The problem with those that bring up "the problem with evil"

[Spock]

I don’t agree with any of your arguments. The first one basically tells me that you hope there exists free will; otherwise you would not act upon belief in its existence. Fine for me but insufficient from someone who wants to draw his moral code from a materialistic philosophy.

There is no “hope” involved here. We think that there is a freedom to act, even if it cannot be proven. It is a very plausible assumption. The moral code is perfectly supported with this concept.

Where’s the logical error? One of the basic consequences of admitting the existence of God is the recognition of our own feebleness; I have no problem accepting that what seems wrong now - such as one of my friends having a lymphoma right now - perhaps makes sense in a wider perspective that I am incapable of having now.

That is not a question of “justice”. You better try again. There are quite a few things that even God cannot do. One of them is “changing the past”. If a human father would beat up his child, and then later would give him a lollipop as a “compensation”, it would not “undo” the injustice of the beating. The “beating” must stand on its own right if it was “just”.

I think the biggest blunder of atheism is precisely the belief in almost supernatural capabilities for our species.

Almost? How would you know if our capabilities are “almost” supernatural? To declare something supernatural, you need an exhaustive knowledge of the “natural”… claiming omniscience again?

Your final remark is just another instance of what I have just said. “Poor people, the believers!” “They have to be helped!” “Let us help them getting out of the pit history put them in!” This is of course unbelievably arrogant.

Well, well… if I had a dollar for every time when some theist wanted to help me out from my “miserable, hopeless, horrible” life, I would have many shining dollars now. And guess, what - I usually thanked them for their good will and did not scold them for their arrogance - because even if I disagreed with them, I could see their genuine wish to help. Seems like I do not get the same courtesy… oh well.

 

[SGWessells]

Jochoa wrote: “If he only chose those who would do the most good or made us more loving, Humanity as a whole would never be of a free nature.”

Not at all. There are people today who are more loving than others; are they less free? No, they are better people.
Psychopaths are by nature incapable of feeling empathy for others, or compassion for their sufferings. They often know intellectually that their actions are considered wrong by others, but have no sense themselves of the wrongness of these acts. Since this condition is caused by defective genetics and brain chemistry, I am not debating their moral culpability; but they do have free will, in the sense that nothing constrains them from choosing what they do, except that they lack the sense of compassion and empathy which prevents normal people from acts they would likely commit without it. They are unquestionably less loving than others, since they cannot love at all; yet their freedom of action is not constrained. The question is, why does God create such people? Is the freedom of the psychopath worth all the misery they create? Apparently, God thinks so.

 

[SGWessells]

Even, though B is the case, it does not follow that God does so all at once. It is a basic principle of most OT hermeneutics that God gradually

reveals his character to mankind. He may have done commanded (really allowed) some of those OT israelite actions because he knew that they were not at a point where they could make further sense of God’s full character. That may have been the best they could do at the time.

So the entire Old Testament tells us nothing at all reliably about God’s moral character? Everything the OT asserts about his commandments, desires, and actions could, if inconvenient enough for the idea of God’s moral perfection, be simply dismissed as the mistaken delusions of people so primitive and depraved that they could conceive of nothing bad about genocide, or God ordering David (whom God himself called a man after his own heart, which is hardly an assessment of someone ignorant of God’s ways) to take a census for which God later murders 70,000 Israelites who were innocent of the crime? (2 Sam. 24:1,15). I thought God inspired the scriptures to teach people to be better than “the best they could do at the time.” I guess they didn’t work too well.
Nor can you get away with that “(really allowed)”, as though that absolves God somehow. No, in many instances, God explicitly orders massacres; in fact, sometimes he orders massacres of people for something their ancestors did, as with the Amalekites (1 Sam. 15:2,3).

Second, it might be the case (as I said earlier in this thread) that the Isaelites were simply mistaken in attributing those commands to God. This would not prevent us from regarding the Bible as inspired, only prevent us from regarding it as literally inerrant in every detail. Nonetheless we could still regard it as inspired, and maybe even inerant when understood in proper context.

Sorry, but what part of “utterly destroy all they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ***” is hard to understand? What crime had the infants and suckling babes committed?

