The 'Hotel Manager' Indictment
//Thread title changed - originally The Hotel Manager Theodicy, which was misleading, as the view being criticized is not a religious apologetic, but used as an indictment. Thread title changed to reflect this.//
One of the most frequently raised objections to religious belief in the modern world is the Problem of Evil. The argument is simple and emotionally powerful: if God is all-powerful and all-good, then why does He allow terrible suffering? The stock examples are ready to hand: the torture of innocents, natural disasters, the capricious cruelty of life. Surely, it is said, if God were truly good and omnipotent, He would not permit such things. He has the power to prevent them, but does not, so He must be malicious.
But this framing of the problem reflects a profound misunderstanding of its nature. It assumes a particular conception of God one that is, in effect, a kind of cosmic hotel manager. The world is imagined as a well-appointed establishment where the guests expect, indeed are entitled to, a decent standard of accommodation. If the plumbing leaks or the ceiling collapses, we understandably demand to know who is responsible. Whos running this place!?! Who is in charge!?! becomes not just a rhetorical question but a moral indictment¹.
Let us call this the Hotel Manager Theodicy. It holds God to account for the conditions of the world in the same way one might complain about bad service. But this view has no basis in the spiritual vision of the major religious traditions. And even on its own terms, the logic quickly becomes untenable. If suffering were to be eliminated, where exactly should the line be drawn? Is it enough that we only suffer head colds, not cancer? That no child is ever harmed, but adults might still endure misfortune? That natural disasters occur, but without casualties? (It turns out, after all, that life on earth requires that the earths core be hot, which causes volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis.) So, the very premise begins to collapse under scrutiny, because any finite world governed by change, limitation, and contingency will contain disorder. The moment there is matter, there is entropy. To demand a world of comfort and security without suffering is, in effect, to demand a world without change, decay, or finitude. But such a world would be lifeless, inert, or unlike anything we recognize as human experience. Disorder and disease seem, in some sense, to be inevitable aspects of physical existence itself.
Besides, nowhere in the sacred texts of East or West is there a promise that the world will be free of suffering. Quite the contrary. Christianity, for example, is founded upon the image of a crucified Saviour, who bore suffering for the benefit of all mankind². Buddhism begins with the recognition that life is inevitably marked by suffering (dukkha). These traditions are not surprised by suffering; they take it as the starting point of spiritual inquiry.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov³, gives voice to a famous version of this complaint in the character of Ivan, who refuses to accept a world redeemed by God if the price of that redemption includes the suffering of a single innocent child. His rejection is not logical but moral an existential protest. Yet the deeper reply is not given by counter-argument, but by the spiritual witness of Alyosha and the silent faith of the saints, who do not explain suffering but transfigure it through love.
To modern sensibilities, this sounds like a dodge. But that is because modernity has flattened the metaphysical landscape. When there is only this world, and only this life, then any suffering seems unbearable and unjustifiable. After all, life is supposed to be good, right? There is no longer any axis of salvation, no trajectory of the soul, no higher destiny against which the meaning of suffering might be understood. The result is either a kind of moral outrage, which demands an answer that the spiritual traditions were never trying to provide, or retreat into the nihilism foretold by Nietzsche.
The Augustinian view of evil as privatio boni (privation of the good) is also instructive. Evil, on this view, is not a substance or a power in its own right, but the lack of something that ought to be. Like rot in wood or shadow in light, it is a deficiency, a defect, not a thing in itself. Augustine writes in Confessions, For evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being. This view does not explain evil away, but it places it in a broader context: creation is good, but also finite, and finitude allows for, indeed entails, distortion, error, and suffering. This is not an answer in a managerial sense, but it reframes the issue in a broader context.
The Buddha, too, begins with suffering not as something to be blamed on a creator, but as a or the basic fact of existence. The First Noble Truth states that existence inevitably entails suffering, and the Buddhist path begins by recognizing and understanding that it has both a cause and a way to bring it to an end. It is not an appeal to divine justice so much as a liberating insight. But it doesnt try and gild the lily of suffering in this world.
In both Christian and Buddhist cosmologies, the condition of suffering is not incidental but intrinsic to our state of being. In Christian theology, suffering is bound up with the Fall not simply as a punishment, but as the consequence of a turning away from the divine source. In Buddhist thought, there is no single event of falling, but rather a beginningless ignorance (avidy?) that gives rise to craving, rebirth, and the cycles of suffering (sa?s?ra). In both cases, the fact of being born into the material world is itself an index of spiritual estrangement. Worldly existence, in these traditions, is not expected to be perfect. On the contrary, it is marked by imperfection as the very condition that makes liberation or salvation necessary.
The modern indictment of God on the grounds of suffering is, therefore, based on false premisses. It seeks from religion what religion never promised: a world without pain. The real question is not why suffering exists, but what it means, and what it points to. For that, one must look not to a cosmic customer service desk, but to the depths of the soul and the mystery of being.
In that sense, the real problem is not the nature of life, but one of spiritual literacy. We are missing a dimension of existence, against which the nature of suffering can be better understood. There is no sickness, toil or danger in the place to which I go, sings the Poor Wayfaring Stranger?. And that isnt for a minute to justify suffering, or to deprecate the ability to seek amelioration through medicine, science and political remedies.
But spiritual literacy is not something that can be regained through a change in opinion or sentiment. It is a way of seeing the world a metaphysical orientation that has been largely lost to modernity. The decline of religious cosmologies, the ascendancy of scientific materialism, and the collapse of a shared symbolic framework have left us without the conceptual space for transcendence. We live, as philosopher Charles Taylor has observed, within an immanent frame? a view of the world that is closed to the transcendent by default, even when it remains open to moral or aesthetic experience.
To recover a sense of the larger reality that the religious traditions point toward is no easy undertaking. It often requires a kind of rupture or a crisis a painful deconstruction of the ego and its assumptions, the subject of many a major work of art, philosophy and literature. The path to a deeper understanding often passes through doubt, loss, and confrontation with suffering itself, a dark night of the soul, as it has been called. The mystics and sages rarely speak of temporal comfort; they speak of insight, of awakening, of seeing what really matters.
But this essay is not an attempt to justify suffering, nor to offer spiritual guidance. It aims only to point out the mistake of that common assumption in modern discourse the idea that if God exists, He must operate like a benevolent manager of human well-being. Its a superficial way of seeing it. Recovering some understanding of the metaphysical and theological contexts against which the problem of evil has traditionally been resolved, allows us to reframe the question in a larger context??one in which suffering still has to be reckoned with, but not on account of a malicious God.
-------------------------------------
1. The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in Gods acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God in the dock. Lewis, C.S. God in the Dock, Eerdmans Pub Co; Reprint edition (1 October 1994)
2. A significant exception to the classical theistic view is found in certain strands of Gnostic thought, which depict the creator of the world the demiurge as either malevolent or ignorant (sometimes identified with the Jehovah of the Old Testament.) In these schools, the material world is not a fallen creation of a good God, but a prison from which the soul must escape through the attainment of gnosis. See Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. 3rd ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.
3. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.
4. Poor Wayfaring Stranger, American Folk Hymn, Traditional
5. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
One of the most frequently raised objections to religious belief in the modern world is the Problem of Evil. The argument is simple and emotionally powerful: if God is all-powerful and all-good, then why does He allow terrible suffering? The stock examples are ready to hand: the torture of innocents, natural disasters, the capricious cruelty of life. Surely, it is said, if God were truly good and omnipotent, He would not permit such things. He has the power to prevent them, but does not, so He must be malicious.
But this framing of the problem reflects a profound misunderstanding of its nature. It assumes a particular conception of God one that is, in effect, a kind of cosmic hotel manager. The world is imagined as a well-appointed establishment where the guests expect, indeed are entitled to, a decent standard of accommodation. If the plumbing leaks or the ceiling collapses, we understandably demand to know who is responsible. Whos running this place!?! Who is in charge!?! becomes not just a rhetorical question but a moral indictment¹.
Let us call this the Hotel Manager Theodicy. It holds God to account for the conditions of the world in the same way one might complain about bad service. But this view has no basis in the spiritual vision of the major religious traditions. And even on its own terms, the logic quickly becomes untenable. If suffering were to be eliminated, where exactly should the line be drawn? Is it enough that we only suffer head colds, not cancer? That no child is ever harmed, but adults might still endure misfortune? That natural disasters occur, but without casualties? (It turns out, after all, that life on earth requires that the earths core be hot, which causes volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis.) So, the very premise begins to collapse under scrutiny, because any finite world governed by change, limitation, and contingency will contain disorder. The moment there is matter, there is entropy. To demand a world of comfort and security without suffering is, in effect, to demand a world without change, decay, or finitude. But such a world would be lifeless, inert, or unlike anything we recognize as human experience. Disorder and disease seem, in some sense, to be inevitable aspects of physical existence itself.
Besides, nowhere in the sacred texts of East or West is there a promise that the world will be free of suffering. Quite the contrary. Christianity, for example, is founded upon the image of a crucified Saviour, who bore suffering for the benefit of all mankind². Buddhism begins with the recognition that life is inevitably marked by suffering (dukkha). These traditions are not surprised by suffering; they take it as the starting point of spiritual inquiry.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov³, gives voice to a famous version of this complaint in the character of Ivan, who refuses to accept a world redeemed by God if the price of that redemption includes the suffering of a single innocent child. His rejection is not logical but moral an existential protest. Yet the deeper reply is not given by counter-argument, but by the spiritual witness of Alyosha and the silent faith of the saints, who do not explain suffering but transfigure it through love.
To modern sensibilities, this sounds like a dodge. But that is because modernity has flattened the metaphysical landscape. When there is only this world, and only this life, then any suffering seems unbearable and unjustifiable. After all, life is supposed to be good, right? There is no longer any axis of salvation, no trajectory of the soul, no higher destiny against which the meaning of suffering might be understood. The result is either a kind of moral outrage, which demands an answer that the spiritual traditions were never trying to provide, or retreat into the nihilism foretold by Nietzsche.
The Augustinian view of evil as privatio boni (privation of the good) is also instructive. Evil, on this view, is not a substance or a power in its own right, but the lack of something that ought to be. Like rot in wood or shadow in light, it is a deficiency, a defect, not a thing in itself. Augustine writes in Confessions, For evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being. This view does not explain evil away, but it places it in a broader context: creation is good, but also finite, and finitude allows for, indeed entails, distortion, error, and suffering. This is not an answer in a managerial sense, but it reframes the issue in a broader context.
The Buddha, too, begins with suffering not as something to be blamed on a creator, but as a or the basic fact of existence. The First Noble Truth states that existence inevitably entails suffering, and the Buddhist path begins by recognizing and understanding that it has both a cause and a way to bring it to an end. It is not an appeal to divine justice so much as a liberating insight. But it doesnt try and gild the lily of suffering in this world.
In both Christian and Buddhist cosmologies, the condition of suffering is not incidental but intrinsic to our state of being. In Christian theology, suffering is bound up with the Fall not simply as a punishment, but as the consequence of a turning away from the divine source. In Buddhist thought, there is no single event of falling, but rather a beginningless ignorance (avidy?) that gives rise to craving, rebirth, and the cycles of suffering (sa?s?ra). In both cases, the fact of being born into the material world is itself an index of spiritual estrangement. Worldly existence, in these traditions, is not expected to be perfect. On the contrary, it is marked by imperfection as the very condition that makes liberation or salvation necessary.
The modern indictment of God on the grounds of suffering is, therefore, based on false premisses. It seeks from religion what religion never promised: a world without pain. The real question is not why suffering exists, but what it means, and what it points to. For that, one must look not to a cosmic customer service desk, but to the depths of the soul and the mystery of being.
In that sense, the real problem is not the nature of life, but one of spiritual literacy. We are missing a dimension of existence, against which the nature of suffering can be better understood. There is no sickness, toil or danger in the place to which I go, sings the Poor Wayfaring Stranger?. And that isnt for a minute to justify suffering, or to deprecate the ability to seek amelioration through medicine, science and political remedies.
But spiritual literacy is not something that can be regained through a change in opinion or sentiment. It is a way of seeing the world a metaphysical orientation that has been largely lost to modernity. The decline of religious cosmologies, the ascendancy of scientific materialism, and the collapse of a shared symbolic framework have left us without the conceptual space for transcendence. We live, as philosopher Charles Taylor has observed, within an immanent frame? a view of the world that is closed to the transcendent by default, even when it remains open to moral or aesthetic experience.
To recover a sense of the larger reality that the religious traditions point toward is no easy undertaking. It often requires a kind of rupture or a crisis a painful deconstruction of the ego and its assumptions, the subject of many a major work of art, philosophy and literature. The path to a deeper understanding often passes through doubt, loss, and confrontation with suffering itself, a dark night of the soul, as it has been called. The mystics and sages rarely speak of temporal comfort; they speak of insight, of awakening, of seeing what really matters.
But this essay is not an attempt to justify suffering, nor to offer spiritual guidance. It aims only to point out the mistake of that common assumption in modern discourse the idea that if God exists, He must operate like a benevolent manager of human well-being. Its a superficial way of seeing it. Recovering some understanding of the metaphysical and theological contexts against which the problem of evil has traditionally been resolved, allows us to reframe the question in a larger context??one in which suffering still has to be reckoned with, but not on account of a malicious God.
-------------------------------------
1. The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in Gods acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God in the dock. Lewis, C.S. God in the Dock, Eerdmans Pub Co; Reprint edition (1 October 1994)
2. A significant exception to the classical theistic view is found in certain strands of Gnostic thought, which depict the creator of the world the demiurge as either malevolent or ignorant (sometimes identified with the Jehovah of the Old Testament.) In these schools, the material world is not a fallen creation of a good God, but a prison from which the soul must escape through the attainment of gnosis. See Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. 3rd ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.
3. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.
4. Poor Wayfaring Stranger, American Folk Hymn, Traditional
5. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
Comments (265)
This is a bit of an understatement, if God is understood to be the creator of the cosmos he is also the creator of all suffering. He didn't merely "allow" it. The more pessimistic among us would condemn God not for "allowing" suffering but for creating a world for suffering to occur within in first place. Couldn't he have left well enough alone?
Anyway, I think the obvious answer to the problem as you put it is to conclude that suffering is in fact not evil. Equating evil with suffering specifically seems like a very modern idea, God might think that the occasional suffering is a good thing.
You mean, not created the world?
Quoting goremand
It's one answer, although suffering that is inflicted, or intentionally brought about, is generally regarded as evil (although to explore that topic would require further consideration.)
Yes, exactly. Its something I've always had trouble with, why would a perfect, infinite and self-sufficient being bother with such a thing? Seems completely arbitrary.
Quoting Wayfarer
We think it's evil when it "crosses the line", but most people are fine with child scuffing their knee (builds character), or a criminal having a bad time in jail (it's a punishment, after all).
Anyway, why should God be concerned with what a bunch of ignorant, fallen beings consider to be good or evil?
Well, I dont believe in God, but for the purposes of this exercise, Id tweak the argument about suffering.
Its not just that suffering happensthrough accidents, natural disasters, terminal illnesses in children, and so on - but that if God created nature and all life within it, then he designed a system where predation and abject cruelty are the engine of survival. An essential feature, not a bug. Nature isnt merely amoral; its grotesquely cruel and perverse by design. To me, this feels less like an argument against Gods existence and more like one for it, because only a conscious superbeing could intentionally design something that inflicts such a vile fate on so many billions. In other words, God isnt just the hotel manager - hes the fucking architect and builder of the joint and it's a charnel house.
I don't like to think in hard yes/no categories. I prefer gradual, relative thinking. So, a little pain is OK. That's not brutal. That's enough to get warned about caries or fire. It's not neccassary to exaggarate it. When there is a white spot on the photo, it's clearly recognisable; it makes no sense to overexpose the photo; it won't make the white spot whiter. I think this hotel manager has no interest in well-exposed photography; he's just a myopic sadist.
Blame Yaldy-Baddy, the ol' Demiurge. Or, even on the more mainstream view: "Satan is the God of this world" (II Corinthians 4:4; see also John 12:31). And "the entire cosmos is under the control of the Evil One" (I John 5.19).Hence, "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him" (I John 2:15). The world is rather in need of saving: "For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved (John 3:17). But "this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil (John 3:19).
Hence, as David Bentley Hart writes in "The Gates of the Sea:"
Metaphysical optimism seems generally at odds with the picture of a fallen and rebellious cosmos.
Right, for instance the view from I Peter 4:
And I Peter 2:
There is also Surah Al-Baqarah - 214
[I]Do you think you will be admitted into Paradise without being tested like those before you? They were afflicted with suffering and adversity and were so ?violently? shaken that ?even? the Messenger and the believers with him cried out, When will Allahs help come? Indeed, Allahs help is ?always? near.[/I]
That said, the passage from David Bentley Hart offers a powerful theological stance worth acknowledging. His view, as I read it, is not that suffering is part of God's plan, but that it stands as a distortion of it something God opposes and ultimately redeems. So he's breaking from the 'it's all part of the plan' rationalisation which sometimes characterises traditional theology. He distinguishes between optimism, which attempts to rationalize suffering as necessary, and hope, which insists that suffering and evil really are evils, but are destined to be overcome. From that perspective, God is not the author of suffering but its adversary not the architect of the charnel house, but the sure refuge beyond.
I remember author Anthony Burgess talking about faith. He told the story about his father narrowly surviving World War I in the abject misery of trench warfare, only to come home and find his wife and children dead from the Spanish Flu. 'My father knew immediately that this proved God was real...'
Quoting Wayfarer
That's a tricky perspective to proffer, if you ask me, since the very condition of life is suffering - it depends upon it for its continuance. Now we do know theology and exegesis can be spun to justify anything - so I have no doubt there will be escape hatches left, right and centre. I'll bugger off now...
But is a view that really seems to struggle with the problem of evil. God is supposed to be the author of everything, something that he sincerely opposed would never exist in the first place. Really this only makes sense if you consider God to be a limited being who is not in full control of the cosmos.
As I mention in the OP, that life is suffering is the foundational truth of Buddhism. But that is not the end of life, indeed it is the first of the 'four noble truths', the remainder comprising the cause, the end, and the way to reach the end of suffering. The first link in the chain of 'dependent origination' - the psycho-physical complex that is the driving force behind lived existence - is ignorance, avidya, which is the lack of insight or knowledge into what enmeshes one in suffering.
Quoting goremand
You might rephrase that, because, as written, it does not parse.
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I'll add another philosophical note here - again, not intended as religious apologetic, but as a way of expressing an existential truth in analytical terms. One of the formative books in my quest was Alan Watts' The Supreme Identity (although I don't know how well it has aged). But something I took from this book, is that the cause of suffering is a consequence of our mis-identification with who or what we really are. Because of this mis-identification - this is what 'ignorance' means - we fall into states of suffering, which can extend over lifetimes (or 'aeons of kalpas' in Indian mythology). Realising the 'supreme identity' is the seeing through of that illusory sense of identity, and the awakening to our true nature, which is somehow beyond death and decay. Of course, this is a motif that is found in many cultures (think Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey). You can find analogies for it in philosophies East and West. And I think seeing it in those terms (rather than just through the prism of inherited religious lore) gives it credibility, at least for me. So again, in analytic terms, the aim of the paths of liberation or enlightenment, is to come to know directly a higher intelligence - not theoretically, not dogmatically, but through insight, always hard won. And that awakening, or 'return to the source', is what is being alluded to through the various religious lores that have been handed down. That on that return, the being realises it's original identity as one with that source and beyond suffering (although each cultural tradition may have very different understandings of what that means.)
What I mean is that God might allow suffering in the service of some greater purpose, in other words he would regard suffering as good in certain circumstances. But there is no reason an almighty being would permit something he fundamentally disapproved of. Why would God be "tolerant" in this way?
And, hey, these are very deep questions. I'm not trying to push a polemical barrow here, just exploring them.
But that is what I mean by a greater purpose. This is a lesser "pseudo-evil" in the service of the greater good of free choice. In this case, the real evil would apparently by for humanity to be "just animals" (horrible to contemplate).
Quoting Wayfarer
The problem of evil is an argument against the omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent God of mainstream Christian theology. What is there to discover for God, an omniscient being?
If giving cost nothing, generosity would be no virtue. If love had no price, it would be worthless. I do not doubt that the same voices that condemn God for allowing suffering complain also of parents spoiling their children with indulgence. Wrong on both counts.
I like this! A good phrase that captures a major tenet of traditional theocidies.
Quoting Wayfarer
But here's the problem. There is a promise, in the Abrahamic religions, that God is a loving God, that God is love, that we may view God as we would a parent. The charge, then, is that this is completely inconsistent with the amount of suffering in the world. Not the fact of suffering as such, perhaps, but the sheer devastating omnipresence of it. And to short-circuit the Free Will Defense at this point, we can simply limit the suffering in question to the so-called natural evils -- disease, earthquake, accident, etc. What loving parent would do this to their children? "After all, life is supposed to be good, right?" No, this is the wrong point. God is supposed to be good.
But does God "do this"?
As others have commented, it makes a difference that God is not merely the manager of the hotel, but the architect and builder. It would require some highly abstract philosophical premises (along the "best of all possible worlds" line) to maintain that God has done the best they could. If that's so, then God's ways are truly mysterious to humanity; we are missing so many pieces of the theological puzzle that we might as well give up trying to understand it at all. Certainly "love" and "goodness" and "possibility" cannot mean the same thing to God as they do to us.
Quoting Wayfarer
The line can be drawn anywhere, to refute the theodicy. Use the parent analogy again. We expect a loving parent to permit suffering that is truly necessary (a painful operation for their child, perhaps) but firmly exclude anything else in their power, especially capricious and pointless pain. So if God could have, say, prevented the development of cancers in humans, but did not, then God is at fault. But likewise, if God could have arranged things so that a single volcano in Sri Lanka in the year 418 did not erupt, yet it did, God is equally at fault. No loving parent would do either one.
By the way, this whole idea of what God "could have arranged" is hard to discuss in reasonably scientific terms. What are we actually asking for? Some difference in the initial conditions, 14 billion years ago, such that eventually the Earth and its inhabitants would have different characteristics? I guess so. With God all things are possible, or at least we have to allow this for the purposes of the theodicy thought-experiment.
Quoting Wayfarer
This suggests the only theodicy that I've ever been able to accept: Like Kant, I think we have to postulate an afterlife if we're to make sense of suffering, and God's reasons for creating things as they have. If this life is all there is, I would find the idea of a loving God absurd, and would reject all the theodicies I've ever seen. I would, I suppose, be a Buddhist. But with an "axis of salvation" a "higher destiny" understood literally as "death is not the end," we have additional possibilities.
Classically, the idea of nature as merely "laws + initial conditions," which God must tweak so as to "minimize suffering," wouldn't even have been on the table. Beings possess their own self-determining natures, although in the fallen cosmos they fail to fully correspond to the "divine idea" underlying them. In struggling to maintain their form, each being is doing the best it can to be "like God" in the way they are adapted to by their limiting essence. Each being is self-determining to some extent, and is striving (poorly or well) to become more so. "Evil as privation" suggests then that evil is ultimately a failure of things to "become what they are." Suffering as "negative sensation" plays a role in this, but the sensible world is ultimately "less real" than the intelligible, often "passing away" in many cosmologies. Evil, by contrast, lies wholly in the inappropriate use of things (including sensible suffering).
In this world, man is a "middle being" strung out between the corporeal/sensible world and the intelligible order. He is not "the highest of beings," as he often is in the modern view. The fallen cosmos involves a web of sin or imperfection/confusion involving not only human action, but also superhuman rebellion, the turning away of Satan and the corrupt archons and principalities, which manifests in the decay for nature. Earth itself is accused of rebellion by some of the earliest Jewish commentators because God tells it to "grass grass" (a use of the verb akin to "dance a dance") and it instead "puts forth grass." Whereas in the modern view, it often becomes just man, mechanistic nature working according to inviolable laws, and God in the picture. There is no notion of "vertical levels of reality," and so sensible suffering is not "less than fully real," and its conquest thus largely a matter of proper perspective (as in much Pagan thought, or Boethius' philosophical consolation).
I suppose the difference here is perhaps also one between having to argue that all of creationcreatures taken as a wholemust be free, versus the consideration of the freedom of individual creatures as individuals (often just man) against the backdrop of a "clockwork" nature. The shift in focus to the individuals throws up new difficulties for the classical view.
Maybe a shift in ethics and politics is relevant too. God, far from simply giving over the gift of being and freedom to creation (and of course ultimately redeeming them and bringing them to perfection, or at least offering them this choice), becomes a cosmic executive on the model of the liberal state. He must contend with the problem of one creature encroaching on the freedom of another and strike the ideal balance. The role of the higher beings gets flattened out or vanishes here, or else explodes into a major issue because they are now "encroaching on the freedom of the cosmos". And this also goes along with changes in Reformation theology that moved towards seeing redemption and election as largely about the individual (e.g. Calvinism vs Arminianism, often taken as exclusive of all possible views, versus the prior dominance of corporate conceptualizations of election).
