Bookworm on Oct 21 2009 at 8:29 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
This has been popping up amongst the handful of my facebook friends who are religious. I think you’ll like it:
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I think the problem comes when you try to discuss a Being that could have been able to create a universe that our minds cannot really comprehend, and then attempt to understand that such a being could care one iota about each and every being on this small speck of solid material in the universe.
It’s not so difficult to adhere to one concept or the other, but to mesh the two….that’s almost not possible.
I think this may be a pleasant urban legend. Einstein was probably, at best, a deist. There is no record of him believing in a personal God. Perhaps he did so as a youth. But this kind of pleading to authority leaves me cold. The child’s arguments stand on their own without needing the weight of a great name to make them any more impressive.
The argument I’ve heard from some that how could God care a jot about any person in a universe that measures 15 billion light years across makes no impression on me. If there is a being that can call matter, time and space out of nothing, I would say that the mental prowess of that being far exceeds mine. That includes attention span. If the creator of eveything chooses to get personal, I am in absolutely no position to be dubious about his ability to do so.
suek, the beauty of our incomprehensible universe is that we do slowly comprehend it. The creator has given us great intelligence and curiosity, and as Einstein said, does not play games. You will notice that as our comprehension deepens, our awe and surprise increase. The universe we perceive is ever so much more complex and finely wrought than the one Copernicus and Newton perceived. With each passing discovery, we understand that the layers of the onion we are peeling may not only be endless in number, but that each layer is richer and more compelling than the previous one in structure and significance. Endless goodies to contemplate!
Hmmm. It’s amusing. The subtitle translation is a little weak.
The counterargument is to ask if then a tsunami that kills tens of thousands only exists because God’s love is not present in people.
Well I have to say that I loved this!
suek, I get what you are saying it’s like being aware of every cell in your body let alone the DNA in each cell and all of the inner workings (truly in itself a universe of information) for us it is impossible. But for one not bound by the second law of thermodynamics not relying on neurons and misfiring synapses it may not be so difficult. I had started getting swept by this kind of thinking in college and the Dean said to me then Your God is Too Small. This of course is a book by JB Phillips. On the other hand is it so difficult to think that the God of the universe, the creator of the universe, would care about it’s creation? As a child you know that your father has a whole universe of things that he does besides it but he cares for it and comes to interact with it usually out of love.
I would be glad to clarify later
This reminds me and actually clarified for me a troubling term in a verse in the New Testament where Jesus is teaching on how his Father gives good things. Starting at Matthew 7:7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. “For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. “Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? “Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him! “In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets”. This is the phrase that gave me trouble until seeing this video: “If you then, being evil,” If evil is the absense of God’s love in one’s heart then it makes sense to me. They still had natural love and knew to give good gifts but were spiritually dead as it were uh, like a functional alcoholic. This is why he said that in order to have this greater love, this life that He was speaking of we need to be born again (john ch3) when we are functional but spiritually dead (evil) we need to be reborn having lost God’s love in our hearts. Any that’s my off the cuff thoughts, I write as I think so if it’s confusing to you imagine what it’s like in my head!
Well, trying to merge divergent ideas of God created by irrational and illogical humans, especially those from far less knowledgeable times, is always going to be fraught with difficulty. We must also understand that many of these ideas were created by individuals and groups as a means to harness the need for and fear of God to gain power and control.
I have a belief that God created the universe and as part of the universe, I carry a small part of God in, let’s say my DNA for lack of a better analogy (sixty years ago what analogy would I have used). All I have to do is listen to this part of God within me to get guidance from God.
I also do not believe that God causes things to happen to us. Rather he sparked a process now pushed back by science to the Big Bang that is ongoing. I exist in that process and am affected by the currents. As an individual with free will, I can make choices in how I interact with the process. If I need help in dealing with the impacts of my decisions or in making a better decision, I can learn to listen to God via my inner link.
I personally reject the concept of God the father or benevolent dictator as a valid explanation for its time but now superseded by better understanding. Similarly to how Bohr’s atom is a valid representation of the atom but now superseded by more encompassing understandings of the atomic and subatomic nature of the world.
