If god cured cancer [is there a ‘prime directive’]?
I thought i’d share this question that arose in a conversation between me and arc, it concerns a question of perhaps integrity and or wisdom…
but is mostly about divine intervention [or advanced human intervention in star trek lol]…
I totally agree! There was an episode of ST next generation where a planet was about to die if the enterprise didn’t solve their problem, Picard insisted upon the prime directive and got around it by moving the remaining inhabitants to another planet. For me he should have saved their planet as their new one was a different class of planet which would change them far more than if they had stayed on their own world.
It’s a serious point for me, quite fundamental to my philosophy. We could ask; what if god cured cancer? wouldn’t it be one of the greatest success stories of humanity if collectively we eventually cured it?!!! …and so god would have taken away one of our major achievements! 1 in 3 die of cancer though and we probably all know people who have died from it. We would all want god to cure it, but the strength of the need for me furthers the requirement for us to achieve success.
In the end if I were a wise deity I would build the ‘prime directive’ into the very fabric of existence, such that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t change anything. Or at least that to change any one thing I’d have to change so much, maybe the whole universe, in order to make a single such change.
Stranger still, I feel that such things are ‘automatically’ written into the fundamental nature of things!
Its as if ‘wisdom happens’ ~ and without any prior thought nor considerations, no intellect nor divinity even. I don’t think we even have a word for that notion do you?
Something I think is the furthest ‘within’, in fact so far within that it belongs to no one nor thing, and may even be ‘without’ ~ in the greater sense I.e. further without than objects, energy etc.
Cancer is a natural consequence of evolution. Life has no regard for anything but utility and what cancer does has nothing but utility when it happens at the right time, mutation can cause it to happen at the wrong time. If God cured cancer broadly he would be an idiot, for without it no life would exist.
We pay the price for cell division that differentiates and spreads to all parts of the body, that creates it’s own blood supply and seeks to create new organs or cells where they are needed and when they are needed in the womb, with those same genes being turned off when they are no longer needed. Turn off cancer and you terminate life, turn off cancer when it happens at the wrong time and you have a cure.
1 in 3 get cancer, so you’d be not giving the 2/3 a chance to live, as well as the survivors if we find a cure?
Not to mention that none of us can really make the choice for everyone else, so its useless to suggest such a thing - if I may.
Tralix
That about rounds it up! ~ as far as science goes. …but this is in the religion section?
The main philosophical point concerns divine intervention [many people blame god for not making everything better, kinda] ~ or even human intervention e.g. say we went to another planet and people there had cancer but were a pre-industrialised civilisation, should we intervene and change their history. Is it right to take san achievement away, indeed the great many achievements it takes to arrive at a cure.
The people suffering it [largely I’d assume] are not the ones creating it.
It is surely wiser to not punish the innocent, and hell, if you’re going to intervene [note; if God even made that possible!!!] why not take out the wrong doing, or go on the news and say “hey its these guys killing you all“, then name them.
doesn’t intervention assume an imperfect creation anyway?
I think that I remember seeing that episode. If I’m not mistaken, did some kind of romance blossom between someone on the planet and someone on the enterprise? But did Picard reveal any advanced technology? I suppose actually that he did just by the fact that he was able to send them to another planet. And you really couldn’t know, could you, how that planet that they were sent to would change them. The question is though: How much technology/knowledge would have been revealed to the far less advanced species had Picard decided to keep them where they already were?
I think that another question which comes to mine is: Where would a god stop? If a god is required to intervene by us to cure cancer, where would it stop? What would be next? And having cured cancer, as you said, even though one of the effects would be that we would not have had to struggle and evolve through that struggle and process, and thereby achieve success, how could we possibly know what the effect of god curing cancer by intervening would be? Maybe it’s kind of like a domino effect - if we push things (a deity’s intervening) and all things ARE connected - we have no idea what the result would be.
