By creating a world in which pain, accidents, competition, conflict, failure and frustration were not necessary consequences of the way I had built said world. But I’m hardly a perfect, omnipotent creator now, am I?
Permitting with full knowledge despite ability to prevent amounts to intention. A perfect, benevolent, omnipotent creator would not have to choose between any evils. If God was once all that existed, according to the theistic interpretation of a creator god, then this god is the ultimate source of all evil. Evil could not occur in spite of such a being.
Which doesn’t hold if these processes were the creation of an essentially moral being. The processes themselves are still amoral in and of themselves, but the creator is not. It’s the difference between an accident and a deliberate action.
If the only way God could create a world that didn’t require his constant intervention in order to function was to create one that naturally gave rise to evil and suffering, then he is remiss, and is not omnipotent. If he is able to occasionally subvert the physical laws that he supposedly created, then he could have created them differently, even if that meant he had to intervene to keep things going.
Why would I not believe this? It’s essential to maintaining social relations.
Why is my statement absurd if yours wasn’t? If you believe in a creator God, you must have some idea how he would operate. Otherwise what would you base such a belief upon? As to making decisions, I can contemplate the process in what are probably far more simplistic terms than your average neurologist, but I also don’t see what bearing this has on my original claim that it is up to you to explain why you believe your God made this universe, not me to explain how the universe could have been different. I don’t even know if it could have been, given that I don’t countenance any supernatural intervention.
That would kind of depend upon your concept of perfection and what you were measuring it against. Perhaps finitude is a characteristic of a perfect life.
That purpose is conceived in the minds of conscious entities, which are ultimately the result of natural processess devoid of conscious intention. I have even seen it proposed that consciousness is an expression of a fundamental property of matter, when that matter is arranged in certain ways - just as conductivity is an expression of a fundamental property of matter (that particles all have an electrical charge) which only arises when that matter is arranged in certain ways.
Maybe danger could have a bad smell…
Except the reality of the subjective feeling.
Because you seemed to be suggesting that most animals have an easy time on this planet.
Not according to my beliefs.
The fact that it is balanced is neither here nor there when it comes to supposing that an omnipotent creator could have tipped the balance in such a way that tended to favour the preferences of sentient life forms. I’ve been given to understand - though this may just be evangeloony creationist mumbo-jumbo - that God’s initial creation was a perfect paradise with no predation (at least on sentient creatures) until humans went and screwed it up, as God knew they would, of course.
Again, you’ve picked up the wrong end of the stick and run the whole relay with it. Just to be clear - I am not complaining about the way the world is. I can understand how many aspects of life as we know it are necessary and valuable in the context of life as we know it. Even if there are things in the world that I would prefer not to be the case, who would I complain to anyway? But I would have to be insensate not to recognise that there is a great deal of suffering in the world as it is, some of it caused by free, conscious agents, but much of it not so. A perfectly benevolent and omnipotent God could and would have seen to it that this was not the case, with no opportunity cost to himself or to his creations. That’s what it means to be all-powerful and all-good. The world as I see it is magnificent, amazing, fascinating, all those things - but it is also harsh, violent and uncaring of the fate of sentient beings. It is what it is. This is not a moral assessment, because I don’t believe there is or was a conscious, ethical being who decided to create nature the way it is and is therefore ethically responsible for everything that happens, good and bad.
If we are the result solely of a material process, then are we really free? Or are we the playthings of a Lucretian shower of material particles with its random swerves and quantum fluctuations?
Mind, intentionality, purpose, free will, ethical responsibility – these seem to belong to a different level of reality than blind matter “devoid of conscious intention”.
I don’t mean “life” as a biological phenomenon. Rather, life as “pursuit of happiness”. Some people are lucky. Some are less so. It’s all a matter of chance, genetics, etc. The roll of the dice.
Then how do you know it is feasible?
How do you know this? Any physical existence entails drawbacks but not to create a universe for that reason would be a greater evil because existence is immensely valuable.
Ultimate responsibility is not identical with direct responsibility.
Natural processes are not deliberate actions but the consequences of the laws of nature. Car manufacturers are not held responsible for accidents which occur due to chance, malice or negligence.
How do you know what omnipotence entails? Are you omniscient?
