I just do not think of those natural evils as “evil” in the same sense I suppose, though awful and tragic and painful as they are. I understand the problems with theodicy and why we grapple with why we suffer if God is good and all powerful, but guess I just have come to be at peace with acceptance that that is just the way it is. Makes for poor philosophic discussions, perhaps.
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This presupposes that “God” is being used or pushed as a scientific explanation for something – which is a category error, both on the part of creation-science enthusiasts as well as their detractors.
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I’m not trying to challenge your faith. It’s faith, meaning you believe in something for which there is no evidence. What I’m trying to do is; point out that the universe does not appear to be designed specifically for humans to worship a God. If that was the ultimate goal why jump through all the hoops to get to that point? The universe looks exactly how one would expect if something set it in motion and the natural laws took over. The law of big numbers kicks in and eventually life shows up on a random planet in a random spot in a random galaxy. Nothing supernatural about it. Now you claim that something is God, great, demonstrate that claim. I could claim it is universe creating pixies that did it and all they do is start universes and don’t interfere after that. Using Occam’s Razor my theory is already better than yours.
The problem with the disease and torture of innocents is that once you dwindle your thoughts down to a single Deity: (with a triune of unlimited capacities: love, knowledge and power) you have boxed yourself into a corner.
But, as I have said in a recent posting, if God is using Evolution to accomplish his ends, it is at least more comprehensible that what looks like natural evil is encountered in the world around us.
Otherwise, YECs have to accept that God could have done things differently, but “he didn’t wanna”.
Oh yes, the universe does appear to be designed for humans to worship God. For one their is a universe, and that has no and will never have a, “scientific” explanation for it’s existence. Two, the physical laws and constants have to be just right for life to appear anywhere. The mistake in your analysis is that life only appears in, as far as we know thus far, in one planet out of trillions in the universe. That matters not. The frequency of life, or lack thereof, has no bearing on the fact that this universe has somehow created life. I could just as reasonable make the case that (and this is my official opinion) this God designed the universe so that only one place would evolve intelligent life, so that the unspiritual, obsessed-with-the-physical humans wouldn’t have another major distraction to Jesus.
Add in the fact that the vast majority in history have felt and/or acknowledged the spiritual, and long for a connection to their creator, that, not only does the universe appear to be designed for humans to worship God, but, and I think is more the reality, humans were designed to feel, understand and acknowledge God.
An estimated 96% of the universe is unknown or empty. And the percentage that is habitable by humans? It is a very small number, something probably on the order of a billionth of a percent. So I feel pretty certain that your statement is false.
I completely agree but that doesn’t automatically make God the right answer. You do realize that, correct?
Again, I agree but that was the whole point of my posts. If God’s master plan was to create humans who would worship Him; why did He go about it in such a non-omnipotent way? He really looks like an incompetent Creator if it takes Him 13BY to finally get to the point where 1 planet out of potentially trillions can actually sustain a species that will worship Him.
Again, if that was the goal all along why did it take so long? Did He just set things in motion hoping that an intelligent species would evolve (much like my universe creating pixies)?
And if everyone on the planet had the same experience and ‘feelings’ to the same God that you do, I would say you have a point. But what do we find? Every person believes what they want to believe and you would judge them and tell them that their experiences and feelings are wrong because it isn’t ‘your’ God. Kind of negates your point.
Maybe that says less about us than it does about him. 13 billion years. A long time. Compared to what? It’s huge. Compared to what?
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You’re going to find a single Deity anyway, probably. The two legitimate alternatives are atheism (no god) and pantheism (nature is god). Any kind of polytheism is really either an expression of theism (one of the gods is going to be the “most powerful”) or pantheism (the gods are some kinds of aspects of nature).
There is also something called panentheism, which holds that God is part of nature but also outside of it.
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This is false. It means rather, “…something for which there isn’t evidence of the sort you would like to see.”
Your sample size of 1 makes this a less-than-compelling speculation.
Your wrote later on…
Which is it … unknown? or empty? I prefer to think its buzzing with all sorts of exciting life in all the various corners, just because it’s more exciting to think that way – so I definitely vote for the “unknown” part there. Who knows what all God is taking delight in? Most certainly not just us. But even if we were the only life, or the only “intelligent” life (whatever that might mean beyond our own self-serving definitions of it) it still wouldn’t follow that its “emptiness” or “non-convivial (to us) vast parts” are all then just “waste” (another judgment word devoid of any science).
Imagine it this way: if we took the immense volume of a Saturn V rocket and decided to “beam” somebody into a random spot anywhere in that vast structure, a near 99% likelihood says they won’t survive the teleportation since they will likely end up sticking into some bulkhead or submerged in a cryogenic fuel tank.
But by the bizarre logic you are following, we would be forced to conclude the Saturn V could not possibly have been designed to keep anybody alive since there is such a minuscule portion of its space that is person-friendly. Sure-- it’s a different scale nowhere as big as the universe. But sticking extra zeroes into the already small 0.1% doesn’t at all help the substance of your claim.