We are, in a sense, extremely primitive. We have evolved in a similar way to all other lifeforms. We are slowly proving to be the exceptions (not due to our biological origin, but due to our behaviour, intellect and heightened consciousness). We are still extremely early in this 'path of enlightenment.'
Our primal instincts still run deep within us. This is why our emotions, especially fear, are so powerful. We fear the unknown, fear change, and we fear what might lie beyond in the void. To handle this fear, the mind creates stories. Stories about fate, karma, God, a higher purpose, Heaven and Hell, and so on. Since none of us alive today understand the naked truth regarding the nature of reality, and this is a question we may never find a truthful answer to, we create our own answers. This is why there have been countless religions, philosophies, rituals, and traditions in the history of humanity.
So regarding your Hotel Manager Theodicy, you'd indeed have to be willfully ignorant to believe that God, if He exists at all, runs the show. There is so much injustice and suffering going on, on this planet alone (both man-made and natural) that there is no legitimate case for a managing God. So go ahead, have some intercourse before marriage. He won't care. Or don't. Your call.
We should have listened more to Nietszche. We need geniuses like him now more than ever, to wake humanity up from its spiritual slumber and to start to take matters into our own hands. We are already stuck in an era of nihilism (and hedonism), since God is dead and we have no alternative. We have tossed the baby with the bathwater, and we cannot cope with an empty crib.
This is a logical conclusion. Being an agnostic, I assume the christian god is unable to manipulate these logical axioms (and all mathematical laws); he seems to be subject to them. Thus, this god's power is limited. He's a semi-god.
The true god is called Logic. There's another god called Random.
Logic and Random are very cold gods. They don't care about a specific pain limit. Logic provides the axiom that reads "life without variety would be no life", and Random sets the maximum possible pain experience at random. The christian semi-god has to follow their rules; he's employed as a hotel manager.
Quoting goremand
You bring up a good point I have also proposed in past posts. That is to say, a self-sufficient being doesn't need to design a game of "struggle of lower beings to recognize X, Y, Z", and "learning their lessons through cycles of suffering". This just seems all too human.. that there is some sort of moral/aesthetic lessons to be learned that suffering must be instructive towards.
Leads to a conclusion of radical contingency over elegant design. Thus leading to a sort of multi-universe theory whereby this universe is but one we happen to inhabit with all its experiences. It could have went differently, but since we are living it out, it seems inevitable.
Partly, this is less of a problem for the older theology because modality was dealt with quite differently. Modality was primarily conceived of in terms of act/potency. "Is it possible for a cat to become a frog?" The old answer would be "no." You're talking about substantial change there, replacing one thing with another. It is only possible for a cat to become something that it already possesses the potency to become. It must "be that thing potentially." If something isn't "potentially actual" then it isn't possible. If one contrary is present, "in act," say "light," then its opposite, "darkness" is not a possibility.
I think it would be fair to say that, starting with the nominalists, modality gets much more "expansive" and "linguistic," while also becoming less "metaphysical." Possible worlds modality ends up looking a lot different. I suppose the critique of it would be: "just because you can slam words/concepts together and not recognize an explicit contradiction doesn't mean there isn't one to be found if the things you were speaking of were fully understood."
In one of his homilies (Pentecost I think), St. Thomas claims the collective efforts of the human race have not even come close to fathoming the essence of a single fly. On this view, thinking up possibilities in terms of linguistic composition, and then searching for obvious disqualifications, seems less justifiable. So, they stick to a understanding of necessity grounded in act/potency.
It reminds me a bit of existentialist "overcoming." How absurd must the world be for us to find meaning in our capacity to overcome absurdity? Just a little? A lot?
I would imagine the ideal is likely closer to "as absurd as possible without resulting in a total collapse into despair" for a lot of those thinkers though.
But that sounds like a throw away line you had to say in order to avoid the proper criticism that you must be telling me that suffering has some mysterious purpose else an all good god wouldn't allow it. Couldn't he forge within me whatever solid character comes from suffering without me having had to suffer? Quoting WayfarerI don't know, but it is in fact drawn. There is a level of suffering no human has ever endured, so there are limits. Quoting Wayfarer
I also don't agree with the general assessment that there aren't ancient examples of considering God as a hotel manager providing lousy service.
Consider:
Exodus 14:10 to 14:12
"10 As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians, marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the Lord. 11 They said to Moses, Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? 12 Didnt we say to you in Egypt, Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!"
Sounds like some ancient Hebrews kvetching (bitching in the way only Hebrews do) to their hotel manager about their accomodations. What happened next was he parted the sea for them and swallowed up the Egyptians, which sounds like excellent customer service finally.
Then in Exodus 16:1 to 5 they kvetched about the food situation, and so the Good Lord accomodated by dropping bread from the heavens.
16 The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. 2 In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. 3 The Israelites said to them, If only we had died by the Lords hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death. 4 Then the Lord said to Moses, I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. 5 On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.
My point is there is the no good answer to the theodicy problem.
And by the way, these complainers did eventually get their comeuppance when they tried to cross over into the promised land and God told them they couldn't cross. Enough was enough. But at least in that example the suffering was earned and deserved. A just dessert in the desert.
Can I steal that line? :grin:
This seems a pretty tired argument - are you a Jordan Peterson follower? What reasoning do you have to support this?
What do you mean? And I am not a Peterson follower. I don't follow anyone, I read literature all across the spectum and would align myself most closely with Stoic philosophy.
Indeed, the world behaves pretty much as one would expect, if there were no god. Theodicy is the study of excuses for how this can be so.
I'm curious whenever someone paraphrases Nietzsche on this, just how they interpret this particular well-worn notion.
Peterson, as you may know, practically wraps his entire anti-modernist screed around this observation, which he likes to follow up with muddled account of what he terms 'post-modern Marxism' presumably taken from Stephen Hicks.
The "idea that if God exists, he must operate like a benevolent manager of human well-being" is not something to which folk outside of the theistic tradition might be committed. It's the faithful who understand god as caring for their needs. So yes, one could see the rejection of the hotel manager ads a rejection of theodicy.
One has the impression of watching slowly returning to the Catholicism of his childhood - if I recall correctly.
You may be right about a return to Catholicism. Interest in gods or gods does not seem compatible with Buddhism though. I think the real struggle is with the notion that some kind of intellectual insight has been lost in modernity. I don't find that idea remotely supportableI think it stems from a yearning for the magical, the magical and otherworldly which science, and critical reasoning has shown to be nothing more than superstition.
The huge market for fantasy literature shows that this yearning is still well and truly alive and kicking. I think we all still may enjoy a good fantasy. For some fantasy has apparently supplanted truth.
Like this
Quoting Hanover
They were crying out to the Lord, but actually talking to Moses, werent they?
Cheers. I stand corrected.
Quoting Janus
Yet what is it that was supposedly lost?
The god botherers have taken to posting en masse; a symptom of something... but what?
There are so many problems we now face, and solutions seem to be unlikely because of humanity's incapacity for globally coordinated action. Despair leads to searching for answers somewhere other than in this world, which can seem, given certain mindsets, to offer so few, I guess.
I don't think the crisis is one of a loss of meaning, but rather one of too much meaning, much of it trivial and much of it threatening and what there is of value perhaps seems to those who are after easy explanations like a return to tradition, to take too much effort and discipline and critical thought to pursue.
I suppose they were complaining to the front desk clerk expecting it to get relayed to the manager.
Is there such a crisis? Sure, @Wayfarer says there is, but the crisis seems on analysis to be just that folk disagree with his view.
So, what's the muted spiritual crisis? How do we know there is a crisis?
So yes, I agree there is no crisis of meaning as such, if that is meant to assert that loss of traditional meanings constitute a crisis. I think that idea is arrant nonsense and is also elitist considering the low levels of literacy in the past, and how the masses were in thrall to supposed religious authorities. That is what religion is really aboutcontrol.
To good effect, considering what happened next.
Quoting J
Thats a fair challenge, and I agree it raises one of the most serious theological tensions in the Abrahamic traditions: the insistence that God is loving and good, and yet the world is filled with devastating suffering especially natural suffering that doesnt seem to arise from human choices.
But I would make two clarifying points in response. First, the original claim that nowhere in the sacred texts is there a promise that life will be free of suffering is an observation about the narrative structure of those texts. Christianity is not founded on the promise of earthly comfort, but on the fact of the crucifiction a figure of suffering who shares in, rather than eliminates, the worlds pain. (Again, some gnostic heresies (so-called) dispute that, by saying that in reality Christ did not suffer at all.)
Second, Id question the modern framing of divine love as analogous to human parental love. That may itself be part of the conceptual difficulty. We naturally imagine a loving God as a kind of celestial caregiver who would prevent harm, much as we would do for our own children. But traditional theology has often insisted that Gods love is not sentimental or merely protective but is also wrathful (especially in the OT.)
Philosophiclly, I'm drawn to the Thomist view (and it's in the philosophical sense that I'm drawn, not so much the devotional side.) It doesn't attempt to explain suffering away, but accepts calamity an inevitable aspect of a finite, material world. For Aquinas, suffering and death are not evils in themselves, but aspects of a world in which things come to be, change, and pass away. That doesnt make suffering good in the moral sense, but that the presence of suffering in nature is not evidence of divine malice. As folks like to say nowadays, it is what it is. Its a view that offers philosophical clarity without diminishing the gravity of suffering itself.
Quoting J
That, I think, is the consensus view in a secular culture. The nearest thing to eternal life that can be envisaged is interstellar travel, hence the popularity of the genre.
Quoting schopenhauer1 @goremand When it comes to omniscience, I'm unwilling to claim that I even understand what that means. I don't think it means that all of the content of what humans believe they know is known by an omniscient mind, in that it's feasible that what we think we know might be illusory and so not a real object of knowledge. Perhaps what we call real includes distorted cognitioins that only exist for us because of our limited perspective. The real object of knowledge is not the falsehoods we believe, but the truth that they veil.
Good OP. I agree. We see this sort of thing constantly.
Quoting Wayfarer
Exactly right. Such critiques seem to be wholly ignorant of actual religious beliefs and traditions. They strike me as a kind of naive escapism which is not able to deal with or confront the fact of suffering. It is not a surprise that those who do not confront that fact know nothing about religion.
Quoting Janus
Yes, but like most trolls, Banno doesn't read posts, so it isn't a surprise that his response has nothing to do with the OP. Wayfarer is talking about the sort of critique of theism which presupposes that God is a hotel manager, and such a critique is not a theodicy. A theodicy is supposed to vindicate God in the face of such a critique.
Yes, that's right and that is why I pointed out that 'The Hotel Manager Theodicy' is a misnomer.
That's an interesting perspective, but it doesn't really address the point. The point is really just that it is impossible to improve upon a perfect and complete being, and therefore God can't possibly derive any benefit from creating the world. He can do if he wants to, it doesn't affect him either way, but it's still completely arbitrary.
Edit - sorry I just saw the response
I think its the usual footnotes to Nietzsches god is dead and weve lost our way But the solution is different to Ns it tends to be to be a nostalgia project - back to theism or Neoplatonism
In some senses, it's an adventure. According to the Alan Watts book I mentioned, and without wanting to sound flippant about a serious topic, God plays hide-and-seek with himself.
Well, any philosophical problem can be solved if you're allowed to re-conceptualize the terms involved as you like. But I don't understand why you're entitled to your "God-child" who plays hide-and-seek and goes on adventures, but others can't have their divine hotel manager.
I recommend a read of The Supreme Identity, Alan Watts. He spells it out in considerably more detail than I am able to reproduce in a forum thread.
I agree, but I don't see how this gets God off the hook, so to speak. Why not have us all, God and Christ included, in a lot less pain?
Quoting Wayfarer
Jeez, I dunno. An impartial reading of the Gospels seems to show Jesus insisting that his Abba (Aramaic for "Daddy" or "Papa") is very much a loving parent as we would understand such a figure today. Sometimes stern, sure, but heartbroken in the face of suffering. And Jesus himself reproaches his father God for abandoning him on the cross.
I don't think the "modern parent" theory flies.
Quoting Wayfarer
So I understand. I'd file this under "the mysterious ways of God," as above. If being slowly tortured to death, or watching your son or daughter suffer the same fate while the guards laugh at you, is somehow to be justified as not "evil in itself," then clearly Aquinas is using a different and highly eccentric vocabulary, one which I can't pretend to understand.
Quoting Wayfarer
We don't need malice in order to defeat the theodicy. Indifference will do, and if you add in the fact that God designed the whole mess as well, I think "criminal negligence" would also be appropriate.
This way of thinking, meaning no disrespect to @Wayfarer and others who've given it a lot of attention, seems like a litmus test of one's overall conceptual chemistry. The crisis one sees in "modernity" (another litmus-test word: what's that?) will reveal one's own take on how life and society ought to be organized. All I'm prepared to say with any assurance is that there is no crisis resulting directly from some intellectual moves that occurred in Europe in the 17th century. Not even the butterfly effect could make that plausible.
As for the meaning crisis, it's an undeniable fact of modern existence. John Vervaeke expresses it in the foreword to his lecture series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, like this:
Quoting John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
Which part of that isn't true?
//that said, I can't really fathom Christian teaching about 'God's love', other than to think it must be a pretty tough love.//
I agree that some suffering might be unavoidable, of the "my child's necessary operation" variety. What counts against God as a loving parent, I think, is the vast amount of gratuitous suffering, at least as far as we can fathom it. I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who asked, "Can't there just be less of it?" That doesn't strike me as a false or unreasonable expectation . . . if God really does love us.
And yes, the non-human world is full of suffering too, but God isn't supposed to be the loving parent of ants, on the Abrahamic account of things.
Quoting Wayfarer
I have no idea. :smile: But, with respect, I don't think you do either. Let me turn it around: What would it take to falsify this statement?: "And that mental health crisis is itself due to and engaged with crises in the environment and the political system. And those in turn are immeshed within a deeper cultural historical crisis I call the meaning crisis." What sort of evidence would count decisively for or against this sweeping overview, to the extent that it could be declared simply true or false?
But it's already been said that
Quoting Tom Storm
Which to me suggests the question, does the perversity and cruelty of existence negate its worth altogether. Which again suggest nihilism.
And it also should be acknowledged that the most grotesque and needless forms of suffering to have been suffered by humans in recent history, has also been inflicted by them, in the form of world wars and military and political repression and conflict. Indeed, great suffering has been inflicted in the name of religions, but again whether that constitutes an indictment of a Creator is a different matter.
As to the suffering that is due to natural causes - the 2004 tsunami comes to mind as an example - how is that attributable to divine act? I'm sure there are those who would intepret it as such, and indeed they are sometimes referred to as 'acts of God', but whether they actually signify malign intent is the question at hand. I'm inclined to think not - the Thomist understanding, that they are an inevitable aspect of a contingent and imperfect world, still seems reasonable to me.
Quoting J
The emergence of trends showing less mental illness, decreases in depression and anxiety, and a commitment to veracity in the political sphere.
Don't hold your breath!
Not sure that would necessarily amount to nihilismperversity and cruelty are value-laden terms, and many people actually find them galvanizing, even a kind of raison dêtre.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, those familiar examples are kind of boring. Far more damning is the design and creation of a world that uses death and pain as the engine of survival. Thats pretty twisted. A god might have engineered creation any way he wanted; creatures could have survived on water or light alone. But instead, he designed hunting, maiming, killing, and predation as the lingua franca of survival. None of this involves human sin or any other spurious theological cop-out.
I'm just exploring narratives here. As someone who doesn't believe in gods or ultimate purpose, these aren't facts I need to explain away.
True enough.
The "hotel manager framing" speaks as if God's only purpose is to prevent suffering, and as you say, this sole-purpose-god can be invoked to remove any level of suffering, no matter how small. That's the oddity: the Copernican Revolution led to a cramped, anthropocentric worldview, where the removal of human suffering is the most important thing. The "god" of this worldview has but one job: remove suffering. The whole picture is self-directed rather than transcendent of selfcurved in on oneself. Like going to the doctor day after day and demanding more painkillers. A diminished anthropology.
Ah. They like them.
Quoting Tom Storm
The Buddhist creation myth has it that sentient beings were originally composed entirely of light. At the beginning of each kalpa (a cosmic age), beings are reborn as luminous entities, often described as shining or radiant beings. These beings, called Abhassara, are said to be reborn from the ?bh?svara Brahma-realm and initially lack physical form, moving through the aether like pure energy. They are also said to not require sustenance and possess great longevity. Over long periods of time, they become attracted to a sweet substance on the physical plane, and as they consume it, their bodies become heavier and more physical, eventually losing their luminous qualities and differentiating into two genders.
Quoting Tom Storm
I found this essay, in a book of essays by a US Zen teacher, provides quite a compelling account of the source of religious consciousness:
[quote= The Violence of Oneness, Norman Fischer (On the Motivation for the 9/11 Terror Attacks]The animal world is a world of pure being, a world of immediacy and immanence. The animal soul is like water in water, seamlessly connected to all that surrounds it, so that there is no sense of self or other, of time, of space, of being or not being. This utopian (to human sensibility, which has such alienating notions) Shangri-La or Eden actually isnt that because it is characterized at all points by what wed call violence. Animals, that is, eat and are eaten. For them killing and being killed is the norm; and there isnt any meaning to such a thing, or anything that we would call fear; theres no concept of killing or being killed. Theres only being, immediacy, isness. Animals dont have any need for religion; they already are that, already transcend life and death, being and nonbeing, self and other, in their very living, which is utterly pure.
(In his book, A Theory of Religion, George) Bataille sees human consciousness beginning with the making of the first tool, the first thing that isnt a pure being, intrinsic in its value and inseparable from all of being. A tool is a separable, useful, intentionally made thing; it can be possessed, and it serves a purpose. It can be altered to suit that purpose. It is instrumental, defined by its use. The tool is the first instance of the not-I, and with its advent there is now the beginning of a world of objects, a thing world. Little by little out of this comes a way of thinking and acting within thingness (language), and then once this plane of thingness is established, more and more gets placed upon itother objects , plants, animals, other people, ones self, a world. Now there is self and otherand then, paradoxically, self becomes other to itself, alienated not only from the rest of the projected world of things, but from itself, which it must perceive as a thing, a possession. This constellation of an alienated self is a double-edged sword: seeing the self as a thing, the self can for the first time know itself and so find a closeness to itself; prior to this, there isnt any self so there is nothing to be known or not known. But the creation of my me, though it gives me for the first time myself as a friend, also rips me out of the world and puts me out on a limb on my own.
Interestingly, and quite logically, this development of human consciousness coincides with a deepening of the human relationship to the animal world, which opens up to the human mind now as a depth, a mystery. Humans are that depth, because humans are animals, know this and feel it to be so, and yet also not so; humans long for union with the animal world of immediacy, yet know they are separate from it. Also they are terrified of it, for to reenter that world would be a loss of the self; it would literally be the end of me as I know me.
In the midst of this essential human loneliness and perplexity, which is almost unbearable, religion appears. It intuits and imagines the ancient world of oneness, of which there is still a powerful primordial memory, and calls it 'the sacred'. This is the invisible world, world of spirit, world of the gods, or of God. It is inexorably opposed to, defined as the opposite of, the world of things, the profane world of the body, of instrumentality, a world of separation, the fallen world. Religions purpose then is to bring us back to the lost world of intimacy, and all its rites, rituals, and activities are created to this end. We want this, and need it, as sure as we need food and shelter; and yet it is also terrifying. All religions have known and been based squarely on this sense of terrible necessity. ... [/quote]
I hope not. But the point about egregious suffering may well extend to non-human creation too. I was trying to give the Abrahamic God a break by only committing their parental love to humans.
Quoting Wayfarer
Not at all, directly. But we have to remember that God is not imagined merely as some actor in the drama, who can be held innocent or guilty of the various plot developments. God set up the whole thing. It seems fantastic to say that it was impossible for God to allow a planet to develop as a home for his beloved children that didn't have tectonic plate shifts. I mean, why not, for goodness' sake? I could've done that! :wink: Must we insist this is the best of all possible worlds?
Quoting Wayfarer
Especially for that last item! (truthful politicians)
I don't have a big stake in any of this modernity stuff. I'm kind of temperamentally allergic to sweeping statements about society, so please forgive me.
I'm sorry, I still don't think that is a fair assessment. It's a very Dawkins style depiction, God as a kind of cosmic film director, staging all of the action. I think it betrays a misunderstanding of the God that Dawkins doesn't believe in. A straw God, so to speak.
Quoting J
Which is key to the whole thing.
You do know I was kidding, right? I just meant that it doesn't seem like such a big ask, no earthquakes.
Quoting Wayfarer
(My own conception of God is not really as a being that "staged all the action.") I'm trying to stay true to the classic framing of a theodicy in the West, which conceives of God as omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent. And I'm adding to that, the standard Abrahamic language of God as loving parent. If all of that is a misunderstanding of God, then the need for theodicy disappears, of course.
It does disappear if your version of god is less benevolent sky wizard and more ground of being. Mind you, the Bible deosn't help as it depicts a pretty nasty deity who has no issues with slavery and genocide and behaves like a mafia boss, demanding deference and worship to sooth his seemingly fragile ego, so there is that. He is totally consistent with a creation that is redolent with grievous flaws and dangers.
Interesting.
But regardless, one being amongst others - apparently with extraordinary powers and longevity but a being nonetheless. This is why Paul Tillich says that to conceive of God as a being is to deny Him. (And I'm not saying this from the viewpoint having it all worked out, either - more like a historical forensic pathologist, trying to reconstruct what happened on the basis of scattered remains. It ties into the loss of the heirarchical understanding of Being, and its replacement with univocity, 'all being(s) are of the same kind'. That, in turn, leads to the loss of a 'dimension of value' - values are subjective, or intersubjective, or social, there being no value in so-called objective reality (ref)).
Specifically, the Old Testament. And bearing in mind, the OT texts preserved in the Bible originated in the late Bronze age, amongst agrarian tribes, for whom the subtleties of the much later theologians would presumably mean nothing. Ergo the voice that is presented speaks in the terms appropriate to the society in which it was heard (although I don't know if genocide was part of the narrative. That doesn't enter the language until WWII, and not through any act of God.) But it raises the question of what is being debated.
Perhaps it's this confusion about the nature of the 'supreme identity' that is behind the belief that He operates as a kind of supreme agent a being with immense power, knowledge, and will, who chooses outcomes in the world much like we do, only on a grander scale. Its from this anthropomorphic projection that the impulse to assign blame arises: if God could have prevented this or that disaster, and didnt, then He must be responsible, perhaps even malicious.
But this view mistakes what kind of causality is at issue. In the classical world particularly in Aquinas and the Neoplatonic tradition God is not a proximate cause operating within the causal order. He is not a being in the world, but the ground of all being, the cause of causes. His causality is not like ours it is ontological, not mechanical or voluntaristic.
The Hotel Manager model of theodicy arises precisely from this misplaced attribution of agency: it treats God as if He were running the world like a human administrator, and then judges Him by those standards. But this picture, intuitive though it may be to us, is metaphysically confused. It domesticates divinity into a kind of super-personality and then is shocked when the universe doesnt live up to the standards we come to expect.
[quote=Lunging, Flailing, Mispunchiing, Terry Eagleton (review of The God Delusion)]Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their scientific hypothesis was unsound.[/quote]
@J is not altogether wrong here, @Wayfarer. First, it's very confusing that the word "theodicy" is being used in this thread to mean "anti-theodicy" or "anti-theism." For that reason I will avoid the word altogether.
Here is a standard argument against theism which utilizes the problem of evil:
1. If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent, then there would be no evil
2. But there is evil
3. Therefore, there is no existing God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent {modus tollens}
Part of your argument is something like this:
4. If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent, then there would be no head colds
5. But there are head colds
6. Therefore, there is no existing God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent {modus tollens}
7. Therefore, head colds disprove the existence of God {reductio ad absurdum}
(Note how similar this is to <my argument against anti-natalism>.)
(7) represents Hotel Manager Anti-theism, and the response is to say that (4) is rather dubious.
For me, the point is that there is a real and live problem with Hotel Manager Anti-theism, and yet at the same time it is true that at some point Hotel Manager Anti-theism ends and more legitimate reasons for Anti-theism begin. So there is a possible danger of over-emphasizing the critique contained in the OP, namely by overemphasizing the question, "Where exactly should the line be drawn?"
(See also my response to Tom Storm. The trick here is that not all anti-theistic arguments are created equal.)
Acknowledged. I had associated the word with general discussion of the problem of evil not realising that it was usually intended as a apologetic in the religious context. So it is misleading, and I have changed the thread title to reflect that.