How do you know physical laws could have been created differently and achieved the same goals?
If you believe in the laws of nature you must have some idea of what causes them to operate…
Can you explain how both this universe and your power to make decisions originated? If not you are not entitled to reject a supernatural explanation on the ground that you have a natural explanation. Precisely what is a natural explanation? Is all your behaviour natural?
Can you justify that hypothesis?
Another unsupported hypothesis.
What necessary significance does any particular subjective feeling have for the nature of objective reality?
What’s the point of positing an omnipotent deity if you then impose limits upon its scope of action? I don’t know that a perfect universe is feasible, but I also don’t confuse the issue by investing belief in a perfect god.
Why does a physical existence entail drawbacks? How do you know that? Is this a logical implication of physical existence, or is it an observation based on physical existence as we experience it? You believe in immaterial existence - is this more or less valuable than physical existence?
It is if the one ultimately responsible knew in advance what the results of every action would be.
Except if it’s negligence or deliberate sabotage on the part of the manufacturer.
Because omnipotence is defined as the ability to do anything logically consistent. It is not a logical contradiction to suppose that the world could have been created better than it is for millions of sentient creatures.
I don’t. But neither do you, and in order to justify your god’s creation on the grounds of necessary limitations on the way universes can operate, you would need to know that this universe is the only option. Why would it be necessary to achieve the same goals? Because a lot of those goals would appear to be based around the suffering of sentient creatures.
I wasn’t criticising any such thing - I was simply questioning whether unselfishness can ever be considered truly unselfish in the context of belief in an eternal paradise after death. Would it take more selflessness on the part of a person who didn’t believe in an afterlife to sacrifice his life for a cause or for other people? I would tend to think so.
The laws of nature are descriptions of the way matter and energy and forces and fields behave. I don’t need to know why they behave that way, just that they are invariably observed and experienced to do so.
What would you claim to be a supernatural aspect of human behaviour? How would you distinguish it from a natural behaviour? I don’t reject supernatural explanations out of hand, but what use are they if they cannot be observed, tested or experienced definitively? How is the claim that something is supernaturally caused any better than an admission that we don’t know how it happened?
And yet no more unsupported than the god hypothesis, and with the advantage that it is at least theoretically testable. Much of religious apologetics seems to revolve around denying the testability of the god hypothesis for various reasons.
Sure, why not? Not all dangers are immediately painful either.
Subjective experiences are part of objective reality. It’s just that such experiences are a product of interactions between a subject and its environment. They are specific to individual subjects, although common enough across subjects to derive broad conclusions about the subjective preferences of sentient beings.
The claim is that god has a purpose for everything. What reason would the Christian God have for creating billions of species that were destined to die out? Were they part of his plan? Were they simply subordinate to God’s process for creating human beings?
Yet it doesn’t sit well with the idea of a perfect, omnipotent, benevolent creator. It’s one thing to accept evolution because the science so strongly supports it, but it’s another thing altogether to justify maintaining belief in an entity that is inconsistent with observable fact.
It sounds like you erect a barrier between internal and external reality, when the two are fundamentally connected. Our subjective preferences are part of the nature of reality. How could they be otherwise? I can’t level a moral condemnation of matter and energy, because in and of themselves, they have no intention. Only specific arrangements of matter and energy give rise to intention, as far as we can determine. However, if I am to suppose that the intention was supplied by a conscious, ethical being, then it is possible to judge the morality of that being’s intentions in light of what is observed to be the case in the natural universe.
Why do you assume it couldn’t have been otherwise? Is it necessary to suppose this in order to maintain belief in your god? Do you have to assume that all suffering is ultimately necessary, or at least is justifiable in light of other goods that a god who is claimed to be omnipotent could somehow not have achieved without it?
How?
Your arguments imply it is testably false! And that a Godless universe is a testable hypothesis…
Can you explain the mechanism? Or is it a fantasy?
What do broad conclusions prove?
Creation does not entail a purpose for everything.
Because in your own words life does not have to be eternal to be valuable! Their lives were intrinsically valuable.
The concept of development sits exceeding well. Do you think a static universe is a better bet?
How?
