If you haven’t read Alvin Plantinga or The problem of pain I highly recommend them. They can answer most if not all of your questions about reconciling God and evil and how they are logically and emotionally compatible. They can give answers with more depth than you can find on forum posts and stuff
Just a recommendation though.
You are describing abstractions which are physical thoughts in our physical brains.
I have yet to see evidence that it is there.
It’s the neural activity in the brain that is responsible for our consciousness, not the neural activity in our solar plexus.
My parents created me, and I think the process is pretty well understood. For quite a while after my conception what I experience as being a person didn’t exist either. However, through embryonic development a brain did develop, and here I am. Dying is equivalent to what I was before I was conceived.
Irreversible brain damage.
Why does it require pain and suffering, such as contracting deadly infectious diseases? Emotional pain from rejection? Okay, I can see that. But why physical pain and suffering?
Apparently we had irreversible brain damage before our embryonic development if we are returning to what we were before? what allowed us life in the first place? Why can’t the process of life from the beginning of the universe restart?
Are you admitting that emotional pain isn’t physical? That seems to contradict your entire point of there being nothing non-physical.
The idea your parents created you, ok. It’s an infinite regress of who created your parents and your parents parents, so on and so forth till the first human, back even further to the beginning of the universe, then what?
Yeah of course its neural activity in our brain not our solar plexus, I already said that. I was asking why the neural activity in our solar plexus isn’t conscious if it does indeed have the same neural activity as our brain?
Abstractions are abstract: non-physical. Thoughts aren’t physical either. Neural activity is, but if i think of a pink elephant, opening my skull and examining my neural activity wont tell you what im thinking about.
I think we have both said our peace, and I don’t want to turn this into more of a tit for tat than it already is.
You have said some things that have piqued my interest, and I will consider your Plantinga recommendation. Thanks for responding to my posts, and I promise your posts were not ignored.
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Ah fair enough. I was about to say the same thing. Good day to you sir, I hope you find what you are looking for, and let me know how the recommendation goes!
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Thank you for responding to my posts and being very open minded and respectful.
The 17th-18th century mathematician (co-founder of Calculus) and polymath Gottfried Leibniz coined the phrase ‘best of all possible worlds’ to mean … (roughly, and here in my words) … that the world we live in is the best possible one that can logically exist. So God is giving us his [the] best, and if there’s stuff you don’t like in it … well, that’s too bad, because all other possibilities could only go downhill from here for whatever various reasons (even if we lack God’s omniscience to know this.) It was his answer to theodicy and why there is evil in this world as we know it. Best of all possible worlds - Wikipedia.
It has also been considerably mocked and dismissed (and maybe not even just by atheists), but perhaps most famously by Voltaire after the catastrophe of the Lisbon Earthquake. Leibniz’ view came to be mocked as an apologetic that left a lot to be desired as far as God goes. I.e. - it’s pretty easy to take potshots at (as @T_aquaticus is demonstrating so well). If God is omnipotent, then why not at least do ______. Given that even we wicked humans with neither omniscience nor omnipotence have already been able to accomplish much that seems pretty indisputably good. It ends up looking like a pretty apologetically impoverished theodicy to try hiding one’s allegedly infinitely good God behind.
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Yeah I think that is a pretty far-fetched response as we can’t know either way.
It likely would if there has been previous training on pink elephants to map associated neural activity.
What we have achieved is only relative and sometimes at great cost. Introducing animals into an ecosystem and watching it fall apart, for instance.
Does medicine somehow counter the workings of the Universe? Or is man’s ingenuity part of the reason he is top of the pile?
We cannot say for certain that God did not anticipate (or know) what humanity is capable of and factor it into creation
There is a human vanity in thinking we could do better than God but it all boils down to the “bigger Picture” which, no matter how hard we try, or what inventions we make, we never can match God (Or what we assume God has)
There is also the bias that humans have for “the value of all life” which has an ideal that is maybe beyond reality? Sometimes I think we are not fully aware of the dynamics and what constitutes life, especially sentience. We make assumptions based on our observations. Perhaps some things we see as instinct have more to them?
