You certainly have! The objections to carnivory, parasitism, and disease are based on the unsubstantiated assumption that they are unnecessary. No one has explained **why **they are unnecessary and how they could be prevented.
That isn’t an argument that can be upheld in conjunction with the idea that God’s ways are necessarily beyond human comprehension. It isn’t necessary, in order to attack the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds, to describe in precise detail how it could have been constructed in order to avoid premeditated, accidental and ‘natural’ evils. It is necessary only to notice that things could be better than they are - from the perspective of the sentient beings in which God is supposedly interested - and suggest ways that this could be accomplished, if we had vast powers at our disposal.
That is well said, and would seem to hold up as well for panentheism as well, Design as a concept, it skirting the issue of the 'disigner" as well, is similarly to materialism, a least likely hypothesis.
No it doesn’t. Again, your working under the unproven, and I would submit essentially unprovable, assumption that the laws of reality, given the first principles of maximization of freedom in creation and so forth, could have been different. It in fact seems rather dubious to me when taking this basic principle, freedom in creation, that an intelligible universe could have been possible without such features as disease, predation and so forth being interwoven into the tapestry. This, again, does not “limit” God anymore than it does to assert that God cannot create a square circle.
This is semantics, not logic. Changing the definition or understanding of “love” does allow it, in a sense, to enslave. But that’s not the use of the term that I, or most of us, would have in mind when asserting that “love” has at its foundation the desire for freedom for the object of that love. Don’t think “love” as in “obsession”, but rather “love” as in the Greek “agape”.
Whoa, “fiction” of eternal life? Obvious unproven and unknowable assertion. But as for your main point here; please articulate for me how one could truly be “free” at all if, at a foundational level of free will, said freedom did NOT include the possibility for one to determine to harm, butcher, rape, or kill others and then to act on that determination? How would such a “freedom” work? You are free to act as you will because God wills it so out of love for you, but only insofar as you act only in accordance with His moral laws and precepts? Let’s not be silly, clearly we are either free to act virtuously or heinously as WE decide, or we are not really free at all. To take away the choice in attempt to save others from the terrible harms we might do is to make us automatons, not humans. So, from God’s perspective, apparently the answer is “Yes”. Freedom IS worth the price of the potential to inflict suffering on others, because it couldn’t rationally be any other way, and here I must say I’d have to agree…would you rather be a computer, after all?
You are still assuming that even with vast powers it is possible to make things better than they are **and **achieve the same goals. You also have to specify what you mean by “better” - which presupposes a value judgment based on an obscure criterion…
So far I have seen nothing whatsoever that justifies the proposition that the suffering in the world disproves the existence of the omnibenevolent, omnipotent Creator of this immensely valuable universe in which there are beings who have the power to deny and reject the very Source of goodness, freedom, justice, beauty and love in favour of the blind Goddess…
Really? I haven’t seen a cogent refutation of the points we theists have made here. The points made may not make you feel warm and cozy, but they stand regardless.
We all see faces in woodgrains and animals in clouds, so I guess it is “natural” to make up some story that our univers and we in it are “designed.” I’ve even hear of people massing to geve devotions to an image construed to be Jesus or Mary in a slice of pizza, so it would follow that some might expand that to the incomprehensibly vast universe. But such a proposition is, to be both kind and tactful, immature. It also demeans God by anthropomorphising That which is unknowable by th human brain and its astonishing ability to devide in order to comprehend what is whole. It ain’t gonna happen by those means, science notwithstanding. There is another thread on here relative to this idea that might better be called “*Powerful *(lack of) evidence for Design.” Perhaps a more useful word for what is happening might be discovered by those who are using “design?’”
Perhaps you are imagining that you are reasoning but you may well just be the product of purposeless events and your thoughts are merely meaningless electrical impulses…
Thanks, Tonyrey, for remiding me that what we speak confesses our own condition.
Don’t you think we have any choice regarding our condition?
Everything that has been said to rectify the two propositions either assumes that God couldn’t have created the world and made it work without all the suffering, or that the suffering is necessary in order to provide a greater good - human free will.
Why would it not have contained sentient beings? Are people not sentient in heaven? Are angels not sentient? And yet there is no suffering in heaven. Clearly God CAN create a realm that contains sentient beings but does not contain suffering.
The abuse of free will is only one of the many causes of suffering. Nature is designed to cause itself to suffer. Are you saying that lions are abusing free will when they tear a zebra apart? No, they’re just doing what they’re designed to do. They have no choice in the matter. Likewise, natural disasters such as fires and tsunamis cause immense suffering and death to people and animals, but there was no will involved there at all. If anything, the “will” that controls nature would be God’s will, because he designed it that way.
I fail to see how preventing unnecessary suffering defeats the purpose of the universe.
Why? Does suffering make us sentient? And again, there’s the problem of heaven, which is full of sentient beings but has no suffering.
They wouldn’t be inevitable if an all-powerful being didn’t want them to be.
I agree with that point. But that only tells me that there are physical laws ruling the universe. I’d think that if there was an omnibenevolent being calling all the shots, he would overrule the physical laws when they were about to do harmful things.
Boring to see the same unimaginative nonsense. Vegetation does not have pain receptors, and they do just fine. If a part breaks off, it can regrow. Planaria survives even being cut in half. The mechanism to live without pain is there - and, of course a good designer would incorporate the good solution into its creation. Not to mention that life does not have to be biologically founded. Sentient beings could be created of any material, as long as there is information processing capacity there.
Genuine love accepts the weaknesses of another, but does not allow the loved one to succumb to the point of being destroyed by those weaknesses. Consider anyone who is, for example, married to an alcoholic. Is it genuine love to allow the alcoholic to drink him/herself to death? Or, alternatively, to allow a heroin addict to commit a violent robbery to feed his/her addiction, thus risking a lengthy term in prison - or even overdosing on their next fix? It could certainly be argued that addicts, whilst in the grip of their drug of choice, are not truly ‘free’. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that we, generally, when driven by our passions, and as we have been shaped by our genetics and our social and environmental conditioning, are also not truly ‘free’ in the sense in which it is often meant - that of contra-causal free will, that is, the ability to make any choice under given circumstances. It could further be argued that the freedom to harm and abuse is no true freedom at all, since the exercise of this supposed freedom on the part of one person necessarily cancels out the freedom of another person - hence maximal freedom, if such is the ultimate goal, requires a better, perhaps more finely-tuned balance than has apparently been achieved in our present world.
Poseidon:
I’m delighted you would prefer to be a vegetable - or a robot! It would solve all your problems very neatly…