Are the subjective preferences of sparks in the dark likely to have any objective value or significance? Or are they more likely to be the result of wishful thinking?
Precisely how do you determine that?
I entirely agree. The immense value of life for a start…
I can ask with equal facility:
Why do you assume it could have been otherwise? Is it necessary to suppose this in order to maintain disbelief in God? Do you have to assume that all suffering is ultimately unnecessary, or at least unjustifiable in light of goods that a God who is omnipotent could somehow have achieved without it?
In other words your questions do nothing to further the discussion…
I can’t speak for all pantheists, of course, but for me the satisfaction in life comes at least in part from the consciousness of being connected in some way to the whole vast scheme of life in the world and to the universe itself. It comes from accepting change as a necessary consequence of our natural, physical existence, from the realisation that life itself is change, and that death is just one more change. It comes from the realisation that the choices we make and the way we live our lives are not a matter of playing catch-up to the perfections of an imaginary being that we couldn’t possibly hope to emulate; but that every moment of happiness we can bring to ourselves and to others is valuable in and of itself, simply by virtue of its being felt.
In the same way that it has been determined that all particles have an electric charge, and that it is this property that gives rise to the conductivity of certain arrangements of particles - by observation and measurement.
Far from it. Scientific ‘proof’ is rarely absolute, but based on an inference to the most likely explanation that accounts for all the facts (and the absence of other facts, importantly). Insofar as we can test it, though, the hypothesis of a perfect, omnipotent, benevolent creator god falls short of what we experience. But that is why there is a whole raft of Christian apologetics that endeavours to explain why the most obvious explanation for this discrepancy - that such a god does not exist - is not the correct explanation. For the most part, the assumption of a godless universe is made because the evidence suggests that a creator god is, as I’ve said before, surplus to requirements in terms of being an explanation for why things are as we observe them to be, and also an unnecessary complication if we accept that reality is such as we observe.
I should think that the mechanism would be rather similar to the mechanism that causes us to experience pain. That in itself is the result of a complex set of interactions between the brain and the rest of the nervous system. If the ‘pain’ response were experienced as an unpleasant odour in the olfactory system, that would alert us to the danger without maximising the possible suffering - at least as we understand suffering in the context of our existence. But then, an omnipotent god might be expected to be able to manifest any number of possible existences for his creatures, right?
They don’t ‘prove’ anything, and nor are they intended to - they simply act as guidelines on how we might behave given the constraints of our existence.
Actually, it kind of does. Unless the creator is somehow inefficient, and a perfect creator would not be so. Creating things without a purpose speaks of a process of trial and error, not one of complete forethought.
Oh, boy, is that so not the point! I’m not the one claiming that finitude is a mark of imperfection or that life loses value if it doesn’t go on forever. I don’t think that life has no meaning if it’s not eternal. You, on the other hand, have expressed such a belief. It is thus internally inconsistent, in your belief system, to suppose that your god would have created living things just to have them die out. Now, you might say that I’m okay with finite existence and therefore I should think that your god has nothing to answer for in creating creatures with a finite existence - but that would be to misunderstand my investment in this whole line of argument. I am taking your belief system as a whole - not grafting aspects of my belief system onto it. If you believe that life has value only insofar as it has the eternal opportunity to fulfil its potential, then you are the one who must answer for why your god would make creatures that were destined for extinction.
That would depend entirely on the form of said static universe. You believe your god is unchanging and perfect - in other words, static. Leaving aside the contradictions inherent in the notion that a perfect, unchanging being could have thoughts and could act and could undertake creation, existence as a god is clearly preferable to existence as a physically constrained human being - else why would anyone aspire to an immaterial, immortal existence such as that possessed by god? Why would a perfect and benevolent being intend a flawed existence for its creatures when it knew that a better existence was possible, by virtue of its own existence? Is it logically necessary that creations must be inferior to the creator?
The ideals espoused by believers in any deity hold that there is a level of perfection beyond that which can be experienced in a physical existence. From what I understand, the Catholic Church has accepted evolution as God’s creative mechanism because it has been overwhelmed by the scientific evidence for evolution and because it would look foolish - like the evangelical protestant churches - if it didn’t accept such evidence. It’s all very well for the Church to say, “Okay, this is the way things are”, but it’s quite another thing to say, “This is the way our God intended it, because it obviously is this way, and although we can imagine a better world, we have to be content with the one that exists because we must believe this is the way God intended it.” Cognitive dissonance much?