Well, I’m not so sure how that would work either. Like with Captain Picard and Star Trek, I think that there has to be some ways, some intelligent and resourceful ways, in which to get around something without influencing it much or greatly. Aside from that, ethics and morality do dictate that there has to be some kind of intervening - it would depend what would be for the common good. We intervened during the second world war and stopped Naziism. Had we not, how many more people would have been destroyed in the concentration camps. We intervened with the underground railroad during slavery and eventually slavery was stamped out - at least in that time.
I think just like ethics and morality, observing the prime directive, maybe kind of manipulating it for the common good while at the same time, observing its “spirit” would depend on the situation and the circumstances. All situations and circumstances are different and require different actions. The thing about observing the prime directive or manipulating it or ignoring it is that we can never really know the repercussions or the effects that will be involved in it. All we can do is examine our options and opt for what we feel subjectively and objectively to be the best course of action. Of course, there are things which are not black and white – where the plight of human beings come into view – and there’s really not much to be determined there. I wonder what picard would have done had he the opportunity to go back in time and do something about Nazism and the plight of the Jewish people and others – had he not known the conclusion of it all? Would the imperative not to reveal technology get in the way of saving these people if that was the only way to do it?
That reminds me of something which happened to me about a little bird. I was walking up the street one day and I saw a little bird. It was after a rain. This little bird was hopping so close to the road, almost on it and I was afraid that he would hop into the street and get killed, the direction he was going towards. I thought that his wings were wet and he couldn’t fly. I picked him up and put him on the grass far away from the road but he “flew” right back to where he was in the beginning. From there, he hopped right into the street and into the line of traffic. His little body was swirled round and round by a few cars and he died. I freaked out, screamed and cried. It might seem like such a small thing to some but to me it wasn’t. Sometimes I would wonder if I had let him alone, if he would have flown away from that spot. But I had to get involved because I wanted “to save him”. What I’m trying to say here is that sometimes we just do not have enough information and we cannot know all of the different possibilities or the chain reaction which could happen. There are times when it is best to leave people and things to their own devices but not always. It’s remarkable how that one little experience has left such an impression on my mind when I’m prepared to know the outcome of something – when I’m prepared to influence and advise.
What "such things’ are you speaking of here?
But wisdom doesn’t always happen as one can see from history. What happens is that consciousness, good will, courage and intelligence does at times take over and evil is sent running with its tail between its legs. What is the expression: "For evil to happen, all that is necessary is for [good] men to do nothing.
Can you explain what you mean by that?
I watched a really good, very poignant and sad movie yesterday afternoon (I cried through most of it) called “The Soloist”. On and off through the whole movie, I thought of the prime directive, sans the technology thing of course, because of the relationship developing between Steve Lopez, a newspaper columnist and Nathaniel Ayers, a mentally ill man with schizophrenia, who was such a brilliant musician in his way. At first, Ayers was simply a story for Lopez but than he began to care about Ayers’s life and welfare. He did help him a great deal but to the point where he tried to intervene too much in Ayers life and mental development, because he did not have a sense of where Ayers’ really lived within himself and how the schizophrenia really affected him and he tried to push the man’s personal evolution and development too far especially when Ayers could not even be fully conscious and accept the fact of his schizophrenia. All hell broke loose at that point.
In 2005, the only thing hurting Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez more than his face from a recent bike accident was his pressing need for story ideas. That is when he discovers Nathaniel Ayers, a mentally ill, homeless street musician who possesses extraordinary talent, even through his half-broken instruments. Inspired by his story, Lopez writes an acclaimed series of articles about Ayers and attempts to do more to help both him and the rest of the underclass of LA have a better life. However, Lopez’s good intentions run headlong in the hard realities of the strength of Ayers’ personal demons and the larger social injustices facing the homeless. Regardless, Lopez and Ayers must find a way to conquer their deepest anxieties and frustrations to hope for a brighter future for both of them. Written by Kenneth Chisholm (kchishol@rogers.com)
Interesting post. I’ll repeat what I said to james for your comments about intervention…
“doesn’t intervention assume an imperfect creation anyway”?
I suppose an omnipotent deity could change specific things or make it so cancer didn’t occur [but that would affect evolution [creation as ongoing?]]. Are we asking for a ‘perfect creation’ then though?