Evil and good are the result of choices. God can remove evil, by removing free will and liberty. Just as God can remove poverty by removing rich and poor, wealthy and destitute. But then you would never be able to get rich, from anything.
The equalization of reality is seen in the function of entropy. But if creation results from the ordering of energies, then it cannot be tied too closely to entropy. Thus if God creates, equalization is the last of his objectives.
It’s not so difficult to adhere to one concept or the other, but to mesh the two….that’s almost not possible.
I think that was the point – to separate G-d from science and to understand the difference.
It also reinforces my own belief that it is important to ask questions.
The answers come eventually, in course of human history, as Charles Martel so eloquently said it.
>>The counterargument is to ask if then a tsunami that kills tens of thousands only exists because God’s love is not present in people.>>
I’d guess that’s because you consider death to be evil – or at least bad – which means that you probably think that this life in the here and now is all there is. For those of us who believe in an after life – well, we have whatever time on earth we have and then we move on. Death may be something we fight to avoid, but it isn’t the ultimate evil. If the here and now is all there is, then I can certainly understand that death would be the ultimate evil.
I don’t think that we are the be-all and end-all of God’s glorious Universe.
Our galaxy, so large itself as to be nearly incomprehensible to us, is merely one of millions of galaxies. Our Sun sits well toward the exterior of our galaxy, off in a very unremarkable section of it.
Does that make us unremarkable and worth little or nothing? Hardly. I may be agnostic, but I’m not hostile to God. If God did in fact create this Universe, He is entirely capable of knowing each and every one of us at each and every moment, in and out of Time itself.
Yet I don’t think we would be his only significant creations.
He exists and has a wonderful sense of humor, too.
Just listen to Contessa Brewer apologize to Rev. Jesse (she confused him with Rev. Al). On the other hand, Rev. Jesse, has no sense of humor. If looks could kill, Contessa should be in an ICU now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CKHFn8mULE&feature=player_embedded
I know He exists – I spoke to Him just this morning (as someone once said).
I do not visualize G-d as controlling everything that goes on down here. The Bible teaches us that we live in a “war zone” – this earth constitutes a demonstration of the results of what occurs when we depart from God’s way of doing things. Currently, it is a battlefield between the forces of evil (Satan and his cohorts) and those of good (the humans who sign up on God’s side). As in any battlefield, “stuff happens” that the commanders do not directly “intend” – wounds, deaths, incredible screw-ups, etc. God does not will anyone’s death (remember the scene in Gettysburg, where Joshua Chamberlain orders his own brother to take a few soldiers and defend the end of the Union line – sending him to almost certain death….not because he “willed” his brother’s death, but because there was a greater value at stake than his life. That’s how I see G-d’s position vis a vis the earth and its inhabitants – His “children”, according to Scripture).
G-d knows our sorrows – He has suffered the loss of a loved one, and weeps with us whenever we suffer loss. But, by granting us free will, our heavenly Father risked exactly what we see here….and blessedly, the Bible also explains how it all will end.
I have good news — God wins!
You know, I can pick up the phone — an increasingly old concept itself — and call a huge corporation and be immediately greeted by name. Why? Because they have a computer that can recognize me. They also have all of my records, all my transactions, everything right there on screen. Thirty years ago this was science fiction.
So, do I have a problem believing God knows the number of hairs on my head?
No.
Do I have a problem believing he loves me?
Based on incontrovertible personal evidence — personal miracles — no, I have no problem believing he loves me.
Do I understand God?
No, and if I DID, he wouldn’t be God.
@ Bill Smith
I registered just so I could tell you that I loved that explanation. Very nice! =P
A tsunammi is a natural process. If you call it bad, it becomes even easier to call it evil. And on that road, you can see what happens with the AIDS epidemic in Africa. It negatively affects Africans, thus is bad, so therefore this is the will of God or Satan made it up. And since the US is Satan, obviously the US cooked up AIDs to kill black people.
The tautology is invalid in this circumstance. It is also untrue that the logic used by the mythical genius child in the video utilizes such a tautology.
The counterargument is to ask if then a tsunami that kills tens of thousands only exists because God’s love is not present in people.
