An invitation for Al Moritz to explain fine tuning

[ReapReason]

I would argue that the argument from pain and evil has even evolved lately from the argument of gratuitous pain and evil. Sure we have to have light to understand dark - but do we need ridiculous amounts of it? We didn’t need a Hitler killing millions of people to understand that murder was wrong. God the perfect all powerful, all knowing all everything could have easily changed the parameters and we would have never know the difference to begin with. The argument for pain is easy to understand in that aspect, but when you thrown in the argument from gratuitous pain it makes it a little bit more authentic in the face of this all everything god notion.

In terms of objective truth, you cannot logically know that there is a degree of suffering that is gratuitous without first acknowledging a universal objective standard of morality by which we know that an action is unwarranted and unjustified. When speaking in terms of a purely pragmatic sense of pain and suffering, all you can really say is that you are not prepared to put up with any particular degree of suffering. But you have not there-by shown good reason to think that it is not truly and objectively good for God to allow suffering. You have merely expressed your subjective tastes. Neither can you know without being all knowing, that God could not possibly have good reason for permitting any degree of possible suffering we happen to encounter in our lives.

In other words, you cannot simply say that some event does not subjectively suit my taste as a human being and therefore expect it to be universally and objectively true that a God that is love would not allow suffering, since subjective taste is not a measure of objective morality and you are not God; and thus you cannot say that their cannot be a possible moral context in which the love of God cannot act for the sake of a greater good.

You must first ask, what does it mean for God to love? What does it mean for a God that is love to be a creator? What does it mean for love to be objective? When you do that, you will be approaching the issue honestly, rather than with assumptions about what a loving God would do or wouldn’t do based on your limited subjective perspective as a human being.

 

[ricmat]

(cont.)

There is another problem with the interventionist view of biological ID. It sounds like saying God was not intelligent enough to design the process of material evolution to do everything naturally from the beginning. It gives a diminished picture of God.

%between%

You’re Catholic. So I assume you accept Christ/God who diminished himself by becoming human, a naked baby born in the lowest possible place. You accept a diminished human Christ spat upon, tortured, humiliated on the cross, powerless, at the mercy of his own creations. You accept Christ with the appearances of bread and wine - apparently powerless to stop the many humiliations done against Him in this form as well. God, of course, could have come in more non-diminished forms than these. But He didn’t.

So you accept these “diminished” forms of God. The one thing you can’t accept is a diminished picture of God the biological creator. VERY interesting.

 

[ReapReason]

No offense to Al Moritz, but anytime someone doesn’t agree him - then they are accused of not reading the article - or not understanding what they read. I wasted some time, and read the paper. I’m still not clear on what this definition of “fine-tuned” is?

You act like finite tuning (also known as the anthropic principle) isn’t a well known evident fact. Al Moritz isn’t making it up. Go read a book about it.

Its called fine tuning because it really does look like somebody finely tuned the initial conditions of the big bang to produce particular qualities that are favorable to the potentiality of life.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

 

[ReapReason]

You’re Catholic. So I assume you accept Christ/God who diminished himself by becoming human, a naked baby born in the lowest possible place. You accept a diminished human Christ spat upon, tortured, humiliated on the cross, powerless, at the mercy of his own creations. You accept Christ with the appearances of bread and wine - apparently powerless to stop the many humiliations done against Him in this form as well. God, of course, could have come in more non-diminished forms than these. But He didn’t.

So you accept these “diminished” forms of God. The one thing you can’t accept is a diminished picture of God the biological creator. VERY interesting.

There is evidently a meaningful reason and purpose behind that which lead to the humiliation of Jesus Christ. The same is not evident for God as a Creator. God does not do unnecessary or arbitrary things. It makes no sense for God to create physical laws if it is not his intention for physical reality to produce and function according to its nature. What is the point?

 

[Al_Moritz]

You’re Catholic. So I assume you accept Christ/God who diminished himself by becoming human, a naked baby born in the lowest possible place. You accept a diminished human Christ spat upon, tortured, humiliated on the cross, powerless, at the mercy of his own creations. You accept Christ with the appearances of bread and wine - apparently powerless to stop the many humiliations done against Him in this form as well. God, of course, could have come in more non-diminished forms than these. But He didn’t.