As a father one wouldn’t want our children to suffer, but you equally wouldn’t want them to be week or otherwise fail, …or not achieve.
True for us but not for God/divinity.
Well you probably wouldn’t have had world wars without capitalism/banking paying for it, so it would have been better to go back in time and stop that. Hitler couldn’t have financed his massive armies without it. Then again we wouldn’t have all the benefits of capitalism either.
I sometimes wonder if divinity does act on the mental level, and there we could find inventions ‘occurring’! no matter what hitler would have lost the war, because the allies would have got and did get nukes first.
Then again that’s just as bad as intervening on the physical level perhaps.
We could say [as concerns the; ~ Stranger still, I feel that such things are ‘automatically’ written into the fundamental nature of things!] that things have a way of working themselves out, and that maybe history is non-coincidental when it comes to the relative thinkers of that time being Jewish!
that’s quite another thing to try to explain though.
“Its as if ‘wisdom happens’ ~ and without any prior thought nor considerations, no intellect nor divinity even. I don’t think we even have a word for that notion do you?”
I didn’t say it always happen, I am more thinking that it is woven into the fabric of existence ~ but also the lack of it is [like opposites perhaps].
What I was referring to is an emptiness containing all wisdoms. Some may call it god but I wouldn’t, its just a thingness of reality, the basis of all intellect and everything.
Hmm remember that black slab in the film 2001?
Something like that, but not a slab.
Sounds very interesting, I’ll watch it some time. Thanks.
Well, that’s the thing about assuming. I might say that “intervention” points to seeing a creation that is still in process…incomplete… Is that your understanding of imperfect? Is something which is incomplete necessarily imperfect? Is a sapling tree imperfect? Is an embryo imperfect? Is a blossoming relationship imperfect or is it simply incomplete. And in a manner of speaing, none of the above have to be seen as incomplete but simply in flux, in process. Incomplete is seeing the bowl as half empty instead of simply seeing a bowl with “something” in it or something in relationship to it. Okay, I’ll stop now.
I don’t know. We’re judging what is “omnipotent” by our standards. If there is some deity, some first cause, there are probably standards of 'omnipotence" far beyond which our puny minds can conceive of.
Could all powerful also mean incapable of making a mistake? By a deity’s standards, not ours.
Many of us would like to see one. We’re so lazy. But I think we would get bored with one quickly. We silly humans need to create for ourselves and to rectify our own mistakes.
And what fun would there be in a perfect creation? Where would the struggle be? Humans need struggle, they need to evolve and to be involved, to be part of the ongoing process. Anyway, if everything IS proceeding as it was designed to, couldn’t creation be seen as being perfect, on the other side of that coin?
True. But I don’t think that a deity, if one exists, is a father figure. We’ve just ordained one in that way.
So the prime directive can be a very powerful dance but one would have to know the movements to use for each particular situational musical note.
But you can’t really know if god is omnicent, let alone if there is one. And if so, and this deity intervened, what does that say about free will and also allowing evolution to go its own way? But perhaps there is some kind of a prime directive and the universe is subconsciously proceeding along its lines. But I hope not. Wouldn’t that make us puppets on a string, so to speak?
Are you talking about inspiration and imagination here by “acting on the mental level”? Or miracles?
But wouldn’t the results be the same?
Things don’t always have a way of working themselves out, I don’t think, especially if left alone, though of course, at times things do have a way of working themselves out, if left alone. wu wei wu.
It might appear at times that things work themselves out unless you examine the theatre of life. How would have things worked out had there been no one to fight against the Nazi regime and the evil (excuse the word) it caused? There are times when we ought to intervene but what about a deity? Aren’t we responsible for our own actions and results? If a god intervenes, doesn’t that interrupt the process of evolution?
Hmmm…you mean as in the various possibilities of what can come to us through evolving consciousness? I wouldn’t say that it is woven into the fabric of existence but that there are various blueprints which might come to be used. Or kind of like different paths might lead us to the same destination. But we don’t know it until we take it. And we don’t have to take it. Or are we saying the same thing with different words.