Quoting Leontiskos
That is not the argument at all. The argument is, if the existence of suffering is supposed to be an indictment against God, then where do you draw the line between what you would deem a reasonable and an unnacceptabe degree of suffering? That colds and influenza would be 'allowed' by a merciful God, but not cancer? That earthquakes would be reasonable, but mass casualties would not be?
The more general argument is that a world without suffering is inconceivable, (although I might add that this is actually what Heaven is supposed to mean.) So it's not as if suffering is inflicted on the world, either by design or intention, but that physical existence must be susceptible to suffering, pain and imperfections of many kinds. Hence the Thomist view of natural evils:
God does not will evil to be done, but He permits it to be done; and thus He brings good out of evil. ST I, q.19, a.9
As facing and rising above evil is an essential aspect of existence.
Further, that the most conspicuous forms of intentional evil have been committed by man against man - even in the name of religion itself, which is particularly egregious, but again, not an indictment against God.
Again, the essay 'is not an attempt to justify suffering, nor to offer spiritual guidance. It aims only to point out the mistake of that common assumption in modern discourse the idea that if God exists, He must operate like a benevolent manager of human well-being. Its a superficial way of seeing it. Recovering some understanding of the metaphysical and theological contexts against which the problem of evil has traditionally been resolved, allows us to reframe the question in a larger context??one in which suffering still has to be reckoned with, but not on account of a malicious God.'
And I stand by that argument.
Mass extermination of a people is still mass extermination of a people, regardless of the word used. Deuteronomy 20:1617: 'In the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy themthe Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusitesas the Lord your God has commanded you.'
Samuel 15:23: "This is what the Lord Almighty says: I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel... Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.
Curiously, Jesus never apologizes for the genocidal actions of the God he is said to incarnate. Nor does he acknowledge that the Old Testament was wrong for not speaking out against slavery, but instead being complicit with it, which suggests that JC's ethics are incomplete.
Of course, they are just stories and if god is a cunt in the books it's because we are and he is made in our image.
Quoting Wayfarer
And I suppose one would also want to argue that God didnt deliberately design and create a world where countless insects and animals hunt, mutilate, and tear each other apart alive just to survive.
I don't know if it's metaphysically confused or not, but it is the picture given us by the Abrahamic tradition. "God is love" - "God loves us like a parent loves their children" -- aren't these statements meant to be true? Perhaps they do represent a domestication of divinity. The question is, is such a picture consistent with the state of this world? Most other spiritual traditions don't see it that way, as you point out -- not the Greeks, not the Buddhists, not the Taoists. Nor do many Christian theologians like Tillich, from what I can gather (I haven't read him firsthand). Standard Christian theology, to its credit, recognized that an afterlife is essential in order to make sense of this picture. If you want philosophical reasons for that, Kant offers some excellent ones in CPR.
Quoting Wayfarer
Here, again, I have no argument with this. I merely ask, does such a God love us?
Sorry for the second post, but I just saw this.
I can reinforce the point I was making above by changing this to:
"If the existence of suffering is supposed to be an indictment against a loving God who is like a parent to us, then where do you draw the line between what you would deem a reasonable and an unnacceptable degree of suffering?"
So this gives us some choices. We can say that God is like a loving parent, but our human idea of a "loving parent" is hopelessly wrong, that true parental love is much more like super-super-super-tough love, necessitating every bit of the (natural) suffering that occurs in the world.
Or we can say that God is not like a loving parent -- their "ontological causality" rains equally on the just and the unjust -- in which case the question of suffering is moot.
Or we can agree that to imagine God as a loving parent is to imagine them more or less like our human idea of such a love, in which case the question of "where to draw the line" is, to me, obvious. We could debate the specifics, I suppose, but if any human parent created an environment for their child that even approached the horrors of what humans experience from nature, that parent would be monstrous. So rather than draw a line and say "right here is where God should have stopped," let's just say, "take your pick, but it should have been drawn WAY closer to compassion and mercy."
Not to be repetitive, but this doesn't represent me trying to tell God how to run the hotel. It's me trying to find some consistency in the way Abrahamic faiths claim God does run the hotel, versus what we actually see. The "should" translates to "should, if these other claims about God's love are true." The problem is not with God, but with the consistency of human descriptions of God.
Yes, the image of God as a loving parent is a recurring motif in Christian scripture. But its meant analogically, not literally. Divine love isnt the same as human affection its not sentimental or reactive, nor a description of a mortal parent with moral obligations. And it also depends on what we take Father to mean. Interpreted archetypally, Father is a symbol of creative origination the generative, principle. Think of the Father as the seed or zygote, the initiator of form; the Mother as Earth, the bearer of substance. So the religions speak of Father" it has many layers of meaning.
Something else is nagging me as well. Jesus, after all, was a pretty demanding teacher. 'He who saves his life will lose it, while he who loses his life for my sake will be saved.' There's a moral demand in that, isn't there? It isn't 'do what you like, it will turn OK'. And isn't the final end of suffering the 'salvation' or the 'life eternal' that the faithful are said to inherit? I'm not trying to preach (although I admit it sounds like it!) but to interpret.
Quoting J
Right! Especially when abstracted and disconnected from the sacerdotal and liturgical context in which it was originally meaningful and interpolated into modern idioms.
But read the Gospels. Do you really imagine this is what Jesus meant? He called God Daddy, and begged him not to make him suffer! And when Christians gather every Sunday to proclaim that God is love, do you think they mean this analogically? Or only that they ought to?
Quoting Wayfarer
Do you say this because a literal meaning doesn't seem sensible to you? You may be right. But I truly believe that Christian doctrine (and, in large part, Jewish and Islamic doctrine as well) finds it not only sensible but essential. Unless you want to picture a huge divide between "theological Christianity" or "Christology" or whatever, and the plain tradition of Christian teaching, for "unsophisticated" people.
Quoting Wayfarer
Oh, definitely. There's nothing there that contradicts my idea of a loving parent. It's the dying-of-loathsome-diseases part that bothers me -- if God loves us.
I know I jump in and out of this thread, so I might have missed something, but I do agree with this statement, and it forms the bulk of the problems with theistic debates we have here.
The atheists surely have an argument to make, but they focus way too heavily on attacking its least sophisticated form, the caricature religion one imagines of simple literalism screamed from the pulpits throughout the South. Despite it being a fairly recent phenomenon, it's the only theology attacked, and none here find it worth defending.
Even in this thread I hear of the ridiculousness of the Bible, yet no one is actually interested in hearing how it is interpreted by those who use it, as if the meaning of the words is entirely detached from the actual use of the words.
Is "God is love" or "God loves you" simple literalism?
If you asked for a specific interpretation of those sentences within the context of a particular denomination, you'd get varying answers. "My dog loves me," "My wife loves me," "My co-workers love me," and "God loves me," all constitute differing ways "love" is used.
We love our brother, our nation, or child, and meatloaf in different ways. The Greeks pointed this out as well.
Certainly. But I'm asking for your answer, in the context of saying that "simple literalisms" should be avoided when trying to understand religious doctrine. Is this an example of such a literalism? If further context is needed, I can find some Gospel passages, I suppose, but I doubt whether you really need them.
What I mean by context isn't just providing me a few more lines of text. Just from what you've provided, you're assuming a particular context, specifically a New Testament version of "God" which arguably differs substantially from the OT (as you refernced "Gospel). That places you into a Christian context. You then ask me to interpret it along with you, which assumes a certain perspicuity of Scripture, which is an interpretive ideology consistent with 19th century fundamentalism that proposes that Scripture is written in a plain and direct way that is subject to interpretation without special knowlege.
This also assumes a priority and almost exclusivity of NT Gospels in interpreting, omitting not just non-canonical literature, but also historical literature and practices developed within and outside the tradition over time.
To give a secular example, if I were to ask what a particular provision of the US Constitution means, I can't just read it along with the rest of the document to have a full understanding its meaning. Not only are there hundreds of thousands of pages of past interpretation that binds its meaning, but there is an entire context of American society that must be understood (and its historical placement) to fully appreciate how that document is used and how that meaning is derived from its use. The suggestion that it is readable and understandable by just a casual reading without special expertise is a construction ideology unto itself.
With the Bible, regardless of whether you think it has a shred of divinity within it, has been used as a basis to run civilizations for thousands of years, and just coming along and saying "the Bible promotes dashing children's heads into rocks" because it says so, doesn't mean it means that.
I get that to break a leg means to fracture a femur, but that doesn't mean "break a leg" means that. But if you stand in shock that theater goers desire the actors to break their legs and you can't get past that, then that is an adherence to an interpretive scheme the other users don't use.
And this was my point to @Wayfarer (and his point as well), which is that the attack on biblical meaning by using the most unsophisticated exegesis method available is a strawman.
I think you definitely need them, given that people use "love" to justify anything and everything. For example, I know Christian consequentialists who say that in the Trolley scenario, or in a scenario where a tyrant applies consequentialist pressure so that you might murder someone, the loving thing to do is to go ahead and murder for the greater good. You might even be one of these consequentialists who would say that if you can murder someone so that ten other people do not die, the loving thing to do is to murder them.
Without some context, "Love" is an incredibly ambiguous and increasingly meaningless term.
Thanks. I think that's helpful, even though I realize there isn't a great rhetorical substitute for the word "theodicy." Nevertheless, "Indictment" is a good one.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's basically the argument I gave. I'm not sure if you're familiar with reductio ad absurdum arguments? The implication is that either (4) or (5) must be false.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again:
Quoting Leontiskos
So for example, does your "Where exactly should the line be drawn" argument imply that not only colds, and not only cancer, but also genocide is permissible? The danger here is the idea that there is no line and nothing is off limits. Even if (7) is absurd, there still seems to be a line somewhere.
Quoting Wayfarer
Right, but if heaven exists then it's not clear that, "facing and rising above evil is an essential aspect of existence." Specifically, I think Buddhism takes evil/suffering as a brute fact in a way that Christianity does not. For Christianity evil possesses a contingency at a level which is not true for Buddhism. The difference is that Christians believe in a God who allows evil that he was at least somehow capable of preventingeven in the extreme case where he decides not to create at all. That's presumably why Dawkins does not levy the Problem of Evil against Buddhism.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, and I think it is a salient point. :up:
Contemporary atheists definitely take the argument too far and make God into a Hotel Manager.
This definition of deity may be peculiar to the Catholic rendition of Judaism. The God of the Hebrews was indeed all-powerful, by contrast to pagan idols, but his goodness was conditional : if you don't Love & Fear & Obey God, you will suffer. The Creation was described as Good, but its imperfections were blamed on the species of sentient-yet-gullible creatures that were supposed to manage the Garden. Ironically, the Hebrews, as the Chosen People, accepted that blame, on behalf of all humanity, as inscrutable divine Justice.
Catholics inherited the Good God as a given, then spawned a corps of Scholars charged with finding reasons to reconcile Omnibenevolence with both natural and cultural Evil. As usual, the blame is placed on the creatures, not the creator. Except that the machinations of a subordinate Evil God were postulated as a way to test human faithfulness & love for the Good God, which presumably makes up for their innate credulity. Yet, if God is indeed Omnipotent, then the "buck" of suffering stops at the top. Not the desk clerk, but the CEO. :smile:
Quoting Wayfarer
Contrary to Catholicism, my philosophical god-concept is closer to that of Spinoza and Whitehead*1. Whitehead defined his God, not as an ideal of perfection, but as the potential for creation and change. Specifically, his god functions as a principle of concrescence : the act or process of coming or growing together; coalescence . And that is one way of describing Natural Evolution : incremental & progressive occasions of form change.
The Big Bang was a cosmic explosion of Energy, followed by ongoing expansion & Entropy. If that was all there was, then eventual Heat Death would result in the snuffing-out of the Cosmic flame. But mutual gravity causes concretion, as Energy becomes Mass, and Mass becomes stars & planets. Evolution is an elaboration and extension of the process of coalescence. And, historically, it has a direction : from the simplicity of a Singularity, to Darwin's "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful"*2.
Philosophically, we can think of Energy as positive, and Entropy as negative. Then, in terms of human emotions, Positive change is Good, while Negative change is Evil. For sentient creatures, Evil results in suffering. But, as far as we know, natural Energy has no agenda for the survival or thrival of humans. Yet, if Evolution --- as exemplified on Earth --- is indeed moving inexorably toward complexity, then the human brain may be the current apex of material concrescence.
The physical brain's non-physical (immaterial) function, Consciousness, may also be the emergence of a novel form of causal Energy. The homo sapiens brain produces something undreamed of 14B years ago : knowledge and self-awareness. So, Whitehead's impersonal Principle seems to have set our universe on a course that we humans are unable to predict. But some of us may look upon the process of Evolution, and say that it is both Good and Bad, depending on your viewpoint. One way to look at it is to admit that the Cosmos is improving*2 but not yet perfect. :wink:
*1. PROCESS COSMOLOGY --- a worldview for our time
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15833/process-cosmology-a-worldview-for-our-time/p1
*2. Misconceptions about evolution :
Evolution results in progress; organisms are always getting better through evolution.
https://evolution.berkeley.edu teach-evolution misco...
Note --- Adaptation means improve or die
Quoting Hanover
Yes. Sorry, I thought that was the context from which you spoke as well. Perhaps I got that wrong.
Quoting Hanover
But a little perspective, please? :wink: This isn't a judicially ambiguous, much-contested provision of a legal document. It's a simple phrase: "God loves you." Definitely some possible divergent ways of understanding this, but is it really capable of the same kind of multiplicity of interpretations, arguing the same case-specific technicalities? Is that what you think Christians would say about it? (I'm trying to picture the disciples scratching their heads and saying, "Now when he said 'love,' do you think he really meant 'love' like my Daddy loves me? Maybe he meant the way I 'love' catching a fish? That could have been it!"). And of particular significance for this thread about theodicy, is it capable of an interpretation that is consistent with our brutal circumstances here on Earth? As I've said earlier in the thread, I think we require the possibility of an afterlife to make sense of that.
Quoting Hanover
I quite agree. I don't agree that asking what "God is love" might mean, in a Christian context, is asking for an unsophisticated exegesis. And you've misunderstood me if you think I'm trying to cast doubt on this picture of God. Just the opposite.
Quoting Tom Storm
That is the irony of the problem of evil. The argument assumes the existence of God, assumes moral objectivity and normativity (suffering is evil), judges God as immoral because we suffer, all in order to support the conclusion that God must not even exist. God's definition, plus my suffering, proves God's non-existence. We need a certain and specific God in the argument to prove the conclusion that such God must not exist.
But if we take God out of the mix, we still have nature; what does that make of the use of death and pain as the engine of survival in nature (the physics of it)? The world is still as it is, with it's pain and death.
We can't call death and pain "twisted" as natural processes without a creator God behind them.
In a world without God, don't we have to jettison "evil" when we jettison "God" and say that pain, like pleasure, is just another sensation, and that death, like birth, is just another moment in a biological entity's life? Shouldn't we move beyond good and evil too?
So now, with no one to complain to (no God to appeal our case of suffering to), why even call suffering, pain and death, evil or bad? There's nothing twisted about pain and death so long as God does not cause them. It's still the same world, same pain and death, just now, because there is no intention behind them, we are without any need to judge or justify pain or pleasure as bad or good.
But in the case that pain and suffering are no longer adjudged evil or bad, why did we think God wouldn't want us to suffer in the first place? Now the premise about what God would want (God would want to prevent pain and death) in the problem of evil argument seems ridiculous. Why would God want to prevent suffering and pain if these are not evil?
But the real irony is, without God, for some reason, this same life is now seen as the triumph of nature, with life finding a way despite calamity after insufferable calamity. If we take God out of the equation, we see those beings that bear suffering and overcome pain as heroic and good. Suffering almost becomes justified by all of the lives that follow it. Suffering adds to the good of living once it is overcome.
Yet though we can, in a secular way, save our triumph and heroism, we haven't found a way to save our God (at least not in the minds of modern geniuses and academics).
Quoting Tom Storm
You sound like a hotel guest who doesn't have enough towels (or who can't read his Gideons Bible).
Bottom line to me is, the only way for me to be me, for me to become free one day, for me to participate in the structure of my own character, for me to be able to love, for me to recognize something as good and to choose that good - the world has to be as it is. And this is for each of us. for me to be different than Tom, and for Tom to be different than all others, the world can only be as the world is.
Individuated entities, like Tom, or the moon, don't get to sit in existence, for however long they might exist, without breaking free, which causes suffering.
I suffer so that I can be me. Suffering has to be, for something precisely like me to come into existence.
Its not a 'best of all possible worlds' argument; its a 'there is only one world anyway' argument. I think God does not have the power to create me as me in any other setting besides the world as it is, with pain, and earthquakes and suffering and death of babies and extinction of species, etc.. I don't know what an "omnipotent" being actually means or is. There is no other possible world, if I am to be in it, as me. Maybe it means, God has the power to do anything, but in order to do me, as I am, the world I live in could be no different than it is. This is the same for all beings that exist.
The only position against God, then, to me, is, God should not have created anything. We should never have been given the opportunity to weigh in on our own lives or God's creation. Fine, if you are antinatalist or a miserable solipsist, or just contrarian. But the position that God must not exist because pain exists? Seems ultimately like a complaint to the hotel manager.
The instant you think there is something that exists that should be or could be improved upon, some pain that should be relieved, you now subject yourself to all of the forces that brought you to have that opinion in the first place. And those forces include the ability to suffer, and the suffering itself; you would not imagine the improvement otherwise.
It's actually more ambiguous by virtue of its antiquity and the multiplicity of traditions offering opinions on what God's love is. A Catholic response to your question of what God's love is, for example:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_caritas_est
If you want to know another tradition's view, you can look that up as well.
I'll assure you there are important differences among them, pointing to differing contexts and hermeneutical approaches.
I dont understand this argument at all. Much life is suffering and gloomy regardless of theism or atheism. The experience doesnt change with or without a deity.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Lots of ideas here. Yes, perhaps God should not have created the world. I can see this as a legitimate response. I am not arguing that god does not exist because of pain. I am saying that theres a design argument for pain and suffering being intentional to Gods plan. The hotel analogy isnt terrible. You know what happens to dysfunctional hotels? They are shut down and the owners are prosecuted.
Exactly! Arguing about the goodness or badness of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim God does not solve the humanistic problem of Evil & Suffering. It merely assigns blame to the mythical Manager, who is ironically assumed to be absent from his post. A more philosophical position would be to recognize that the world (i.e. Nature) "uses" pain & death (sentience & senescence) as integral components in the constructive process of Evolution, from a mathematical quantum-scale Singularity to a near-infinite & ever-expanding Cosmos of Consciousness. On one Pale Blue Dot, we humans somehow became sentient, and invented the categories of Good & Evil, so we'll have something to philosophize about.
Non-theistic pre-Christian philosophies --- Brahmanism, Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism --- accepted the world "as it is", and charged humans with the responsibility for adapting to that reality. The various gods of Theism serve mainly as someone to complain to (e.g. the management). But secular history records no instances of divine interventions into the course of Nature, on behalf of whining humans. Yet, we have myths saying that the gods fixed the problem by evicting the troublesome tenants with floods & massacres. Obviously, the goal of evolution is not you or me. So we are merely means to some other end. Meanwhile, we philosophize.
That's why I prefer A.N. Whitehead's notion of God (Nature) as the inexorable Process of Evolution. The Darwinian Procedure works like a program*1, via And/Or/Not (selection & combination & elimination), to improve the current stock for the next generation. Like Spinoza, Whitehead uses the term "god" in a technical, not religious, sense to designate the implicit Programmer of this ongoing process of cosmic Creation. So, God is still in "the mix", not as the intervening manager, but as the program and/or programmer of the creative system we call "Evolution" or "Nature". The manager is not at the front desk, but at the cosmic computer console. :smile:
*1. Evolutionary programming (EP) is an approach to simulated evolution that iteratively generates increasingly appropriate solutions in the light of a stationary or nonstationary environment and desired fitness function.
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-540-92910-9_23
But using all of the same terms from the flip side, the problem of evil says our experience of God changes with or without suffering.
The argument says suffering cant coexist with an all-good/powerful/knowing God. We suffer. Therefore, we either do not experience God at all (because God doesnt exist), or our experience is of a God who isnt all-good or all-powerful.
You said the experience of suffering doesnt change with or without a deity. Im saying that may be true, but my point is the experience of a deity changes with or without suffering and that changed experience is supposed to be of the deitys non-existence.
The experience of our pain co-existing with God re-characterizes the pain as something God controls, and this creates a new problem for us that isnt a problem without the presence God - how can Good God leave us to suffer so much pain? This is a new experience of suffering. It is suffering inflicted by God, and not simply the suffering that happens in nature.
When I eliminate God from the landscape, my suffering remains, only now I can accept or judge it differently; I cant judge anyone or any deity or other personal force for inflicting it upon me, and I cant expect any such outside force could eliminate the suffering. Life has pain in it. No reason to seek blame or harbor resentment anymore. And in fact, I have to start taking responsibility for my own suffering, embrace it, and see what it is telling me, especially if I want to alleviate it or change, or grow from or overcome or prevent it.
Without God or anything behind it, pain is just another experience, justifiable and justified as any experience might be justified. It is what it is; thats how evolution works. Pleasure draws things toward each other, pain repels things apart; the living grow and take over, the dying diminish and are consumed. Suffering is no longer something to be eliminated or something that can even be imagined as eliminated. Pain is now a badge of honor to those for whom that which does not destroy us makes us stronger.
So my point is, why should I think my own experience of suffering where there is NO deity, takes on a new character of preventable bad/evil where there IS a powerful, good, deity in the mix? Basically, why is God held accountable for making me suffer unjustly if I can be made to suffer justly by nature without God anyway?
We have to assume an all-good God who was all-powerful would use that power to eliminate all of our suffering. Thats not a necessary, logical assumption.
So the problem of evil tells me I have no idea of the significance of suffering or all-goodness or all-power or all-knowing. Or no understanding of all of the above. The presence of suffering doesnt mean that God doesnt exist, any more than the presence of suffering means that pleasure doesnt exist.
If you want to be able to feel hardness, with that ability, you will be able to feel softness. If you want to know pleasure, you will learn of pain.
We have to be without, in order to receive.
So unless the argument is against the universe for being the universe, and you wish you were never born, I see no reason to conclude Good God and evil pain cannot coexist.
I am saying that this comment from you:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Seems mistaken.
As an atheist who doesn't beleive that there are gods, reality does not become a triumph of nature just because there's no 'magic sky wizard' or ground of being, call the thing whatever you want.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Not all atheists accept this argument.
Suffering aside, I think it is certainly worth remarking upon that predation and cruelty are built into the engine of survival for most creatures, but this is not a disproof of god. The problem of suffering does not lead you automatically anywhere, whether you are a theist or an atheist.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I don't recognise this way of thinking. It reads like bad Nietzsche to me. No doubt atheists hold diverse views on suffering. Trying to avoid it is my path. Suffering holds no intrinsic meaning.
Thats kind of my whole point. Someone who uses suffering to prove God doesnt exist is putting some intrinsic meaning into the suffering. Suffering = evil doer doing evil.
But since you said suffering holds no intrinsic meaning, it makes sense that:
Quoting Tom Storm
Which is my whole point.
So it sounds like you might be agreeing with me even though you are saying you dont.
The point of this quote:
Quoting Fire Ologist
is this: the existence of suffering, which in nature has no intrinsic meaning, can be taken to mean nothing, or can be taken to mean there must be no good God, or can be taken to mean that I am a hero who overcame suffering. And my point in saying that is irony is that, we can give ourselves a break and turn suffering into heroism (if we want to insert meaning into it), but for the God who created us and is supposedly all-good, it seems easier to only see God as an evil-doer, or just non-existent, despite using the same formerly meaningless suffering as the evidence.
Without God you are not suffering justly or unjustly. To apply the notion of justice to your suffering in the absence of the presumption of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient God would be a category error.
Quoting Tom Storm
Yes, there certainly seems to be no point seeking it...there is plenty to go around.
So why must we apply the notion of justice to suffering with the presence of of God? There is no other way?
What you dismiss as a category error, I dismissed as justification - its the dismissal of trying to justify suffering that is the point.
Because we know how powerful God is, and we know what God would want to do with suffering, and we know God knows everything - we know God must not exist because we suffer?
We know how all of that works, how suffering, power and goodness would all be justified, and that this new justified world would have no suffering in it? There is no other logical conclusion? We might not understand what we mean by God or all-good or all-power?
God only wants there to be beauty and has the power to make what he wants. I have an ugly mole. Therefore, God doesnt exist.
Atheists generally get their idea of God from elementary religious education, from interacting with casual believers and from listening to sermons in church directed mainly at casual believers. You can't really blame them for not appreciating these sophisticated, esoteric alternative accounts of God of interest mainly to a small number of theology-inclined people.