The counterargument to your counterargument is that nobody has claimed an opposite to a tsunami exists that can be considered good and Godly. Good and evil are opposites. Light and darkness are opposites.
The premise shown here is that one exists, while the other is simply a human abstract conception of the absence. We give a word, an idea, to the absence and call it evil, while we call what exists, good. But existence is not the definition of good, and non-existence is not the definition of evil. That’s because the epistemology behind good and evil requires free will to exist.
If you can prove that people suffer because they do not have God’s love, then you can utilize your argument in a logic chain. Until then, you’re stuck with things as they exist now. And things as they exist now, God doesn’t need tsunamis to punish people or kill them. Human mistakes and fallibility take care of that matter quite well by themselves.
If God is capable of miracles like creating a tsunami to smite the ungodly. Then he must also be capable of miracles to reward the faithful or even unfaithful. That’d be an argument to be in God’s good graces, not an argument that God is evil. It is also a fallacious argument, because not everyone in the region affected should be deserving of the same fate meted out to others. So God would either have to give individual protection to certain people or have wordly agents, like the US military, aid those that do not deserve. Since God is omniscience, he should know who exactly he is punishing. And a tsunami is rather indiscriminate in its destruction.
If we try to get back to the original logic that God is evil because he creates evil, we can now procede to the counter-argument, that evil does not exist but rather is the absence of the good. You can’t then, now, say that a tsunami is evil, that God caused it to smite the unGodly or unloved. You have no proof of that. No proof whatsoever. So we can deal with the logic or illogic of the strain, but the proof doesn’t exist. It’s speculation. We can only follow the chain of supposition and deductive reasoning to its logical conclusion ,but there would be no reality to back it up with inferenced data.
Is God supposed to remove everything that human beings find diffuclt to deal with? Is God to make us immortal, immune to disease, war, and in fighting? That would require that we be made slaves, wards of the slave, cradle to grave welfare care. Total control of our decisions would result in no war, no suffering, and no evil. It also would result in no good. That’s the prototypical metaphysics if you use the logic of “God Created Evil”.
Evil can only ever be defined as the absence of something. In my case, it can be defined as the absence of free will or the intentional destruction of free will in people. Thus how can God be said to create evil, when what he created is free will and it is the evil who wishes to destroy that free will?
Perhaps the reason why Satan wishes to tempt people, using their own free will, to sin and damnation via Faustian contracts is because he wishes to disprove God’s intended goal, which requires humanity be invested with free will. Perhaps Satan wishes for a more controlled and orderly universe where there is no free will, only predestination on the whim of the All Elite, archangels, or of the omnipotent and omniscient God.
God created the physical mechanisms by which atoms and molecules act. The rules by which things happened, action and reaction. If this freedom of existence then results in a tsunami, that’s not bad or evil. A tsunami doesn’t take away free will. It only changes reality. There’s nothing wrong with changing reality, except and unless you try to change reality so that agents do not have free will.
In our modern political culture, Global Warming cultists say that they know what the will of Gaia, Earth, is. THey claim to know what will or will not happen, and will institute controls on others for the stated purpose of recovering Mother Gaia. How do you think they know what the will of Gaia is? And even if they did, would they have the right to try to confiscate the will of others in the process?
@ Klinger800
Why Thank You, Klinger. You made my day.
The counterargument to your counterargument is that nobody has claimed an opposite to a tsunami exists that can be considered good and Godly. Good and evil are opposites. Light and darkness are opposites.
A tsunami and the lack of a tsunami are opposites.
I’m not making the claim that I think God is evil. (And I’d argue with the translation of böse as “evil” in any case: it doesn’t have the same weight in German, I’d make it “wicked” here.) In fact, I’d go with Nietzsche, and say the Higher Being is beyond mere human goodness and wickedness (that’d make a book title), so it’s really a category error to make the argument at all.
However, in this context, using the conventional idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God, the fact of a tsunami’s occurrence is a choice on the part of that God. If we would say that a human who made that same choice — that is, to allow a tsunami to occur, killing thousands, when one has the power to prevent it — was “evil”, then we’d have to say God “is evil”. This, as I say, is fun, and seeing der Herr Professor get his comeuppance from a kid is cool, but I don’t think his argument survives the counterexample.