Or like the infinite possibilities of human evolution and consciousness?
I don’t recall the film. Perhaps not a slab but a tabula rasa?
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Hmmm…don’t forget to wear your seatbelt as you watch it.
Well I ‘assume’ because god hasn’t told me otherwise lol I.e. I have no absolute truths, nor believe anyone else does [sorry Christians ].
Creation I had assumed is not an ongoing thing, all the constituents are in the seed - so to speak. If not then do we assume that god didn’t know what he was doing? Or that he had to change things as they develop due to entropy, environmental effects and free will etc?
If god has some way to effect things physically, what happens if some damned druid finds out how that works? Lol seriously; would he not want his creation to be ‘impenetrable‘? if so then he himself would not even be able to intervene.
Yes. Especially if the above is true.
No, inspiration involves choice I think.
Well that’s my whole point here!
Both of those things would come after the former [slab] I had suggested.
I cannot believe you havent seen the film 2001! My god where have you been hiding lol
It is the law, you must watch it!
You have no absolute truths? Are you sure of that?
And if you have no absolute truths, then how could you possibly assume anything which a god might tell you to be true?
There you go assuming again and what has that lead you to but seeing creation stumped within its growth.
But creation IS an ongoing thing…it’s a process…an ad continuum. Does the tree exist simply as its seed for the duration of its life span, Amorphos?
Does the poem exist as simply a seed because the poet has the potential to draw forth the inspiration and creativity to form it? Does the poem not come to be as a result of a process, a struggle, a shaping and reshaping?
Then that god would simply turn that druid into a tree. lol
I don’t know, Amorphos. Life is flux, it flows, it is the present moment. I may not be able to see a god per se but who would want a god who was so fearful and threatened by change or a god who was so afraid of being known to us albeit I can say that the thought of a mysterious kind of elusive god is appealing to me and sacred to me but not one who is inpenetrable?
And why create an inpenetrable universe? And could there ever be such a thing? After all, we have really high powered telescopes whereby we can penetrate the far reaches of time and space and the vey edges of the universes; well, at least the edges of the universe insofar as we have come to penetrate them.
Even if i were to suddenly come to ‘believe’ in a god, I am not so sure that this is a god who would intervene. But I don’t know. It boggles my mind the more I think of it but the thought might come to me that even though a potential god might not choose to intervene perhaps there is that seed (as you spoke of) that causes us silly humans to intervene where it cannot. But then, that would be intervention, would n’t it. I suppose it comes down to levels of.
I don’t necessarily think either of those two involve choice. Only our determined intention to go further and act involves choice. But i may be misunderstanding you here. Inspiration and imagination are the seeds but unless that seed is looked after and acted upon in some way, there is no choice.
Can you explain in more details what you mean by that?
I find it hard to believe that you would find that hard to believe.
Indeed, and that’s the whole point, we can only make subjective interpretations, we cannot know absolute truths because the world is calibrated by the brain i.e. changed in the particular.
I agree but then that is not ‘creation’, at least not from an omnipotent omniscient deity. Don’t Christian’s think there is a plan? i.e. that is written in the creation and makes our futures inevitable. That doesn’t sound like poetry to me, more dictum [noun: an authoritative declaration] and dogma.
What if the druid turned the god into a tree ~ he does after all know the knowledge of creation if there were such a thing! Lol
That penetration doesn’t change anything about the universe, we cannot create, we can only change what has already been created i.e. make/modify.
That’s a very good point! To place intervention in the seed is equivalent. Better to just make the world and let people live in it freely without intervening at all.
Ha, well I don’t think my imagination could have anything but free choice, there simply isn’t anything particularly structured enough to be deterministic. I think its the same for most of us? Intuition in my mind doesn’t come in a single train of thought but multiple ones, thus I can take or leave some of them. This is free choice, we have lots of options at any one time, we are not affixed to the particular. In fact life itself I think relies upon such fluidity in self animation ~ the brain has plasticity.
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