Maybe the actual problem is this massive conceptual gulf between the mainstream sky-daddy and the borderline Lovecraftian "higher being" of the theistic intelligentsia?
I think if you read it more you would find a lot of your own ideas reversed and turned into horror. Lovecraftian enlightenment amounts to confronting human ignorance and worthlessness and the absolute amorality and indifference of all things "higher".
I think the kind of atheists who the OP is referring to get their idea of God from New Atheist sermons. That group is disproportionately represented online.
I don't find that plausible. I think people get these ideas independently, then they flock to Dawkins or whoever because he gives them validation. New Atheism is (was) reactionary in that sense.
And more importantly, they always cared far more about the opinions of Al Qaeda, Kent Hovind and the Westboro Baptist Church than those of Alvin Plantinga or Thomas Aquinas.
As opposed to what? Who is more deserving of our focus?
In the sophisticated mainstream theological accounts of God I have encountered, he is still considered to be all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful and that conception is simply incompatible with the nature of the world he is believed to have created. So, it is not just the simplistic "sky-daddy" conception of God which is inconsistent with the suffering in the world.
Some theologians may tackle this by removing one or other of the omnis from God's CV in order to achieve some consistency, I don't know if that is so, just surmising. It's the turning of the theological backs on human notions of goodness and justice which I find indefensible.
I do know the Gnostics believed, with far greater consistency than the mainstream theologians, that this world was created by an inferior and deluded deity they called (if I remember right) Yaldobaoth.
As it happens theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart has cited suffering as the argument that gives him the most amount of doubt and his understanding of God (disliked by some Christians as being too progressive or Left and therefore mistaken) is highly sophisticated.
When someone proffers the design argument and appeals to the perfection of nature one can always argue that this perfection is dubious at best since nature is full of horrors and fuck ups and if God were a car manufacture, he would likely be prosecuted and shut down.
That's it, in a nutshell. If our human notions of goodness and justice are so far off the mark, from God's point of view, then why call God "really" good or just at all? It's just words, at that point. I think there are ways to "get God off the hook" but this isn't one of them. It's as shameful as a parent whipping a child into the hospital while saying, "But this is just a sign of how much I love you." Yeah, with love like that, who needs hatred?
This is a bit like saying, "All teh theists are Westboro Baptists!" It's an irresponsible strawman.
Reformed theology is problematic.* Also, the Reformed constitute a tiny fraction of Christianity. So why take the beliefs of a 2.5% minority and pretend that they represent the whole group? ...Because it's fun to be indignant, and focusing on the crazy minority offers that opportunity.
* Or rather, some. It's not even fair to characterize that whole group this way.
But again this predicated on the expectation that existence ought to be a state of perfection, or a state of being where there is no suffering, predation, death or loss. What is the basis of that expectation?
My conversations with theists who argue this time and again. All these sorts of arguments exist solely as a riposte to to common arguments put out by theists. Of course, not all theists hold to this but what percentage of Christians and Muslims do you think are out there with sophisticated accounts?
I would agree with you that it is a very human default tendency to rationalize in order to manufacture support for what we want to believe. But isn't the aim of philosophy the truth and isn't rationalization, in whatever area of one's life it is practiced, an impediment to seeing the truth?
Stalinists and ideologues are just as much victims and/or purveyors of blind faith as religionists in my view. On the other hand, atheism is simply lack of belief in a god. When atheists point out the inconsistency between our notions of goodness and justice and the usual conception and the biblical presentation (at least) of God, I don't see that as any kind of rationalization but as reasoned critique.
I'm not familiar with Bentley Hart, so I don't know if I would consider his conception of God to be reasonable, but I would say that any reasonable understanding of what a deity might be would not be such as to offer any comfort to us.
I agree with you regarding the supposed perfection of nature. Nature is a work in progress and is both beautiful and awe-inspiring and terrible and in some ways far from perfect.
The argument given by religious apologists that asks why we should expect nature to be without suffering and judge the notion of God as inconsistent with the suffering we see everywhere fails to take account of the fact that God is presented by religious authorities as all-goo, all-knowing and all-powerful, and also judgmental to the point of casting sinners into eternal damnation.
From the perspective of the human understanding of goodness and justice this is appalling, and the only answer religious apologists have is to say something along the lines of "God moves in mysterious ways". This seems to me a total copout. If God were really what they claim he is, he could have created a perfect world for his creatures where they always already enjoy perfect happiness. He is said to be omniscient and omnipotent after all.
So, it is only that conception of God that I have a problem with, and that I think any reasonable person should have a problem with. The thing is that by and large within the Abrahamic religions it is THE conception.
I was rather struck by the William Butler Yeats quote, 'man can embody the truth, but he cannot know it', written days before his death in a letter to a friend. So truth is something that can only be lived, a state of being, rather than an abstract proposition. And I would hope that what is worth saving from the religions is aimed at that (and that indeed there is).
You should find a theological treatment of the problem of evil and actually read it. That way your appraisal will be based on at least one piece of real evidence.
As far as popular writers who come to mind, there's Brian Davies, Eleonore Stump, David Bentley Hart, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright...
No, definitely not. I'm saying the opposite. It would be a monstrous lie, cruel hoax, etc, if there were indeed no salvation, no possibility of an afterlife. But I believe there is, and not for nothing is this the central metaphysical tenet of traditional Christian theology. I think that when the Western tradition speaks of a god of love and justice, those words mean just what they mean to any ordinary human being. In order for God to truly deserve being described with those qualities, however, this life cannot be the end of the story.
But we can't play games with words and try to maintain that "love" in God's eyes "really" means what humans mean by "cruelty" or "indifference."
If you truly think the Christian God is the author of reality, whether or not he likes priests to bum infants is hte least of your worries.
Yes, I agree. But I note that you also said in a response to another poster:
Quoting J
I don't agree with this for two reasons. An all-powerful all-loving all-knowing God could have created paradise to begin with. There is no need to torture his creatures even if the reward (for some?) is eternal happiness thereafter.
The other reason is that no mention of an afterlife is posited for the animals, who also suffer. Given those two issues I would still say that no three-O God cuts the mustard from the POV of humans notions of goodness and justice.
I know there are different conceptions of God than the one that posits the three O's although I'm not sure there are mainstream theologians who hold them. I also know that any theodicy which insists on maintaining the three O's is fatally flawed from the point of view of a human conception of justice and goodness, and I find any position that claims that we can't really understand divine justice and goodness ridiculous and in fact pernicious.
You'll hear apologists saying it's an issue deep and difficult to understand, but I agree with Nietzsche that is merely obfuscation: muddying the waters to make them appear deep. So, I don't need to read into an area I'm not really interested in, given that I find in myself no need to believe in God, and do not find the idea at all plausible from a rational standpoint in any case.
Quoting AmadeusD
If it doesn't "get off the ground" as a concept, then I don't think it's a matter of making fun of them but of pointing out the flaws in the concept and hoping they will be disabused of the idea. You don't educate people by making fun of them.
That's fair.
But it works as solution to the problem, and for a philosopher that is all that matters.
My point is that I find it hard to blame a these more politically animated New Atheist types for attacking the conception of God with the greatest social relevance. Of course we shouldn't lower ourselves to that level.
Quoting Leontiskos
Then why should we listen to Wayfarers conception of God? How many % does he represent?
I don't understand why you would think that something that rejects human rationality is a solution to any problem and especially in the context of philosophical thought.
Rationality? You said "goodness and justice".
The idea that Gods will necessarily aligns with what is good is one of "our" notions of goodness, people just don't necessarily get that it implies that God is fine with human misery. When you do get there you can choose to reject the notion that "God is good" or the notion that "misery is bad", but I wouldn't say either choice makes you irrational.
Completely agree. Traditional Christian theology is primitive, in this area. But I think we can "expand the circle of compassion" without necessarily moving out of the Abrahamic traditions entirely. (FWIW, I've been an animal-rights advocate -- and vegan -- for decades.)
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, and I'm under no illusions that anything I propose could settle the issue. But about privation . . . I don't know whether you've had the misfortune of watching a parent suffer the loss of a child. In such a case, I'm fairly sure the experience is not one of lack or want; it's an active and excruciating suffering. And once again, it's hard to put this down to mere divine indifference. Perhaps, if that's all it was, we might manage to see the experience as a lack of the good, misinterpreted by us as a not-caring. But the problem is that God, in the tradition we're discussing, is posited as caring very much. So we need to square that -- the God of love -- with the creator of a natural world which is clearly hostile or indifferent to human beings. Privation? OK, but why so much of it? And why must children and parents suffer the consequences?
Accepting that God exists, He could not be Good considering the existence of Evil in the world. Good and Evil are fundamental features of reality, and both are necessary. To my understanding, God must be neutral regarding Good and Evil, so all problems are resolved.
Believe me, it is easy to see that you don't read in this area.
From a historically conscious perspective, the whole notion of calling the Christian God evil is unfathomably confused (it's no coincidence that our most cogent illustrations of evil and even of the Problem of Evil come from Christians themselves). Then add the fact that you cannot even produce a substantive reason for why racism is wrong, or should be prohibited. That's pretty standard philosophical-academic problem in the contemporary Anglo-American world: moral truths do not exist and moral claims are not truth apt. Which gives us the average amateur philosopher on TPF saying, "God is evil! Also, evil doesn't exist."
It would be extremely difficult to underestimate the anti-religious [s]thinking[/s] sentiment on TPF. What is desperately needed here is reading and information.
replied "No, the reality of a suffering world is incompatible with the usual conception of a tri-omni God."
When you {plural} use the word "God" are you referring to A) the triune God of Christianity, one aspect of whom is a person capable of empathizing with human suffering? Which may be an attempt to reconcile the "notion of justice" with an omniscient abstract God, incapable of suffering . Or B) to the omnipotent (necessary & sufficient) God of Spinoza, which is the non-personal force of Nature, that is no respecter of persons, hence dispenser of impartial natural justice (it is what it is)?
In case A) Justice is whatever God says it is. Or whatever God's interpreters say it is. {natural law or religious law}. In practice, God's law & justice are always filtered through human opinions.
For case B) what happens is often deemed unfair (contrary to my best interest) by sufferers of natural disasters. But we have no recourse to a sympathetic higher authority. So, we can't legitimately complain about injustice.
Yet there is another way : mundane Human systems of Law & Justice.
Aside from ecclesiastical courts, most appeals to Justice are directed to fallible human judgement, despite its spotty record of fair & balanced & accurate dispensation. Ironically, even most secular courts of Justice aspire to divine recompense for suffering (hand on the bible). But, in practice, it seems that most human & animal suffering leaves us with only two options : take opioids to dull the pain, or "suck it up!"
Even so, wronged humans typically look for someone to blame for the Evil stuff, and to praise for the Good stuff. Hence, the notion of divine Justice as an Ideal for comparison with what's Real. Yet, agnostic pragmatic Aristotle placed the blame for suffering on human ignorance & lack of virtue (bad people)*1. So, we're back to reliance on mundane Justice. :smile:
*1. Aristotle viewed good and evil as being about actions and choices, not as inherent qualities. He believed that knowledge and virtue are the hallmarks of good, while ignorance and vice are the causes of evil. Essentially, Aristotle didn't see a separate source of evil in the universe, but rather evil as the result of a lack of knowledge and virtue.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=aristotle+good+vs+evil
The question is not what percentage Wayfarer represents, but what percentage the object of his critique represents. I actually think Wayfarer's critique is applicable to a large percentage of the vocal atheist population, and more importantly, it is applicable to a large percentage of the TPF atheist population.
Beyond that, various people have noted that the critique will not apply to more precise indictments of Christianity, including myself.
Quoting goremand
Along the same lines, I think this is just false. The caricatures that atheists present are not found in elementary religious education, among casual believers, or in church sermonsunless the atheist limits themselves to Westboro Baptist sermons, which they may well do.
There is continuity between the academy and the general population. Parishioners learn from pastors who read theologians. They are all on the same page, it's just that there is a time lapse between the academy and the general population. The same holds for atheists, and the general vocal atheist is learning from anti-theologians like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who are themselves wielding the caricatures. Atheists who draw from more able minds are not as vocal (because they are drawing from thinkers like Nietzsche, Marx, Feuerbach, Comte, etc., and these thinkers are much more careful and nuanced in their representations of theism).
Let's not overstate things, I'm not saying New Atheism has had no effect on the discourse. People definitely do pick up some unfortunate attitudes, arguments from these science-y public intellectual types. I just can't see someone walking into into a Sam Harris TED-Talk without a preexisting notion God. The seed is already there, so to speak.
Quoting Leontiskos
If you say so. My impression is that a lot of stuff gets lost in this game of telephones. The God of the common believer has always felt very "human" to me, he's our father, he loves us, he'll take care of us in the end, etc. A far cry from the timeless, genderless, emotionless, unfathomable "being" all the serious thinkers seem to end up with.
Quoting Leontiskos
Well these people sound nice. I wonder why it is that when I spoke of "atheists generally" your mind went straight to Dawkins and Hitchens and not to these guys.
D&H as polemicists have had the most traction on the internet. I guess they are entertaining polemicists, if you like that kind of thing. The New Atheism was a publishing gimmick for a while, and it seems to me that people quickly lost interest. Where I live, neither atheism nor theism interests most people. They seem to be default atheists, with no particular arguments against gods, just a lack of interest. I guess this is our secular age in action.
When I was a young atheist I read mainly pamphlets and listened to secular talks and read Robert Ingersoll.
Quoting goremand
The problem with this esoteric (and sometimes apophatic) version of God is that it's so hard to get people interested in it. Why would they care? Theistic personalism seems to have more vitality.
Okay, fair enough.
Quoting goremand
I think that's the false inference, though. "The preacher said God loves us therefore he has an undeveloped notion of God." The vocal atheists make that assumption, but the parishioners don't. It is really a kind of circular reasoning for the (vocal) atheist to find that inference plausible.
Christian theism is both philosophically and Scripturally informed, and therefore in that case a "personal" God is not unphilosophical. There are tensions, sure, but that tradition is very old and well-developed. You find the same thing in some other religions too.
Quoting goremand
I have been talking about vocal atheists (or evangelistic atheists, if you like). That's what I think this thread is centered on, and it's also what seems most pertinent as far as perceptions go. I also think the number of atheists who read Feuerbach & co. is extremely small. Marxism is a larger category, but it isn't as focused on religious debate.
We have had personal tragedies in my immediate and extended family, but Ive never felt that it was something God did. The question how could God let this happen? never occurred to me. Quite why is hard to explain, but I suppose its because even though I see the sense in saying that God is personal, I dont understand God as a person. Ive said in the past, that while Im not atheist, I dont believe in *a* God.
Quoting goremand
If God is fine with human misery then he is not good according to the human conception of goodness. Misery cannot but be bad according to that conception. The simple solution is there is no reason to believe in such a God.
Quoting J
That's a step in the right direction. I just don't see why we need God. I don't personally see any reason to believe in God...I think it all comes down to upbringings and personal conviction. I cannot criticize someone else's personal convictions in this matter because I cannot inhabit their experience.
What I can criticize are rational arguments for the existence of God, and weak apologetics...I've examined them all and none of them work. If you are a believer why not accept that, simply believe on the strength of feeling alone. like Kierkegaard's arational "leap of faith" and leave others to their own feelings in the matter? For many reasons I don't think it is an interesting or fitting topic for philosophical discussion.
Quoting Gnomon
I was referring to the three omnis: omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. The Chrisitan conception of God is of a loving personal God, one who cares for all his creatures. The nature of His creation (assuming just for the sake of argument that there were such a creator God) belies the conception that God could be all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful. It a pretty easy to understand inconsistency which keeps getting glossed over by believers.
Spinoza's critique of that conception of God can be found in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and a trenchant critique it is. His own conception of God grew out of that critique. Needless to say, Spinoza's God has no concern for humanity or anything else.
Quoting Tom Storm
This is exactly the problem. There is no more comfort to be found in such a God than there is in nature itself as we find it.
Yes, this is the face of atheism to me as well. The idea that atheism works like an organized religion, with Pope Dawkins preaching his dogma to the faithful, misses the mark in my experience.
Quoting Leontiskos
I think the aspect that you are underselling is that religion isn't just about the "top down" of disseminating doctrine to the masses, but also the "bottom up" of appealing to those masses in the first place. This is true now more than ever, I've seen what a church desperate for membership looks like and it's not pretty. Preachers need a God with charisma, it's in their interest not to make him too "weird".
Now I'm sure some good work has been done to stich together "the God that draws the crowds" and "the God that wins internet arguments" and I don't want to sell that short, but fundamentally that is what I take it to be: reconciling two very different ideas of God created for two very different purposes.
Quoting Janus
Exceedingly narrowminded, in my opinion. "Suffering is good" is perhaps a strange and disturbing claim but I wouldn't say it's a literal contradiction in terms. Maybe it is a contradiction under your conception of goodness, but that's all it is: your conception.
You are right to recognize the distinction
To me it seems like equivocation between the God described cataphatically during uncritical in group discussions amongst believers, and the vagueness of the God described apophatically when faced with skeptics.
I'm not seeing the "good work" though. Can you explain?
Neither do I really, but I'm sure someone, somewhere put in a decent effort and deserves a pat on the back. Or at least that's what my intellectual humility compels me to say.
Nor me, in quite that way. I was bringing up this example as a contrast with the idea that such grief is experienced as a privation, a lack, not as an indictment of God.
As it happens, I agree with you about the rational arguments. I believe religion begins where philosophy ends. And theology, that halfway house, has never interested me much. But let me push back a little on your final sentence, or at least the "fitting" part. Whether it is true -- whether it's fitting for philosophy to examine rational apologetics -- is itself a philosophical question. The arguments themselves may or may not fit comfortably within philosophical practice. But that too is a philosophical question.
I'm pointing out this peculiarity of philosophy: To consider whether something should be ruled in or out of philosophy is . . . to do more philosophy! And I'm sure you're not saying that the meta-question itself is inappropriate.
Okay, but that seems to fly in the face of the weird caricatures from New Atheist types (or their historical antecedents, such as Carl Sagan and Bertrand Russell).
More directly, the Christian claim is that God descends to man in man's hour of need, so it's not surprising that the "bottom-up" part would also be in place. I guess I don't see why philosophical and religious notions of God must be incompatible.
That's not quite what I'm saying. I'm saying that in a sense the masses are the ones telling their church what kind of God they want. And the church responds to that, because they are service providers. So there is a conception of God that flows in the other direction, from the bottom to the top.
Quoting Leontiskos
It's not that they must be, it's that in my experience they are. And I think there's a plausible reason why.
The philosophical question, then, is whether these narratives still contain anything existentially real and relevantsomething that speaks to the human condition even if the language has become foreign. This is complicated by the fact that Christianity, as a universal religion, must speak to all people and cannot be elitist. It must present its insights through parables and imagery accessible to the widest possible audience. Yet in doing so, it risks being misunderstoodor ignoredby those who no longer share the cultural frame that once made these symbols intuitive.
This creates a crisis of semantic translatability. The ancient symbols still carry meaning, but it is often obscured or misread outside the world that gave them shape. Joseph Campbell pointed to this when he said modern people need a new mythologyone that speaks to the realities of space exploration, ecological fragility, and inner psychological complexity, rather than tribal cohesion or agricultural renewal. Much of the appeal of interstellar sci-fi may stem from a sublimated longing for heaven. This helps explain the often-noted parallels between Campbells Heros Journey and the Star Wars narrativethough, admittedly, Star Wars is abundant in spectacle and obviously fictional.
Some theologians and thinkers today are re-framing religious symbols in existential, psychological, or ecological terms. But the challenge is immense, because myth is not just an ideait is a way of seeing. It shapes how we perceive the world, ourselves, and what we value. Authentic spirituality doesnt simply affirm; it confrontsit speaks to our deepest fears as well as our hopes. And there are always good reasons to resist that.
A great deal of the heat surrounding contemporary debates about religion arises from the misinterpretation of mythological language. The myths were never meant to be taken as literal reportage; they are symbolic maps of meaning. But when the symbolic is flattened into the literalor dismissed as mere fantasythe real depth of what myth once conveyed is lost.
Relevant essay from a few years back, The Strange Persistence of Guilt, Wilfred McCay, The Hedgehog Review. Long read but I found it very insightful.
I think the idea that misery is bad is universal, or almost universal. Do you really believe anyone thinks it is good to be miserable? I doubt there are any or at least many. It seems it is your assertion that misery could be considered good, that is out of step and is merely "your conception".
Quoting J
I agree religion begins where philosophy ends. I once was interested in and read a good bit of theology but I found it all very arbitrary and vacuously speculative, ultimately a waste of time.
When I said religion has no place in philosophy I meant religious apologetics and theology. From a phenomenological perspective religion certainly has a place, it is an important aspect of human life. Faith itself is a powerful and important part of the human condition, and since it can be transformative, whole-life altering, it deserves a place in philosophy. Such experiences do not have a place in metaphysics as I see it, because we cannot tell what they really mean or even if they mean anything at all, beyond what they mean to the individual having the experience.
People experience powerful altered states and they cannot help interpreting them to indicate some metaphysical truth or other according to their cultural predispositions. While this process may indeed be of phenomenological interest, it cannot be held to yield any propositional truth, and so could be of no help for metaphysics.
Ive met some Catholics, particularly among the Missionaries of Charity, who seemed to believe that misery is a sign of special blessing from God. They wouldnt say that suffering is good in itself, but they regarded it as a form of grace and they do venerate it. Possibly a sign that the miserable are active participants in the suffering of Jesus.
Yes, absolutely. And why not?
Quoting Janus
That's not a problem, because unlike you I never made any assertions on behalf of humanity.
Quoting Wayfarer
An insurmountable flaw, in my opinion. You can't be a philosopher if you're not prepared to say "I am right and everyone else is wrong".
Your post reminds me of this quotation from Kierkegaard. Did you have it in mind when you wrote it? (I don't have a proper reference, but found it included in Kierkegaard - AZ Quotes)
Kierekegaard is criticizing the argument, not because it is invalid or unsound, but because it is inappropriate. We are thrown into the ongoing world. Approaching it from our beginning in this way displays the arrogance of a new-comer turning up in a community and criticizing it without taking the time or effort to understand it. Or, at least, something along those lines. I don't think this is a slam-dunk, conclusive answer, but might at least us to be a bit more suspicious of the idea that the traditional problem of evil is a slam-dunk argument against anything that a believer can recognize.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is one possibility - that Christianity, like other religions, cannot be understood as philosophy, but as a different kind of enterprise, directed at persuading us to adopt a way of life, and a culture, rather than a collection of doctrines. Its project and its methods are not those of philosophy. Perhaps the philosophical problem of evil is perfectly correct, so far as it goes. But then it misses the point of the religious practice, creating a God quite different from the God of philosophy.
Quoting JanusYou are right, of course. But people do sometimes suggest that being miserable can have good consequences. "What does not kill us makes us stronger".
The paradox here is that Christianity, like other religions, needs to make us feel that we are miserable wretches, in order to create the opportunity for God's intervention to save us from our misery. Evil is not an optional extra here, but an essential part of the project.
Choices made a long time ago. Also known as karma.
I guess it's a matter of this quartet: Random, Causality, Logic, Math. You don't exist before you start to exist. You can only decide when you are there, but then it's too late.
At first I thought you were saying that "suffering is bad" is a priori true. Then I thought you were saying "suffering is bad" is a universally held belief. Now it seems you saying "most people think suffering is bad" which is a trivial and irrelevant claim.
Again, this might be true. But whether it's true is a philosophical question. It seems to me that discussing that question is neither apologetics nor phenomenology, but plain old epistemology, wouldn't you say? As such, shouldn't it be a respectable activity for a philosopher?
Perhaps what you're saying is that you believe you have independent and solid grounds for insisting that only propositional truths can be helpful in metaphysics -- and moreover, that religious discourse can't supply them. I bet you can guess what I'm going to say next! :smile: : This may be true, but whether it's true requires . . . more philosophy.
That third "omni" is the problem. As the Jews learned over centuries of divine tough love, Omniscience & Omnipotence are not compatible with Empathy & Sympathy. Omni love would be more like Artificial Intelligence*1. Modern humans can "fall in love" with computers, and the computers are programmed by humans to express their "care & concern" for the person with benevolent words*2. But computers & Gods, lacking biological bodies & motivating hormones, are presumably incapable of feeling love, in the human sense.
So, that's why I think the Christian triune God-concept had an emotional advantage over the abstract unitary deity of the Torah. It reintroduced a physical concrete element that the prophets of Yahweh had attempted to banish for generations. A heroic, half-human, half-god messiah was more like the pagan demi-gods, Aeneas, Bacchus, & Hercules : More inspiring & sympathetic characters, for people to admire and aspire to. The addition of an immanent Holy Spirit added an element of practical magic to the mix. So, Christianity hit all the right notes at a time when both Roman and Jewish gods were fading in popularity.
