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Bahman
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How did devil get the authority and power to create this world?
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Bahman
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Or how did devil get authority and power over created world?
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sealoch
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One of the common phrases i have seen so far in the discussion is that “God is actuality” and therefore is good. This still does not follow. I have read what Aquinas wrote and his statements of what god is not does not lead you any closer to an answer.
I could postulate the same about Cthullu.
Cthullu is not awake. Cthullu is not alive. Cthullu has not yet destroyed the earth.
Cthullu is an evil god because he will destroy the earth.
You can not prove the Cthullu is not real and reside at 47° 9′ 0″ S, 126° 43′ 0″ W in Ryloth. I have read the accounts relayed by the historian HP Lovecraft that he tried to use to warn the world of Cthullu existence by hiding it in a short story.
My point of this example is that Cthullu is no more evil than the Christian God is good.
I could postulate the same about Cthullu.
Cthullu is not awake. Cthullu is not alive. Cthullu has not yet destroyed the earth.
Cthullu is an evil god because he will destroy the earth.
You can not prove the Cthullu is not real and reside at 47° 9′ 0″ S, 126° 43′ 0″ W in Ryloth. I have read the accounts relayed by the historian HP Lovecraft that he tried to use to warn the world of Cthullu existence by hiding it in a short story.
My point of this example is that Cthullu is no more evil than the Christian God is good.
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Portofino
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Agreed. Desirable by Satan?
I think the position is, “not everything desired by human beings (or Satan) is intrinsically desirable” (ie good is, evil is not).
Yet goodness is being defined as that which is desirable!
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Portofino
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I agree – for a believer, the only answer is, “because such was God’s will.” Satan having free will is not itself an adequate explanation. Charles Manson has free will but is still a mortal man, and presumably will not be permitted to escape the confines of hell and “roam the earth” (assuming he is hellbound). Satan is both not confined to hell and possesses, frankly, what we would describe as superhuman attributes. Nor is it explained why Satan is permitted interaction with the earthbound (if Charles Manson lands in hell, his interaction with what is earthbound will cease). Free will alone does not explain why Satan is not confined to hell and permitted no further interaction with this earth (as the damned are).
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tonyrey
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“can” is a gross understatement because your capacity for reasoning is the very foundation of your claim to be rational and worthy of attention. To belittle reason is to belittle your own arguments and conclusions. You can call it what you like but if you claim it is worthless you are spouting nonsense.
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polytropos
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I don’t have time for a detailed response, but I might be able to address some of the misunderstandings, which others seem to share with you.
You are reading in a different notion of “desirable” than Aristotle and Aquinas intend. It is not meant (directly) as “I want that thing.” (This is, I think, why people are asking “desirable to whom?”). What Aquinas means is desirability in the sense of final causes, ie. every thing desires (tends toward) its end. So again, the source of this misunderstanding seems to be to read consciousness into instances of natural intentionality. The “looseness” in people judging things as more or less good does not come directly from people having different motivations and different preferences; it comes from misapprehensions of final causes.
(In this thread, I have substituted “final causes” for a more epistemologically lite notion of “what is expected” or “what a thing is supposed to be.” So you are exactly right that it requires additional arguments, arguments which abound in the writings of Aristotle and Aquinas. When you say, “What Aquinas obviously would need to show is that not all that humans desire is good…,” indeed he does, and he does so elsewhere.)
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davidv
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God did not will satan’s dominion over the earth. Humans abdicated it to him.
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polytropos
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Men have the substantial form of rational animal. Angels are purely immaterial substances. As such, after a man dies, though his soul (as immaterial) continues to exist, it is significantly diminished - because human souls rely heavily on the material for their non-intellectual capacities. Angels do not rely at all on the material. The two cases of Satan and Charles Manson are in no way symmetrical.
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polytropos
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You are referring to negative theology? That is exactly what we are doing when we are saying that God is good. Aquinas believes that we can understand the essence or nature of objects we come in contact with. We do not come into direct contact with God, however, and so we cannot understand God’s essence.
That does not mean that we cannot know anything about God, however. In particular, we can evaluate some propositions and understand God through a). negative theology and b). the doctrine of analogy (or both). So what is entailed by saying that God is Pure Act is that we know that God is subsistent being itself, and that his essence is to exist. But we cannot understand that in the way that we understand what a tree is by seeing a tree.