Richard
I would say that God can but that logical coherence is the difference between dream and reality. So yes God could make a dream world like any child can but that is hardly impressive. So yes God is all-powerful but some versions of omnipotence like what we all have in our own dreams are a bit trivial.
So I think the point is that God wants other things which are more important (like reality and life), and that pain and death are essential for the process of life itself. God created life choosing love and freedom over power and control. This is why I say I can only believe in Christianity because of evolution, because otherwise the problems of evil and suffering make the belief in God untenable for me.
BUT… as a consequence of this I do not believe God indulges in magic contradicting the laws of nature and especially not just to impress a bunch of ancient savages who cannot tell the difference anyway. The laws of nature allow for all kinds of miracles and magic shows to impress people. Jesus never claimed supernatural powers. In fact several things He said suggest the opposite, such as John 5:19 and John 14:12. So I believe that what makes something a miracle is the involvement of God (yes He does play a role in events and the laws of nature does not exclude this) and not magic or a violation of the laws of nature. The miracle were Jesus seeing how God was arranging events to make things happen. Yes, I think all the miracles of Jesus have natural explanations. And only the resurrection of Jesus is more than this, demonstrating a spiritual reality according to 1 Corinthians 15.
Well yeah, If you associate a neural wave with a certain image then yes, you would know what I’m thinking, but you still can’t see it. You only know because I told you I was thinking of a pink elephant.
That’s a fair point. Never thought about it that way, thanks!
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That’s right. Which also means then in that case, that he could have anticipated all the evil we would do too.
Well - or maybe just thinking we can do … better than where reality is at right now! A future without smallpox seems like a better future than one with it. It’s a pretty hard (or desperate) case to try to pretend otherwise.
That would be my speculation too.
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I haven’t read Leibniz and didn’t know his “best of all possible worlds” philosophy. But it reminded me of what I heard a (modern) theologian say (I’m paraphrasing from hazy memory) "We do not live in the best of all possible worlds, but in the best possible world that will lead to the best world.
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This brought to mind a si-fi novel where there’s an invasion of a colony world, and one guy immediately signed up for the defense force. He had an important position in his lodge (think cousins out to fifth or sixth) and so as he comes out of his house to the transport to take him to training after saying goodbye to his family and kids, another of the recruits asked him, “You could get killed! What about your heritage?”
He replied, “I just said farewell to my heritage; now it’s time to put my life between the invaders and them”.
Interesting. I think I agree.
Generally when He does so there’s a “filter” involved.
I think mine just hit 101° F but I’m feeling too wobbly to go figure out where the thermometer is.
Babylon 5, PsiCorps.
And there’s the real issue.
Why not? I can’t recall any texts to support that.
My older brother the mathematician got excited about Heaven because there he could learn mathematics no one has even thought of yet.
Is God “all-principled” or not? If He signed the planet over to humans, intervening to cancel the results of things we do would be unprincipled.
Granted that’s only one category of evil.
And replace it with what warning system to teach us not to grab a glowing log out of the campfire?
And you don’t think God is more capable than humans?
See to me that whole line of reasoning of meaning in our life being basically to protect things that are important to us, or to make the lives of people we love better just shows me that we strive for some kind of meaning beyond what this life has to offer. Even if we already have things that we love and appreciate, we strive for something greater not out of greed, but out of longing. It’s like how C.S. Lewis said that it would be very strange for him to find himself in a world where he felt hungry yet food did not exist.
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That’s a great point
This genuinely made me laugh, thanks. If you were being serious though, I hope you’re ok.
I don’t understand. Perhaps because I forgot the context of what you were replying to but what do you mean “there’s the real issue”.
It’s like how when we overcome a terrible tragedy or hard challenge we still remember what it was like but it poses no evil, threat, harm, danger, or anxiety to us. We feel like we literally, well, overcame it. That’s how I think of it at least.
That is the thing, pain isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, on it’s own, it can be a very good thing. Of course, however, if you wanted your creation to be free, the very unfortunate reality is there is going to be some excess of that, which is obviously very bad.