(This post is mostly directed to BBBats)
I'd like to make a statement here about 'Logic'. The word was used in whole or in part 8 times in the comments of the super-post 9000.
Examples (all mostly direct quotes):
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"Just as the enlightenment can rise out of a state of tyranny so to is it logicly possible that Gods creation could develop a more just system of ethics than the creator."
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"Just as a german soldier who would face execution for refusing to participate in the holocaust was considered to be obligated to die rather than to follow orders so to logically would all of us considering pascals wager be obligated to risk eternal damnation rather than support a biased corrupt tyrant who orders genocide, punishes those that disagree with it and rewards those who agree."
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"Say the god of the wager is Camasotz or one of the other bloodthirsty human-sacrifice demanding gods?
Should people tear the hearts out of others and willingly have their own heart torn from their living chest in fear of the gods displeasure or in hope of its reward?
The same logical principle applies to the christian god too."
4-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The capacity for basic intellectual empathy (as not everyone is born with intuitive empathy) where a person says 'It is wrong to do to others the EQUIVALENT for them of what I do not like done to me' is easilly a rational basis for morality which has as its inevitable logical consequences the principles of Human Rights."
5-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I think we need to be fair to Christians and honest with ourselves about these questions, and I think it is fair to agree that IF the Christian Universe is true, THEN it is also Just - it is practically tautological."
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"But as people can experience things done to them by others that they do not like is that then not the basis logically for all that follows?
7&8---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As I said, not all people are born with intuitive empathy or with the instinctive theory-of-mind skills that enable them to recognise that others are both reasoning and feeling beings like themselves and yet different and seperate beings capable of thinking differently.
But these things can be reasoned logicly even if they are not felt instinctively.
And once such conclusions are held does not the rationality of empathy as a guide of behaviour then follow logicly?"
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So I just noticed the mention of Camazotz which coincidentally is the name of the dystopia in 'A Wrinkle in Time'. (see last post)
So I point these out because we all seem to agree that what we are talking about is very important. It is so important that we really can't afford to be careless with our words, much less so with what we think they mean. When someone says "If A is possible then logically B is possible", I take them to mean that using a series of irrefutable statements, I can get from A to B, or B follows from A. If B doesn't follow from A, then the statement "A follows B" is 'non-sequitur' which is a logical fallacy. (Notice my statement is a logical statement).
So then, statement 3 above, is non-sequitur.
You suppose that the god of the wager is Camazotz
you say:
because Camazotz is a bloodthirsty tyrant
we should reject the wager
then logically,
if the Christian God is the god of the wager,
we should reject him also
Now this I suppose works for you because you assume that the Christian God is as bad or worse than Camazotz. I do not assume that. I'm not sure how anyone who has actually read the Bible would walk away with a picture of a Camazotz god as the God of the Bible of Christianity.
What Toups ( I think) is trying to point out that (Although I'm sure he would not say it like this)
(A) If someone believes the cosmology of Christianity
(B) Then they believe that God sent Jesus(who is God) to die for people who did not deserve it in order to have a relationship with them.
(C) If (B)
(D) then God is very gracious to offer us something that we do not deserve and could not otherwise obtain.
If (D)
(E) then not only should we serve God, love Him with all our being, and obey him, but it is good to do so.
If (E) is true
(F) then (E) is true irrespective of any personal suffering
For the Christian, the fact of the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection is the proof that God is a loving God who kept his covenant (that he need not have made except for his love for us) with Abraham of the old Testament despite the frequent rebellion and breaking of the covenant by His people.
So then, you can't 'prove' that Christianity is wrong by saying "if Christianity were different, then you wouldn't believe it", and most of your statements are basically of that nature.
Finally, is not Christ's Incarnation, Suffering and Death the highest possible form of empathy? God becoming man, suffering as a man, dying as a man --and of course the account of his suffering is beyond what most people ever endure. You don't seem to consider this when talking about the Christian God.