A being which is Pure Actuality cannot have any lack (any lack would be an instance of potentiality, or something that could be different). The claim that God is good, then, is understood as a piece of negative theology because it is based on what God, on philosophical analysis, cannot be (imperfect), not what we learn about him from coming into direct contact with him.
The doctrine of analogy also helps us come to understand it because, as I point out in the first couple posts, all uses of the word “good” are analogical. To call something good means that it succeeds at what it is, and it is less good as far as it fails at what it is. To say a cat and a house are both “good” is to use the word analogically. A cat and house are not good in the same way, nor are they good for the same reasons, but the use of good is not equivocal (which would mean that the use is totally different).
Since God cannot have failures (they would be lacks/potentialities), He must be good. But we do not have a direct understanding of God’s essence, so His goodness must be understood analogically. In other words, He is understood not to have any imperfections.
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polytropos
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It is not really viable to say that one could simply define good as a privation of evil and conclude that there is an evil God since God could have no privations and therefore could in no way be good. The reason is that there is an asymmetry in the concepts of good and evil (which is indeed why evil is a privation of good in the first place).
As I mentioned in my last response to Portofino, “desirable” is not referring to the conscious desiring of human beings. It is referring to the (generally unconscious) intentionality (or end-directedness, or, to use the Aristotelian-Thomistic term, final causality) prevalent in nature. So when we say “desirable,” we aren’t referring to the way that a child desires a lollipop. A more paradigmatic example would be the way DNA desires to interact with certain enzymes to unwind, reproduce, repackage into chromosomes, etc. These are all unconscious processes. They do not necessitate a conscious desirer. So what it means to say that good is being as desirable is that the good is the fulfillment of final causes. It is good for a strand of DNA to do what it is directed toward inherently (and DNA is directed toward unwinding, replicating, and repackaging whether or not it actually does so - which is to say that DNA’s final cause is inherent in its form or formal cause).
So perhaps it is now clear why there is an asymmetry between good and evil (or badness, to use a more morally neutral term). Good is the fulfillment of final causes. Badness is the lack of fulfillment of final causes. There is not really a way to frame evil as a privation of good; would a privation view of good entail that things are good inasmuch as they fail to fail at what they are supposed to be? I don’t know.
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polytropos
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Stephen Law is an atheist philosopher who wrote a paper on the “evil god challenge.” A summary of the “process” of the evil god challenge is this:
The next reason it is seriously flawed is that I will not address the issue of whether any sort of god (be it and evil god or God Himself) exists if I bracket my metaphysics; to do so is simply premature.
So with those considerations, the evil god challenge shows nothing. I would not falsify the evil god hypothesis because goodness is evidence against it. I would not out of hand reject reverse-theodicies. I would alternatively deny that an evil god could exist because evil is a privation, and a purely actual being could not be fully evil.
The other problem is that the Thomistically inclined need not rely on theodicies at all, so showing that theodicies fail would be trivial.
- Bracket your metaphysics.
- Suppose someone claims to believe in an evil god.
- The goodness in the world, however, is evidence against an evil god.
- The evil god-believer can offer reverse-theodicies to try to explain the existence of good in the world.
- If you would not accept those reverse-theodicies, then you should not accept the theodicies for the presence of evil in spite of a good God.
The next reason it is seriously flawed is that I will not address the issue of whether any sort of god (be it and evil god or God Himself) exists if I bracket my metaphysics; to do so is simply premature.
So with those considerations, the evil god challenge shows nothing. I would not falsify the evil god hypothesis because goodness is evidence against it. I would not out of hand reject reverse-theodicies. I would alternatively deny that an evil god could exist because evil is a privation, and a purely actual being could not be fully evil.
The other problem is that the Thomistically inclined need not rely on theodicies at all, so showing that theodicies fail would be trivial.
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Portofino
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I know they’re not symmetrical. Rather, the point I was making is that – for those who ask, "why is Satan allowed out of hell; why can Satan possess us; why can Satan wreak such havoc on this earth–the stock answer that “God respects Satan’s freedom of choice” is an incomplete explanation. What is possible and not possible to Satan (or to any angel, as you point out) was determined by God, free will notwithstanding (a damned human soul, though it has free will, cannot choose to leave the confines of hell and effect demonic possession of a living human body).