 

[SGWessells]

Dansser wrote, "The non-seum inference the atheist makes in support of this fails because we are not well placed to assess if such a being has a justifying reason. Just like the math example. My only point is to show that we are not justified in thinking that the existence of evil is a reason for doubting the existence of the Christian God. As to believing in God, obviously, I have other reasons, so am not stuck with agnosticism. "

We were not talking about other reasons for believing God exists, but of the implications of this particular analogy. My point is that if we are not well placed to judge one side of an issue, like the moral perfection of God or a complicated math problem, we are not justified in assuming the other either, for the same reason. We can say nothing about it.

 

[LittleSoldier]

I don’t agree with any of your arguments. The first one basically tells me that you hope there exists free will; otherwise you would not act upon belief in its existence. Fine for me but insufficient from someone who wants to draw his moral code from a materialistic philosophy.

Where’s the logical error? One of the basic consequences of admitting the existence of God is the recognition of our own feebleness; I have no problem accepting that what seems wrong now - such as one of my friends having a lymphoma right now - perhaps makes sense in a wider perspective that I am incapable of having now. I think the biggest blunder of atheism is precisely the belief in almost supernatural capabilities for our species. Evidence shows that we’re still the same treacherous, envious and venal people our ancestors were thousand of years ago - including the peoples portrayed in the Bible.

Your final remark is just another instance of what I have just said. “Poor people, the believers!” “They have to be helped!” “Let us help them getting out of the pit history put them in!” This is of course unbelievably arrogant. Actually I never thought about the need for a belief in God as a weakness; I think it is in fact a very strong point in favor of adopting a philosophy of the transcendent. While my observations are anecdotal, religious families (and in particular the Catholic ones) have the rather paradoxical characteristic of being gay, noisy and generally lively, precisely when they are under the oppression of religious belief. Go figure. (It must be said that the scientific literature robustly shows that strong religious beliefs correlate positively with measures of well-being.)

This deserves a re-posting. Thank you. You’ve expressed my beliefs in a way I am not capable of.

 

[SGWessells]

Dansser, post 113: “And as to Hitler, it is well known, that Hitler was not religiously motivated; he was not concerned with the Jews for religious reasons, but racial ones, hence his interest in the Aryan master race. And he simply found it convenient to try to use the Church as a cover, but this is no evidence that he was religiously motivated.”

German general Gerhard Engel in his book At the Heart of the Reich, says that in 1941 Hitler said, “I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.” This was after he had come up with the “final solution.” Engel, being Hitler’s army adjutant, had no need to be given a “cover”.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, “I am convinced that I am operating as an agent of our Creator.” Two months after his election as chancellor, he said in a speech to the Reichstag that the Christian faith had "the essential elements for safeguarding the soul of the German people."The day after the failed attempt to assassinate him on July 20, 1944, he said his survival “only confirmed my conviction that Almighty God has called me to lead the German People to victory.” This shows him to be a lousy prophet, but far from an atheist. But if you can assume hidden motives for God, I guess Hitler is no great stretch.

 

[danserr]

Sorry, but what part of “utterly destroy all they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ***” is hard to understand? What crime had the infants and suckling babes committed?

If you are actually interested in a serious answer to that question, then read the book I suggested.

So the entire Old Testament tells us nothing at all reliably about God’s moral character? Everything the OT asserts about his commandments, desires, and actions could, if inconvenient enough for the idea of God’s moral perfection, be simply dismissed as the mistaken delusions of people so primitive and depraved that they could conceive of nothing bad about genocide, or God ordering David (whom God himself called a man after his own heart, which is hardly an assessment of someone ignorant of God’s ways) to take a census for which God later murders 70,000 Israelites who were innocent of the crime? (2 Sam. 24:1,15). I thought God inspired the scriptures to teach people to be better than “the best they could do at the time.” I guess they didn’t work too well.
Nor can you get away with that “(really allowed)”, as though that absolves God somehow. No, in many instances, God explicitly orders massacres; in fact, sometimes he orders massacres of people for something their ancestors did, as with the Amalekites (

The massacre is also discussed in Paul Copan’s book. I advise dropping this childish game of “gotcha” and actually giving some serious thought to the issue.

