The arrogant attitude among many Christians that only Christianity is worthy of consideration is extremely off-putting, fosters ignorance, and goes against the portrayal of Jesus in the gospels.
The modern triune of “worthy” Theism (ALL loving, omniscent, omnipotent) is my usual scope
when discussing religion generally. And with that “triune”, theodicy is inevitable.
So I find it fairly offensive for critics to “bring down dialogue” by emphasizing
the problem of Evil or Suffering. Every faith and denomination has their own
”answer” for resolving/ignoring those problems. Attacking sin/suffering is
tantamount to attacking modern Theism at its core. Not helpful.
G.Brooks
That’s no excuse for declaring that any other religion is not worth talking about.
I find it offensive that you are criticising ‘critics’ for something that hasn’t happened, and complaining about discussion of a topic that you raised.
- This is a very difficult thread to follow.
The last few dozen responses have been about semantics and something very trivial.
Or maybe one dozen, before I get called out for inexactitude and start another side argument over nothing.
2 Likes
- I had to use ChatGPT to sort out most of it, and from what I understand, the part that you say is about semantics and something very trivial, may or may not be trivial, but it needs, IMO, it’s own separate and maybe private thread.
- So, Vinnie, was your initial position–before George used the word “intrinsic”–that any religion (or worldview) that aims to be existentially adequate must, in some way, address suffering—its occurrence, meaning (if any), and appropriate human response—because suffering is unavoidable and presses for interpretation?
More or less. George used the word intrinsic. I just agreed with the general gist of his statement. Any religion should be prepared to discuss aspects of reality and how they relate to their view. The problem of suffering is a huge one for virtually all major world religions and people. Whether its due to past actions (Hinduism) or something in life we need to try to overcome (Buddhism) or something we want to reconcile with a benevolent God (major monotheistic religions) the major religions account for it or try to deal with and explain it. All of us potential converts are going to generally consider it a problem or something we think needs discissing. If If you think God delights in harming animals then animal suffering isn’t really a problem to your view. I don’t know why a simple communication requires this level of exactitude or distinction. Or why something so trivial and tautological needs to be spelled out for people. Its almost like we want to score points as opposed to communicate ideas.
I would say any monotheistic religion with classical ideology are the only intellectually feasible options. But everyone is free to consider whatever they want and incorrect religious beliefs certainly have a lot of value and meaning to those who practice them as a part of their cultural identity and upbringing.
Agreed. Easily refutable notions about multiple “gods” or a singular “god” lacking classical attributes don’t need to explain anything. I wouldn’t expect nonsense to beget anything other than nonsense.
Vinnie
2 Likes
For me as a physicist there is no distinction because I think the laws of nature are basically just the geometry of space-time. The laws of nature are just the form of the universe itself.
I asked about your meaning of “prime mover” in the other thread and now a search of the phrase “prime mover argument” links it to the “unmoved mover” of Aristotle.
I do not think any attributes of God come from the argument. In Hawkings’ “Brief History of Time” (or its sequel), the prime mover was just a quantum fluctuation. Thus I think these attributes are really just a product of other premises added to the argument.
I think this is incorrect because it runs rough shod over the complexities of causality and points to the problem with this phrase “prime mover” as opposed to “uncaused cause.” Let me clarify by distinguishing the difference between two questions:
- Why does anything exist at all?
- Why has one particular thing or course of events happened rather than another?
The phrase “prime mover” suggests all change and movement has only one cause. Causality is more complex because most things have many different causes rather than only one. And while some of the causes may trace back to a uncaused cause, others may be traced back to events which are not determined by pre-existing conditions even though they only happen because pre-existing conditions allow it. Thus these events are contingent but not determined.
And we see this in both science and theology. In science there are countless numbers of quantum fluctuations with no determining cause which all contribute to change and movement in the universe. And in theology there is free will, which suggests we make our own choices not determined by other things – sure we have reasons for our choices but we choose those reasons ourselves.
To be sure, some people do not believe in free will and believe in predestination or determinism. But it is dishonest to close this question by inserting hidden premises assuming this into other arguments.
This recalls my responses in the other thread.
…
This idea of God as sustainer in terms of material cause is pretty much the same as the question of contingency – that things only exist because of God. But in terms of formal cause, I object to the idea God cannot or would not be a real creator by making things which cannot exist on their own. The only additional thought I have now was that this idea of a sustainer in terms of material cause might give me some way of giving some meaning to the idea of God as “ground of being.” In which case, my objection to this idea is more about limiting God to such a role or even exaggerating its importance. Far far far more important to me is God’s role in a relationship of separate existences – Him and ourselves. This is the difference between theism and pantheism.
1 Like
- It seems “problem of suffering” has been used in two different senses. Roy used it in the technical philosophical sense that applies only to benevolent omnipotent deities. You are using it in the broader existential sense: that suffering presses for explanation or response in any religion or worldview that hopes to be livable or compelling. Those aren’t competing claims — they’re different levels of analysis.
- Re: Your use. I asked: In any worldview including atheism? and am told: “Yes — if atheism is offered as a worldview rather than a bare negation, it too must say something about suffering in order to be existentially adequate.”
1 Like
When has atheism ever come close to being existentially adequate?
1 Like
- I’m not an atheist, so I can’t speak for any, much less all.
- However, since I have the opportunity to ask, I did ask: “Is there any atheist who believes that their atheism is a bare negation?” and I was told: "Yes, some atheists explicitly insist that their atheism is a bare negation — but that position is unstable in practice and usually collapses under pressure.