The three-in-one Christian god-head is still popular among the masses, but waning with the intelligentsia, who are more impressed by rational evidence than by emotional myths. That's why I think A.N. Whitehead's update of Spinoza's nature-god is more appropriate for the 21st century. Spinoza referred to his Ultimate Substance as "God", and Whitehead used the same term for his Ultimate Principle of Progressive "Concretion" (evolution).
For my own philosophical purposes, I tried to find a different label for the creative Process that evolved a world of Life & Mind from an initial burst of Cosmic Energy. But that only led to mis-understandings. So, like them, I sometimes use the G-word, because it is the best known term for the Ultimate Cause that is creating a meaningful world from scratch. Yet, I see no reason to complain to omnipotent Nature for succor, to relieve the sufferings caused by both Nature and Culture. :smile:
*1. A Psychologist Explains Why Its Possible To Fall In Love With AI
https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2024/03/24/a-psychologist-explains-why-its-possible-to-fall-in-love-with-ai/
*2. Humans sometime express benevolent feeling in "little loving lies" : Fleetwood-Mac
Quoting Tom Storm
Right, given that we already find ourselves thrown into a world of potential suffering, then actually encountering suffering may be considered to be the only way to learn to come to terms with it. Of course they also presume reward in the afterlife for the pious.
Quoting goremand
If you had understood what I've been saying you would have seen that the fact that most people consider suffering to be bad is not irrelevant to the argument against the Churches' traditional conception of God, and the God presented in the Old Testament. I'm not going to spoon-feed you further. If you want to critique what I've said then go back and read it, quote what I've said and say precisely where you think it's wrong if you disagree.
Quoting J
I agree that all of what you cited are fitting problems for philosophy. But I also think that ever since Kant, Hegel notwithstanding, it has been obvious that the traditional idea that one could arrive at metaphysical truths via intellectual intuition is, if not impossible, at least impossible to verify.
Quoting Gnomon
Yes the three Omni-God is inconsistent with human ideas of goodness and justice, ened of story. So something has to give. Either God would have liked to create a perfect world free of suffering but was unable to do so, or didn't realize what he had done in creating the world, or else such a god simply does not exist in which case there is no "problem of Suffering".
Quoting Gnomon
Sure but Spinoza, probably out of not wishing to offend the religious authorities even further than he already had and out of his belief that the masses need a personal conception of God anyway, spoke in terms of "Deus sive Natura", where he could have simply spoken of natura. An impersonal God offers no comfort, and Spinoza did not believe in any afterlife.
Sure, Isn't the concept of karma precisely intended to reconcile the apparently random distribution of good and evil into the mora/ethical order? It may succeed psychologically, but does it stand up philosophically?
Quoting Quk
That seems to me one of the points that Kierkegaard is exploiting here. It is completely inappropriate to review our situation in life as if it were a holiday that we booked and which is not meeting our expectations. If we don't like where we are in life, it's no good trying to complain to the Manager.
Quoting goremand
This discussion seems to me to have suffered from an ambiguity about whether suffering can be justified or not. Some suffering may have a justification (a beneficial effect), in which case, it might be classified as not suffering, but something else. "Suffering" would then be only "unjustified suffering" and that, it seems to me, can only not be understood as a Bad Thing by someone who doesn't understand what suffering is. To put the point another way, suffering is a Bad Thing unless it is justified.
Quoting Gnomon
I may have the wrong end of the stick, but I have the impression that the difference between the God of the masses and the the God of the philosophers goes all the way back to Xenophanes in the earliest years of philosophy in Ancient Greece.
Quoting Janus
Perhaps the problem here turns on the difference between recognizing suffering and coming to terms with it. Philosophy emphasizes recognizing it; religion is primarily concerned with coming to terms with it.
Are you suggesting that it is (only?) through religion, and not through philosophy that we can come to terms with suffering?
Karma is really a kind of watershed between Eastern and Semitic religions. It must entail one or another kind of reincarnation or rebirth, if karma is to have consequences beyond this existence (and if it doesnt then its a very shallow idea). Ive discussed it many times on this forum, and I get Western culture is averse to the idea of karma and rebirth, its culturally taboo. But I remain open to it. I will add, though, that I despise the popular idea that karma is used to explain or rationalise misfortune or imply blame or retributive justice. It is only ever beneficial as what Kant would have described as a regulative principle, something to guide ones own actions.
It depends what you call philosophy and what you call religion. Boethius (and many others in his time) certainly thought that philosophy could provide consolation. How would you classify his attempt? Ancient philosophers seem mostly to have been confident that philosophy can help us to cope with suffering. But since the scientific revolution, that project seems to have been more or less abandoned and so left to religion (where humanism would count as a religion).
I do want to high-light the difference between two projects, but I don't want to over-simiplify it.
Consoling someone in distress is not the same project as someone analysing the causes of that distress, even though the two projects play into each other.
This is not something I have thought through, but something I am working out.
Quoting Wayfarer
It is indeed a watershed. I don't rule out the possibility that there may be more interesting interpretations availble that might make more sense to a Western person like myself. But I don't feel competent to discuss them. The regulative principle idea does seem to have possibilities.
I will say that the narrow conception of moral responsibility at work in much Western moral discourse seems to me just as much of a myth as the (naive) doctrine of karma. On the other hand, there are many Biblical quotations about the sins of the father being visited on the children.
It is sad how often it is the deep questions that get postponed. This one is so deep that I have no idea how to approach it.
I think the way you write is muddled and this just tells me you have limited interest in clarification.
Quoting Janus
Okay:
Quoting Janus
I take this to be saying that humanity has a single agreed-upon definition of goodness, and that misery is bad according to that definition. I think that is obviously false. For example, there are people who think that it is good for sinners to suffer. They think this not because they are irrational, but because they have a different idea of goodness than you do.
Quoting Ludwig V
A person who believed this would have to be committed to saying there is no suffering in hell, which is a statement I don't believe I've ever heard. And I mean "hell" as in fire and brimstone, people wailing in pain etc. Imagine looking at that and saying "no suffering detected".
Good. And starting with Kant, and the relation of metaphysics to human knowledge, would be a sensible program. We could take a sounding on what is indeed possible, both to know and/or to verify. My only quibble: If the conclusion here is obvious, as you say, one wonders why the debate has nonetheless gone on with vigor for so long -- i.e., you may be right, but not obviously right.
Yes -- the reconciliation of justice with mercy. I may be wrong, but I get a flavor of this in some versions of Buddhism as well. The bodhisattva deserves to be released from the wheel of dharma -- that would be just. But they choose to show mercy on unenlightened beings by returning to help them.
I think I may have been unclear using the word justified. I meant accounted for.
With whatever conception of God there is that fits the all-good-powerful-knowing God of the argument, I am asking why is it we cant account for all the pain and suffering if there is such a God, but we can account for it without God? Why is it we are fine adjudging An all-good God would not want there to be any suffering let alone all of the gratuitous suffering, but nature needs there to be all of this suffering in order for it to function at all. ??
My answer: we dont know God; we cant say an all-powerful God would be able to prevent all suffering, or an all-good God would not want there to be any suffering. Those who accept the Problem of Evil argument and conclude there must not be such a God are willing to leave suffering as it is and move on to continue their lives in the presence of no-God, but unwilling to live those lives as justifiable in the presence of God.
Basically, God must be a jerk if he doesnt immediately end suffering as it might arise (or before suffering), but more likely, God must not even exist. OR, we maybe dont understand God at all. AND therefore, the argument proves/means nothing.
Strangely, most people in the world do believe in some kind of god-concept, as an explanation for basic existence. Yet, they strive to appease the mythical mercurial ruler of the world, because they know that as bad as things are, it could get worse. For Christians, that "worse" is The Worst : eternal suffering in Hell. So despite the routine woes of life in God's creation, the long-suffering victims sing the praises of their redeemer, who will reward them with The Best : eternal bliss in Heaven. This reminds me of the old saying "justice delayed is justice denied".
As you said, Nature seems to inherently "need" (require) both positive & negative variables. This dichotomy goes back to the nature of Energy (causation) : it "works" by alternating between Hot & Cold, More & Less, Pain & Pleasure, Life & Death. These up & down variations are inherent in the cycles of Space-Time. So, we tend to view impersonal Nature non-judgmentally as "it is what it is", but we judge a personal God, capable of Love & Hate, in terms of Good vs Evil. Making God vs Devil a necessary adjustment to the monotheistic ideal.
That's why Spinoza's God/Nature was described as impersonal : it omits the Good/Evil judgements, and stoically accepts the Pain/Pleasure dimension as simply Natural. It's the same Paradise-failed reality, viewed from different perspectives, and with different expectations : differing accounting methods. :smile:
Yes. I think the world was "created" in some sense : Big Bang. But the creation could only be considered intentional in the sense that purposeful, intentional creatures have emerged from the progressive evolutionary process. So, the Bang must have had the potential for purpose. Hence, the Cosmos can be viewed as personal & purposeful in that self-aware & motivated beings inhabit the Earth, and soon learn to take care of themselves.
Yet, when humans are born, they are weak, ignorant, and needy. So, they cling to mother for sustenance and comfort. Consequently, even as adults we often feel the need for soothing solace from another similar being. Unfortunately, other mature --- but sometimes cranky --- humans, with problems of their own, may be less inclined to mother weepy grown-up strangers. Therefore, the wishful notion of a supernatural parent capable of unconditional love, and power to fix broken things, is understandable.
That's why I don't discuss emotion-suppressing and myth-busting rational philosophy with members of my own family, who still feel the need for a more personal & caring I-Thou relationship than Spinoza's natura can offer. :smile:
PERSONAL COMFORT & CONSOLATION
This belief seems easy enough to parse. Isnt it the case that if there is no god and no meaning then needless suffering actually makes sense? Its what youd expect to see in a world with no inherent purpose - struggle, chaos and suffering, But if creation is about genius design and magnificent order and if God cares for us and wants a relationship with us, then suffering by apparent design does not make much sense. It seems contradictory. This is a convincing idea. Of course if your God is an abstraction, a recondite, ground of being type deity, then one would be less likely to have any expectations of the material world. And no doubt theology can explain away anything.
Yes, rational philosophers have always felt less need for the personal touch of anthro-morphic gods. But analytical mathematician/statistician & probability theorist Blaise Pascal, argued that, although we can't be sure the God of theologians even exists, we would be wise to bet on the "house" to win.
He also decried the feckless God of philosopher Spinoza, who can do no more than what happens mechanistically in Nature. And the majority of humanity seems to agree with him. Strangely, some of Pascal's fellow Catholics, believed so sincerely in the infinite reward-pot after death that they were willing to cut short their mortal coil, and go all-in. How can austere reason compete with such popular passion, and long-term thinking? :smile:
PS___ Ironically, Pascal might be surprised to learn that modern science views Nature as statistical instead of mechanical. Does that mean that we are all playing the odds. Does that imply a gambling god? One who does not predetermine the path of nature?
The statement "nature is statistical not mechanical" is a philosophical perspective often debated in physics, suggesting that the universe operates on a probabilistic, rather than deterministic, basis. This perspective is often tied to the idea of quantum mechanics, where measurements are probabilistic rather than having a predetermined outcome.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=nature+is+statistical+not+mechanical
Note that i haven't said that the discovery of universal metaphysical truths via intellectual intuition is obviously impossible, but that it is obviously impossible to demonstrate that what has been purportedly discovered is truly a discovery and not simply an imagining. I wonder how, and hence if, we could ever go about demonstrating such a thing. As far as I can tell it remains, and always will remain, a matter of faith. I'm always ready to be corrected on that.
Quoting Gnomon
That would only seem to hold if you take the so-called laws of nature to be fixed and immutable from the beginning. Peirce didn't think that, and as far as I remember from studying Whitehead quite long ago, nor did he.
Quoting goremand
A weak response. You continue to ignore context and try to shift the blame for your poor comprehension onto a purported lack of clarity. I haven't said that no one ever thinks it is good for someone else to suffer. Of course they may think that but that only strengthens my argument: they think it is good for the evil or hated person to suffer as punishment, because they understand that suffering is bad for the one who deserves punishment.
I have always been talking about good and suffering per se. The fact that suffering to some degree might be good for the athlete; "no pain, no gain" does not weaken my argument because this, as well as punishment thought of as reformatory is always already in the context of the world that contains suffering we find ourselves in.
The theological notions of heaven and hell also demonstrate my point. Heaven is the desirable place of no suffering and hell the most feared place of endless suffering. Buddhism too, has as its aim the ending of all suffering for all beings. Religions in general have as their aim in one form or another salvation from suffering; which only goes to show that suffering, misery is universally considered to be, as such, bad.
So, the idea of a perfectly good and loving, all-knowing and all powerful being as the creator of this world is incompatible with the realities of this world, as it follows logically that he could have created a perfect world of no suffering for his creatures for the start. That has been the thrust of my whole argument and your strawmanning and throwing in of red herrings has done nothing to weaken it.
Quoting Ludwig V
I take philosophy to be primarily about how best to live. I guess the question is as to whether we need consolation or whether we need to come to terms with our condition. Would coming to terms with our condition, in the sense of being able to be at peace with it without expecting anything greater to be on offer to count as consolation? Or should we consider only a promise in some form or other, of some more perfect life to come, as we find in the various religions, to count as consolation?
Quoting H H The Dalai Lama, How Rebirth Takes Place
Very thoughtful observation. In the pre-modern world, philosophy and religion had a kind of common boundary, you might say, and quite a porous one, at that. I've sometimes thought that the role of philosophy is to 'drop you at the border', so to speak - after that, you're on your own! That, anyway, was very much the ethos of (neo)Platonism with its emphasis on contemplative illumination.
But this is where naturalism hems us in, so to speak. Insofar as we are simply another species, thrown up by the blind watchmaker, then the best we can do is one or another form of stoicism, soldiering on, coping, perhaps in the manner of Camus' Sisyphus ('It's hell, but lets keep smiling.') Or do whatever we can to ameliorate suffering and prolong life by whatever scientific means possible.
But all of the classical philosophies held to there being a higher truth, with philosophy being the manner of ascent to it. And in ascending to it, not simply ameliorate suffering, but to rise above it, to transcend it, to a realm of no-more-suffering.
I'm gloomily contemplating the idea that one of the underlying cultural problems around all of this was, in fact, created by Christian culture itself, in that the way it developed inadvertantly demolished the idea of the 'scala natura' and the idea of higher truth, that being deemed elitist and in contradiction of the universal salvation offered to all who would believe. In that way, it negates philosophy in favour of mere Christianity - leave your intellect at the door please. (Perhaps why Immanuel Kant, required to lead a formal procession of his students to Church on Sundays, would stop outside.)
I've stated this a while ago, but I see a the big fundamental division between a cozy unified "oneness", and a cold eternal "separateness". The "naturalism", represents an artificial (at best) unification whereby maybe we can say, in theory, we are all a form of "matter/energy", or in the case of living organisms, all "organic matter", or some such. But this is cold comfort for those seeking something more substantial. So you have the notion of a spiritual/mystical/soul/mind that is "behind the physical", that is really a unified metaphysical thing. And this thing manifests itself in all the entities- and thus the entities are all examples of the Maya of the principium individuationis.
Why the Maya then? Why not just the unification itself?
To answer that, you can propose several things. One is that the world is actually not limited, but boundlessly infinite, and that every manifestation of world exists. This is one existence- one with various amounts of suffering and individual entities.
This really doesn't do much, but just adds an infinite Baroque quality to existence.
Why if it is tailor-made for this way of things, rather than just one contingent universe of an infinite set, is it tailor made for this or that? Then we have notions that any Logos-principle is itself a limiting factor. If it is not limiting, then it was simply one of a number or infinite variety. Why this Logos?
Why not all unification? Why not no suffering?
The answers become ways to justify this or that notion to make people feel better for a bit, or so it seems.
So long as it remains notional, it is impotent. It requires an engagement beyond the word-processing department, so to speak.
You are quite right. But it seems to me, nonetheless, that there are important differences between the suffering of those who are in hell because they have sinned and the suffering of those like Job, who have done nothing wrong. It is the latter's suffering that cries out for a justification, or at least an explanation. Don't you think?
Quoting J
That's very good of them. What puzzles me is that mercy is so often represented as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card that is handed out more or less at random to those who don't deserve it. How is this a good thing? Surely, it can only work if the suffering of unenlightened beings is undeserved. But if that's the case, their suffering is not just.
Quoting goremand
I don't think that there is a single agreed-upon definition of a good life for human beings. But there is sufficient agreement for us to understand that those who have different definitions disagree with each other, which requires a background of agreement.
Quoting Gnomon
I've always wondered what God would make of someone who only obeyed the commandments as an insurance policy. Wouldn't that be a species of pretending to accept them?
Quoting Janus
Well, yes. But then philosophy is in direct competition with religion - or, maybe, religion is a species of philosophy for those who don't grasp the point, or importance, of reason.
What people don't seem to face up to that even asking that question presupposes a complex conceptual structure which needs to be in place to enable potential answers to be articulated and evaluated.
I also have serious difficulty that our problem is in any way articulated as a list of options on a menu, from which we choose. Who writes the menu? Perhaps we live as we must and the only question is how far we can mitigate the down-sides that turn up in every item on on the menu.
I think when there are issues of miscommunication, there is no fact of the matter on whether the speaker or listener is at fault, and debating it is usually a waste of effort. I'm sorry if you think I am being dense, but I hope you don't think it's on purpose.
Quoting Janus
There is something here I am not getting. Are you saying good and bad are necessarily a matter of perspective? I don't think theists are committed to believing that, but let's just say that you are right.
Then, from Gods perspective it might be good when people suffer. And since his opinion is the only one that matters, it's irrelevant how many people think it is "bad for them". The world could still be a 100% perfect place according to God, the arbiter of everything. Where is the contradiction in believing this?
Of course, acknowledging this as a feeble mortal might require letting go of your own intuitions or feelings about what is good or bad, is that what you think is irrational?
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes and no. The specific purpose is different, but they are both cases of God putting his stamp of approval on the suffering, which is the relevant point. It's "good suffering". And yes it does "cry out for justification", but that is what the Job story is supposed to give us.
Quoting Ludwig V
Disagree with each other over what? The definition of a word?
Yes, this is part of the "very deep question" that @Wayfarer points out. Mercy is precisely most admirable when it's undeserved. But consider this from Hamlet:
"Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?"
This begins to explain the power of mercy, I think. An impartial, unmerciful judge would treat all of us justly -- and what a terrible fate that would be!
Here's another way to think about it: Justice = being given what you deserve. Injustice = being given less than you deserve. Mercy = being given more than you deserve.
Quoting Janus
A fair distinction. The individual who claims to have made such a discovery may be in the position of indeed having done so, but being faced with the impossibility of ever demonstrating it. (I still don't think anything here is obvious, but no matter. :smile: )
A fascinating and difficult issue. If philosophy is understood as an ideal form of rationalism, then I do think it "stops at the door" of spiritual or religious forms of life. But you're pointing out that it doesn't have to be understood that way. Philosophy might be a doorway to a higher, non- or super-rational truth. But on this construal, it raises the problem of elitism, just as you say. Or, if "elitism" is a bit worn-out as a term, we could say "privileged access."
It certainly offends most Christian ears that access to the highest and most God-like realities is limited to a few who have walked the difficult path of philosophical knowledge. But this possibility is surely there as far back as the Gospels -- only it's not the intellectual or rational path that is difficult, but the ethical one. When Jesus (in one of his rare moments of humor) tells the rich young man who's done everything right that there's "just one more thing" he has to do -- give all his riches to the poor and join the Jesus followers -- he's making it clear that the kind of "salvation" the young man wants is not for everyone, but only for those who are really willing to go all the way in their lives, not their thoughts. That can't be very many, then or now.
But anyone can quote scripture for their own purposes, and there are plenty of traditional Christian teachings that say the opposite -- "only believe" and you will be saved, etc. And this doesn't touch the specific question of the role philosophy ought to play. Maybe we should just say that the relation of intellect to spiritual insight is vexed, with no clear consensus having emerged.
You'd have to elaborate. Are you talking meditation and such?
It seems to work like this:
T1: We are all one, manifested in different forms...
T2: That bastard cut me off!
The end of unity.
The link below says that Whitehead viewed natural laws as "emergent patterns"*1. And they are indeed emergent in the sense of our understanding of them. For example, Newton's view of Gravity has been significantly modified by Einstein. But the cosmic Law of Attraction didn't change, only our scientific & mathematical models.
Aside from those philosophers, most scientists today assume that Natural Laws are "empirical regularities"*2 upon which we may depend for developing our knowledge and technologies. Either way, the burst of Causal Energy & Regulating Law that we metaphorically imagine as a Big Explosion (voila!), necessarily included the Potential (latent capacity) for all subsequent forms.
For my philosophical worldview, I assume that the various Laws of Nature in effect today, were inherent in the mathematical Singularity that went Bang, but only as generic Potential, not actual or specific. If so, then the possibility of emergent Intelligence & Purpose must have been "programmed" into the metaphorical Singularity. That "point of infinite density & curvature" --- no space, no time --- could not contain anything that we now know as physical or Actual, so the myriads of Real things today, may have originated as what Whitehead enigmatically called "Actual Occasions" : fundamental, irreducible units of reality.
In computer programming, we understand that the Output (result) of the computation process began as a Goal or Purpose in the mind of the Programmer. And that's how I imagine the otherwise mysterious something-from-nothing Big Bang input, followed by the creative computations of evolution. Some imagine that the BB was just a blip in an eternal process of universe production, with no beginning or end. Maybe, but I find that notion difficult to reconcile with the contingent & entropic Reality we experience today. :nerd:
*1. In his philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead argued that natural laws are not fixed, pre-existing rules, but rather emergent patterns arising from the relationships between "actual occasions" (events) and "eternal objects" (concepts). He emphasized that these laws are not separate from reality but are part of the ongoing process of becoming
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=whitehead+natural+law
*2. Most scientists take it for granted that the laws of nature were fixed at the moment of the Big Bang,
https://opensciences.org/open-questions/are-the-laws-of-nature-fixed
If the punishment prescribed for various crimes is disproportionate, then it is unjust punishment. Mercy doesn't come in to it.
Quoting J
Very neat. But you are over-simplifying. Injustice sometimes means being given less than you deserve (e.g. damages) But sometimes it means being given more than you deserve (e.g. punishment).
Quoting goremand
Perhaps "definition" is the wrong word here. I just meant that people disagree about what a good life for human beings is. But those disagreements are taking place in a context where some things are agreed, or not contested. For example, there would need to be broad agreement on which creatures are human beings.
I think you're missing Hamlet's point. :smile: He was suggesting that just, proportionate punishment is what we all have coming, because we've all missed the mark to varying degrees. But the fact that it's just doesn't make it any less terrible to endure.
Quoting Ludwig V
Definitely. Just working with the idea that "justice" has more than one opposite.
So, you don't think it is obviously impossible to demonstrate that a speculative metaphysical claim (purportedly) based on reliable intuition is just that rather than something merely imagined? If you believe that one might ask then why such has not already been demonstrated such that no impartial person could reasonably question its veracity.
Quoting Ludwig V
Sure, people find their answers where they are capable of looking. As I've said all along I am not at all against people believing whatever they might be capable of believing that gets them through the night and day, whatever provides them emotional sustenance and existential comfort, provided they don't try to force it down others' throats. I have more respect for those who simply hold to their groundless faith without feeling a need to convince others that their faith is the one truth and that it is rationally demonstrable to boot. That's just nonsense; the very fact that such believes can be rationally questioned shows that there are no demonstrable absolute truths.
Quoting goremand
We've reached the end of our conversation, because it has circled back to the point where you are saying the opposite of what I said earlier which was that it is only human opinions which matter. No one knows God, so there can be only human opinions as to what God's opinion is. To say that God's opinion trumps human opinions is to abandon rationality altogether and rely on a completely groundless faith that revelation shows the absolute truth. I'm not prepared to waste my time arguing against anyone who believes that. As Mark Twain said: "Never argue with a fool, they will drag you down to their level, and beat you with experience".
This is one of my perennial favorite philosophical puzzles. If Major Philosophical Position A is obviously correct, how is it that Major Philosophical Positions B, C, and D remain on the table, amongst skilled philosophers? I'm sure you're aware that your question, when applied self-reflexively, yields the same question you're asking about the opposite view: If it is indeed the case that the lack of demonstration of the SMC (speculative metaphysical claim) shows it to be impossible to so demonstrate, why then hasn't everyone agreed that this is so, and closed the book on the question?
I don't have a pat answer to this waiting in the wings. I genuinely believe it's a meta-question about philosophy that deserves much more attention than it gets in analytic-philosophy circles, not just about SMCs but about any longstanding philosophical dispute.