I’m simply pointing this out as a way of saying that, in an ultimate sense, that Satan is *capable *of doing such “bad” things on this earth is God’s will. No, God did not will that Satan would do those things – he gave Satan his freedom. But God inevitably willed that Satan would be capable of doing those things, that Satan would have the power to misuse his free will in that way.
It simply contributes to a less white-washed grappling with the apparent problem of evil, since the stock explanation “God respects Satan’s free will” is a misleading answer, ultimately. God determined, willed, that Satan’s capabilities would be Satan’s capabilities, if Satan so chose. This is not such an easy thing to understand.
To give an example – there is no reason why God couldn’t have as easily allowed a damned human soul to be capable of coming back, continuing to attempt to wreak havoc, or to be capable of effecting demonic possession of a living human. You would think that God’s keeping those damned human beings in hell (where they can do no more direct harm) would be a signal of God’s benevolence (“he can’t hurt you any more”). But no… That can’t be a logically air-tight solution, given that it is not a lack of benevolence on the part of God, to enable Satan to do all of those things that we’re glad that the soul of the most hateful, most damnable mortal human being is not capable of doing.
A world in which a mortal soul in hell would be able to come back – like some un-killable rabid pitbull – would be a nightmarish world indeed. Yet an aspect of this nightmarish reality would exist in the sphere of operations – God-willed, God-determined – of Satan and his demons.
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polytropos
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I forgot to comment on this statement.
As I have noted on several occasions, God is not a moral agent. It does not make sense to state any proposition like “God is morally ________” (whether the blank is “good,” “evil,” or “neutral”).
So while you did not say morally neutral here, I feel like the conflation of goodness with moral goodness is what is leading you to make such a comment. One might say that donating money to a responsible charity is a morally good action, watching a movie is a morally neutral action, and stealing a bike is a morally bad action. In this sense, it makes sense to speak of “neutral.”
In Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, though, goodness is a degree of perfection. There is not really a “neutral” point on the scale. Something could be completely perfect (Jesus was a perfect human being, for example), but any departures from that perfection, though “bad,” are not really bringing you towards neutrality (and you cannot have something “fully bad,” as it would be pure potentiality and therefore would not be anything).
Suppose that we have a perfect tree. It perfectly instantiates the Aristotelian-Thomistic form of tree. We saw off one branch. The tree is now less good than it was before. We saw off the rest of the branches. Less good still. We peel all of the bark off of the trunk. It is becoming progressively worse. Finally we saw it off and it is just a stump. Now it’s a rather bad tree (although still not completely bad). But was it ever neutral? No.
So to speak of a neutral God does not really make sense on this analysis, unless you deny this idea of goodness altogether.
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polytropos
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Hmmmm. Could you explain how this is different from people being able to violate others while they are alive (just a different degree)? Humans have certain abilities and angels have certain abilities, all according to their forms. Both also have free will; they can do what they are capable of doing. That entails that, upon dying, humans do not have the ability to mess with anyone’s head (a power that they never had). It doesn’t have to do with people being confined to hell.
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Portofino
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The ability of people to violate each other while they are alive is itself a problem… They can violate the free will of another, whereas one would think that the free will of another ought to be inviolable. But I can understand the argument that, “without free will, including the free will of some humans to violate the free will of other humans, the human drama could not play itself out unimpeded.”
The interaction of Satan and a fallen angel with the human realm is more of a puzzle, I think. No ill-willed human being could ever harm or touch an angel in heaven (though a human being could harm another human being, of course). Yet an ill-willed angel (Satan and his demons) could “attack” a human being. On a common sense, level, at least, it is a paradox because it is like mixing apples with oranges (and, from a human perspective, Satan frankly seems capable of “outmaneuvering” a mere mortal human, who possesses a comparatively more limited intelligence).
I suppose the answer would be something like, “if humans did not possess original sin, Satan would have no power over them.” Something like that. Still, he would appear to be a kind of “third wheel” in the whole proposition; after all, we already have evil-minded human beings making life miserable for other human beings. Satan, apparently, has chosen to join the party – I mean, is it that bad, that you are getting it from both ends? Apparently so.
Why a malicious angel would be given the capability of “joining the party” is a paradox of sorts.