8 comments:
Toups. You never had anything to say about this post?
This whole thing is a morass. The Christian God is a very conceptually powerful one, by which I mean that Christianity imagines that nothing has value except by God's decree and that moral as well as physical laws are given by God. My point is, then, that Justice and Goodness are whatever God wants them to be in a Christian Universe and our opinions become quite irrelevant to either question. One may as well decide that a neutrino is not charged as that Obedience is not good, in a Christian Universe. Whether or not Camasotz is the same kind of God or not is the kind of question that I don't see my point in debating, though if we assume that he is such an "ultimate law giving god" then whatever Camasotz wants must ALSO be "Right" in a Universe where Camasotz exists. I suppose that BBBats is arguing that if we have Free Will then we have something like the power with which whichever God created external morality and we can "create" by an act of consciousness, our own moral rules, thereby rejecting the morality of whatever creator is involved. I don't know. This is a bit like trying to convince someone of the fact that Emma Watson is on the cover of People Magazine when they believe that the screen showing Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone is a window rather than a projection.
I find appeals to Christ's suffering equally perplexing. We cannot reason about God at all. We do not know, for instance, if Suffering or Death are even things which God can be meaningfully said to experience. Arguably Jesus did not die on the cross at all, given that he did not "cease forever" on the day he was crucified. Arguably He did not "Suffer" for our sins because what is suffering to an infinite entity for whom there is no material consequence of any physical action? Merely a series of "perceptions". Separated from its biological meaning of "this will kill you if you do not do something" can pain mean anything at all?
At best a Christian can say "These things merely are, by virtue of Divine Fiat - Jesus Suffered, despite the logical impossibility, because God chose it. He died because God 'expanded' the definition of death from 'to cease forever' to 'to cease forever and come back if you are Jesus'" But in this case things become hopeless muddled and all the believer can do is conclude that they are not supposed to understand what actually happened. That is a very strange thing to conclude about the central event in the history of human universe designed by God.
Vincent. You are forgetting that in the Christian cosmology, you too are a semi-infinite being. You have never met a 'mortal' so to speak. Though you do not have an eternal past (which begs the concept of time) you, like a mathematical ray, have a starting point and go on forever. So let me ask you: Can you feel pain? Can you experience death? Jesus was biologically human, and died a biological death. I see no reason from your argument why Jesus would not have experienced suffering simply because he knew that he would ultimately defeat death. I have the expectation that Jesus defeated death for me. It does not follow that I do not suffer or experience pain or that I will not experience death. There is no logical impossibility of suffering for a human. You haven't even shown why it would be impossible for a deity to suffer. God in the old testament 'suffers' akin to how a husband 'suffers' when his wife is unfaithful; Not unsimilar to how a man, who likes a woman and who has built dreams on her, might feel if she rejected him for someone else.
As far as good being 'whatever God says', your statements hold no meaning. God appears to hold himself to a standard which he never violates, and which all reasonable peoples at all times have recognized as 'good'. No one really thinks that murder or adultery is good. No one is arguing that it is. No one arguing that it is would be successful, except perhaps with dogmatic relativists (which I would assume you are not).
If I am a semi-infinite being then why is it such a big deal that Jesus "rescued me" from death - what you are saying is that death is an illusion and/or a misunderstanding. What Jesus really offers me repreive from, then, is suffering, not death. But what is suffering if it does not indicate eventual oblivion? It is just another sensation which I am free to interpret as I wish.
You might indicate that humans are limited in their ability to perceive suffering as anything but, and that the real effect of suffering is that it steals my time and attentional resources, even if it will never destroy me. That is, if I go to hell, I will be suffering so much that I will not be able to concentrate on anything that I wish. That may be true - but then my limitations as an entity make me suffer meaningfully - God, who presumably can be crucified and contemplate my memory of the scent of a woman's hair at the same time, with no loss of vividness or self, is still not meaningfully able to suffer. At least not as I do.