That two option analysis seems to be a slam-dunk for critics of Judeo-Christian-Islamic theology. But, since our world is pretty good --- stop and smell the roses --- but not yet perfect, and it does include suffering of sentient beings, I have considered a third option. What if this world was not created as an instant Paradise, but as an experiment in Cosmic Creation*1, similar to Whitehead's evolutionary Process*2?
Plato knew nothing of Big Bang theory, but his Chaos to Cosmos theory could be adapted to suit modern cosmology. In this case, I would recast the Demiurge (creative worker) in the role of Causal Energy (ergos = work). His Chaos would be an infinite Pool of Potential, again unrestricted Energy (power to cause change). Although, in the real world Potential Energy is relative to position, in pre-bang infinity it would be absolute.
The Chaos to Cosmos program would not be "modeled on a perfect form", but a learning process of trial & error, similar to our modern methods of Evolutionary Programming*3. The evolution of our universe seems slow & wasteful because it began from scratch and works toward a near infinite universe. But computer programming can begin with the output of previous operations, and is given a narrow definition of success.
I won't go into more detail here, but I'll note that your Either/Or statement does not, in the real world, eliminate the "problem of suffering". It only makes the Genesis account of creation seem implausible. And it leaves us sufferers with no one to blame for our misery*4. Yet, in the Cosmic Creation experiment, sentient intelligence is not the only goal, but also moral & ethical behavior will be selected for. Perhaps working toward an immanent God, or gods, who have experienced suffering and can empathize with it. :smile:
*1. Plato's view of the cosmos is presented in his dialogue Timaeus. In this work, Plato describes a universe created by a divine craftsman, the Demiurge, who fashions the cosmos from pre-existing chaos and eternal Forms. The cosmos is a living, spherical being with a soul, modeled on the perfect Form of a living being. It is not eternal but is a moving image of eternity, reflecting the eternal Forms. The Demiurge creates time along with the cosmos.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=plato+cosmos
*2. Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy provides a framework for understanding evolution as a dynamic, relational process of becoming, rather than a static or predetermined outcome. He emphasizes the interconnectedness of all things and the role of eternal objects and actual occasions in shaping the evolutionary journey.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=whitehead+process+evolution
*3. Evolutionary programming [i]is an evolutionary algorithm, where a share of new population is created by mutation of previous population without crossover. . . .
It was first used by Lawrence J. Fogel in the US in 1960 in order to use simulated evolution as a learning process aiming to generate artificial intelligence.[/i]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_programming
*4. Philosophy Now magazine, article on GUILT :
The following sums up the consequences of dealing with guilt in an unhealthy manner : "they refuse any responsibilities for their deficiencies, refuse to go out in any positive way to others, and blatantly blame everything on a wicked God, a God who is totally guilty".
In science we may be working with previously unknown data, newly discovered phenomena, and I think this has clearly happened in the history of science. But when it comes to the purely speculative metaphysical ideas, unless we admit science into the equation and don't rely solely on intuitions (which has certainly happened in some metaphysical quarters) there would seem to be no new data to work with. And nothing in science itself apart from accurate observations are definitively demonstrably true in any case. Metaphysical ideas seem to be, to repeat loosely something I remember reading somewhere that Hegel said: "the same old stew reheated". I would add to that and say "the same old ancient stew reheated".
Perhaps the reason metaphysics hasn't been given up is on account of, as Kant pointed out, the human inability to let go of such questions, despite the impossibility of definitely answering them. I also think there is much inspiration and joy to be found in such imaginings, especially for the creative type of person. I think speculative fiction is great: just don't imagine that any of it is literally true. We don't need to imagine that in order for it to have poetic value and meaning.
Quoting Gnomon
Sure, it's a speculative possibility, and is not inconsistent with a creator God that is either not all-knowing and/ or not all-good, and/ or not all-powerful. Whitehead's God was understood to be evolving along with its creation. I never quite got the need for, or understood the place of, God in Whitehead's system, though.
When I say that philosophy drops you at the border, I mean that aspect of philosophy which points beyond the bounds of reason not into the irrational, but into the supra-rational. This is the realm that confounds reason, not by denying it, but by exceeding it. You find this implicitly in Neoplatonism, and explicitly among the mystics. Thats why in classical and ancient thought, the line between philosophy and religion was so often porous: philosophy led you to the threshold, but what lay beyond it required something other than reason alone. (I think calling it faith is often dismissive, 'oh, you mean belief without evidence', when, for the aspirant, it may comprise an insight into something that is abundantly evident to them.)
I think that sense is better preserved in the Catholic and Orthodox worlds which still held to an hierarchical ontology, within which the sense of there being a 'higher truth' remains meaningful. Less so in Reformation theology, which swept away the whole superstructure which mediated between, and mirrored, the great chain of being. Hence the origin of today's 'flat ontology'.
Quoting J
This brings up a lot of difficult issues for me. When I was a (mature-age) undergrad, I was persuaded of the reality of spiritual enlightenment, mainly under the sway of popular literature about the subject (all the usual sources, D T Suzuki and Alan Watts). Also that the gnostics had a similar conviction and that this had been suppressed by the 'church triumphant' in early Christianity. I read up on the gnostic gospels. Also read a book on the persecution of the Cathars of Languedoc, which launched the Inquisition, reinforcing my suspicion of ecclesiastical religion. But despite earnest efforts I never made much headway with the 'path of seeing' - more like fragmentary glimpses briefly illumined by lightning, so to speak (although leaving an enduring trace). So, like a lot of people, I find at this stage of life the prospect of realising such higher states impossibly remote (even if in another sense nearby). I'm very much wrestling with that. I can sense the appeal of 'salvation by faith' although it's impossible to will myself to believe it.
To assume a more academic and less personal tone, the 'flattening' of ontology that characterises modernity intersects with 'salvation by faith alone' and the emphasis on individualism that commenced with Descartes' cogito, that 'my own existence is the only thing I can know for sure'. This has lead to a kind of hyper-pluralised and individualised form of Christianity we see today, where salvation is often equated to a state of individual enthusiasm (and a well-adjusted bourgeois existence).
I find myself again at least philosophically more drawn to the Catholic philosophers:
[quote=Obituary for Josef Pieper, Thomistic Philosopher]Our minds do notcontrary to many views currently popularcreate truth. Rather, they must be conformed to the truth of things given in creation. And such conformity is possible only as the moral virtues become deeply embedded in our character, a slow and halting process. We have, he writes on one occasion, lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity. That is, in order to know the truth we must become persons of a certain sort. The full transformation of character that we need will, in fact, finally require the virtues of faith, hope, and love. And this transformation will not necessarilyperhaps not oftenbe experienced by us as easy or painless. Hence the transformation of self that we mustby Gods graceundergo perhaps resembles passing through something akin to dying.[/quote]
Amen to that.
I'd like to respond, but at this point it seems you have lost all interest and I'd just be wasting space. Please tell me if I'm wrong.
I'm not trying to be difficult or inflammatory...and I've spent many, many years examining all the arguments, so I doubt you can present anything I haven't already encountered.
Our intuitions are not universal and unchanging. They are influenced by experience, exposure to ideas (from science, but also from history, philosophy, religion), socioeconomic conditions, moral attitudes... That's not to say that there is some fixed asymptote towards which our collective metaphysical intuitions are inevitably converging. They may well diverge, swing and meander this way and that forevermore.
Yes, there's a lot to this. A great deal may depend on the idea of "data." Are questions considered to be data? It looks to me like the questions that philosophy poses keep changing, era to era and tradition to tradition. And yes, the data that philosophers then appeal to in order to answer those questions tend to be more or less the same -- with a big exception for current advances in cognitive science. So is philosophy in the question-answering business, or the question-proposing business? I think, usually, the latter. The inability, thus far, to answer the question about SMCs may be because the question is badly framed. It's not new data we need, but new insight. The hell of it is, part of the "new insight" we so badly want would involve a new way to understand the relation of rationality to philosophy.
That said, I have some sympathy for those, like Wittgenstein, who want to use (a version of) philosophy to free us from metaphysical fly-bottles.
Yes.
Quoting Wayfarer
Same here. Emphasis on "enduring."
I'm not crazy about the "purity" theme, but this certainly sets out the problem concisely: What sort of person must I be, or become, in order to pass across that threshold? We all know the usual suspects: "I must become intellectually accomplished (good at philosophy)." "I must become ethically good." "I must make a certain profession of belief in an avatar." "There is no threshold; shut up and calculate."
In part it's a self-reflexive problem: If we knew how to choose among those standard answers, we would presumably also be demonstrating, in so choosing, why our answer is true or wise. Can that be done without going in circles?
Right, I haven't said or implied that our intuitions are universal and changing. They are conditioned by culture and tradition. My point was just that the idea of intellectual intuition as source of metaphysical truth is the idea of revelation or of some pure insight which is beyond the relativistic mediations of culture.
I think it is arguable that most of the remodeling of our metaphysical intuitions since the Middle Ages has come form science. It seems reasonable to think that if it hadn't been for science there would have been no really new data. When it comes to mystical intuitions as they are presented to us in the literature there is a base commonality across traditions and cultures, and it is only science which has thrown a spanner in the works, so to speak.
Quoting J
As I say above, I think many if not most of the new questions have come on account of science, and as you note, especially cognitive science.
Quoting J
I do too, and I think the thrust of that project was to show that such questions are to be dissolved rather than resolved.
Quoting J
I think you've hit on something important here. When it comes to how to live, which in my book is what philosophy is (or should be) really about, we do better the freer we are of concern about the self. I think it is arguable that we see our lives and others with greater clarity the more relaxed, the more at peace with ourselves we are.
It is the state of radical acceptance that I see as being the essence of enlightenment, and not imagined knowings of the answers to the great questions, which have never been, and I think arguably never can be, answered definitively. So "crossing the threshold" for me is a metaphor for a radical shift in our total disposition to life.
Well, sa?s?ra literally means 'cyclic existence'. Liberation from that is the ultimate aim of Indian religious systems (which I why I don't think 'mok?a' can be understood apart from it.) It is alien to the middle-Eastern religions which hold to a linear understanding of history. (Hence the doctrines of the dead awaiting judgement in some distant future time, which I could never make sense of.)
(This brings to mind another of the watershed books I read back in the day, The Heretical Imperative, by sociologist Peter Berger. Very briefly, he argues that the original idea of 'heresy' was 'having an opinion' - that the whole principle of religion was that salvation was something done to you or given to you, in which you had no say. 'Heretics' were those of different views or who promoted 'opinions'. But now, he says, in a pluralistic world awash with competing ideas, it's necessary to make a judgement about which path - hence the book title. And, he says, the biggest decision is what he described as 'Jerusalem or Benares' - the choice between Biblical and Vedic religions.)
And I don't believe any of that so arguing for it is not my intention, I just think that claiming that suffering is sometimes good is a logically valid solution to the problem of evil.
I think this comes down to you having a different idea of goodness, I am guessing you would say it's derived from human nature or something like that? Whereas I would say good and bad are determined by objective normative properties which are wholly divorced from humanity and whose content could be pretty much anything, including "suffering is good".
Ah, but which ones are the fly-bottles? :wink: Problem is, to ask "Should all metaphysical questions be dissolved rather than (if possible) resolved?" is to ask a very metaphysical question. Witt's answers, whatever their merit, also depend on evident metaphysical premises.
Quoting Janus
I appreciate any point of view, such as this one, which recognizes that "answering philosophical questions correctly" may not (shock! horror!) actually be the purpose of doing philosophy. Where do we go next, with this insight? Should we conclude that the answers to such questions will never be forthcoming? Or simply never forthcoming within rational philosophy? I think philosophy has to question itself -- its own nature, its own "radical self-acceptance" -- in much the same way you recommend that individual philosophers question themselves. And I'll say again that one of the great clues to the direction of this philosophical self-examination is out there in plain sight: Why can't philosophy generate a body of knowledge, as science does, or settle for a canon of "beautiful" ideas, as art does? What are we really doing when we ask philosophical questions?
As to ego as impediment: certainly true in my ethical life. Probably in my intellectual life as well, since like anyone else I enjoy being correct about things, and get seduced by this pleasure into believing that there is no end to the topics about which I could be correct . . . see above.
This makes sense to me too. In a way, its a tautology and doesnt really say anything. I can reword it this way: In a world with no meaning, meaningless suffering makes sense (like everything would be meaningless in a world with no meaning.). The tautology is: world with no meaning = all aspects or parts of the world (such as suffering) have no meaning.
But even in this world with no meaning, it still means (sorry) for us here in this conversation that we exist, we suffer, and that there is no power or person (no God) who can change those realities. (So we have to bring into existence meaningful/logical arguments to speak of a world with no meaning, meaningfully to each other, which is a contradiction itself, but I digress into some other, linguistic game. I raise this because that is the main point - we are creating contradictory conclusions in order to defeat the premises we created for n the first place.)
Quoting Tom Storm
In an effort to show that Im following you, Ill take genius as all-knowing, magnificent order as all-powerful (organizing, creating physical force), and God cares as all-good. Now, if we invent such a God, the formerly meaningless suffering from the formerly Godless world seems to take on a meaning the suffering doesnt have. It means God is purposely inflicting the suffering on us, or he at least doesnt care. And so the contradiction arises inside our definition of God. The contradiction is squaring Gods goodness with my own estimation of suffering as badness; God must be bad if I suffer, but God must be all-good if God is God, so God contradicts himself if he inflicts suffering on me and I suffer, so God must not be.
So I see the contradiction. Creator all-powerful good God and my bad suffering shouldnt co-exist.
What Im saying is this seeming contradiction arises because of my own invention of who/what God is, and my own invention of the meaning of suffering is that only arises when I assert my invention of who/what God is.
So yes, if we presume to know how God operates, and presume an all-good God would by definition care for my suffering, and presume I know what all-good actually means, and I suffer, then either my presumptions are false OR God doesnt exist.
And so, if my presumptions about God may be false, it is not logically necessary to conclude God does not exist. Therefore, the conclusion of the problem of evil argument that God does not exist, is not necessarily a sound estimation of what actually exists and what suffering actually means. The problem of evil is a logical exercise, but not a sound estimation of God and suffering proving anything either exists or does not exist.
How should God build bliss from scratch? Since we a judging the process of creation/evolution for improvements.
If we would all call God truly all-good had this God created us from our first moment of consciousness to know only perfect bliss and zero suffering, arent we just eliminating the process of growth? How is bliss physically built up from nothing? Of bliss is to born from not-bliss, dont we need not-bliss too? Wouldnt any process, along the way towards eternal bliss, carry suffering, struggle and process behind it? Does bliss feel blissful in a creature that cant or doesnt feel pain, that cant even remember suffering and struggle and chaos ever? Maybe. Or maybe not as blissfully?
So my conclusion is, if we play God ourselves, invent and create our God to be all-good/powerful/knowing, invent our feeling that we know what this even means, it makes sense that we would judge this new God weve created as failing to do good or failing to know or have power to do good by me, because I suffer. That does make sense. But Ive merely stacked Gods deck against himself to rule him out of existence. The animating force behind the problem of evil is our own judgement that God is Not good for allowing or inflicting my suffering, but this same suffering is meaningless (neither good nor bad) without God, so maybe there is a middle ground, where an all-good God and my suffering can coexist (as in a world where God will bring redemption, but I digress again).
Bottom line, there is no logical need for us to be such a harsh judge of God or a harsh judge of our own suffering. Maybe suffering can seem good (as in hard work and growth) and maybe God can seem bad (as in children with cancer, and seemingly unexplainable suffering), and instead of eliminating the seeming contradictions by eliminating the presence of God and eliminating the presence of meaning to my suffering, we simply need to further investigate the meaning of both God and suffering in a world where we can imagine bliss.
Essentially, my whole way of thinking about the problem of evil. :100:
The argument concludes the premises on which this conclusion was based make no sense, so why would anything concluded based on those premises be able to be held soundly?
Amen to that Amen.
Yes, we agree - it isn't a logical necessity. The argument is directed at believers, specifically, most believers I've met, who hold to a personal God they think saves people from cancer, rescues lost children and helps them find parking spaces, and yet permits immense suffering on the world.
Quoting Fire Ologist
As you know, the argument from evil is often used by atheists to respond to certain believers who often insist, and I had one say this to me recently: 'Look at the perfection of the world and how good it is; it must be the creation of a benevolent God.' That was the thinking I heard in sermons as a child. The obvious response is that the world is bathed in suffering, and that creatures were created to hunt, kill, and eat each other, with pain as a fundamental expression of life. In my experience that usually ends that line of thinking.
Whatever people think of the argument, for some theists, the problem of evil gives rise to doubt. No less a thinker than David Bentley Hart has conceded this and believes it is one of atheism's best arguments. He is a sophisticated theological thinker, although conservatives often dislike his Left-leaning views. Believers are as tribal as any other group.
But of course, those who want to believe in a just personal God will always construct some kind of exculpatory theory or version of God in which suffering is either necessary, the result of some contamination, or entirely unrelated to the deity. Of course they would. And as I have already said, the argument is primarily used in response to certain naive accounts of God.
Would that not be more an epistemological question? Why must we make any metaphysical assumptions at all? Surely we can just accept the world as it appears to us without worrying about what might be "behind it"?
Quoting J
I can't believe that pure rationality (speculative reasoning) can have anything more after nearly three millennia to offer apart from thinking about fresh material that has come from science. I mean I think it has nothing more to offer that derives purely from itself. It's come to look like "pouring from the empty into the void".
I also think we don't so much find answers as new ways of looking at and thinking about things. If the purpose of philosophy is to come to terms with our lives and live them the best way we can, and if this entails radical acceptance of our condition, then it would seem the task is not so much trying to find answers to abstruse metaphysical questions, but rather coming to understand and work on ourselves.
Quoting J
Yes, we all suffer from that particular affliction to one degree or another. I used to think analytic philosophy was useless, dry "logic-chopping", and pedantic concern about being correct, but I have changed my view on that. What I have come to like about analytic philosophy is its ability to free us from conceptual confusions. That may not give us wisdom per se, but I think it can help clear the way to seeing our condition more clearly.
All that wriggling and to-ing and fro-ing just to admit that the usual conception of a loving, personal God does not jibe with the reality of the world we find ourselves living in!
But I wonder why I sense an underlying, lingering "and yet..." in your words? Something you find hard to let go of?
Quoting Fire Ologist
That's a poor characterization of the critique of what merely amounts to two ideas which are inconsistent with one another. It's a lame attempt to dismiss the critique by attempting to explain it away psychologically, as though those pointing out the inconsistency are merely whiners.
It's very shallow indeed if that's your "whole way of thinking about the problem of evil".
Quoting Janus
Yes, epistemology strictly speaking, but isn't epistemology a sub-inquiry under metaphysics? Is it possible to frame a question about what we can know, without an explicit or assumed metaphysical framework? I don't think so.
The larger question about metaphysical assumptions, regardless of their connection with epistemology, is interesting. We can, as you say, simply accept the world as it appears to us. Are you also saying that to do so would free us from any metaphysical assumption? I don't quite see how. Common-sense realism is full of (perhaps unspoken) premises about what the world/life/reality consists of.
Quoting Janus
Yes. That was what I had in mind about new questions rather than definitive answers.
We can know all kinds of basic things, like whether it is raining or not, for example. We know things because we see them. I know I am looking at a tree for example. Now you could object and say "how do you know it is really a tree?" or "how do you know you are not being tricked by a demon?" or "Does the tree exist apart form its being perceived?", and so on. Those are metaphysical questions, and I consider them to be pointless in one way, simply because there cannot be any way of answering them if they have no empirical or logical solution.
So, I see accepting that basic human situation, accepting the world as we find it, as eschewing metaphysical speculation not as assuming any metaphysical framework. I am not opposed to metaphysical speculation, though, as I've said on these threads many times; I think it can be a great exercise of the creative imagination. I just don't take it very seriously or expect any answers from it. New ways of thinking? Sure...
Whitehead's God was not defined in those "omni" terms, but described in functional roles*1. But then, his Process Philosophy was written prior to the cosmological evidence that our space-time universe had a beginning in philosophical time*2. And that apparent Creation Event would place his Immanent God into a new context : how to explain the "birth" of God/Nature. All answers to the pre-space-time questions are speculative & theoretical, not empirical & scientific. Which includes Multiverse notions. And they are only religious if they become dogmatic.
In my own "speculative" thesis, I would describe Whitehead's (and Spinoza's) creative force, and Plato's Demiurge (world builder) in terms of Energy (causation) and Law (regulation). But the question remains : how & why & whence did those practical Forces suddenly appear in a "cosmic explosion" birth-event of the world we now inhabit? Again, all postulated answers to such questions are philosophical, not scientific.
Of course, I have no revelation from the Great Beyond. But as an amateur philosopher, I feel free to extend knowledge of the extant world, into the realm of logical possibilities. So, I have created my own conjectural thesis, based primarily on what we know of non-classical Quantum Theory, and post-Shannon Information Theory*3. I also go back to the origins of Rational Philosophy in Plato & Aristotle for the logical necessity of a First Cause or Prime Mover*4, which Whitehead assumed was "uncaused" in the physical sense*5.
The "need" for such an eternal Principle was probably based on Whitehead's pre-bang intuition, that all known space-time processes --- including biological evolution --- eventually come to an end (what we now know as Entropy), and must have an injection of Energy to begin. In effect, his Causal Principle is equivalent to the axiomatic (taken for granted, not proven) eternal Energy & Law inputs that sparked & regulated the primordial explosion of an infinite mathematical Singularity into an evolving & progressing Evolutionary Process of emergent Space & Time, and Life & Mind.
The pertinent question for this thread is : would you hold such a Nature God responsible for the evils of this world, or view H/er as a fellow sufferer : "a participant in the process of change"? :smile:
*1. In Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy, God is not a supernatural being, but rather the persuasive ground of novelty and freedom, necessary for his metaphysical system. Whitehead saw God as an indispensable part of his system, as the force that provides order, novelty, and an aim for all entities. This God is not eternal, but rather a participant in the process of change, and his power is one of persuasion, not coercion.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=why+whitehead+god
Note --- Scientists refer to that "force" as Energy, but usually ignore the "order, novelty & aim" implications. His God is both an eternal Principle, and an immanent agent of change.
*2. Philosophical Time : The philosophical study of time explores the nature of time, its relation to space, and the implications of its passage. Key questions include whether time is a fundamental dimension of reality, or merely a human construct, and whether the past, present, and future exist as real entities or just as perceptions.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=philosophical+time
*3. Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field was established and formalized by Claude Shannon in the 1940s,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
Note --- "Claude Shannon is often described as "the father of information theory" although he described his work as "communication theory."
Subsequent developments have expanded the theory into Physics applications, in which Information functions as a form of Energy.
*4. Gnomon : I refer to the logically necessary and philosophically essential First & Final Cause as G*D, rather than merely "X" the Unknown, partly out of respect. Thats because the ancients were not stupid, to infer purposeful agencies, but merely shooting in the dark. We now understand the "How" of Nature much better, but not the "Why". That inscrutable agent of Intention is what I mean by G*D.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
Note --- Whitehead referred to the causation & intention as "persuasion" & "concretion", but also as the"principle of limitation" (natural law) and the "organ of novelty" (creative causation).
*5. In Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy, "first cause" is understood as the fundamental, uncaused source of all reality, a principle of creativity that underpins the universe and its ongoing process of becoming. Whitehead's concept differs from traditional notions of a "first cause" that is separate from and external to the world. Instead, he views God as both the primordial "how" and the consequent "why". God, as the primordial cause, initiates the creative process, and as the consequent cause, enjoys the beauty and goodness that result from the universe's ongoing development.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=whitehead+first+cause
Note --- The notion of a God who creates, then inhabits, a physical world is usually labeled Pandeism. But I prefer PanEnDeism. The Creative Principle transforms into a Physical Process. Some imagine that humans are God's sensing & thinking organs.
"Whitehead's process theology proposes a dynamic and interactive God who is both immanent and transcendent" https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=whitehead+pandeism
I find it interesting that you associate this sort of thing with Peterson. Nietzsche has tended to be more fodder for the left, and I think the "death of God" tends to get rolled out more often by post-structuralists, or at least Continentals more generally, than anyone else. The "political right" has, by contrast, tended towards "God never died in the first place" (or "if 'God is dead and we have killed him,' nonetheless he is risen!"), holding up living traditions as a counterpoint to modernity.
Peterson is, in this respect, definitely a figure of the "nu-Right," which tends to be more unmoored from tradition (even if it tends to be vaguely respective of it). In a lot of ways, the nu-Right is very post-modern in its sentiments and methodology, and its critiques of the liberal order (which is ironic because they blame "post-modernism" for all their ills, when in fact it seems like a lot of what they decry is a symptom of right-leaning neo-liberalism).