And there is no inference from “the OT authors may have been mistaken in attributing some commands to God,” to “the Bible tells us nothing about God’s moral character.”
The we cannot understand everything about God’s character from the OT, does not entail that we understand nothing about it from the OT. The rest of your post is simply rhetoric. In the same way a teacher will hold beginning students to a lower standard, so God may have held the Israelite to a lower standard at first. Asking too much too soon, might have broken them.

Your comments are simply irrelevant to the problem of evil. At most your comments would force us to abandon our doctrine of literal biblical inerrancy and adopt inspiration instead. That might require some adjustment, but would hardly be traumatic.

 

[danserr]

Dansser wrote, "The non-seum inference the atheist makes in support of this fails because we are not well placed to assess if such a being has a justifying reason. Just like the math example. My only point is to show that we are not justified in thinking that the existence of evil is a reason for doubting the existence of the Christian God. As to believing in God, obviously, I have other reasons, so am not stuck with agnosticism. "

We were not talking about other reasons for believing God exists, but of the implications of this particular analogy. My point is that if we are not well placed to judge one side of an issue, like the moral perfection of God or a complicated math problem, we are not justified in assuming the other either, for the same reason. We can say nothing about it.

Agreed, on the basis of ST alone. My analogy does not prove that we know God is good. But that is not the point. The point is only to show that the atheists nonseum inference is misguided and unwarranted, not to prove God is good. We know that for other reasons, such as the moral argument.

 

[jochoa]

Not necessarily. If a floor is made up of identical tiles, and every tile is square, then it does not follow that the whole floor is square.

Your statement is definitely valid. Although, it does not take into consideration of Free Wills. If each tile were Free to choose its shape, then a collection of Freely shaped Tiles would be Free to either choose to shape the floor differently or the same as the original tile.

Here is the definition I use: Evil is intentionally causing or allowing gratuitous pain and suffering to a being with a nervous system. And I do not subscribe to “thought-crimes”, so thoughts cannot be “evil”, only actions can.

I have a few questions to help me understand your definition: How do you differentiate between pain and suffering? Would you consider sharing a thought an action or an extension of thought? How would you determine the Intention of the Criminal?

God could have created humans who would have only a certain amount of freedom, sufficient to separate the “goats from the sheep”. To be precise: allow us the freedom to worship or not to worship God. Then he could have had the “excuse” to torture eternally all the “non-worshippers” and reward all the worshippers with eternal bliss. (I don’t know which one is worse.) There is no need for the extra freedom to be able to kill, torture, rape etc… each other.

If God only wanted us to worship Him, He could have created Robotic (Limited Will) Beings. However, He wants you and me to Freely choose to be Patient and Kind and Motivated for Him towards All Others and the Self, not only will you and I experience the greatest peace, an undefinable happiness and unstoppable energy, He will also experience a Greater/Undefinable Joy. And in order to achieve this, there is Need for Absolute Freedom.

Thoughts?

 

[jochoa]

Jochoa wrote: “If he only chose those who would do the most good or made us more loving, Humanity as a whole would never be of a free nature.”

Not at all. There are people today who are more loving than others; are they less free? No, they are better people.

To help me understand your perspective better, please consider the following questions:
How do you define Love?
Scenario:
If a person is raised by Amazingly “loving” parents, and develops only to a person of Excellent love. And…
If another person is raised by Decently “loving” parents, and develops only to a person of Good love.
And…
If another person is raised by rather “hateful” parents, and develops into a person of Amazing love.
Which persons, including parents, are the better people?

Psychopaths are by nature incapable of feeling empathy for others, or compassion for their sufferings. They often know intellectually that their actions are considered wrong by others, but have no sense themselves of the wrongness of these acts. Since this condition is caused by defective genetics and brain chemistry, I am not debating their moral culpability; but they do have free will, in the sense that nothing constrains them from choosing what they do, except that they lack the sense of compassion and empathy which prevents normal people from acts they would likely commit without it. They are unquestionably less loving than others, since they cannot love at all; yet their freedom of action is not constrained. The question is, why does God create such people? Is the freedom of the psychopath worth all the misery they create? Apparently, God thinks so.