The materialist explanation is much more meaningful - suffering is existentially meaningful because it signals the termination of the self as well as depletes the self in the short term. We suffer because we are organisms which need to protect ourselves from a hostile environment.
I am a reasonable person and I do not recognize God's behavior as good by my understanding and assertion of morality. For instance, a human is only capable of finite crimes, yet God punishes us infinitely. This is neither good nor just, not even considering the fact that we are purportedly being punished not for anything we have done, but for something our ancestor has done. In my view my relationship to my parents is entirely a coincidence, although a pleasant one. I cannot see how I should be held responsible for their actions. And this is one example. You saying that God is good because he offers us succor for our suffering is like dogs thinking that I am exceptionally chaste because I've never had sex with a dog. That doesn't really make sense, but it sounds awesome and the flavor is conveyed - you cannot be a moral relativist but surely God must be - all morals are relative to Him.
God is not just good, but perfect, holy and good. Perfect having never sinned, holy- meaning set apart for pure and perfect good, and thus good. It is not mysterious that God would reject someone who refuses to take the offer of Jesus' substitution. Jesus has offered to pay for our sins. Rejecting the offer means paying for them yourself.
I suspect that you are butting up against God's requirement of holiness (that His people be set apart for pure and perfect good). You say "I am a reasonable person and I do not recognize God's behavior as good by my understanding and assertion of morality. For instance, a human is only capable of finite crimes, yet God punishes us infinitely."
You immediately forget our conversation and the assertion that beings are mathematical rays thus infinite thus capable of infinite crimes. The suffering of hell has both 'weeping and gnashing of teeth'. I think this implies sorrow, suffering, and also anger and resentment. Have you ever been moved to gnash your teeth? It probably accompanied an anger almost capable of murder. You also neglect, ignore, or reject the requirement of perfection vs 'good enough'. God graciously provided a substitute for us (Jesus) and allows his perfection to count for us, and his death to take away all of our sins. Consider that only perfect might be good enough (Part of the Christian Cosmology).
Secondly, you pay for your own sins. A sin is a sin whether intentional or not, whether there is predisposition or not, and to refuse to accept that is futile and frankly peurile. A man inclined to alcoholism or rape or gluttony is not less guilty of such acts nor are the consequences less severe. We are people inclined to sin. One of your sins is blaming your parents for your sins. You'll remember that Adam blamed Eve and God ("the woman that you put here with me; she gave to me and I ate"), and Eve blamed the snake ("the serpent deceived me"). Blaming someone else (especially God) for our sin is a very old trick and you might fall for it, but I won't.
The way you tell it God holds a baby responsible for getting fetal alcohol syndrome. This is a fallacy. The baby suffers the consequences of her mother actions, but the mother is to blame. You might rather that Christianity did claim the former because you could wash it all away as rubbish, but cursory serach of the scriptures, old and new testament will show the objective reader otherwise.
With regard to your last simile, it makes no sense and I cannot even imagine what parallels you think you see.
In the Christian cosmology humans may be semi-infinite, but God punishes them after only a finite trial period (one human lifetime) in which they could not have possibly sinned infinitely. Your argument seems to be "Well, if you went to hell you would be so angry you would sin forever, and therefore would then deserve to be punished forever." This would complicate, if not invalidate, the notion of free will. In any case, my point was that as a reasonable person, I don't recognize the "Goodness" of God in an unqualified way. I don't even recognize the value of Justice or Punishment. From my perspective the only reason to cause a person to suffer (or to prevent a person from suffering if it is within my power to do so) is if the suffering is ameliorative or instructional. The perpetual suffering of hell is not ameliorative, because it never ends, and it is not instructional, because the damned person will NEVER have the opportunity to try again and do better. The damned person is treated like garbage, and it is not that important to me whether he is treated that way directly or by ommission. Hell is not moral from my perspective. Obviously, if I believed in God, I would believe it was just and good that people go to hell, but I would have to believe it in the same way I would believe that Jesus "suffered" on the Cross in a meaningful way - as a thing which I could not hope to understand, a concept half-way across the event horizon of the singularity of God.