There has been an on-going debate between an Athiest and a Christian over at Vox Popoli. They are now on their fourth letter, and Vox is still drawing out Luke’s definition of evil (and whether Luke even thinks that evil exists.)
http://voxday.blogspot.com/
You need to read the original letter between the two bloggers to get the context of the discussion.
This has already been expressed, better than I can, but since I’ve never been one to keep my opinion’s to myself, here goes.
To my simple mind, the nature or existence of evil is one of Athiesm’s weakest arguments.
By the way, the argument that God is evil since he must be the author of evil doesn’t argue for the existence of God, only that an evil God is not worthy of worship.
No matter how constructed, a moral framework sans God, must inevitably become authoritarian, since the Athiest has merely traded God as moral arbiter for some other arbiter and there have always been a surplus of tyrants willing to fill the void.
Since the Athiest has trouble coming up with a consistent moral framework, their best argument is to cast God as arbitrary or uncaring or evil.
Hence the tsunami argument. Since the Athiest also rejects free will, every bad event must be caused by God.
The Bible is clear that God sustains the world, and were God to remove his presence, the world would cease to exist, but that is not the same as saying that it rained last night because God made a conscious decision for it to rain. It rained because God created a world with physical laws that operate consistently. God can certainly intervene and contradict those laws (called miracles), but he isn’t obligated to at every instance. The Bible says the rain falls on the just and the unjust.
In the case of the tsunami, humans have chosen to live in places that are subject to the effects of volcanic activity. They would be better served to live in a higher elevation not subject to these forces, but have expressed their free will and live in the tsunami’s path.
While God certainly could have created a world where humans live entirely within God’s will (where acting oustside it would not even be considered), that would be a different world than the one he created.
It seems to me trying to force God to always act in my best interest while I myself often act outside of my own best interests is childish. That’s more akin to having a personal genie.
CS Lewis has made the case why pain must exist in his book “The Problem with Pain”, but what about suffering? I don’t know the full answer to that, but what if life had purpose greater than the mere avoidance of pain and maximization of pleasure?
The Bible lays out three attributes to be sought by Christians, but I think they appy to everyone. Those three are Faith, Hope and Charity (Love). These are certainly three attributes that will make our lives fulfilling, regardless of our circumstances.
In all of this excellent discussion, one difference I’d like to raise is the difference between “bad” and “evil”.
Perhaps it’s only my personal discrimination, but as I understand it, “evil” is a moral judgment. “bad” is a judgment of how a particular event or outcome affects us.
If I don’t win the lottery, is that evil? no…it’s bad. If someone steals my winning lottery ticket before I can claim it…_that’s_ evil! as well as bad!
When bad things happen to us, we often make a judgment that it’s due to an evil action on the part of someone/something. That’s because we feel a need to blame – we have a hard time accepting that we’re just simply not in control of some things. Or that there are thing that are out of the control of _anybody_. That’s a scary thought. But it’s a fact nevertheless.
Many of the environmentalists are unable to accept that, and assume that we _are_ in control of the climate, and therefore if the climate does bad things to people, we bear responsibility for evil actions or inactions, as the case may be.
By the way….the odd thing is that no such discrimination occurs in the use of “good”.
I’m not sure how you can claim that it’s a category error to hold God to a human standard of good and wickedness in one breath, then say in the next that “we’d have to say God ‘is evil’” because we’ve just compared him to a human who allowed a tsunami to occur. Which is it?
A tsunami and the lack of a tsunami are opposites.
A tsunami exists. The absence of a tsunami does not exist. They didn’t say a tsunami is good or evil. So why do you think this disproves anything either of em said in the video? They aren’t connected, except by your claim that they are connected, as I would state it.
The original logic, as I said before, was that evil and good exists and God created everything. Thus God created evil, by the fact that evil exists. Thus anyone that creates evil must be evil, thus God is evil.
The logic is broken by the annihilation of the existence of evil. Although that’s not necessarily the only point you can annihilate the original claim.