I know in my infancy, I was one of these “psychopaths”. I could have cared less that my parents were tired and had to go to work early in the morning the next day. If I wanted to play at 1:00 in the night, I was going to freely choose to get their attention. Over several years, my parents, family, and friends, “loved” me enough to get me to a more stable livelihood.
Therefore, I propose that older “psychopaths” are unquestionably less “loved” than others, since they can only recognize how to “love” themselves.
I am quite confident that All Humans experience this stage of life. I think this is Evidence of Writings on the Human Heart: Every Human has a Free Will from Ignorance (lack of Compassion and Empathy in particular), and a Selfishness from Desires of Peace, Happiness, Energy/Power, and Knowledge.
I think it would be more productive for us to consider How can we help “psychopaths” and victims of their crimes, rather than How can we rid of “psychopaths”.

Thoughts?

 

[CatholicIllini]

Athiests pose the questions:

1. Why would a perfectly good God would allow evil?
2. If God knew mankind was going to fall, why didn’t he create humans that were less vulnerable to sin?
3. Why do innocents (children) suffer?
4. Why does God allow natural disasters, which are unrelated to human sin?

Answer to 1: Is there true love without free will? Can you truly love an entity in which you have no choice but to love it? God allowed evil to come into the world because he wanted men to love him freely and truthfully. Without the existence of evil, there would be no real choice. Evil is obviously the worse choice, but it is still a choice. Without knowing and experiencing what is evil, one cannot truly understand the good that is God. It’s like all the unsuccessful relationships you have before you marry your spouse. Without those bad relationships, you wouldn’t know how truly lucky you are to be married to your spouse, and therefore wouldn’t feel nearly as happy and content. What if you were in an arranged marriage from birth? Even if your arranged spouse was beautiful and kind, would you be more content with him/her over someone you chose yourself?

Answer to 2: God alone is perfect. It is His very essence. Since we are not God, we cannot be perfect. Also, our imperfection and sin only makes us love God more. Jesus explains this perfectly in the Parable of the Two Debtors and the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Who loves the lender more: The one who has the smaller debt forgiven or the one who has the larger debt forgiven? Who loves their father more: the righteous son, or the prodigal son? If man had never been separated from God through Original Sin, we would never know the unending joy and gratitude of being redeemed through His Son. As the saying goes, “Separation makes the heart grow fonder.”

Answer to 3: It truly is a tragedy when children suffer and die. But considering that there is evil in this world, maybe God is actually sparing them from the suffering and temptation that they would face later in life. Maybe if the children had lived longer, they would have been worn down and depressed by the evils of this world, as so many are, and eventually rejected God and not achieved salvation. Maybe God decided they could skip all that hardship and come straight to Heaven to enjoy eternity with Him.

Answer to 4: God makes it rain on the good and the bad. If more and more people are going to be born into this world, some people are going to have to die to make room and let others enjoy the gift of life. Everyone has to die sometime, whether it be by illness or natural disaster. When an earthquake happens and thousands die, the good go to Heaven and the bad go to Hell. It’s no different than if they had died individually.

 

[tonyrey]

If it can be proved that any of the precepts or actions of Jesus were evil Christianity is refuted! So far no one has performed that feat…

The problem of evil doesn’t exist in a purposeless universe. You can’t get blood out of a stone neither can you get value out of a spark in the dark…

 

[Samuel_Maynes]

Dear Readers,

I was asked by Lisa, over on the “Questions about Trinity” page, to say something about the “problem of evil.” When I looked at your recent posts, I see you have the answers in an abstract way.

To be more specific (and provocative), don’t you sometimes think that Hitler was the devil incarnate, and humankind may have already survived the 1000-year reign of Satan on earth? After all, the Master once said, If those days be not shortened, no one will survive. Now we may stand in a new world, with the devil off our backs, by the grace of the Son, and the power of the people.

One of the first things on the new agenda is to finish the battle against religious racism, and hopefully, we may be “pushing on an open door.” If the existential threat has been excised from the equation, the powerful concepts of universal moral duty and pure practical reason are bound to start shining through (see below) - finding common ground, and growing strong and good.