I bring up my own beliefs because Christians often make overblown claims that the entirety of the human universe recognized the wisdom and goodness of the Christian story, even if they don't believe it. But this is not true - reasonable people everywhere believe that aspects of Christianity are simply unjust and/or immoral.
Part of my problem with Christianity, to address the latter part of your response, is that I do not really accept the descriptive universe around the human entity that Christianity asserts. I believe, for instance, that a person's responsibility for their behavior may be partially or entirely mitigated by their "predispositions". A schizophrenic person may murder his neighbor because he believes that she is passing messages to Nancy Grace by tapping on the steam pipes in the building, but I don't think the he should be held responsible for the murder in the same way I should be if I decided to murder someone so that I can scratch murder off of my "experiences to have" list. The idea that a Christian God would create imperfect beings and then punish them for their imperfections (and there is no way I have ever heard which can describe the situation as anything but trivially different from this) strikes me as ridiculous.
I should also point out that from God's perspective, consequences of sin are really just coincidences. The universe could have been made in such a way that our actions had no consequences and we could still have free will and the choice to obey or disobey God. If I sin because of the consequences of my parent's actions, then that too is God's "fault." He designed the system and the structure. One way or another you have to accept that in a Christian Universe any structural faults in the human entity must be directly on indirectly the fault of the person who built the structure. If the most important thing a person ever does is make choices, why do we have any predispositions at all? They are directly opposed to rational choice.
To use your example of a baby with fetal alcohol syndrome, it very much is as if God holds us responsible for having it. We are all born with "moral failure syndrome" through no fault of our own (perhaps through God's fault or our parents' or ancestors') and we are held responsible for our moral failings. This would be like me beating a child with Down's Syndrome because he was not as intelligent as his peers.
Ultimately I can't see much productive use in discussing this because I think it just doesn't really fit the observable data. Humans are not motes of will facing one moral choice after another. We are collections of informal reasoning and decision making processes (many of which having independent or contradictory goals) which have blossomed out of the process of natural and sexual selection. Our consciousnesses and internal lives are the product of natural processes and we should reason about ourselves, and judge ourselves, appropriately.
You make carless claims like "The universe could have been made in such a way that our actions had no consequences and we could still have free will and the choice to obey or disobey God."
If i wanted to swing a bat at your head, God could have made it so that the moment I get close enough, the bat glides though like air or that I always miss you, or better yet, God could have made it so that my brain would never chose to strike you with a bat... but then I would not have free will.
now I'll just repost this:
The issue of suffering has been raised and is adequately addressed in the first book (the Problem of Pain). The second book (Wrinkle in Time) is delightful and much easier to read and takes truths from PoP to their natural conclusions. The thesis of PoP is many-fold. Lewis starts with the idea that in an existence with only a Creator and a created being where the created being has free will implies the possibility of pain. He then discusses scenarios where the Creator attempts to remove the possibility of suffering, but the result is necessarily the removal of the free will of the created being.
This is borne out in WiT when the children find themselves on a planet that is entirely controlled by one mind. All suffering, mistakes, pain etc are removed from this society because all beings actions are controlled by the mind until their wills, having been forced into alignment with the mind, operate automatically. Any creature whose actions go against the mind is immediately destroyed. This planet is more a dystopian hell than the creation of a loving Creator, and yet, it is very similar to what you lay out as the actions of a better God.
Next, Lewis argues in PoP that the fall, while being a necessary possibility for creatures with free will, was not a necessary outcome of creatures with free will. Lewis also very carefully discusses the idea of possibility and impossibility as it applies to God. People often pose questions or make statements that "God could have made..." but non-sense is still non-sense when applied to God. So while some things are impossible to man, but possible to God, some things are "intrinsically impossible". Thus if it is 'intrinsically impossible' for creatures to exist with free will and without the possibility of pain, then that applies to God.
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