So you accept these “diminished” forms of God. The one thing you can’t accept is a diminished picture of God the biological creator. VERY interesting.

God’s essence of omnipotent being and creator is one thing, God’s ‘self-diminishing’ voluntary acts of love and humility another. I don’t see why you have to confuse the two.

Related to this: I prefer to believe in a God who performs miracles when He wants to, not when He has to.

 

[Al_Moritz]

There is evidently a meaningful reason and purpose behind that which lead to the humiliation of Jesus Christ. The same is not evident for God as a Creator. God does not do unnecessary or arbitrary things. It makes no sense for God to create physical laws if it is not his intention for physical reality to produce and function according to its nature. What is the point?

Aah, I see we posted at the same time on this. You highlighted another perspective on the issue, and I agree with you.

 

[Al_Moritz]

In terms of objective truth, you cannot logically know that there is a degree of suffering that is gratuitous without first acknowledging a universal objective standard of morality by which we know that an action is unwarranted and unjustified. When speaking in terms of a purely pragmatic sense of pain and suffering, all you can really say is that you are not prepared to put up with any particular degree of suffering. But you have not there-by shown good reason to think that it is not truly and objectively good for God to allow suffering. You have merely expressed your subjective tastes. Neither can you know without being all knowing, that God could not possibly have good reason for permitting any degree of possible suffering we happen to encounter in our lives.

In other words, you cannot simply say that some event does not subjectively suit my taste as a human being and therefore expect it to be universally and objectively true that a God that is love would not allow suffering, since subjective taste is not a measure of objective morality and you are not God; and thus you cannot say that their cannot be a possible moral context in which the love of God cannot act for the sake of a greater good.

You must first ask, what does it mean for God to love? What does it mean for a God that is love to be a creator? What does it mean for love to be objective? When you do that, you will be approaching the issue honestly, rather than with assumptions about what a loving God would do or wouldn’t do based on your limited subjective perspective as a human being.

 

[ManRay]

In terms of objective truth, you cannot logically know that there is a degree of suffering that is gratuitous without first acknowledging a universal objective standard of morality by which we know that an action is unwarranted and unjustified. When speaking in terms of a purely pragmatic sense of pain and suffering, all you can really say is that you are not prepared to put up with any particular degree of suffering. But you have not there-by shown good reason to think that it is not truly and objectively good for God to allow suffering. You have merely expressed your subjective tastes. Neither can you know without being all knowing, that God could not possibly have good reason for permitting any degree of possible suffering we happen to encounter in our lives.

In other words, you cannot simply say that some event does not subjectively suit my taste as a human being and therefore expect it to be universally and objectively true that a God that is love would not allow suffering, since subjective taste is not a measure of objective morality and you are not God; and thus you cannot say that their cannot be a possible moral context in which the love of God cannot act for the sake of a greater good.

You must first ask, what does it mean for God to love? What does it mean for a God that is love to be a creator? What does it mean for love to be objective? When you do that, you will be approaching the issue honestly, rather than with assumptions about what a loving God would do or wouldn’t do based on your limited subjective perspective as a human being.

Point made - but if you agree with that then why does the catholic church have varying degrees of sin? Are you going to be able to reconcile what you just said with that? I would argue that within small differences there may be subjectivity, but it seems to become more and more objective as the degrees lengthen.
We could conquer a city by defeating it’s army…or we could conquer a city by killing every man woman and child in that city. I would say objectively speaking it would seem that killing everyone would be the gratuitous position as you could have accomplished the same goal without the latter. It seems that you would actually have to introduce subjectivity to sidestep that.

 

[ricmat]

There is evidently a meaningful reason and purpose behind that which lead to the humiliation of Jesus Christ. The same is not evident for God as a Creator. God does not do unnecessary or arbitrary things. It makes no sense for God to create physical laws if it is not his intention for physical reality to produce and function according to its nature. What is the point?

The biological laws (which we cannot discuss because of the ban) are not, despite popular opinion, physical laws just like gravity. My point was mainly for Al to think about, and not something I was addressing to everyone necessarily.

