Phyllo.,
I speak of everybody’s God, not just my God.
And, contrary to public opinion, the God does not create tsunamis or other natural disasters and is not responsible for starvation or any form of human suffering.
You apparently believe in the fundamentalists God, not in the God of universal, unconditional love. My belief is that if God is love of that caliber, there would be no hell.
FYI, I am a panentheist–a progressive Christian. I do not ascribe to fundamentalism wherein God can be accused of all sorts of immorality. Universal love creates; it does not destroy. It comforts, it does not induce suffering. It repairs broken lives. Its only obstruction is the ego.
Imagine what it would be like for a group of logical positivists to watch a thread like this.
Yo I just thought of some funny Monty Python type shit. Okay u know how positivists and verificationists believe the word ‘god’ is nonsense? So as they read the thread, every time they get to the word ‘god’, the readers voice is bleeped out and a loud horn sounds (a bicycle handlebar horn).
Okay that’s a start. Let’s develop the skit further. Irrellus, what do u suggest?
God is universal, unconditional love for humans and their ecosystems. Bleep out God and the description remains. Sorry, I’m not into games.
Some logical positivists do watch threads like this. Let them add their two cents.
It’s your description and your account of it.
This is the part that I don’t understand.
How can you look at someone dying a painful death over months and say that God is not the cause of that pain and suffering?
You’re jumping to unjustified conclusions.
If I believe in God and I look around and see the suffering. I can’t say a God of universal, unconditional love created it.
The evidence tells me that God is not all loving. That just doesn’t seem to be a characteristic that can reasonably attributed to God.
I would then characterize God as a mix … grey … not black and white. (If I was going to talk about God in terms of love/hate or good/bad or virtuous/evil.)
“God is universal, unconditional love for humans”
Yes I think so. When I was nine one of my first girlfriends had a friend who had asthma so bad she never left the house. I remember seeing her seated on the couch between two huge air humidifier’s with a bag of phlegm beside her. She couldn’t go anywhere it was so bad. At rest, her breathing was so labored and all you heard wuz the gurgling and popping of the phlegm in her lungs. Her mom had to hit her on the back to get her to spit the phlegm out like every ten minutes. We are way beyond inhalers here, mang. This girl couldn’t get enough of a breath to talk. She was our age. I distinctly remember how skinny and frail and pale she wuz. I don’t know if she lived or not, but she clearly had god’s unconditional love while she did live nine or ten years of such hell.
So the question boils down to why do bad things happen to good people? The typical Christian response is that God is more interested in gaining souls for eternity than in the mundane happenings of this world. For me that response doers not suffice, because it could not imagine God as eternity here and now. I agree that we cannot hold God responsible for human moral ideals. Being in the "grey’’ area of human morality still places god in the arena of anthropomorphic considerations, as is accusing God of causing the suffering in this world. The most honest answer to these questions is I don’t know; but I can think of a God who is more moral than most of us are, who is love incarnate.
Jesus’ teachings are essentially about morality and what it is like to be like God or to share the God within. The teachings of eternal punishment come mostly from Augustine. Prior to him the early church fathers did not teach this belief.
Good things happen to bad people as well as bad things happening to good people. That’s what it’s like to be human. But can’t we aspire for something better than our most negative imaginings?
Are you blaming God for this person’s condition?
Mmhm. If the universe had a beginning, and was designed/created by a separate entity ‘god’, then everything about the nature of the creation would be an effect of that ‘god’s’ will. The inviolable natural laws that dictate the way the universe behaves, are designed by ‘god’ in advance, are ‘had in mind’ by ‘god’ in advance.
Omnipotency would be a necessary characteristic of such a ‘god’, as he would be restricted by nothing and able to do anything (excepting illogical things). He would also be the ‘determiner’ of everything that happened… either indirectly as natural causation or directly by a miracle (suspending the natural laws at the moment of intervention).
This is a question that’s opened up by Michael Dowd’s book “Thank God for Evolution” which we discussed elsewhere. Because natural selection entails every calamity and brutal act of one organism on another since life began. That includes every atrocity that is proffered as evidence for the theological problem of evil. To consider it is to stare into the abyss of deep time. And when you do that, as someone famously once said, the abyss stares back into you.
Omnipotence is not a necessity.
A god can be very powerful and intentionally create ‘unpleasant’ stuff.
A god can be very powerful and unintentionally create ‘unpleasant’ stuff.
Or the ‘unpleasant’ stuff may be a logical consequence of ‘pleasant’ stuff.
I cannot presume to know what God does or allows to be done in this space of time. In that limited perspective good and evil appear to be what happens to us, not what God is like; however, I have experienced what I would describe as a God experience. The experience was of feeling at one with Nature and of belonging with all other living creatures. In that experience God is love.
Phyllo I have no idea why u think pleasure/pain, pleasant/unpleasant, has anything to do with what power a ‘god’ would have, and demonstrate, if he indeed exists and created a universe.
I would also argue that a ‘god’ couldn’t make mistakes or do things unintentionally, as a consequence of his omniscience; he must know in advance everything that is possible before it happens on account of him designing the natural laws of physics, chemistry, stirnerism, etc., that run the universe.
Moreover, this feature of ‘god’ would prevent the possibility of free will in human beings. Not in the corney, calvinist sense, but in the spinozean sense. Averroes, I believe it was, put an argument like this:
If god can’t be wrong, and knows everything in advance, his knowing that Joe will get up in five minutes and get a drink of water, means that Joe is not free to NOT get a drink of water.