An excellent question. The problem with Wittgenstein's approach, at least in the hands of some practitioners, is that if very quickly shifts into seeing the entire world as made of nails because they (think they have) found a hammer. Every philosophical problem becomes a "pseudoproblem," and perhaps more importantly it becomes a particular sort of pseudoproblem. Language is always the culprit, not say, epistemic presuppositions, an understanding of mereology, etc. This is problematic if a problem might be (more or less) convincingly resolved by looking at the latter instead of language.
I think we'd find it quite impossible not to. Can one do philosophy without making [I]any[/I] assumptions about universals, how parts relate to wholes, whether something can both be and not be in the same way, at the same time, without qualification, identity, etc? How does one discuss the "act of knowing" without any assumptions about what act entails?
To "not make assumptions" is really just not to explore one's own assumptions and make them clear. A lot of analytic philosophy is guilty of this move. It "brackets" metaphysical questions, and then uses this "non-assumption" to make a defacto metaphysical assumption. To say: "I simply won't consider universals or parts and wholes," tends towards simply uncritically presupposing nominalism and a deflationary mereology for instance.
Pryzwarra has a good section on this in Analogia Entis. While epistemic and ontological questions will always jockey for primacy, it simply isn't possible to move into the epistemic without at least some ontic presuppositions. Epistemology itself doesn't even make sense without a reality/appearance distinction. If appearances are just truth, there is no problem of knowledge!
Interesting. For years Peterson has been droning on about how Nietzsche is the only atheist who understood the implications of atheism through his death of God frame. There are several lectures on Nietzsche by Peterson on this and he brings it up in a heap of podcasts. He quotes Nietzsche a lot.
Peterson is sometimes incoherent I would not have always said that he is Right - he is conservative but that's slightly differnt. I used to think of him more as a Centrist politically. He self-defined as a progressive leaning centrist. Although his support of Trump and Musk and even Thiel may have moved him further right.
Peterson's bogus obsession with "postmodern Marxists" - is really just Stephen Hick's frame - the guy he seems to borrow most of his philosophical (but not his religious) ideas from. I think his views on Nietzsche may come from Hicks too. People who are learned in postmodernism and Nietzsche tell me Hicks is confused and misread. Of course one man's misreading is another's theorised interpretation. :wink: Any thoughts on Hicks?
We don't need to make assumptions, in the sense of holding some metaphysical view or other, to do science, and I count science as part of philosophy. We don't even have to make assumptions in order to critically examine metaphysical assumptions.
This discussion is shaping up -- no surprise -- as a terminological dispute about what counts as "metaphysics." Janus conceives of metaphysics as an addition to the common-sense approach to what we can see, what is uncontroversially the case, etc. Thus, as they so clearly put it:
Quoting Janus
Count T and I, in contrast, want to use "metaphysics" more broadly, to mean any framework that results in a philosophical position about "the world as we find it." On this usage, it looks impossible to do without metaphysics, since philosophy presupposes it.
I'm going to make a familiar move here, though I know many don't agree with it. I'm going to suggest that we set aside the terminological wrangle (who is "right" about the word "metaphysics"?) and instead focus on the underlying issue. There is clearly a difference between looking at the world as Wittgenstein does, and as, e.g., Ted Sider does. Is someone "doing metaphysics" here? Let's not worry about it. Instead, let's ask into what these two ways of looking consist of, and what they would entail. Perhaps, after this very difficult subject is thoroughly understood, we might then feel we had reason to circle back and offer a (now ameliorative) definition of "metaphysics" -- or perhaps not.
I'm not sure if that's quite the difference. Perhaps can clarify, but I thought his point could variously be:
A. That there is a common sense metaphysics that can just be assumed (your reading);
B. That what is called metaphysics can just be done as part of each individual science; or
C. That methodologically one does not need to begin from metaphysics.
I think all three are true to varying degrees. Metaphysics is prior to the other disciplines in the order of generality, but not in the order of knowing. Indeed, in general we know the concrete and particular better than the abstract and universal.
I think it should be uncontroversial that parts of what are generally deemed to be "metaphysics" come into play on the sciences at every turn. For example, one cannot discuss the "origin of species" in biology, or different "types" of atom or molecule without the notion that different concrete particulars can nonetheless be "the same sort of thing" (i.e., the notion of species, essences, and universals coming into play). Likewise, questions of emergence includes the relationship of parts to wholes, and shows up in physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Perhaps the most obvious example is causation.
Now, I think it's fair to say that scientists work on these sorts of issues all the time without conducting an analysis of being qua being. But, it does not seem to me to make sense to say that the way in which different particulars are the "same sort of thing" in chemistry is completely unlike and unrelated to how this is so in physics or chemistry, hence metaphysics, as the general study of this sort of issue. It seems problematic to have a unique causation specific to each science in particular.
One difficulty in supposing that such issues are unique to each science would be that, without a higher science, there is no way to determine what rightly constitutes a unique science in the first place. We have seen declarations of "Aryan versus Jewish physics," "socialist versus capitalist genetics," "feminist versus patriarchal political science," etc. There would be no unity, and strictly speaking no "science" or "philosophy" (singular) if all the issues in whatever was declared to be its own science were sui generis, but rather a potentially infinite plurality. This is perhaps related to the idea of each science as a unique, hermetically sealed magisterium (Latin Averroism redux).
One need not study metaphysics, or "do metaphysics" to do biology, but one will invariably be forced to take up metaphysical questions at some point. One cannot even have a "science of life," without eventually getting around to the question "in virtue of what are all living things 'living'" which leads to the more general question "in virtue of what can all x be x, while being distinct beings."
Hence my recommendation that we turn away from worrying about how to use "metaphysics" in true statements.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Perhaps it should be, but nevertheless it isn't ... Why invite a wrangle about it? Let's talk instead about what the philosophers are saying, regardless of who calls it "metaphysics" and who doesn't. But that does involve accepting that we can talk about concepts divorced from traditional assignments of certain words to those concepts.
I agree. To make a simplistic black vs white distinction : Empirical Physics is based on sensory observations, including those amplified by technology, of the "world as we find it". But Theoretical Philosophy, including Einstein's relativity theories, adds human reasoning in order to know what can't be sensed directly (e.g. what it would be like to ride on a light beam).
Non-human animals are empirical scientists, in that they come to understand the world via their innate senses. But, as far as we know, animals don't theorize about things unseen. Yet, they cope with the "world as they sense it" well enough to survive and evolve.
Since Philosophy is almost entirely theoretical & speculative, instead of observational & practical, I tend to equate Philosophy with Metaphysics, in the sense that its theories go beyond (meta) what we sense, to rationally infer (extrasensory) universal & general principles, including Holistic concepts vs Particular observations.
Ironically, those with Materialist worldviews tend to denigrate metaphysical (theoretical) Philosophy in favor of physical (evidential) Science. But the presumption that our universe consists entirely of material substances, as opposed to intangible, incorporeal, or ethereal forms, is itself a metaphysical conjecture*1.
The Materialist conjecture makes sense to most humans, perhaps because it is necessary for survival in the natural world ("red in tooth & claw)". By contrast, Philosophical speculations have little to do with living in the Natural world, but are necessary for coping with the Cultural world of human societies. All social animals must be able to "read" the minds of their fellows to some extent.
But for humans, in world-spanning societies (red in bullet & bomb), it is imperative to theorize what-it's-like for our social associates. Hence, we must metaphysically go beyond what's obvious (the crocodile smile) to speculate on the intention for future action. Metaphysics measures the world as we infer it. :smile:
*1. The word materialism has been used in modern times to refer to a family of metaphysical theories (i.e., theories of the nature of reality) that can best be defined by saying that a theory tends to be called materialist if it is felt sufficiently to resemble a paradigmatic theory that will here be called mechanical materialism.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/materialism-philosophy
Note --- Modern Quantum Physics*2 has been forced to deal with aspects of the real world, that are not objectively Material, nor classically Mechanical. It's mainly Mathematical & Logical, focusing on "things" unseen, and things that are not yet things (indeterminacy). Hence Meta-Physical.
*2. Quantum indeterminacy, in a philosophical sense, refers to the inherent uncertainty and lack of definiteness in the physical world at the quantum level, as described by quantum mechanics. It's not just a limitation of our knowledge or measurement techniques, but a fundamental feature of reality. This indeterminacy has sparked philosophical debate about the nature of reality, determinism, and free will.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=quantum+indeterminacy+philosophy
Nothing is that simple for us anymore. Mental struggle and conversational suffering.
Quoting Janus
Ok. So its my whole way of thinking about the argument/syllogism called the problem of evil.
My whole way of thinking about God and suffering includes thoughts of what is sin and what is free will, what is the heart, what is love, why did God become a man and die, on a cross .
Anyone who might decide there must be no God because they think they understand the syllogism, had a shallow understanding of God or all-good or suffering or all of the above.
This forum, to me, is not really the place to account for God and suffering, as that would take Bible quotes and histories of saints and in the end, we will only be able to answer how God allows suffering by asking God, so if there is no God to you, there is not only no need to ask the question, but no need to think there would be an answer discoverable through our own reason.
Sure, it's perfectly good way to use the word, and my own preference. But I hope you also agree with me that "how to use the word correctly" (assuming this could even be determined) is much less important than understanding the issues various philosophers are raising when they talk about being, truth, structure, logic, et al. Who knows, it might turn out that the word is dispensable entirely, but the questions raised under its banner won't therefore go away. We might just need more perspicuous ways of talking about them.
You could just as easily say that this is owed to the fact that Greek philosophy and science laid the basis for the whole development of modern science, that without the intellectual armoury provided by Aristotle and the other great minds of that tradition and its conceptual groundwork - substance, essence, accident, dynamic, potential - science would not have developed at all. Not for nothing that the scientific revolution occurred in the West and not India or China, which a millenia earlier were way ahead of Europe in terms of art and culture.
Would there be MS Word Tenplates had Plato not seen the Form?
I think this is an important point. Too often, people get bogged down in dictionary definitions and an almost obsessive categorization of language, at the expense of nuance and context.
That's fair and I think once one is appealing to versus and lives of saints we are really moving away from philosophy and into a world of faith, dogma and doctrine. I heard the same point recently from a Hindu Uber driver who was incensed at 'stupid Christianity' with its superstitions and held that his gurus lives and the scriptures and how these aligned with science clearly demonstrated the superior truth of San?tana Dharma.
Interesting. Is this right?
Doesn't science rest on metaphysical assumptions such as the world is comprehensible and that reason and observations are reliable and there's an external world and causality - those kinds of things? Or do hold a view that methodological naturalism (as opposed to metaphysical naturalism) is a default common sense foundation that requires no justification other than our continued demonstrations of its reliability in action?
[quote=David Loy, Terror in the God-Shaped Hole]The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.[/quote]
Quoting Gnomon
I can't make sense of the idea that the Universe had a beginning in time, and certainly not "philosophical time" (whatever that is meant to be). The beginning of the Universe was the beginning of time according to my understanding of the current theory.
Quoting J
It seems then that you are redefining metaphysics as philosophy and not as merely one domain of philosophy. If metaphysics is philosophy then of course you can't do philosophy without doing metaphysics; you have simply stipulated that by your definition. I'm not going to agree because I don't think philosophy is all, or even mostly, metaphysics.
Quoting J
I'm not familiar with Sider. I performed a quick search and it seems he is a 'modal logic as metaphysics' kind of philosopher. I'm not that much up on modal logic, but what I have encountered of it has led me to think it is primarily about what we can coherently imagine. So I would see it as semantics, not metaphysics. I'm open to rethinking this, though, given my sketchy knowledge of the subject.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I am not claiming 'A' because I don't think the commonsense understanding of the world is metaphysics, but is rather an evolved pragmatic practice.
I am not claiming 'B' because I don't think metaphysics needs to play any part if the sciences (although I agree that it may play a part, and that it has, historically speaking, played a part in shaping what we now call science).
I agree with 'C'. Methodologically we can in science do without metaphysics entirely.
Also I want to make a distinction between 'doing metaphysics' meaning holding one or another metaphysical standpoint, and speculating about ontological possibilities. The latter is an exercise in creative imagining which may feed into scientific theory to be sure. But I don't count speculating about what might exist as "doing metaphysics". To repeat, for me doing metaphysics means holding to a particular position regarding the fundamental nature or reality.
I agree, but it's also true that most of our knowledge of particulars comes through generalizing, which I think amounts to recognizing regularities and patterns. I don't like the term 'universal' much because I think it's loaded with metaphysical baggage, and it really doesn't mean anything more that 'general'.
Those "parts" may be deemed by some to be metaphysics, but I wouldn't deem them to be so. Different concrete particulars can be the same sorts of things on account of shred morphologies. We don't need essences for that ( if you mean the idea of unique essences as opposed to essential characteristics). And of course I don't see universals coming into play, but just a human capacity to generalize on account of the ability to recognize patterns and regularities, as I already noted above.
The relationships of parts to wholes are multifarious, and I think it is basically a sematic issue. Like the 'Ship of Theseus" or the supposed puzzle about what constitutes a heap, these are just open to different ways of framing, and are thus semantic possibilities. We can say the ship of Theseus is the same ship or not depending on how we want to define it. When it comes to heaps if a number of items jumbled together doesn't resemble the general pattern of a heap then we won't call it a heap. There is no precise cutoff point and it depends on the kinds of items jumbled together.
Quoting Tom Storm
We find the world to be comprehensible, so I don't see a need for any assumptions in that matter. We comprehend it in terms of causation and it might be argued that causation is a metaphysical assumption, since it cannot be observed as Hume claimed. Hume says we arrive at the notion of causation by observing constant correlations between events. I think that's part of it, but even it was the whole of it I don't think it counts as a metaphysical assumption but as simply a matter of habit, which is what Hume thought too.
Even animals show by their behavior that they think causally. Where I think Hume only told part of the story is that failed to acknowledged that we all feel causation in our bodies. We feel the sunlight and wind on our skins. We feel the force when we throw objects or wield a hammer or strain to walk up a steep hill and in all our bodily activities. Of course animals feel these things too, so causation, acting upon and being acted upon, is a natural aspect of embodiment.
That's all I have time for right now.
Quoting Fire Ologist
It seems we think very differently. I cannot make sense of libertarian free will ? the kind of free will Christians posit when they claim that we are 100% responsible for our actions and will be judged for them, as to whether we will receive eternal reward or eternal punishment or, according to some accounts, a spell in purgatory.
There is no point saying that people have a shallow understanding of "all-good" ? that's a cop out in the context of philosophy because it dispenses with human reason. I for one do not say there must be no God, but I do say, and have said, that the human notions of perfect goodness and justice (which are the only ones we have access to) do not jibe with the world we live in, so something has to give.
You're just doing the usual religious apologist thing when they have no answer to the critique and saying what amounts to "God moves in mysterious ways". If God is beyond human knowing then why believe in God at all?
I agree with you that this forum is not really the place for theology. I think the faithful should find themselves content with their faith ? there seems to be no point asking questions of it which cannot be answered by human reason, and then turning the back on human reason. Better to turn the back on it from the start ? at least that would be consistent with faith.
Hmm. Not sayign you are wrong, but I probably wouldn't share that view. Sure we can navigate the world pragmatically, but claiming true comprehension overlooks the potential complexities beneath our experiences. Our confidence in understanding as you say often rests on habits of thought and inference, not on direct access to realitys underlying structure. Habit and comprehension would seem to be different things.
Quoting Janus
So you're a realist? I'd probably reserve judgment on this. We pragmatically engage a world of forces and sensations, but can we infer unmediated access to a noumenal reality beyond those experiential conditions? And at some level, sure, who gives a fuck? It works, so let's just intervene in the world. But isn't this just suppressing our metaphysical assumptions?
It is obvious that we comprehend the world, both in an everyday sense and in the enormously complex web of coherent understanding we call science. Some of our understandings may turn out to be incomplete or even wrong, to be sure. Is that what you mean when you refer to "true comprehension"?
You mentioned "complexities beneath our experiences"; by that I take you to refer to things we cannot gain cognitive access to? If so, I would say those are merely imagined possibilities which cannot really mean much, if anything, to us except as perhaps enjoyable, stimulating or even inspiring exercises of the imagination.
So, when I say we obviously comprehend the world, I'm only speaking in an everyday sense, a sense in which I would include science as an augmentation of the everyday. "Direct access to reality's underlying structure" seems to me to be a kind of nonsense. It is impossible, or even if you believed we can have it, having it would be impossible to prove. Comprehension and habit are not unrelated as I see it; you cannot develop habits without any comprehension...think of language in this connection. Animals comprehend their environments through forming habits too. Habit is a sign of comprehension, in other words.
Quoting Tom Storm
Why do say I'm a realist? I really don't see myself as any kind of "ist". I merely accept the warmth on my skin from the sun, the feel of the wind, and the sense of acting upon and being acted upon, as ineliminable aspects of my life. I accept the explanation of cause as not merely correlation, but as exchange of energy or force, because it jibes with my bodily experience and comprehending phenomena that way has produced a vast and coherent body of understanding the world that I see no need to question as a whole. That doesn't mean I think it is some kind of timeless, absolute truth, but merely that it is the best we have so far in the way of understanding the nature of the world we find ourselves in. The point is that it is an understanding, and a vast, complex and coherent one at that. So we most definitely do comprehend the world.
I don't think we can infer unmediated access to a noumenal reality; I don't even really know what that could mean, and I certainly don't think it could be all that important. I don't know what you mean by "suppressing our metaphysical assumptions" ? did you mean "supposing"?
Anyway I really gotta go do something...I got sucked back in.
However, if there really is a life beyond this one, then foreclosing it would be momentous, would it not? If you don't believe in it, it is only a matter of a fallacious belief; but if you do, then something is at stake which might be more significant than anything else in your life.
Me, I'm wrestling with it. I think a lot of what is said about it is obviously mythical, but it remains, for me, at least an open question, and something that nags me, now I'm in my 70's. And that if it turns out to be real after all, it could be the ultimate in rude awakenings.
Yes. I consider our understanding of the world to be tentative, the best we can do with what we know and how we know it.
Quoting Janus
Yes, but not necessarily in the Kantian sense - also our incomplete understanding of physics, maths, biology, consciousness, etc.
Quoting Janus
I guess we agree on this.
Quoting Janus
An animal can comprehend that an electric fence will hurt them btu they don't understand it - the whys and hows. I guess what I should've have said is understanding rather than comprehending.
Quoting Janus
I think we could only know what it meant if we could access it.
Quoting Janus
I meant supressing (but supposing also works - they are presuppositions) - in as much as we 'bracket' off our assumptions about the world when we take the sun and the earth and human science as true rather than just the product of contingent experince. And I guess some people might argue that contingent human experince is true enough to be getting on with.
Yes, I think we live in a world where people follow the same inferences, but end up in differnt places. I imagine that culture and foundational axioms are often at the heart of this difference.
I'd like to think I am open to idealism and other domains of understanding - higher consciousness, call it what you like. And frankly part of me thinks, the hope of getting a reliable reading of Heidegger alone is a lifetime's study, what hope to access anything close to the noumena. Is it even worth thinking about?
I'm interested in your point about "rude awakenings" (which might be a funny pun, too). I know you came to your thinking through a counterculture path, but do you think there's also an element informed by a potential fear of missing out? Of being wrong: and so one needs to keep searching?
Well, that would certainly provide some incentive.
Yes, I find the idea of death as 'the end' oddly attractive and tidy.
The Buddhist idea of afterlife is not based on a soul, I understand, but more like a stream of consciousness that (what is the famous metaphor?) is like a candle lighting another candle. If there is no continuity or 'eternal essence' how is such a hell realm understood? Doesn't punishment only make sense in a context of continuity?
So the idea that there are future lives, but no single individual, is how it comes across in popular culture, but it's not entirely accurate. It is well known that in Tibetan Buddhism, reincarnate lamas are said to be able to recognise the possessions of their former incarnations - that is part of the test for recognising them. It's not a soul that is reborn, but a mind-stream ('cittasantana') that has manifested again (voluntarily, in the case of lamas, whereas for most other people it's due to ignorance). And liberation from the cycle relies on the extinction of the idea of a self to which karma is attached. That's the theory, anyway. But the practical upshot is, everyone else is destined for some future existence in one of the 'six realms'.
God is obviously a big puzzle piece in the history of philosophy and on this forum. I get it. But it is just as reasonable to conclude this God doesnt exist, as it is to conclude we must not understand this God in the first place, and, using this same reason, neither can be proven to be the sounder conclusion, or premise. About God. God doesnt exist, or even if God exists and his existence makes no contradiction, we may not understand God anyway - both are sensible estimations of this God in philosophy.
What becomes the point of further discussion using this God in our arguments if we cant use religious sources and experiences to make further distinctions? We would have to ignore that this God might not exist to clarify God and suffering in the same good world. Ignoring the fact that God may not exist is not reasonable if on the other hand one isnt sure one has any idea what God means. So we are stuck. Without saints and some other religious experiences to draw from besides our words and arguments and logic, we are stuck.
God becomes a placeholder in such philosophic discussions that once directly analyzed seems interchangeable with everything and nothing or the one or truth or being itself, or Self - so I would rather talk about those other things as a philosopher talks, and only talk about this God as one who believes this God actually exists talks.
Quoting Tom Storm
That all sounds silly. Interesting uber ride though. But there is no superior truth. Just truth. Christianity and Hinduism, and Buddhism and Taoism, and Islam, and Judaism, at base, agree on this. Just one truth if truth is to have any meaning. Many schools of Hinduism ultimately value the truth of love above all, which, like Christians, seems the superior value to me. Again, what good metaphysician or epistemologist or logician would care to parse all of that? And what believer in God would find fruit doing the parsing with no recourse to the experience of other believers, and to do so with people who dont believe?
And what does he mean his religion aligns better with science? Which science is aligned to which religion, and when? Science today, or science from 500 years ago, or science as it will be in 500 years? Aligned with which eternal wisdom, in a superior manner? Silly. Reincarnation aligns with being born again in Christ. Does reincarnation of one eternal soul align with any science better than simply rebirth in heaven?
There is nothing about Christianity that requires the repudiation of any empirical laws or scientific facts and observations. The problem of evil is a valid syllogism. Its just not sound. Because it misunderstands any tangible, lived experience of God for sake of some hypothetical Omni-being thing called God. That need not exist for sake of argument.
I don't 100% believe there is no afterlife, but it really is nothing more than a fantasy, whether oriented towards the pleasant or the unpleasant, for us earthlings given that we could have no way of knowing. I find it impossible to believe in eternal punishment which would be the only version of an afterlife that scares me.
If there really is a life beyond this one, then I'll deal with it then. It's only the assumption that one or other of the Abrahamic religions might be the only true one(s) that I would need to worry about my own personal suffering post mortem. If there is judgement then I assume the judgement would be made on the basis of whether or not one has lived an ethical life. We should know that about ourselves. I know that I have lived an ethical life, by and large; I have always tried my best to avoid harming others and helping them where I can.
I could never buy the Christian idea that you just need to believe in Jesus as your savior. I think preoccupation with personal salvation is a form of egoic attachment anyway. On the Buddhist view the being that inherits my karma will not be me, so why would I be any more concerned about that being than the beings who will inherit the Karma of others?
I spent years seeking enlightenment; meditated virtually every day for eighteen years, and all I got were a few powerful epiphanies, somewhat akin to my copious psychedelic experiences, and the ability to still the mind. It wasn't a waste of time because I am now calmer and more accepting of life as it presents itself. That calmness frees me up for creative pursuits; I'm no longer preoccupied with trying to solve problems that cannot be solved.
I turn 72 this year, and I feel calmer about death than I ever have. It is not death, but dying that frightens me somewhat if I choose to think about it. You know the old saying : "A coward dies a thousand deaths" ? I can't see any point in worrying about something you can do nothing about.
So, which?
Quoting Janus
Death cant be avoided but if there does turn out to be an afterlife then what one has or has not done may indeed be highly significant.
I am a Catholic, so I hope and believe in an afterlife, but it all sounds impossible to me. The body supports my consciousness and my consciousness is where I live and breath, so if my body dies, where and how could I exist anymore? Stuff of fantasy for sure.
But I believe anyway. Because God makes no sense either, and really my own existence with all of its questions and knowledge of illusion, makes no sense either. None of it makes sense, so, to me, there is plenty of room to trust God anyway.
It's not a matter of "which"; I don't hundred percent believe there is no afterlife, because I have no way of knowing if that is true. And because none of us can know whether it is true until we die (if then) it cannot be more than a fantasy ? meaning it is something which is imagined, not known.
Quoting Wayfarer
All we can do anyway is try to live the best lives we can, ethically speaking. Worrying beyond that is worrying about something you can know nothing about and can do nothing about.
That's all fair enough and quite Kierkegaardian ? you admit it is a leap of faith, and I respect that.
I would like to believe that a higher intelligence makes perfect sense, but sense that were not able to apprehend - after all we see through a glass, darkly.