God’s essence of omnipotent being and creator is one thing, God’s ‘self-diminishing’ voluntary acts of love and humility another. I don’t see why you have to confuse the two.

Related to this: I prefer to believe in a God who performs miracles when He wants to, not when He has to.

My response was mainly directed at your contention that ID couldn’t be correct because that would diminish God in some way. You accept that God voluntarily diminishes himself in many ways (all with regard to humans in some way), but you’re not open to the possibility that he might personally direct biological processes over time (thus diminishing himself in your eyes).

If you want to argue that God put the processes in motion, then took a hands-off approach, go for it. But to use the “it diminishes our perception of God” argument just doesn’t work.

And I’ll also repeat that it is very interesting that Al apparently accepts the other forms in which God diminishes himself, but not the one that gores his ox.

 

[ReapReason]

Point made - but if you agree with that then why does the catholic church have varying degrees of sin?

You cannot rationally speak of sin without acknowledging the existence of God, simply because it is Gods nature that is the measure of right and wrong. An action is wrong precisely because it does not measure up to the intrinsic objective meaning that is expressive of Gods Nature, which is Love/perfection. All sin by definition is an act of selfishness against God since God is love. Therefore, as soon as you say that an action is truly immoral, it becomes impossible to say that God could sin, because God is the rational ground for speaking of sin in the first place. There cannot be sin, without there first being a perfectly good God.

The rest of your post has moved from the more general question of pain and suffering, to the bible. This is a complex issue in itself that i don’t really want to get in to now, because ultimately we have to make assumptions about the intentions of the author, and we would also have to deal with the question of what it would mean to say that the bible is the word of God. But assuming that the bible is the word of God, are we therefore supposed to take everything it says as literal history in the modern sense of the word? God supposedly ordered the death of all the Canaanites (men, women, and children); and not just a group of them, he means every living Canaanite in existence, including their live stock. Yet it is interesting to note that there is no historical evidence to suggest that the Canaanites ever met such a fate. Its hyperbole and probably not meant to be taken literally. In other words its just a story. And even if there is a historical aspect to it, i am not entirely sure that just because it is written that God ordered it, that therefore God really did ordered it. Not to mention, that it is not clear that there can never be a good reason for God to take life, if he himself is the author of it.

For example, hypothetically speaking if it was a question of physical death or eternal spiritual hell, then surely physical death is the greater good if some people do not have a fair chance of going to heaven otherwise. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with God taking life if life in the first place belongs to God. Are lives do not belong to us; they belong to God.

 

[ReapReason]

And I’ll also repeat that it is very interesting that Al apparently accepts the other forms in which God diminishes himself, but not the one that gores his ox.

How does it diminish God to sacrifice his life for his Friends?

 

[ricmat]

How does it diminish God to sacrifice his life for his Friends?

How does it diminish God that He might be personally involved in everything (or everything relating to his children), rather than creating mechanisms to do it for Him?

God cannot be diminished in reality, but only in the perceptions of some. In their view, they think they know what constitutes “best way” or “most Godly way” to do something. Certainly God could have accomplished our redemption in a different fashion (a golly gee-whiz that was impressive sort of way) rather than the folly of the cross. But the cross was God’s way, and it involved the creature humiliating the Creator. In a similar fashion, it just may be that God personally intervenes in all aspects of nature, and our lives, even though in the “wisdom” of some, it “diminishes God” and therefore can’t be so.

 

[wmw]

It is not to my liking to argue against evidence for God. I am for God being intellectually understandable (not really proved), but I think I’m seeing a weakness in this argument and feel it should be defended.

Let me segway this “diminishing God” back to “fine tuning” from which, it seems to me, the discussion has gone far a-field.

Is it diminishing God or more accurately a show of how presumptive man is to say the following paragraph?

We humans have a descriptive language we call math. Math consists of formulas and a set of these formulas, we believe, describe the complexities of cosmology of your creation as we examine it. Math contains coefficients, often constants, that we need to measure to a very precise range of values for the formulas to come close to describing the cosmos as might contain us. In setting this universe in motion you must have done so by the selection of these coefficient’s values and now we can determine the likely hood of your selection over a random selection for only through these formula could the universe be made.