If he was, and didn’t (remaining seated instead), it would mean that god was wrong when he thought Joe would get a drink of water in five minutes.
Clearly that cannot be the case. Ergo; Joe has no freewill.
Knowing in advance what can happen by designing and starting a system of existence that is completely deterministic… prevents any freewill in any voluntarily acting creatures that evolve within it.
It simply contradicts a necessary characteristic of a ‘god’s’ being.
Alternatively, without a ‘god’, the universe still acts with astounding regularity and is subject to the same deterministic forces that would exist if a causa sui existed and created it.
But most certainly freewill doesn’t exist is ‘god’ exists. Atheists sometimes like to think that quantum physics and what-not makes freewill possible in a godless universe. But this is wrong; they mean ‘randomness’, but to have freewill, there must be agency of some kind. Randomness, chaos, unpredictability… none of these are results of agency and none of them prove freewill.
The following caught my attention and I wanted to address it, because I’ve written about this idea in other posts.
Averroes was wrong.
This is incorrect. Joe IS free NOT to get a drink of water. But …
The above is where the argument runs off the rails, and commits a fallacy of logic called the modal fallacy.
God is never wrong, but it does not follow from this that Joe must therefore drink water. The fallacy lies in confusing the modal categories of “will” (contingent, could have been otherwise) and “must” (happens of logical necessity, cannot be otherwise).
If Joe does NOT drink water, then God would know THAT fact about the future instead. That is, it is perfectly within Joe’s power to drink or not drink water. Whatever he does, however, must MATCH God’s foreknowledge.
IOW, there is a matter of logical necessity, a matter of “could not have been otherwise” here, but it is not that Joe MUST drink water. It is that Joe’s free act and God’s foreknowledge of that act must be in accord.
Joe is free to do whatever the hell he wants. It’s just that he cannot evade prior detection by God of what he freely does.
The argument for Joe’s free will applies equally well to causal determinism and logical determinism (problem of future contingents, first mooted in the ancient seat battle argument due to Aristotle).
However, I’ve already written about this extensively on this forum and even presented the argument in formal symbolic logic. I’ve no illusion that people here actually learn anything. Like what’s his face, the guy who goes around insulting everyone and calling them “punks” and so forth, who does not even know that DNA transcription errors are routinely caused by external forces and does not know that most mutations are neutral. But oh, he can confidently assert, without any basis of knowledge whatever, that eyes and brains cannot evolve via descent with modification! Combating militant and willful ignorance on a message board, or pretty much anywhere for that matter, is a fool’s errand. But I thought I’d drop by to address this because I’ve discussed it before, and if anyone wants to see the extended and formal argument rendered, just do a search of my posts.
I must not understand ur argument, because this:
“That is, it is perfectly within Joe’s power to drink or not drink water. Whatever he does, however, must MATCH God’s foreknowledge.”
… admits that ‘god’ can’t both know that Joe will and will not get up and get a drink of water. He’s gonna do one or the other, and since ‘god’ can’t be wrong about what he ‘forsees’ Joe doing, he must know in advance (because he knows every possible effect of every possible cause) what Joe is fated to do. Therefore, it is not within Joe’s power to do something ‘god’ does not know he will do, since ‘god’ can’t be wrong about what he believes Joe will do in the future.
Yeah I know I just basically reworded the same argument.
Here, ‘god’s’ foreknowledge is a preview of a state of affairs that are about to happen. Events in the universe are entirely determined by natural laws, and ‘god’s’ perspective on this would be like that of an author’s perspective on his work as it was produced in a stage play. It’s all already written.
(Keep in mind I don’t believe in an anthropomorphic ‘god’, so I’m only entertaining the argument for the hell of it)
Why do I have to assume omnipotence and omniscience?
I don’t.
And why is your post mostly about determinism?
Because prom is a closet steadfast Aristotelian with an existentialist crisis brought on by the subpar quality of said Aristotelianism.
Before he makes any effort to overcome it, he will just throw a tantrum and go an as if it were true.
Like how the life of the hero in Psycho revolves around his fake relationship with his mother’s corpse.
Well put.
You know, if we’re on the same page.
If you watch nature documentaries long enough your mind is absolutely boggled at all of the ghastly ways in which predators and prey go about the business of mere survival. Hell on Earth would be an apt description for most of them.
So, if there be a God, what the fuck was He thinking?!
It had to be this way?
Just google nature’s gruesome deaths: google.com/search?q=nature% … nt=gws-wiz
You know, in “regularity theory”.
What we need though is an actual extant God, an actual extant Joe and an actual extant glass of water.
Then a youtube video allowing us to actually see what unfolds if this extant God is omniscient.
And, of course, a definitive resolution regarding whether or not that all unfolds given some measure of human autonomy. Or is entirely reflective instead of the only possible reality given the only possible world given that the human brain itself functions entirely within the material/phenomenological parameters of the laws of matter.
And then, finally, a way to make that relevant to “Eternal Punishment and Time”.
“Psycho revolves around his fake relationship with his mother’s corpse”
I will always love Mother… but thanks to you, Pedro, I now know what I must do…
Leave that woman alone, prom. I swear to god every time she shows up in one of your videos she seems like one of the coolest people ever.