Arguments of relative size (whether of organism, or of biotic environ) just can’t carry the value you want to impute to it. If it did we would all be saying elephants are more important than people. It just doesn’t work.
grammer edit.
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I don’t see how God can be found in our ignorance, nor why life appearing in a universe capable of producing life leads to the conclusion that it is designed so that we can worship a supernatural deity. It seems that on both points you are simply assuming that God exists, and then inserting that assumption into your conclusions.
The popularity of a belief does not factor into a logical argument.
I would agree with others, both atheist and theist, that it is a bit foolish to make claims about what God thinks. What @JES10 seems to be getting at is a common position held by many atheists (including this one). We are but one species on a single planet in a galaxy with 100’s of billions of planets in a universe with 100 billion galaxies. We atheists tend to think that it is a bit egotistical to think that the universe was created just for us given immensity of the universe and our place in it. Of course, we could be completely wrong, but that tends to be our thought process on the topic.
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Right, but arguably panentheism is a form of theism. Another way of phrasing it is that all of nature is “held together within God,” but that God is, as you say, also beyond nature. There are some notable theologians (not least of which is Jürgen Moltmann) that hold to this kind of panentheism (justified by verses like “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together,” Colossians 1:17).
My thoughts exactly. Funny how the point of the discussion seems to be to dig at people who give too much privilege to puny humanity… but the very structure of the argument privileges the vantage point of puny humanity.
As anyone who has watched the iconic Powers of Ten video can tell you, your perspective on such adjectives as “huge,” “tiny,” “long” and “short” is going to vary greatly depending on your size and life span.
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I think that idea is common and compatible with Christianity also. My personal thought is that life is probably not common, but probably does exist episodically. Space seems much stranger and with much more variety the more we learn of it, but my fantasy is that if life is a one in a billion chance, every galaxy is likely to have at least one planet with life at any given time. Life is also transient and it is really hard to escape a solar system, so it is very likely we will never know.
Now I am just rambling, but the ISS passed overhead last night, and as I watched it fly over, I thought about how much money and energy it takes to keep a half dozen people alive and thriving up there, and how much it would take to build a multi-generational spaceship, housing a big enough population to insure diversity and staffing to get to a possible new inhabitable planet, and got a little sad about the near impossibility of such a venture.
To get back to the theological implications of life elsewhere, I think we see amazing examples of life in the ocean trenches, and species that have never before been seen, and life in the stars is not that much different so far the hand of God is concerned.
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I’m just using the standard definition:
2 a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion
b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof clinging to the faith that her missing son would one day return (2) : complete trust
Your example of a Saturn V misses the mark, The main purpose of the rocket is transportation not a place for humans to live.
But let’s do a different example: A house builder, a perfect house builder, who can make no mistakes, builds a beautiful 6,000 sq ft home. But when you move in you realize you can only live in one small room in the basement. If you try to go to any other part of the house without some type of protection and oxygen you will immediately perish. Would you assume that the house was built specifically for you? That the perfect builder built the house for you?
In general, I agree with you. I think the tricky part is our privileging of Jesus (who, since 6 BC, has been in human form, whether perishable or imperishable) in the very heart of God in the formulation of the Trinity.
Of course, we can always follow CS Lewis’s lead…
- If all of them [AMW: the potential alien life forms] or any of them have fallen, have they been denied Redemption by Christ? (p. 86).
If they exist (which is still hypothetical at this point), perhaps Christ has already been incarnate their world and provided salvation to them. Or perhaps, of all other created species it is only we who fell.
This from http://www.varsityfaith.com/2012/04/c-s-lewis-on-god-faith-and-aliens.html.
Well – I would at least conclude that the builder must have had other considerations and agendas in mind other than just myself! I would be grateful that there was at least a room there for me.
Let’s take a real, non hypothetical house, and apply the same test. Yes, hopefully there will be more great spaces for people to thrive and be. But the fireplace, or the chimney above seems to be a particularly deadly place for folks to hang out. Would we for that reason castigate the architect? If so, her response back to us could be that we are misusing and misunderstanding the purpose of a fireplace if we think it’s a great place in which to loiter. So even your normal house has plenty of deadly space, but that doesn’t make all such space a waste or unnecessary. But even so – I already take your point that much of our vast universe seems well beyond anything we could conceivably need for our current existence. Even if it is and always had been, it may be there for other reasons or for other life that we know nothing of. So the argument as a positive assertion still fails at both levels.
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I think you will find that the Greeks were not able to blame all the troubles of the world on a single deity.
However, they did figure a woman had something to do with it, right?
And then, of course, there is Mother Nature … don’t cross her.
Interestingly, the Sumerian and Akkadian stories of unleashed evil seem so much less Greek-like than the Genesis story of Eve…
And yet Zeus was “king of the gods.” Then again, the Titans seemed greater still…