In a recent Documentary, I saw a German Captain of the army, still looking formidable at 70. He said, “When I met Hitler, in 1933, I knew right away that he was a God, and afterwards, I didn’t have time for anybody who couldn’t see that. Later on, near the middle of 1944, I realized Hitler was an evil genius, who had misled Germany to catastrope. But by then it was too late.”

I think, for the rest of us, it is not too late. The time for closer economic unity of the world is ripe. However, the legacy of racism is still with us in the form of religious racism, which is still the curse of the earth. This pernicious belief in “only” one way, blocks the way forward to world unity, under the representations of multi-dimensional God in a United Nations and World Council of Churches, or something very much like them.

These institutions, in some form or other, simply must be made to work. There is no credible alternative to building on what we’ve got - short of violent revolution - and there is no excuse.

The Papacy has pointed to the answer in ecumenism and interfaith dialogue. Please checkout my new book, now previewing at www.trinityabsolute.com “The Trinity Absolute: a Constructive Interpretation of World Religions and a Metaphysical Blueprint for Peace.”

Samuel Stuart Maynes
www.trinityabsolute.com

P.S. Here is page 43 from my book outlining the “moral duty and reason” mentioned above.

1.4 THE MORAL DUTY ARGUMENT FROM THE CONCEPTION OF A CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE

This proof is from the conception of one absolute categorical imperative, as identified by Kant, and the understanding that the absolute idea is of God, as recognized by Hegel.

Immanuel Kant makes the case that space/time, cause/effect, mathematics, logic, and moral duty are part of the structure of pure theoretical reason and constitute certain knowledge. There is an absolute moral law discovered by pure a priori reason. The universal moral principle is: “Act as though the maxim of your action were, by your will, to become a universal law of nature” – the one categorical imperative. Kant then made the argument that ‘ought implies can’, and there would be no practical point in following any so-called absolute moral law unless the soul can achieve perfection, and this can only happen if the soul is free and immortal. God also gives the moral law divine sanction, and without Him moral duty exists only in disconnected theoretical terms relative to practical utility and the overwhelming human life concerns of self-advantage.

Kant argued that there is no absolute subjection to moral duty unless we assume something the existence of which in itself has objective value… something which as an end in itself could be the ground of determinate laws… something having its source outside all causal chains. But, that “end in itself,” which is the ground of all laws based on the one categorical imperative, is part of the moral spirit of the Absolute, which we commonly call God. And all human souls have a divine spark of that moral spirit, which they commonly call conscience.

Pure practical moral wisdom combines the universal principle of pure reason and the greatest utility principle of practical reason. This provides the basis for all law between and among individuals. The highest morality is a righteous combination of duty and universal utility, truth and goodness, but without God duty cannot be absolute. Without God, the social principle of “one for all, and all for one,” is a political choice and not a moral duty. And without God, we cannot ascend to the higher morality of the positive expression of the Golden Rule, and the rarefied atmosphere of the challenge to “love your neighbour as yourself,” and even “love your enemy and forgive.”

If there is no God, then the only motivation to be good is the abstract satisfaction of the pursuit of perfection. But without God, perfection becomes an empty slogan, because there is no absolute perfection, and all morality is relative. And in the end, such rationalization is merely a form of cynical stoicism, which is a rather melancholy and unreliable substitute for real moral conviction. (p.43)

 

[antunesaa]

There is no “hope” involved here. We think that there is a freedom to act, even if it cannot be proven. It is a very plausible assumption. The moral code is perfectly supported with this concept.

That is not a question of “justice”. You better try again. There are quite a few things that even God cannot do. One of them is “changing the past”. If a human father would beat up his child, and then later would give him a lollipop as a “compensation”, it would not “undo” the injustice of the beating. The “beating” must stand on its own right if it was “just”.

Almost? How would you know if our capabilities are “almost” supernatural? To declare something supernatural, you need an exhaustive knowledge of the “natural”… claiming omniscience again?

Well, well… if I had a dollar for every time when some theist wanted to help me out from my “miserable, hopeless, horrible” life, I would have many shining dollars now. And guess, what - I usually thanked them for their good will and did not scold them for their arrogance - because even if I disagreed with them, I could see their genuine wish to help. Seems like I do not get the same courtesy… oh well.