Indeed, as I mentioned in the post above, we can breathe a sigh of relief – and it is merciful – that the soul of no damned human being in hell can “come out to play” and try to wreak further havoc. God would seem to be like the jailer who is benevolently putting people in jail and throwing away the key. Again, in human terms, the statement, “he can’t hurt you any more” is a very comforting statement to hear.
Yet Satan “enjoys” those privileges, with God’s consent (God, being omnipotent, could take those privileges away at any time, determining that Satan has lost the right to claim them).
Again, I suppose the only Christian answer – not necessarily satisfying to non-Christians; but, then again, most non-Christians do not believe in Satan! – is that it has something to do with original sin. Because of original sin, we’re susceptible to Satan attacking us (and God, for whatever reasons, chooses not to stop Satan from doing so).
After all, Satan is not “allowed” – mercifully – to try to attack those in heaven, to try to spoil things for them.
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polytropos
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We are certainly not entitled in any way to having our free will unviolated. I don’t know why it can be violated.
I am not offering this kind of theodicy here.
Angels are higher-order creatures than humans. A human can do harm to lower-order creatures (ants, let’s say) that, generally speaking, cannot harm us. The idea does not seem fair, perhaps, but no one said creation was fair. Dogs received more than slugs, humans more than dogs, angels more than humans.
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Portofino
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Would you have an explanation of why final causes in nature so often fail? In other words, would you have an explanation for why natural evil exists?
If it is necessary to go further afield, to revelation (e.g., the fall) by all means, feel free to do so.
The example I’m thinking of sex being ordered towards procreation. It fails in this mightily, much of the time. The typical sexual encounter – without birth control, and where both partners have healthy reproductive systems – does not end in procreation. A naturalist would observe, in fact, that nature is “hedging her bets” in the ironic sense of Christ’s parable of the sower (some seed fell on rocky soil; some seed fell by the wayside; but some seed…). Having millions (billions?) of sperm would be another means of “hedging one’s bets” in terms of increasing one’s chances, in what is a very imperfect process (thankfully, humans are willing to try it more than once, if they don’t at first succeed
).What I think is logically incontrovertible is that there is no imperative that the creation of a perfect Creator not be as perfect as itself (indeed, Heaven would refute anyone who would claim the contrary).
So what is Aquinas’ explanation for the reason why a perfect Creator made an imperfect Creation? With humans, we are talking about free will. But I am talking about nature here.
Again, if revelation is necessary, by all means invoke it. But if Aquinas is saying that nature – which is not God – must contain imperfection and evil (privation), then he is making an assumption that does not logically follow. I see no logical reason why nature would not be a perfect chip off the old block of a perfect Creator, especially an omnipotent one. There is no logical reason why the created realm of an absolutely perfect creator would need to be a faded facsimile of the perfection of the creator.
I suppose the Aquinas answer is in the distinction between potential and actuality – potential is, by definition, imperfect. But this is more a description of the way things are, not a description of why they are, as they are. On an a priori basis, the real paradox is how the creation of an utterly perfect Creator should not be as perfect as itself. In fact, once you acknowledge imperfection and privation, you’re actually giving carte blanche to creation’s being almost infinitely more imperfect than it is. Creation could be much more imperfect than it is – say, with the human race dying out because it can no longer reproduce; and, indeed, many species did fail so utterly to achieve their final causes, that they became extinct – and yet it would not impeach this idea that the Creator is perfect.
I don’t know, it seems like a pretty amusingly rigged standard of measurement
But perhaps our human expressions, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” and “a chip off the old block” are not valid; nor, the expression, “by a tree’s fruits, you will know the tree… No good tree can produce bad fruits.”
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Portofino
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And if the creator is pure actuality, lacking in nothing, why create anything in the first place? Why create the possibility of imperfection? Why create potential if none of that potential could possibility measure up to the pure actuality that is God?
I’m not sure there are answers to these questions, or that Aquinas seeks to address them. But his explanation of God as pure actuality – lacking in nothing – would make creation seem superfluous, redundant.
It becomes like Michael Jordan retiring from basketball when he is at the top of his game – why not go out on a high note? In comparison with the perfection of God, nature is a pretty pretty pitiful rendition. Final causes fail to be realized as often – if not more often – than they succeed. It’s as if, with creation, there was no place to go but down, nothing to manifest but…what was worser.