Now you say a tsunami is evil. That God created a tsunami. Well, you see, a tsunami isn’t evil, nor are the consequences of a tsunami evil. Thus your entire logic claim shatters. Far from disproving anything originally said, you simply repeat the original mistake.
Whether you believe God is evil or not, is immaterial in my view. It doesn’t bias the situation either way. The logic of the matter stands by itself. It is either true or not, demonstrable or not. If you cannot demonstrate by the rules of logic that God is evil, then why even claim it is so in the first place.
As before, the key problem with the original claim is that evil exists. Evil does not exist as its own physical entity, was the correct argument. Now you say the correct argument is wrong, because you claim a tsunami is evil? First you need to prove that evil exists. And by what reason does a tsunami make evil into existence? We’re missing a whole heck load here in terms of the logical structure for argument and claim.
However, in this context, using the conventional idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God, the fact of a tsunami’s occurrence is a choice on the part of that God.
Are you under the mistaken impression that God has free will, like human beings? Consider quantum mechanics. That, if anything, describes ‘God’s Choices’. Unlike a human being, God is not limited in his choices to good or evil, to evil or lesser evil. Is God evil because he chooses to have every version of reality exist all at once, including the good and bad versions? Is that evil, is that just
The question isn’t really about why God ‘chooses anything’. The question is why you define a tsunami as evil. Prove that, and then we can get to God’s choices. But if you are not able to demonstrate that that is true, that a tsunami is evil or even its effects evil, then what does it matter what comes afterwards. When it is demonstrated that evil has no independent existence, that it is simply the absence of what does exist, then it shatters the logical chain that had based itself around that foundation. No foundation, no building. No steel supports, skyscrapers fall in on themselves, or fall over in the worst case scenario.
If we would say that a human who made that same choice — that is, to allow a tsunami to occur, killing thousands, when one has the power to prevent it — was “evil”, then we’d have to say God “is evil”. This, as I say, is fun, and seeing der Herr Professor get his comeuppance from a kid is cool, but I don’t think his argument survives the counterexample.
What’s fun about assuming God is omnipotent and omniscient, and then saying a limited, fallible, ignorant human can make God evil by creating a tsunami? It may be fun in the aspect of playing God, and assuming one knows what one is doing, but it isn’t necessarily so. Since humans are fallible, they can never supplant what is omnipotent or omniscient. There’s no other way for it to work.
But let’s say I assume certain things are true that you have not yet demonstrated as true. Then what? A human being drops a nuke on Hiroshima. Is that God’s fault or the human’s fault? If God is omnipotent, and thus evil for creating evil, that would by necessity absolve the moral responsibility of those that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it would also absolve Islamic terrorists, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and all criminals and enemies of humanity from judgment. “God is Evil”, he created these things. Human beings are not responsible, you see. Islamics, after all, always say inshallah, if God wills it. If it doesn’t happen, God didn’t will it. Of course, in reality, it didn’t happen because humans didn’t want to make it happen.
Thus, the conventional Christian view of God is one based upon free will. The Islamic and more fundamentalist view of God is that he is responsible for all, and we are responsible only for submission and obedience.
but I don’t think his argument survives the counterexample.
Well yes, I did understand that as your original intention. And I hope I have restated my position on that particular aspect in clear enough terms as well.
I’m not sure how you can claim that it’s a category error to hold God to a human standard of good and wickedness in one breath, then say in the next that “we’d have to say God ‘is evil’” because we’ve just compared him to a human who allowed a tsunami to occur. Which is it?
He means by Nietzsche’s descriptors, God is separate from human decision, but that if we use conventional Revealed Truth’s description of God, God becomes more like a person that makes personal decisions.
I cataloged that there are two primary religious conventions about God, based upon Revealed Truth. God is either the enabler of human free will or he is the Decider, and we but his subjects. Many Christian denominations combine some of both, like Black Liberation Theology, but mostly Christianity prefers the free will template and Islam overall prefers the other one.
I agree that if we use the Revealed Truth of Mohammed, God would be evil, because God would be like a responsible human being, responsible for all. But that is ONLY true if you use the Mohammedan dogma, or something else similar to it like Calvinist predestination. If you use a different Revealed Truth, like Judaism, then it all comes apart, now doesn’t it.