As for your first phrase, your “lame excuse” to accept belief in transcendent objects (free will) is then that free will is “a very plausible assumption”. Ok, fine - let’s move on. But notice that you’ve opened yourself to the supernatural. No materialistic philosophy that I know can give a convincing account of the simultaneity of immanence and free will. In fact, they do exactly what you just did: state that it’s a plausible assumption or a self-evident truth. The problem is of course that the assumption of total immanence puts tremendous constraints on how a true free will would be operative.

I think your second sentence misses the point: the justice I mentioned is not done according to worldly criteria, although it can also use them. Moreover, who told you that God cannot change the past? It is possible that what we observe is just the outcome of the interaction of contingent realities with divine actions, present and future. A simple analogy is: reality could be thought of as the solution of a given parameterized equation (admittedly a very, very complicated one, with partial derivatives with respect to time, space and what not; a tremendous beast). Once you change the parameters, you have a different solution. God would have the power to change the parameters.

I’ll skip your third paragraph but address the last one. I am not trying to convert you to anything. I know Catholics and other Christians can be quite arrogant; they are not alone. But that is no reason not to engage this discussion in an amiable atmosphere. I think you should abstract from the possible bad experiences you had with theists in the past and follow your own spiritual quest. Who knows what you might just find in the end?

 

[Samuel_Maynes]

No materialistic philosophy that I know can give a convincing account of the simultaneity of immanence and free will.

antunesaa,

I think I agree with much of what you say. However, I think that for every contradiction there exists a dialectical synthesis, and thus reality is triune, not just dualist, nor just monist. For example:

Father and Son unified in their Holy Spirit,
Existential and the experiential consummated in associative consciousness,
Transcendant and immanent integrated in the eternity of the ultimate,
Supernatural and natural fulfilled in their combined destiny,
Necessity and contingency co-related in sufficiency,
Infinite and the finite realized in the limitless,
Theology and cosmology harmonized in psychology,
Heaven and earth integrated in the divine kingdom of All That Is,
Determination and freewill resolved in universal morality.

That last one says that universal morality is the solution to the problem of determination and freewill, which is also the answer to the “problem of evil.”

Please checkout my previous posting on the proof from moral duty. What do you think?

Samuel Stuart Maynes
www.trinityabsolute.com

 

[SGWessells]

Danserr (sorry about the misspelling) wrote:

"And there is no inference from “the OT authors may have been mistaken in attributing some commands to God,” to “the Bible tells us nothing about God’s moral character.”
The we cannot understand everything about God’s character from the OT, does not entail that we understand nothing about it from the OT. The rest of your post is simply rhetoric. In the same way a teacher will hold beginning students to a lower standard, so God may have held the Israelite to a lower standard at first. Asking too much too soon, might have broken them.

Your comments are simply irrelevant to the problem of evil. At most your comments would force us to abandon our doctrine of literal biblical inerrancy and adopt inspiration instead. That might require some adjustment, but would hardly be traumatic."

I said “nothing reliably”. Big difference. They can ,and did, tell us lots of things, but the only standard we have to differentiate between their limited, erroneous understanding and their accurate, inspired insights, is, as far as I can tell, whatever we moderns find compatible with our current ideas of morality. Clearly the ancient Israelites saw nothing wrong, in principle, with slavery, so they saw nothing incongruous in God regulating and permitting it. We moderns, on the other hand, are appalled at it, and believe it makes God look bad if he isn’t (and in fact many anti-Christian writers point this out), so Christians have to find some way to disassociate God from those passages. Yours is one such theory I’ve run across, but they all suffer from the same problem of reading modern morals into ancient literature.
I don’t buy the “lower standard” theory. There are religions contemporary with ancient Israel which postulated a duration for the cosmos of millions of years, for example; also myths of one being metamorphosed into another, as in Ovid, were also common. I see no reason why a God of infinite wisdom couldn’t have used similar concepts to teach a simplified picture of evolution and an old earth to the ancient Hebrews in a way they could understand. But he didn’t.
As for morality, is not “love thy neighbor as thyself” found in Leviticus 19:18? That’s pretty early. If the writers of that period understood that principle, they could easily have written books in which God’s behavior gave them a good example, or never commanded otherwise. But they didn’t. So it wasn’t that God hid this sublime principle until the New Testament.