What use is a sense we can't apprehend ? what could it be to us?
Quoting Janus
As I said.
And that's fair enough. All the more reason not to worry about what's metaphysics and what isn't! I like your move toward asking about "assumptions" instead.
Quoting Janus
Sider is a good contrast with Wittgenstein, since Sider believes that most of the traditional metaphysical questions that Witt rejected are reformulable, and to a degree resolvable, using the apparatus of formal logic. He thinks they're good questions. But once again, while you may well be right that this winds up as semantics rather than what many call "metaphysics" . . . need we care? Let's read Sider and see what he actually says about the issues, not the vocabulary. (And BTW, Writing the Book of the World is one of the best works of contemporary philosophy I've ever read.)
Quoting Janus
But this, I must admit, is interesting. What if we did reserve the term "metaphysics" for the stance you're describing? To me that's a referendum on "holding a particular position," not on "the fundamental nature of reality." If I understand you, you're saying that there's nothing intellectually shoddy about speculations on fundamental reality, whether in the form of philosophy or fantasy. That is, you don't think the very idea of a fundamental reality is incoherent. But you do think that holding a particular position about it is unacceptable. Would you want to say more about why that is so? Is the difference to do with degrees of certainty?
Quoting Janus
So back to "assumptions" . . . This is a bit brisk, no? Surely the world is to varying degrees comprehensible, not tout court, and the "we" for whom it is comprehensible is also going to vary a great deal. Maybe we should put it this way: When I find the world (or some aspect of it) comprehensible, is it true that this involves no assumptions?
Quoting Janus
OK, this is from your reply to @Tom Storm. I don't mean to impugn your everyday experience -- or Witt's, which must have been much the same -- but it isn't mine. I seem to walk around in more or less constant puzzlement about how my experiences connect with the world that appears before me. This is particularly acute when I try to examine the experiences themselves, self-reflexively, including the question of why the idea of "comprehensibility" is so powerful. But all this is only to say that I think "like a philosopher" -- or more accurately, like the muddle-headed type of philosopher who Witt believed needed therapeutic release!
Quoting Wayfarer
Let's try rephrasing along the line of Janus's "assumptions": "It's nonsense to say that science doesn't require or imply any assumptions." OK, "nonsense" is kinda harsh, but I agree that it's implausible. What, then, are these assumptions? What are scientists assuming when they do science? Probably no one would say they're arbitrary -- that scientists just like scientific method -- so what justifications can philosophy of science offer for them?
Quoting Wayfarer
More evidence that "metaphysics" as a term may only muddy the waters. Presumably the early modern scientists meant "metaphysics" in one way, and the cultural historians that you cite meant it in another way, such that someone who denies having any metaphysics may nonetheless be convicted of having them after all. But all this demonstrates, surely, is that the word is equivocal.
I may be pushing this too far, but how about if we said: "Early modern science assumed a clear and knowable division between matter and mind, between so-called objective and secondary qualities, and conceived it the duty of science to investigate the former, not the latter." This phrasing allow us to ask a number of interesting questions about the degree to which any of this might be justified.
EDIT - switched "latter" and "former," above, eeech.
I hope God does come between you and anything else one day. Im actually sure God will, and expect that will be a pleasant meeting. But not today. Cheers!
I am always moved/inspired by the existential embrace of the absurdity of being a person. Kierkegaard is good reference.
Because there is such a thing as making sense, I agree it therefore makes sense that there is a being that makes all sense of everything. And I agree, such a being is not one of us, so we may never apprehend it, or will never make sense of everything.
And absurdity creeps in when we think, until it all makes sense it remains possible that making sense is a house of cards and so nothing ever made sense in the first place. Meaning, if we admit we dont know everything, we must admit we havent yet learned the one thing that would undercut all that we thought we knew, so maybe we never know anything.
But I also think there is a possibility that, in our likeness to God (the higher one), we sometimes apprehend things completely, that when we know something, we know the same thing God knows. We will forever pursue all-knowledge, but along the way, possess particular knowledge the same as any knowing being would possess. That makes sense to me - that I am not God, but that I can know God anyway (because of God, not my own discoveries).
I too expected that using the ancient concept of "metaphysics" to distinguish theoretical Philosophy from empirical Science would be non-controversial. But on this forum it is still associated --- primarily by Atheists & Materialists --- with Religion instead of Philosophy. So, I'm forced to spend a lot of time explaining why I like the functional distinction that Aristotle made, without naming it*1.
Aristotle's encyclopedic Physics (Nature) began with empirical observations, but in a separate chapter --- later labeled The Metaphysics --- discussed theoretical philosophical Ideas about Nature-in-general. Book 5 is sometimes described as a compendium of then-current theories about the Natural world, including conceptual abstractions (Justice & Ethics) and its immaterial functions, such as Life & Mind*2. Admittedly, "Metaphysics" viewed narrowly is a Theological term. But considered "more broadly" it's a categorical label that distinguishes conceptual Philosophy from materialistic Science. :smile:
*1. Physics refers to the things we perceive with the eye of the body. Meta-physics refers to the things we conceive with the eye of the mind. Meta-physics includes the properties, and qualities, and functions that make a thing what it is. Matter is just the clay from which a thing is made. Meta-physics is the design (form, purpose); physics is the product (shape, action). The act of creation brings an ideal design into actual existence. The design concept is the formal cause of the thing designed.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html
*2. In the famous chapter on the meanings of the term nature (phusis), contained in Book V of the Metaphysics, which is considered Aristotle's dictionary of philosophical terms, he distinguishes among the various meanings of this term, present in common parlance or in the theories of the philosophers preceding him:
https://www.pas.va/en/publications/acta/acta23pas/berti.html
That's why I specified that the Cosmic Birth Event was in "philosophical time" not clock time. Can you make sense of Einstein's notion of "Block Time"? It's a metaphorical concept, not to be taken literally*1.
You may need to imagine that our subjective experience of Sequential/Cyclic Time is an exception to the timeless state we call Eternity --- or Frozen Time, or Block Time. Then, imagine yourself as a god-like observer of the Big Bang, like the Trinity Atomic Bomb test. From your philosophical perspective, the Bang would be Now, and the Past would be Potential-not-yet-Actualized. Metaphorically, our little bubble of space-time is passing through non-dimensional changeless latent Possibility. :smile:
*1. Einstein's theory of relativity, specifically the idea of a "block universe," doesn't mean time doesn't exist or is an illusion. Instead, it suggests that space and time are interwoven and that all moments in time, past, present, and future, exist simultaneously. This challenges our subjective experience of time passing, but it doesn't negate time's objective reality.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=Einstein+block+time+not+literal
ETERNITY IMAGINED AS A BLOCK OF ICE
PS___ Maybe you could imagine yourself as the "Hotel Manager" at the grand opening of the Hotel Cosmos.
It's an interesting subject. The empiricist tradition often justifies itself by pointing to the fruits of modern science and ascribing these to its philosophy (and thus to its rejection of much of what came before). However, historically, the "new Baconian science," the new mechanistic view of nature, and nominalism pre-date the "Great Divergence" in technological and economic development between the West and India and China by centuries. If the "new science," mechanistic view, and nominalism led to the explosion in technological and economic development, it didn't do it quickly. The supposed effect spread quite rapidly when it finally showed up, but this was long after the initial cause that is asserted to explain it.
Nor was there a "great divergence," in technological progress between areas dominated by rationalism as opposed to empiricism. Nor does it seem that refusing to embrace the Anglo-empiricist tradition's epistemology and metaphysics has precluded people from becoming influential scientific figures or inventors. I do think there is obviously some sort of connection between the "new science" and the methods used for technological development, but I don't think it's nearly as straightforward as the empiricist version of "Whig history" likes to think.
In particular, I think one could argue that technology progressed in spite of (and was hampered by) materialism. Some of the paradigm shifting insights of information theory and complexity studies didn't require digital computers to come about, rather they had been precluded (held up) by the dominant metaphysics (and indeed the people who kicked off these revolutions faced a lot of persecution for this reason).
By its own standards, if empiricism wants to justify itself, it should do so through something like a peer reviewed study showing that holding to logical positivism, or some similar view, tends to make people more successful scientists or inventors. The tradition should remain skeptical of its own "scientific merits" until this evidence is produced, right? :joke:
I suppose it doesn't much matter because it seems like the endgame of the empiricist tradition has bifurcated into two main streams. One denies that much of anything can be known, or that knowledge in anything like the traditional sense even exists (and yet it holds on to the epistemic assumptions that lead to this conclusion!) and the other embraces behaviorism/eliminativism, a sort of extreme commitment to materialist scientism, that tends towards a sort of anti-philosophy where philosophies are themselves just information patterns undergoing natural selection. The latter tends to collapse into the former due to extreme nominalism though.
By all means, I'm just laying out the case as I see it. That the sciences involve discussions of causality, identity, emergence, or universals just seems to me like a good starting point for common ground.
Anyhow, people wedded to the Wittgensteinian approach are [I]constantly[/I] making metaphysical assertions of TFP and other venues. Rorty's use of Wittgenstein is a fine example. And these assertions are based on an analysis of language as prior to metaphysics (which I'd argue just results in implicitly presupposing an unclarified metaphysics for that analysis of language). Yet if the very thing in question is the existence of, or role of metaphysics/first philosophy, and one turns to philosophy of language as the arbiter of this question, it seems that one is already picking an answer, no?
Now, the classical metaphysician must do something similar, but it's explicit. "Metaphysics is first philosophy because it is most general." This is different from, "there is no first philosophy, or if there is, we must be skeptical about it, thus we must analyze language to decide the issue (i.e., philosophy language is defacto first philosophy, and will decide the issue of first philosophy as first philosophy).
The reason I think this is often not profitable is because, as noted above, I think metaphysical assumptions are inescapable. So, the analysis just assumes certain assumptions. I think I pointed this out to you before vis-á-vis the extreme authority given to Wittgenstein's "rule following argument," which is often taken as "this is something that is always and irrefutably true about rule following," not "this is what is true about rule following given we grant Wittgenstein his metaphysical and epistemic presuppositions." Wittgenstein's assumptions, premises in the argument, then have to later be analyzed in light of the very conclusions of that very same argument, i.e., "here is what can be said about epistemology and metaphysics, and how we can justify them, given what we have already said about language." The horse cannot pull the cart on the grounds that we have already set the cart before the horse.
That is why I tend to be skeptical of the approach in a nutshell. There is nothing wrong with wrangling about definitions IMO, it's a time honored tradition.
Does swapping in "general" for "universal" resolve the issue of "in virtue of what are different things the same as respects some feature?"
It seems that "general" would just require the same sort of metaphysical assumptions. Likewise, how does saying "things that share properties actually share 'morphologies'" resolve the issues of universals and natural kinds?
I mean, this just seems to me like: "we will call them 'morphologies' to presuppose nominalism without debate." I don't see how a word swap justifies such a move though. We could call them "tropes" just as well, but it doesn't remove the issue of presuppositions.
Edit: actually, to be fair, I think "patterns and regularities" could probably qualify as universals. It's perhaps more profitable and accurate to define nominalism as the rejection of form and nature than of universals, since only the most extreme, self-refuting sorts of nominalism denies "universals" in a broad sense (normally in the context of anti-rationalism.
God knows you're right about that! :smile: I just think that, too often, the wranglers actually believe someone must be correct, which, when it comes to definitions of abstracta, or terms that appear in different contexts in different traditions, is rarely possible. This leads to a lot of wasted effort, not to mention ire. Better to say, "OK, for purposes of this discussion, let's say 'metaphysics' means X, and we'll both know what we're referring to, at least. It's that piece on the board." (The game metaphor here is, I hope, inoffensive: It doesn't matter whether you call the piece a rook or a castle, as long as everyone knows it's the one that moves in straight lines.)
Another reason I'm in favor of being more self-conscious about terminological wrangles is that we can learn something, in the process, about what can be usefully defined. That poor tiger we talk so much about can in fact be given a definition which admits of being accurate or inaccurate. It may not be the "only way to define a tiger," but it allows us to sort them out with near-perfect success, and accords with a naming tradition (biology) that has won universal acceptance. Such is not the case, sadly, for putative definitions of love, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to name three. So . . . what is the difference? Plenty of food for philosophical thought here.
Lastly, as I've often said, I don't think we should encourage a view of philosophy that says, in effect, "You pit your definition/position/viewpoint against mine; these positions include differences in the 'rules' each of us thinks we should follow in this agon, so we'll never agree; but nonetheless, let the games begin and may the strongest argument win!" I mean, huh? How often is this really a good way to philosophize? And yet so many wrangles about definitions seem to assume this model. The problem goes all the way back to what I believe is a misunderstanding of Socratic dialogue.
Totally other thread - but its along the lines I suggested. Early modern science and philosophy - Galileo, Newton, Descartes - the division of mind from matter, primary attributes from secondary, the exclusion of factors not considered amenable to quantification. The description given in Nagels Mind and Cosmos. But meta-physics never goes it away, per the famous remark about philosophy burying its undertakers. Quantum physics has brought up large metaphysical questions which remain unresolved. Philosophy of biology has expanded to include biosemiotics and the metaphysics of symbols. And so on. But the positivist spirit is still powerful - all that can be known, can be known by science.
Much more to say but family duties call for a couple of hours.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, these are the assumptions we're talking about, but I'm asking for the justifications for them, as they would have been put forward by early modern scientists, and perhaps some philosophers of science today -- assuming you agree that the assumptions are far from arbitrary, but reflect a powerful (if mistaken) worldview. But maybe it does require a new thread.
Quoting Wayfarer
Unacceptable, but if you must . . . :wink:
:roll:
Quoting Wayfarer
From my point of view you certainly seem to see through a glass darkly.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I dont generally quote scripture, but one of the New Testament aphorisms is blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall know God (Matt 5:8). In saying that Im well aware of my own lack of purity and the probable consequences of that. But I want to consider this through a philosophical rather than confessional perspective.
I understand that teaching to be a reference to what came to be called theosis or the divine vision, It is described as a state of union with the Divine and is the culmination of the spiritual life in both Catholic and Orthodox Christianity (although with a few exceptions it is not nearly so explicit in Reformed Theology for reasons I wont enlarge on here.)
Similar motifs can be found in other spiritual traditions, of divine union, mystical absorption and so forth. Of course there are also profound differences between them and Im not suggesting they all be blurred into a kind of mushy new-age syncretism. But from a philosophical perspective its the convergences that are interesting, as it suggests archetypal forms found across cultures. And all of these traditions - not only religious teachings, but also philosophical traditions - indicated the importance of purity of motive, lack of attachment, abandonment of craving, and so on, as preconditions for that insight to arise. That is the kind of saving insight that the Biblical verse is referring to. It is not an empirical observation about states of affair in the world, but insight into the divine origin of being- mystical insight, known under various terminologies in different cultures - Gnosis, Jñ?na, Prajñ?p?ramit? being examples from different traditions. Again, the cultures differ amongst themselves as to the specifics, but again the similarities are of more significance than the differences: they are agreeing and disagreeing about something real.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Well, your own Catholic tradition has a noble and still esteemed school of philosophical theology, namely, that of St Thomas Aquinas, who (again from a philosophical perspective) I would propose as an example (and possibly the last example) of the philosophia perennis in the Western tradition. Thomas adoption of Aristotelian hylomorphic (matter-form) dualism conforms with your general idea. See Sensible Form and Intelligible Form in Aquinas. Im not presenting it as holy writ (which many will present Aquinas as) but as a philosophical model which I think still holds up even in light of the many scientific discoveries since Thomas day. That idea is that the rational soul of man (psuche) has insight into the formal causes, which themselves arise in the Divine Intellect. I know there are many ways to criticise that philosophy and that it is overall regarded as superseded in the Western tradition, but Im not sure how many of those who criticise it really understand what theyre rejecting. Underlying all of this is a different mode of knowing and being to that of the detached observer of states of affairs in the world.
Incidentally, the through the glass, darkly is part of a Pauline scripture that is very often read at wedding ceremonies, and indeed one of the most poetic invocations of the spirit in the whole New Testament. The complete verse is
[quote=1 Cor. 13-12]For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.[/quote]
Then is a reference to entering the divine presence, nowadays generally understood as something that happens only at the time of death, but in the mystical sense, corresponding with the advent of the beatific vision.
I see...we see through a glass darkly but you don't. :rofl:
I agree. Much to ponder peering into the wisdom that overlaps cultures, religions, times.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree as well. And I see Aristotle and Heraclitus everywhere too, as well as I see God everywhere. We are all after the same thing. Im not afraid to call it wisdom, or more directly, truth, and more practically, admit it is universal to persons who love other persons. Love is at the heart of all. Motion, being, becoming, unity, community, knowledge and truth (unity of mind and object), and language itself - the deepest personal expression of love in the one who truly means I love you to another
Quoting Wayfarer
I see a philosophic leap too far when you or Aquinas end up in the Divine intellect. I know God can be an essential ontological feature of many philosophies, but I think it is a scientific cop-out (so far in our experience) to use God in philosophy (again, so far in human history, not even Aristotle settled such an assertion) (and not that that is what you are trying to do). I hope you follow me here.
I like where you said, the idea is that the rational soul of man (psuche) has insight into the formal causes. Id say the mind sees the formal. Like the eye senses light. And leave it at that. I havent yet explained the formal ( though we obviously keep seeing it in mind) just like I havent fully explained light or eyes seeing light consciously though I obviously see.
Quoting Wayfarer
And here, in my view, there is one mode, one knowing. It may take complexity to lay down the science of it all in a language, but if it all doesnt end up how it starts, with the naive, hand-in-hand with all things in the world, we have lost our way.
Illusion stands out against its only possible context, namely, reality. We cant bemoan illusion until we know something else, namely the real, so we need to recall and rejoice, for however illusion has been delivered to me, it came with the real!
Quoting Wayfarer
I feel like here, in this forum, we are miles away from a more measurable, more strictly philosophical conversation. Weve leapt into mysticism at its most universal (and more TPF friendly form), or something more like theology in more particular form, and neither are too comfortable here at TPF (and thats ok with me).
Personally, I see what Aquinas meant when he said his philosophic thoughts about his beloved Father in heaven were straw. The beatific vision will come as a gift and a surprise and I would expect it to be utterly unlike anything I could expect. Gods visage, to me, is different than the aspirations of mystical enlightenment. Enlightenment can be sought and found through ones own effort (or ones own complete quelling of effort). To me, in the end, it is only because God wants me to see him that I would ever come to be able to see him and then actually see - and in the end, when it comes to God, Id rather just look for his own words first, see if God will come to me, then discuss my interpretations (again probably better received in some other forum).
I think we have a similar approach to this thing of ours - this love of wisdom.
And see how far I stray from the problem of evil where God is falsely taken as an object that can be fixed in a syllogism that concludes God is not; I feel obliged to save God from the fiery pits of Humes to the flames! Or Nietzsche, or Russell..
But then I recall, philosophy is its most pure when it remains science first and foremost, so it is likely no one cares God has been spared by me.
Anyway, always interested to know what you think. Cheers.
I know Ive already said plenty, but your comment has stayed with mepartly because it touches on a deep philosophical issue that Ive reflected on before.
One of the most insightful books Ive read on this is The Theological Origins of Modernity by Michael Allen Gillespie. Gillespie challenges the usual story that modernity arose from reason overcoming faith. Instead, he shows that the transition to modern thought was deeply shaped by a theological struggle within Christianity itselfespecially the debate over divine reason versus divine will.
[quote=Christopher Blosser; https://christopherblosser.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-theological-origins-of-modernity-by.html] Brief summary: Gillespie turns the conventional reading of the Enlightenment (as reason overcoming religion) on its head by explaining how the humanism of Petrarch, the free-will debate between Luther and Erasmus, the scientific forays of Francis Bacon, the epistemological debate between Descarte and Hobbes, were all motivated by an underlying wrestling with the questions posed by nominalism, which according to Gillespie dismantled the rational God / universe of medieval scholasticism and introduced (by way of the Franciscans) a fideistic God-of-pure-will, born of a concern that anything less than such would jeopardize His divine omnipotence. This combined with the emerging nominalism to form the basis of much of modern thought.
Subsequent intellectual history is, in Gillespie's reading, a grappling with the question of free will and divine determinism. Protestantism involved at its core fideistic, denying free will in order to preserve God's absolute power. However, this in turn culminated in an ambivalence about salvation. If God simply wills whom to save, human action has no real merit (ex. Luther's "sin boldly"). Gillespie's chapter on the debate between Erasmus-Luther was among the most interesting in bringing this out.[/quote]
In medieval scholasticism, especially in the work of Aquinas, God was understood as transcendent but also rational. The universe was seen as ordered in a way that human reason could, at least in part, comprehendsince human reason reflected the divine logos. But Gillespie argues that a shift occurred with the rise of theological voluntarism, particularly through the influence of Franciscan thinkers. They insisted that Gods will was absolutely free and not bound even by rationality. To suggest otherwise, they argued, would limit divine omnipotence.
This paved the way for a more fideistic view of God, where faith meant trusting in the unknowable will of God, even when it seemed to make no sense. This tension played out dramatically in the Reformation, especially in Luthers rejection of scholastic rationalism and his emphasis on trust in Gods inscrutable will.
So your comment, about trusting God because nothing makes sense, actually reflects a deep-standing thread in Christian culture a move away from the idea of a rationally ordered universe toward a faith based on trust in Gods sheer will. In that light, what feels like a modern attitude is actually rooted in a much older theological shift. This is what Gillespie brings out. But, be assured, Thomist philosophy lives on, and there are many profound Thomist philosophers to this day.
One my lecturers in philosophy wryly pointed out that Humes condemnation at the end of his Treatise actually applies to the Treatise. Take any book of scholastic metaphysic The lecturer compared Hume, like the positivists after him, to the Uroboros, the mythical snake that swallows itself. The hardest part, he would say with a mischievous grin, is the last bite.
(BTW I cross-posted my above reply to you before I saw your reply above that, although I dont think weve crossed purposes.)
I usually cringe at philosophic notions of God. (And I hypocritically philosophize about God, so, no judgment!) I think what you just said here somewhat paraphrases me before. But it strikes me now - how do we know God cares about the things our reason cares about? It makes sense that if there is any logos, there is one logos and if logos is to be known, divine or human, logos is logos. So it clarifies nothing to refer to divine logos in a philosophic manner. What is that?
I see knowing the divine or the transcendent as equivalent to knowing another person. We can know the other person perfectly, but i only to the extent they reveal themselves to us. I now know something of what Wayfarer thinks. You said it, and so I know something of you. I dont know everything about Wayfarer, but I know something. That is how God knows Wayfarer too (it is always particular knowledge when knowing a person, and God also knows much more than maybe even Wayfarer knows about Wayfarer); and this is how Wayfarer knows God. This is what any knowledge is like - the other, revealed, to me.
Its easy to know a physical thing - we can use our sense and invent tools to measure it. But to know the transcendent, like God, or like a person, words and revelations of a person to another person, these are most intimate and can be much more true than senses and, as a Christian, they are whole ball game, the purpose of knowing anything. Knowing he person of God who knows the person of me - that is the purpose of everything.
Quoting Christopher Blosser
Quoting Wayfarer
Interesting.
God gave me reason so that I could use language and understand what he says when he says my will is x - but not reason enough to understand whether what God wills makes sense towards achieving whatever God says he is trying to achieve. We need reason to understand what go bind and sacrifice Isaac or build an Arc in a field means and reason to put together all the pieces that carry out those commands, but not enough reason to understand how these are good acts reasonably connected to a future for life with a loving God.
My opinion is, when God makes a request that we do not understand, we should trust God and comply with the request regardless of our understanding, because we already understand that it is always good to trust God. But there is nothing intrinsic to Gods will and command that I am unable to understand it. God wants me to understand Him. That includes His will when he reveals his will to me. But if I do not understand, even more than me stopping to use my reason and intellect to seek to understand why God wants what he wants and how what God wants is good, I should not stop and trust God, trust his perfect goodness, and follow him wherever he seems to me and my limited intellect to be going.
The point, to me, about not being able to understand God is, God is so big and unique, I will forever have more to learn - I will never know it all (much like another persons soul). There will forever be vast oceans of more to know and fulfill my desires to know you.
So when I say nothing makes sense it is more like an acknowledgment that nothing fully makes sense, yet. God isnt waiting for me to figure him out, so when he bridges the gap between me and him, I am always taken off guard and shown things I cant understand - like someone giving Newton the formula e=mc2, and telling him to trust it and figure that out. God built me to figure him out (to a similar extent we figure out anyone we love). We cant ultimately figure him out all on our own - we need grace and gifts to come to God (revelation), but our intellect is not going to be abandoned and left to our own devices forever. So I hope.
Quoting Wayfarer
Love it! Humes understanding of things is a miracle.
:rofl:
Historically at least, this seems to have proven quite true.