Hi J: I agree and think you are totally correct, but we are believers. Others who do not believe (in God and/or various aspects, teachings, concepts, etc) parse every word and reality - like the ones you so beautifully and simply state. A lot of people don’t make the automatic connection you did from point A to point B and beyond.
Re: Pat's "God can't be mean. if God were mean, God could / would no longer be God." Since the OT God is easily percieved as a God of punishment and retribution, (see post 96 this thread) I say that the god refered to there is completly anthropomorphic and is not the God refered to by Jesus in his minestry of Love.
Re: Toastmachines's signature ~ "What happens to the sinful creatures of God, however tragic, is less monstrous than what happened to the Son of God." P.J. Forsyth: **God did that to Himself! HE sent his Son. ** Who is the "monster?" The total impossibility of that alleged dynamic in Catholic terms confirms for me that the Church's interpretation of the Jesus story is *so* off base as to be a prophylactic to any actual realizaton of the significance of that very Real and utterly fundamental Sacrifice. If there is meanness in god, it is in the god made up to do such an impossibility in those terms. I maintain that incarnation and redemption are on much firmer ground than that mythos promulgated by the Church as its misunderstanding of Jesus, who was the Son of God. I guess we might say then, that the alleged meanness of god is in fact the perhaps ignorant and habitual intellectualized meanness of the Church in misrepresenting the actual facts.Now you are trying to use Hume to show that, at least in Hume’s opinion, we cannot know whether there could be a sufficient justification for evil. So do you acknowledge that when you were using a quote from Hume to show that he thought natural evil was inevitable you were misinterpreting his words? Saying it’s possible that there’s a justification does not mean that there definitely is.
This is twice that you have quoted Hume out of context. I do not assume dishonesty on your part, but I am curious about the reason. If you’re relying on a secondary source, I don’t blame you. We all have to rely sometimes on secondary sources. It just might be a better idea in the future to double check whether something is accurate before using it.
God supposedly created everything. He created matter, as well as the properties of matter. He created our minds, as well as the properties of minds. He created everything. If you are saying that God was constrained by physical laws external to himself, then God loses his omnipotence. And if he was constrained by physical laws, he would not have been able to create dualistic human minds that influence the physical world.
Well it’s obviously fairly hard to imagine a physical world with laws different than my own, although physicists have shown many such universes to be possible. Here’s something that might be easier to comprehend: God could have prevented all natural disasters through perpetual miracles with no effort whatsoever. Whenever a hurricane was about to arise, God could have eased the weather just enough to prevent it.
But God supposedly created everything and is not beholden to any set of physical laws.
He seems to make a very good case for why animls do not need to suffer.
I agree. I do not assume that God must always adhere to our moral intuitions in order to be good. But then you have to wonder whether it makes sense to assign the attribute of “good” to a God. Do we just call him good because we have been fortunate to have relatively happy lives, at least compared to some people in third world countries? You also have the problem of whether God is good because we just assign the label “good” to everything he does (and he could have made murder moral if that was what he had willed), or is he good because his nature adheres to some objective morality (in which case you have to explain how you know this objective morality exists, just like the atheist does)? I explored this topic in another thread, and I don’t think anyone was able to come up with a good justification for how God could be good in a meaningful way. I begin discussing the issue on this page of the thread.
I agree with you that it is possible for a greater good to come from apparent evil. But an all powerful God could bring about the same amount of good without the evil.
They are simply doing what God created them to do.
A diminution of pleasure would hardly be as efficient as pain causing a swift reflex action. Your hand would be severely burned if you didn’t receive a sharp warning.
… rather, I think, God as Supreme Being knows both of those.
Again, I’ll offer a gentle redirection: IS is. It is we who call IS “God.” By doing so, in our usual inimitable and dualistic manner, we split God away from all else, and I believe this to be an incorrect view. Understandable, mind you, since we’re human and think only in dualistic terms, but incorrect nonetheless.
Again we have the split. Is God the ‘substrate’ (the wall of the cave, the screen on which manifestation plays, Emptiness, The Void?), or is God the apparent manifestation that arises… or… both?
Then how do you explain his final conclusion?
God is not constrained by physical laws but once He has created them it would be senseless to keep changing them because that would undermine the purpose for which they are created: to provide an environment for life and rational existence.
Accidents and harmful coincidences are inevitable in any system with physical laws.
A constant succession of miracles would undermine the order necessary for a rational existence.
I believe that it takes a very good man to post that. My hat’s off to you, Detales. Thank you for staying aware and vigilant.
LOL! That is excellent; thanks.It’s a reflex action, which means we do not consciously decide to react in that way. So instead of causing our body to instinctively pull away and causing pain, God could have merely made us instinctively pull away. Since this is not an action we decide to do before we do it, there’s no reason for pain. If we have a robot-like reaction and consciously feel pain, there is no need for the conscious feeling of pain.
Hume is saying that natural theology, as many define it, says that there is some cause of the universe which is at least somewhat analogous to the human mind (not just some physical process). He clearly is not saying that he supports this view. He goes on to say that even if this were true, this would be useless. Merely knowing that there is some sort of immaterial mind that caused the universe does not give you any idea about how we as humans should behave, because we would still know nothing about what that God would want.
You are merely making an unsupported assumption that this is the case. This would be no different than me saying that the material world is all that exists, therefore God could not possibly exist. I am not saying miracles that we know are miracles; I am saying that he could prevent each disaster at its source. We could still come to understand the world rationally. We would just learn that that is how the weather behaves. Science is based upon figuring out the best theories to model how the world works. If the weather was always mild and always behaved the same way, we would develop laws for how it behaves. Just look at physics. When atoms don’t behave how we’d expect based on our current laws, we come up with new theories for what can explain these inconsistencies (like string theory for example). So perpetual miracles would merely be incorporated into our knowledge of how nature behaves. And since God is all powerful, he could create a world set up in such a way that the perpetual miracles would be part of the universe’s behavior, and not something that he’d have to continually intervene to produce.
This article does not address the problems I brought up. If you say which specific argument from the article you find compelling, I can explain why I disagree.
I chose the name because I thought some people might get a laugh out of it. I do not actually see myself as evil. I think morality is a tricky topic. I’m not yet sure whether it is possible to have meaningful objective morality without God, but as I touched on here and explained in the thread that I linked to, meaningful objective morality cannot exist any easier with a God than without one.