I’ve never understood what “inspiration” could mean or how it could work without inerrancy. If parts of the bible were right and parts wrong, one would need an extra-biblical standard by which to determine what parts belonged in each category. Where is it to be found? You can’t say "The Catholic Church, " because the Catholic Church teaches inerrancy, not just inspiration.

 

[SGWessells]

Beautifully said !!! Congratulations!

Thank you, Spock .
:blushing:

How come you haven’t told anyone, “fascinating, but illogical” yet? Too obvious?

 

[SGWessells]

I (It must be said that the scientific literature robustly shows that strong religious beliefs correlate positively with measures of well-being.)

Actually, on a social level, the exact reverse is true. A study published in Evolutionary Psychology, July 2009 (vol.7(3), 399-434) called “The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity upon Dysfunctional Psychological Conditions” tested whether religion is necessary to the health and prosperity of a society, and whether higher degrees of nonreligiosity are more likely to be associated with better social and economic conditions. Seventeen first world nations (per capita income of at least $23,000) were tested.

Criteria for religiosity included belief in God, biblical literalism,evolution, heaven, and hell; frequency of prayer and church attendance, and the number of unbelievers.
Criteria for dysfunction included per capita number of homicides, incarcerations, suicides, abortions, infant mortality, life expectancy, infant mortality, life expectancy, marriage duration, divorce rate, alcohol use, corruption, income and income disparity, poverty and unemployment levels.

The USA came in first in both lists. Overall, there was a marked correlation between how religious a society was, and how dysfunctional it is, with the lowest rates found among the least religious of countries. You can find a summary of this study where I did, in Bugliosi’s book Divinity of Doubt (which, by the way, I cannot endorse wholeheartedly, since its quality and knowledge level are very uneven. This study, however, was endorsed by an impressive list of health organizations).

 

[SGWessells]

To help me understand your perspective better, please consider the following questions:

How do you define Love?
Scenario:
If a person is raised by Amazingly “loving” parents, and develops only to a person of Excellent love. And…
If another person is raised by Decently “loving” parents, and develops only to a person of Good love.
And…
If another person is raised by rather “hateful” parents, and develops into a person of Amazing love.
Which persons, including parents, are the better people?

Psychopathology is a precise medical condition, and is determined by genetic defects. It has nothing to do with how loved a person has been, except to the extent that the psychopath’s lack of empathy and resultant cruelty result in people around them finding them difficult to love. But it has nothing to do with the normal selfish stage we all experience as infants. Psychopaths cannot “grow out of” their condition no matter how you love them, because they lack the necessary brain function in the area associated with empathy and compassion (which fMRI technology has precisely determined).
Of course, this has interesting implications for “free will.” How freely can someone incapable of empathy, compassion, or remorse, choose to love others? They can imitate actions which have been approved by their society as loving, but they only do so to be accepted or gain an advantage or trust they can later exploit.
There is also this: if God is responsible for our genetic makeup, then he has created psychopaths knowing all about the havoc and misery they will create as a result of a defect he put there, and could easily have prevented without interfering with their free will in the least. In fact, their will would be* more* free if they were not psychopaths. So why isn’t God held responsible? The only way to absolve God would be to deny that he determines our genetics, leaving evolution functionally outside his control.

 

[antunesaa]

antunesaa,

I think I agree with much of what you say. However, I think that for every contradiction there exists a dialectical synthesis, and thus reality is triune, not just dualist, nor just monist. For example:

Father and Son unified in their Holy Spirit,
Existential and the experiential consummated in associative consciousness,
Transcendant and immanent integrated in the eternity of the ultimate,
Supernatural and natural fulfilled in their combined destiny,
Necessity and contingency co-related in sufficiency,
Infinite and the finite realized in the limitless,
Theology and cosmology harmonized in psychology,
Heaven and earth integrated in the divine kingdom of All That Is,
Determination and freewill resolved in universal morality.

That last one says that universal morality is the solution to the problem of determination and freewill, which is also the answer to the “problem of evil.”

Please checkout my previous posting on the proof from moral duty. What do you think?

Samuel Stuart Maynes
www.trinityabsolute.com

I’ll check it out.