Nature didn’t sin, did not commit immorality, and yet nature is so severely flawed, by the standards of final causes. A mother hen protects her offspring – her proper end is to ensure their survival. Yet who knows how many of them will perish?
Worse, final causes compete with other final causes – the final cause of the lion, competes with the final cause of the lamb. Why this state of warfare? Animals, again, know no moral transgression, so such imperfection – such a tangling of final causes – would seem to be the will of the Creator, unless one goes farther afield from Aristotle or Aquinas, and makes the contention that, when the lamb was killed by the lion, the lamb’s proper end – it’s proper final cause – was not to survive, but to be killed.
The telos of the animal and the human would thus be a paradox, something left undefined. Is our telos to survive – or to die? Insofar as all of us die, it would seem that death is our telos. Every creature desires survival [desirability?] yet every creature ultimately dies. Was its death a failure to achieve its telos, or its fulfillment of that telos?
I’m not sure there are answers to these questions, or that Aquinas seeks to address them. But his explanation of God as pure actuality – lacking in nothing – would make creation seem superfluous, redundant.
It becomes like Michael Jordan retiring from basketball when he is at the top of his game – why not go out on a high note?
In comparison with the perfection of God, nature is a pretty pretty pitiful rendition. Final causes fail to be realized as often – if not more often – than they succeed. It’s as if, with creation, there was no place to go but down, nothing to manifest but…what was worser.Nature didn’t sin, did not commit immorality, and yet nature is so severely flawed, by the standards of final causes. A mother hen protects her offspring – her proper end is to ensure their survival. Yet who knows how many of them will perish?
Worse, final causes compete with other final causes – the final cause of the lion, competes with the final cause of the lamb. Why this state of warfare? Animals, again, know no moral transgression, so such imperfection – such a tangling of final causes – would seem to be the will of the Creator, unless one goes farther afield from Aristotle or Aquinas, and makes the contention that, when the lamb was killed by the lion, the lamb’s proper end – it’s proper final cause – was not to survive, but to be killed.
The telos of the animal and the human would thus be a paradox, something left undefined. Is our telos to survive – or to die? Insofar as all of us die, it would seem that death is our telos. Every creature desires survival [desirability?] yet every creature ultimately dies. Was its death a failure to achieve its telos, or its fulfillment of that telos?
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Portofino
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Okay, I’ll give it a try…
Not sure what he means by that; perhaps, “don’t bring any of your metaphysical assumptions into the argument; attempt to be neutral?”
Okay – Descartes’ evil genius, or a child pulling the wings off flies (“as flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us, for their sport”–King Lear).
This does depend on one’s definition of goodness. Perhaps a compromise would be to say, “suppose someone claims to believe in a god that hates us and wants to hurt us. The comforting, joyful, happiness-inducing things in the world are evidence that god doesn’t hate only hate us or only want to hurt us.”
Indeed they could; I’m reminded of a scene from Schindler’s List, where Goeth (the cruel Nazi soldier) turns to Schindler, who has sprayed water on the train car in which the Jews are being crushed by heat and thirst, “you are giving them hope! That is cruel!”
You can crush someone, more thoroughly, if you’ve raised hopes so high that – when you dash them – they will only fall harder. That is true malevolence and malice, and it happens in a High School context not infrequently (like the plotline of Carrie, where an evil-minded girl plots for the most popular guy in school to ask the least popular girl in school to the prom, lifting her up higher only to drop her harder, in the end).
Hmmm… Well, in all honesty, I would admit that you can never know, one way or another!
You can never know if the God that seems to be kicking your butt is not actually doing it for your own good; nor that the God who is serenading you with sweet nothings, is not actually raising you by the scruff of your neck, higher and higher off the ground, only to let you drop when you can finally relax and trust that you’re safe in his hands.It’s a wash – either could theoretically be possible, once you say, “we cannot understand God’s ways”
The trade-off, of course, is that you cannot point to the good stuff as proof that God loves you, either. I don’t think you’re doing that, polytropos, but I daresay you are in the minority there, as regards Christians. When they feel God’s love, of course they believe that it is really God’s love, that they are feeling. And when they don’t feel God’s love, they say that this is the misunderstanding. But it could, theoretically, be the reverse.
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