOs, why would you move forward on the completely unsupported theory about ray guns?
Even if you believe in God, why would you choose to exercise your imagination on a new explanation for what God does or his reasons for it? Is it because that’s the only way that an omnipotent, omniscient God who allows all of this to happen becomes palatable?
What if I said I saw a squirrel swoop down and attack a cat? 
No, I don’t accept out-of-the-ordinary claims without further inquiry. And if I saw a mouse swoop down and catch a hawk, I would try to verify it first. But, if I couldn’t discredit it with more than, “well, that’s just not possible,” I might have to believe my own eyes.
I’m a very logical, scientific person. I love to verify things logically, but, logic is not all there is to the world.
without discernible reason.
Why don’t we look at the balance of happiness and misery in the world with a scientific eye?
There are other studies, but, generally, the consensus is that belief makes you happier, even in socioeconomic situations that most people would expect to lead to despair.
So, that indicates that there may be a personal or social benefit to belief, even if God doesn’t exist. So, for this and other reasons, I am an advocate for belief in things-that-may-not-be-true.
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
I and others are saying that the state of the world rules out any God that is both just, compassionate, etc AND capable of helping us…/QUOTE]
Yes, you are saying that. Saying it a lot. And have gone nowhere near proving it.
Show me the set that you’ve disproved and how you did it.
And as we’ve made it better, we’ve made so much progress in cruelty and torture and evil, and are so much better at oppressing and killing and torturing more people at a time than ever before.
I think there’s a lesson to be learned from the fact that our capacity for evil, at the very least, keeps up with, and probably exceeds our capacity to do any good.
oh, but, New Age is still crap…
Because someone tricking you is out of the question, as is something being wrong with you or your eyes?
I would certainly hope that you would go through all logical possibilities for an event, including the possibility that you might have been deceived either on purpose or by mistake, before entertaining the notion that there might be an illogical explanation for which there is no evidence. Sometimes, the only answer that fits is “I don’t know yet, but I will continue to try to find out.” This answer will serve you better than any supernatural explanation.
It’s called “looking at the world.” Both we, and the world are nowhere near any sort of ideal. We are a deeply flawed species in a world that is grossly inferior to one that we could design, if we had the power. That disproves any benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent god. Or even a really powerful, really knowledgeable god. Because such a god would do a better job.
Except that we don’t. The past was a far more brutal, tyrannical, evil place than the present. The Nazis or Communists wouldn’t have stood out much, if at all in the “good old days”.
And all of humanity’s cruelty pales besides that of nature. Which humanity bears no responsibility for.
Societies worse off when God is on their side. I can quote studies too. And given the near-compulsive dishonesty of believers, I see no reason to believe the study you quoted. And given the harm religion has caused and is causing, I see no reason to care even if it’s true.