If we’re sparks in the dark, that doesn’t change the fact that we have subjective preferences. Are you saying that such preferences should not be acknowledged and valued if they were not intended by a creator?
Through observation and interaction - again, these things are not absolutely conclusive, but they provide a guide for our interactions with the rest of the world. We often tend to see intention where there is none - that is part of the reason for the development of religious belief…
Yet this value is very often negligible, it would appear, if your god intends everything that happens to living beings…
Actually, I think they cut to the core of it - the fact is, I don’t simply assume it could have been otherwise. I accept what is. However, I don’t find it necessary to invest belief in an omnipotent, benevolent deity in order to account for what is. If I did, I would have every reason to question why things are not better - this is a God conceived as being fundamentally like us, in subjective, emotive, intentional terms, and I would wonder why, when I can imagine things being better, I would not have made them so if I had the ability.In other words your questions do nothing to further the discussion…
,Your god is unchanging yet changeable. Got it.
You have pointed it out to no effect. An unchanging being cannot experience love, cannot think, cannot create. Your god is a logical contradiction. My objection to being a physically constrained human being? I am not the one who believes there’s an alternative!
And I believe in one less god than you - that makes my beliefs more economical and less ridiculous, right?
I think it’s more correct to say that modern science wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been nurtured by the structure of the church, which for a long time was one of the only means of obtaining an extensive education. Sure there’s nothing cognitively dissonant about the idea that maybe a deistic god set evolution in motion, but it’s hardly the action of a loving, nurturing, benevolent and omnipotent being, ie: the Christian God.
I did answer your question - the fact that our existence is a product of natural processes makes not the slightest difference to the fact that we have subjective experiences. Maybe it’s the case - and I have certainly found it so - that respecting and valuing the subjective preferences of others makes our own experience of life better. Who cares if my happiness has no lasting cosmic significance? It has plenty of significance for me here and now, and as it happens, making others happy makes me happy. That’s plenty reason for me to care for others. Why would someone who thinks this life is just a dry run for the next pay any attention to others, except for the carrot-and-stick principle? Even then, deathbed repentance after a life of debauchery and violence would still get you a pass. And the fact that you have a problem with polyamory because of your repressive attitude to sex, and because you don’t seem willing to understand it is no indication that the practice is inherently damaging - in fact it brings a lot of joy to a lot of people.
Why? Is it absurd to use penicillin for treatment of illness? It didn’t develop with the intention that it would be so employed. And human brains are wired to ascribe intention. If our ancestors saw a lion and didn’t suppose that it intended to eat them, it would probably have ended badly…
God ‘permits’ things to happen with full knowledge and the ability to prevent them. Why is life valuable if it’s not for the sake of pursuing happiness and fulfilment and satisfaction with that life? What does it even mean to say that life has value in some objective sense that is not related to the subjective experience of living things? If that experience is miserable, where is the value in life? The religious concepts you list are based upon the inbuilt human sense of justice, which is an evolved mechanism for living in social groups. It suits our sense of justice and reciprocity to think that everyone will get what’s coming to them after they die, but it does kind of dull the urgency to fix the problems we find in this life.
Knowledge is a measure of the relationship between the knower and the known. Are you saying that thought is illusory if it exists as a physical mechanism? What a strange notion. I assume that physical reality exists, certainly - what I don’t assume is that there is a need to posit a different, immaterial plane of existence when we don’t yet know everything about the nature of matter and energy! You are effectively saying that you know, without doubt, that some things that clearly exist do so in a way that is definitely, absolutely not anything to do with physical substance. How do you claim such knowledge?
Complex interactions between the matter and energy that make up me and the matter and energy of the environment in which I exist. You would be surprised by the extent to which courts acknowledge that people are sometimes compelled by things beyond their direct control to commit certain actions. You seem to be suggesting that the matter and energy that interact to form what we call a mind are somehow not part of the person to whom the mind belongs. We are all the efficient causes of our own actions, but to assume that our decisions take place with complete freedom in some kind of mental vacuum, without reference to anything in our environment, is patently ridiculous. Yet that seems to be your concept of ‘free will’.