Yet you’re a Christian anyway.
It’s easy to say they are easily refutable.
Feel free to refute the idea of a singular god that lacks omnibenevolence, and creates multiple other lesser deities that are not benevolent.[1] Don’t forget to account for the possible existence of a being that is greater because it has more malevolence.
Cf. Satan. ↩︎
Quite so. G Brooks was, as his later post confirmed, referring to the philosophical “problem of suffering”, which only applies to a triomni deity.
But atheism isn’t offered as anything other than a negation.
You can define atheism as a bare negation, but then it cannot do the work you are asking it to do here. Normative judgments about which religions are worthy, arrogant, or harmful require a worldview framework — not a negation.
- Bare negation → no normative authority
- Normative critique → worldview in play
1 Like
I’m not asking atheism to do any work here.
I haven’t made any of those, only judgements about people who are those things.
When I do make such judgements, they aren’t base on atheism. They’re based on my actual views, not on my rejection of the views of others.
Fallen angels have often been worshipped as deities. Some examples off the top of my head Bael, Moloch and Astaroth (worshipped as the goddess Ishtar in the ancient past (PDF) Cult Symbols of Ishtar and Ritual Sex ).
But they have not been created as “non benevolent”, they have chosen. evil out of their own volition
That’s fine — and that clarification actually helps. My point wasn’t that atheism must do normative work, but that when normative judgments are made (about people or beliefs), they’re grounded in additional worldview commitments beyond bare negation. If you’re appealing to your “actual views” rather than atheism itself, then we’re in agreement on that distinction.
1 Like
I’d say that is a misunderstanding of the argument and it seems you are going the linear causation route when this entire thread (and Aristotle’s prime mover and Aquinas’s unmoved mover) are about going in a hierarchical direction. The argument is not about a past regress to some quantum fluctuation. That is a failure to dialogue with what is written.
Also, aside from this whole discussion basically side stepping that argument, I would describe a quantum fluctuation as an actualized potential. And unless someone wants to argue space and time scan only exist in this specific way in this instant, it too is an actualized potential. I’m not even sure that would avoid it. But even if you ended up getting around this you would end at panthesm, not theism or atheism. Given that the fabric of spacetime is expanding-- in your mind-- from a quantum fluctuation, that sounds like in the here and now, it qualifies as an actualized potential to me. A quantum fluctuation cannot be described as coming from absolutely nothing either which is further reason this an actualized potential. A universe filled with empty space and energy is not nothing.
I’m not sure why a methodological or mathematical abstraction of something should be equated with the full reality of it? Isn’t this process more descriptive than explanatory? It doesn’t actually explain why spacetime actualized this way.
Determinism is not a requirement of the A-T view. A cause only needs to make an effect intelligible. Even in things like the Copenhagen interpretation of QM, Robert Koons has noted, “every transition of a system has causal antecedents: the preceding quantum wave state, in the case of Schrôdinger evolution, or the preceding quantum wave state plus the observation, in the case of wave packet collapse.”
Feser said this about QM objections:
Hence, that quantum theory fails to assign a cause to a phenomenon simply does not entail that there isn’t one, since even a completed physical theory could not capture every aspect of the phenomena it describes in the first place. The absence of something in a representation of nature is not the same thing as a representation of its absence from nature. Its absence from the representation does not even make it likely that it is absent from nature, if e already know independently that the representation would leave it out even if it is there. Hence, if an artist represents a scene he is looking at in a black-and-white line drawing, the fact that there is no color in the drawing does not show that there is no color in the scene itself. The colorlessness of the image is an artifact of the artist’s method, not of the phenomenon represented. Similarly, the “mathematicization” to which physics confines itself already by its nature leaves out potentiality and other notions essential to causality as the Aristotelian understands it. It is the method that drains causality out of he world, with quantum mechanics being something like a limiting case. The four-dimensional block universe interpretation of relativity is another limiting case, entailing as it does a picture of the world from which change and thus potentiality are absent. In both cases we have physical theories which tell us, not whether causality exists in the world itself, but what sort of representation
of the world we get when we consistently abstract from causal
notions. To draw philosophical conclusions about causality from such theories is to mistake abstractions for concrete realities. As with the objection to the principle of causality from inertia, then, the objection from quantum mechanics is not even well-formulated.
Nothing can exist without dependence on God anymore than a square can be round. That is the whole thrust of Aristotle and Aquinas #1. I think you are failing to distinguish between linear/horizontal/per accident causation and hierarchal/vertical/per se causation. As noted above, an example of this metaphysical dependent would be the coffee table holds up the cup, the ground holds up the cup, and the earth holds up the ground. God is the bottom member of all hierarchal series. But in such a series there is a dependence of members. Remove one and the whole thing ends. Which means there needs to be a first member or prime mover (not tracing causes back in time–a first vertical member). Whereas in a linear series, once the first domino falls, it can go out of existence. The rest will tumble. God sustains and creates from ex nihilo at every instant. That is what it means to uphold the world.
Just because we have derivitive casual power from God in a hierarchical sense, this does not deny we are genuine causes of our own hierarchies or that we can’t create our own hierarchies and linear causal chains. The genuine casual power we have is sustained and upheld by God at every instant.
Vinnie
2 Likes
Roy,
It hasn’t happened? It happens all the time.
I’m specifically referring to those who raise the issues of theodicy,
aka How can a loving God let humans suffer from natural disasters?
G.Brooks