Because I believe in a God who thinks far beyond our understanding that to even say that God thinks is an understatement, but to say God selects values for our formulas in the making of the universe. Is in serious disregard of His perfection and omnipotence.

I’ve come to think of “fine tuning” as more of a demonstration of how vulgar our “language of Math” is; particularly disgusting are the calculations of how accurate God must be in picking them and the probabilities of his selecting them over some randomness within a range.

It may be an effective shock argument to those who venerate, even idolize, mathematically centric science, but the argument only stands up so far as in all attempted proofs of God for we need faith in Him to come into full belief. (Or should I have switched belief and faith around in this last sentence? That paragraph on reason being three things including reason again has me in a bit of a recursive spin.)

Anyway, I’m afraid after the shock wears off they may argue their way out of this “mathematical description is reality” argument, but not by invoking God’s being above it as I do.

 

[ReapReason]

How does it diminish God that He might be personally involved in everything (or everything relating to his children), rather than creating mechanisms to do it for Him?

You simply fail to understand the issue. Its one thing to give your life for your friends, and its another thing entirely for an all powerful God to create a physical universe that he has to tinker with across a span of billions of years just to get it to do what he wants it to.
It is pointless for God to do that when he could simply create the whole universe as it is now without any need for physical evolution or secondary causes. It makes no rational sense. It is more reasonable to think that God intended Physical reality to evolve naturally according to the principles and laws he put in place from the beginning.

 

[ManRay]

You cannot rationally speak of sin without acknowledging the existence of God, simply because it is Gods nature that is the measure of right and wrong. An action is wrong precisely because it does not measure up to the intrinsic objective meaning that is expressive of Gods Nature, which is Love/perfection. All sin by definition is an act of selfishness against God since God is love. Therefore, as soon as you say that an action is truly immoral, it becomes impossible to say that God could sin, because God is the rational ground for speaking of sin in the first place. There cannot be sin, without there first being a perfectly good God.

The rest of your post has moved from the more general question of pain and suffering, to the bible. This is a complex issue in itself that i don’t really want to get in to now, because ultimately we have to make assumptions about the intentions of the author, and we would also have to deal with the question of what it would mean to say that the bible is the word of God. But assuming that the bible is the word of God, are we therefore supposed to take everything it says as literal history in the modern sense of the word? God supposedly ordered the death of all the Canaanites (men, women, and children); and not just a group of them, he means every living Canaanite in existence, including their live stock. Yet it is interesting to note that there is no historical evidence to suggest that the Canaanites ever met such a fate. Its hyperbole and probably not meant to be taken literally. In other words its just a story. And even if there is a historical aspect to it, i am not entirely sure that just because it is written that God ordered it, that therefore God really did ordered it. Not to mention, that it is not clear that there can never be a good reason for God to take life, if he himself is the author of it.

For example, hypothetically speaking if it was a question of physical death or eternal spiritual hell, then surely physical death is the greater good if some people do not have a fair chance of going to heaven otherwise. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with God taking life if life in the first place belongs to God. Are lives do not belong to us; they belong to God.

I just can’t agree with you. you said that I can’t logically know if something is gratuitous basically without believing in god. Gratuitous is defined as something uncalled for, lacking good reason, or unwarranted, justification, etc…etc…

You cannot rationally speak of sin without acknowledging the existence of God, simply because it is Gods nature that is the measure of right and wrong.

This is completely untrue. I believe that we can come to a moral absolute through reason alone. Atheists do it everyday for one, and most cultures and societies regardless of what they believed came to the same conclusions. It’s simple reward, value, and cause and effect systems. It’s pure logic. My point on killing everyone in the city doesn’t have to have anything to do with god. Let’s just say humans. I don’t have to kill everyone in a city to conquer it…to do so would be gratuitous. i.e. uncalled for…lacking good reason…etc… It could be logically proven otherwise. People claimed Japan would never surrender and we would have to kill all of them…not true…we just had to kill a lot of them.

 

[ricmat]

You simply fail to understand the issue.
That’s quite possible. It’s happened before.
ReapReason;9917128:

Its one thing to give your life for your friends, and its another thing entirely for an all powerful God to create a physical universe that he has to tinker with across a span of billions of years just to get it to do what he wants it to.

