The obvious fact that animals suffer horrendously is beyond debate. Unless you actually want to debate it…?
Unless you can prove according to some objective method, and not your own assumptions, that animals are in fact self-aware and possess a rational consciousness, you’re simply begging the question.
So you don’t know why it occurs, you have no way of knowing why it occurs, it’s just something you have to accept. Whatever the pain and misery, whatever the terror and agony ‘it’s all for a good cause’. It’s cruelty to the nth power and entirely acceptable.
And how precisely is your position any more beneficial? How does your position explain the data? It can’t.
Do I take what I do on faith, absolutely. I have no problem with that sort of agnosticism either. I used to have that pathetic need to have everything explained to an absurd degree but such pursuits are as egocentric as they are vain and pointless. It’s the only position which accounts for all of the data. Christian tradition holds that there is the possibility of freedoms at work no less than the human that we are not aware of, and wherever there is freedom there is the possibility of evil.
Obviously this is insufficient for you, but that’s not do to any sort of objectivity on your part, its merely another rationalization for your bias.
Your position, instead of reconciling the data, makes the problem unsolvable, that’s the point I’m making.
But aren’t you saying that you don’t know why all this suffering (and again, I’m not talking about Man but animals)?
Not at all. I’ve already gone over it as well, I’m not doing it again.
No, you have this backwards. I’m the atheist. I don’t believe it’s an argument against God because I don’t believe in God.
This is what is so absurd about atheism, the sophistry.
I’m the one that believes that nature ‘just is’, not you. You’re the Christian and you believe the opposite.
Please don’t pawn your absurd notions onto me or Christianity.
I believe that nature “is” and that it is ontologically good. That whatever happens is according to God’s design, and that all defects which exist in creation will be reconciled at the consummation of all things.
That this immense cruelty is overseen by God and that there is a purpose. You just don’t know what it is.
Here you go again. You keep prevaricating using these moralistic terms and this line of faulty reasoning which I have already refuted. They’re baseless assertions, not “proof”.
And there’s no evil in a lion eating a gazelle.
Which proves my above point.
As much as I hate answering a question with a question, do you think that someone who knows that evolution has no purpose is a nihilist?
If you hate answering a question with a question, then why did you do it?
I’m simply trying to get to know and understand who I am speaking with. Do you have a vested interest in being evasive and closed?
Yep. Proud Dad. Two great kids. For whom I would sacrifice myself. Not ‘gladly’ as it’s usually written. There’s be a lot of regret. And lots of kicking and screaming. But not for someone I didn’t know. No chance.
Now you can answer mine. Under what circumstances would you sacrifice your life to save others? What about that organ donation I suggested. You could save a few people there. Is it always a good thing? If not, what are your criteria? Maybe the same as mine. People we love.
Which again says more about you than about God.
You just answered your own question. God is also a “proud Dad”, your Dad and mine, with billions of kids which in which He and His Son offered His life and died for.
He did it for Love. And He did it gladly, no regret, no “kicking and screaming”; in fact He did it silently, and willfully.
Now, imagine one or both of your “great kids” coming to you one day in the near future and saying to you, “Dad, you’re dead to me, you no longer exist in my world.”
That is what you do by professing your atheism.