God is clearly like us enough that generations have thought they could know enough about said god to know what he wanted of them, what his intentions were, whose side he was on in wartime, and so on. If God could make us like him in these respects, why did he stop at them?
Yet imagination is the sum total of the evidence for your god…
“In God we live, move and have our being.” To use a spatial metaphor, change occurs “within” God. “Got it” is rather unseemly…
Not if you are determined to reject my point!
The Creator cannot create? God is Love but God cannot love! God is the Source of everything including change. So it hardly makes sense to apply human categories to the Supreme Being…
Your notion of God is a logical contradiction! It seems to be “the Supreme Obstacle”!
It makes your beliefs more inadequate, unintelligible, incoherent, irrational and infertile because you deify atomic particles which lack consciousness, rationality, freedom, purpose and value. “right” is an unnecessary accretion!
In Christ and Science (p. 23) Stanley Jaki gives four reasons for modern science’s unique birth in Christian Western Europe:
columbia.edu/cu/augustine/a/science_origin.html
“set in motion” is inaccurate because the Christian God is both transcendent and immanent. How is development inconsistent with the action of a loving, nurturing, benevolent and omnipotent being?
It raises the formidable problem of the origin of subjective experiences which is acknowledged by atheist philosophers. What is it like to be a bat?!
organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf.
Then it is unreasonable to believe values are entirely subjective.
Many people who care about all the injustice in the world.
Is it an accident that making others happy makes you happy? Would you sacrifice your pleasure to make others happy?
A distortion of Christianity.
Another distortion!
You are assuming (i) Concern for the harm done by polyamory reflects a repressive attitude and (ii) “joy” never leads to harm to oneself, others and society.
That is irrelevant to “that which lacks intentions”.
How did the wiring - and the initial intention - originate?
Except that’s my god, not yours.
You’re not explaining how an unchanging entity can actually do anything, can have ideas or feelings - these things require changes of state.
It hardly makes sense to apply any categories to a fundamentally unintelligible entity.
You keep skirting around the point that the listed characteristics of the Christian god - omnipotence, omniscience, benevolence, immutability, immateriality - logically lead in directions you prefer not to acknowledge. You can continue saying as much as you like that the Christian concept of god makes sense, but you can’t make that a true statement.Your notion of God is a logical contradiction! It seems to be “the Supreme Obstacle”!
Because I seek the justification and explanation for what is within the natural universe in and of itself, and don’t feel the need to augment reality with nebulous ideas about ‘supernatural’ beings…
‘Development’ implies improvement. Why would an omnipotent, loving god create things such that they required improvement? And why, if the need for improvement was unavoidable, would an omnipotent, loving god create a system of development that relied upon death and suffering?
So you reject the notion of a natural explanation for subjective experience, because you want to believe supernatural phenomena exist. I’m quite familiar with the notion that ‘qualia’ are notoriously difficult to explain from the outside, but saying that this points to something above and beyond the natural is hardly addressing the problem - it’s merely trying to explain one set of phenomena that we don’t understand by appealing to a whole new set of phenomena that we don’t understand and cannot test.
Why? Would they exist without subjective experience?
What does that have to do with whether or not my happiness matters to the universe?
For the former, no, I don’t believe it’s accidental - it’s a product of human evolution as a highly social species. For the latter, that would depend upon the circumstances. If it came to sacrificing a relatively trivial pleasure of my own for the sake of helping someone else - say, for example, giving money to a friend in need rather than spending it on a treat for myself - then I wouldn’t hesitate.
Distortions? Or merely highlighting the ease with which Christian doctrine can be ‘interpreted’ to mean whatever an individual believer wants it to mean?
i) What ‘harm’? Is this harm in an actual sense, or harm to your personal sensibilities?
Why do you find it so ‘absurd’ to think that complex arrangements of matter and energy can exhibit intention whilst individual particles lack intention? Do you find it odd to think that molecules of hydrogen and molecules of oxygen are not ‘wet’?
Evolution, development of ever more complex neural arrangements. Why do you believe it necessary for the intention to have been there from the beginning?