So who said God HAD to tinker with it to get it what he wants to do? Of course God could do it without tinkering. Incidentally, tinkering" implies that there really isn’t a plan, and you’re just feeling your way. But if God’s plan is to interact extensively with his creation, then to use the term “tinker” is rather pejorative. Perhaps God’s plan is to sustain every instant of this universe, and interact extensively at each moment, and in each place. Rather than set it in motion and then sit back and relax. Not a hair falls from your head that God doesn’t know about.

It is pointless for God to do that when he could simply create the whole universe as it is now without any need for physical evolution or secondary causes. It makes no rational sense. It is more reasonable to think that God intended Physical reality to evolve naturally according to the principles and laws he put in place from the beginning.

Our whole life of “go forth and multiply” could certainly be done much more simply as well.

I don’t know if you’re married or not, but do you make love to your spouse personally, or did you create a machine to do it for you?

Do you hire a surrogate mother, and donate some sperm to create your children?

Do you hire a contractor, and give him the plans to turn a spare bedroom into a nursery, or do you do it yourself?

Do you hire a nanny to take care of your children, give her the marching instructions, then tell her to go to it, we’ll be back in 20 years or so?

Certainly you could do all those things, but probably choose not to…because you love your children and want to be personally involved with them. We are God’s children. Perhaps he wants to be personally involved because he loves us. Do you find that disturbing?

 

[ricmat]

It is not to my liking to argue against evidence for God. I am for God being intellectually understandable (not really proved), but I think I’m seeing a weakness in this argument and feel it should be defended.

Indeed, God is knowable from reason alone.

Let me segway this “diminishing God” back to “fine tuning” from which, it seems to me, the discussion has gone far a-field.

Is it diminishing God or more accurately a show of how presumptive man is to say the following paragraph?

We humans have a descriptive language we call math. Math consists of formulas and a set of these formulas, we believe, describe the complexities of cosmology of your creation as we examine it. Math contains coefficients, often constants, that we need to measure to a very precise range of values for the formulas to come close to describing the cosmos as might contain us. In setting this universe in motion you must have done so by the selection of these coefficient’s values and now we can determine the likely hood of your selection over a random selection for only through these formula could the universe be made.

Because I believe in a God who thinks far beyond our understanding that to even say that God thinks is an understatement, but to say God selects values for our formulas in the making of the universe. Is in serious disregard of His perfection and omnipotence.

I’m having some difficulty understanding what you’re getting at…

Of course there are physical laws, and constants which gives us a mathematical model of the big bang and subsequent events. Did God create the laws and step back to relax (and only intervene when Al approves of it), or does God continuously, personally, and in real time (so to speak) maintain order in the universe in such a fashion that this order appears to us as “natural laws including fine tuned constants?”

I’ve come to think of “fine tuning” as more of a demonstration of how vulgar our “language of Math” is; particularly disgusting are the calculations of how accurate God must be in picking them and the probabilities of his selecting them over some randomness within a range.

It may be an effective shock argument to those who venerate, even idolize, mathematically centric science, but the argument only stands up so far as in all attempted proofs of God for we need faith in Him to come into full belief. (Or should I have switched belief and faith around in this last sentence? That paragraph on reason being three things including reason again has me in a bit of a recursive spin.)

Anyway, I’m afraid after the shock wears off they may argue their way out of this “mathematical description is reality” argument, but not by invoking God’s being above it as I do.

Again, I’m having trouble following you…but I’ll add that God created us to give him glory and praise. Looking at the universe and saying “WOW!” is giving praise by showing appreciation of his creation whether looking through the lens of mathematics, or the lens of “artistic beauty”, etc. Really. The bottom line is God Did It. Scientifically, the details are irrelevant. Theory X or theory Y. Who cares? Theologically, however, it is important to realize why God does it or did it.

And…our mathematical models of reality are only models, not the reality itself. A painting of a horse, not actually the horse. A user manual for how the computer works, not the computer itself.

The universe will eventually end, and the natural laws with it. But God’s love is eternal.

 

[Al_Moritz]

Certainly you could do all those things, but probably choose not to…because you love your children and want to be personally involved with them. We are God’s children. Perhaps he wants to be personally involved because he loves us. Do you find that disturbing?

But He is personally involved, all the time.

Let me repeat from above:

Even though God appears to intervene rarely in the natural order, He is necessary as the sustainer of the created world. Study classical metaphysics (Aquinas) and you will see why that is so. It is also a ‘de fide’ article of the Catholic Church. In that sense, God is constantly active in the natural order as well, even though not in an obvious ‘interventionist’ manner. This alone excludes a deist view.

---

In other words, if God is constantly active in His creation by sustaining it in every moment, He is intimately involved with it – in each and every moment. Do you find that disturbing?

Your problem is still that you cannot get off your deistic horse – in your view God is only involved when He intervenes. Now, in those moments where God does not ‘intervene’, and that is frequently*), is He not intimately involved? Oh no, He is, see above.

This brings me to the second problem you appear to have: you cannot envision that God’s acting as the First Cause is fundamentally different from the action of humans. But that is the case, see the Church document Communion and Stewardship, paragraph 69 (emphasis added):

*But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation. According to St. Thomas Aquinas: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1). *

Link:
vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20040723_communion-stewardship_en.html

*) See my airplane example that I mentioned:

In the natural order, God appears to intervene rarely, at least in a measurable way. This is even logically necessary, otherwise we would not know what to expect from our physical world. Imagine stepping into an airplane without predictable laws of nature …

 

[Marc_Anthony]

Al, I’m no philosopher, but what you’re saying sounds awfully similar to Thomism to me. Would you agree with that? What do you think the major differences are?

 

[ricmat]

But He is personally involved, all the time.

That’s what I just said.

Let me repeat from above:

Even though God appears to intervene rarely in the natural order, He is necessary as the sustainer of the created world. Study classical metaphysics (Aquinas) and you will see why that is so. It is also a ‘de fide’ article of the Catholic Church. In that sense, God is constantly active in the natural order as well, even though not in an obvious ‘interventionist’ manner. This alone excludes a deist view.

And let me repeat what I said before. Just because Al Moritz writes it down and says it a lot - “God appears to intervene rarely in the natural order” - doesn’t make it True.

I am not a deist. I believe that God intervenes in all aspects of our lives. That’s the opposite of your view, which is the deist view. You’re the one who believes that with regard to the natural laws, God created them and then let them run to completion (which has not happened yet) and only intervenes when necessary [such necessity apparently based on laws made up by Al Moritz]. THAT’S THE DEIST VIEW.

Your problem is still that you cannot get off your deistic horse – in your view God is only involved when He intervenes. Now, in those moments where God does not ‘intervene’, and that is frequently*), is He not intimately involved? Oh no, He is, see above.

Deism says that God intervenes rarely if at all. That’s you. I claim the opposite.

In your view, intervening is somehow deficient, non-perfect, non-Godlike, “tinkering”. I disagree. I call it love.

Even just continuously sustaining which you seem to agree with = continuously intervening.

In the natural order, God appears to intervene rarely, at least in a measurable way.

So you’ve figured out exactly when and where and how often God does or does not intervene in the universe. In a measurable way. I guess when God is not sure whether to intervene or not, he looks up Moritz’s Law. You should get a Nobel at least. Maybe 2.

This is even logically necessary, otherwise we would not know what to expect from our physical world. Imagine stepping into an airplane without predictable laws of nature …

No, it’s not logically necessary. Again, you put the laws of science above God. God makes things understandable to us in a limited way because we are limited. God is above logic, math, science, biology, and the laws of nature.

And I didn’t actually say the laws of nature were not predictable. Rather, I suggest that they are predictable because God in a continuous fashion, moment-by-moment causes immediate effects that look to us, with our limited faculties, like laws that act on their own which require no intervention. Rather, it seems to me that he continuously intervenes to make the laws predictable to our limited understanding.

For you, it seems that the laws of nature stand above God, and he has limited power or will to circumvent them. You suggest that the laws of nature were created just once and rarely to be (your term) tinkered with. I suggest that God recreates them as he sustains the universe in existence.