How God works (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, January 15, 2013, 17:12 (4120 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: I am rather tired of going round and round on this. You see my views as unreasonable and irrational because they are based on faith, which to me, is based on evidence. 
I see your view of the potential for pain as a complete negative just as irrational and unreasonable. Pain serves an important purpose. It teaches us lessons we were too stupid to learn from the wisdom of others. [Followed by some excellent examples, vividly and entertainingly illustrating the point.]-DAVID: I'm on your side. Pain is a friend that warns you of trouble so you can do something to protect yourself, as you have stated.-Unfortunately, both of you have completely missed the point of my own post, which is not to downgrade the importance of pain and suffering on this earth, but to highlight the inconsistency of the argument that pain is essential for bodies on this earth, and yet it won't be essential for bodies on the new earth! This part of the discussion sprang from Tony's reference to Revelation as proof of God's goodness ("Is this the description of a tyrannical asshole of a God?"). Let me be as blunt as both of you: I have great difficulty seeing any possible rationality in or justification for the belief that our dead bodies will be resurrected, and those who continue to fornicate, murder or disbelieve will be condemned to eternal death, while those who love God will live with him forever on a new, death-free, PAIN-FREE earth ... provided they toe his line, which may be different from ours. (I asked some practical questions in my post of 3 January at 13.18 under "Love me or else", but these have been ignored.) I have never denied the importance of pain, suffering, death etc. in the kind of life system we have ... whether built by God or not (see "Endings" in the "brief guide", and my post to BBella on the "Afterlife" thread). My objection, linked to the inconsistent argument mentioned above, is to the image of God that Tony is trying to conjure up.
 
Tony, you have said repeatedly that you do not know WHY God "had" to build the earth this way, as you don't know his purpose, so perhaps I can best illustrate my dissatisfaction with the above discrepancies by offering you a well-known hypothetical purpose: God was endlessly bored. The relief of endless boredom might be endless entertainment, which requires endless variety. No use sticking to the same individuals of the same species all eternity long. New species are therefore necessary, as is death, as are contrasts: no good without bad, no beauty without ugliness, no joy without pain etc. That's the way to do it ... a complete mixture, and it doesn't matter if living beings suffer, so long as the show is entertaining. Accordingly, yes, God HAD to build it this way to fulfil his purpose. And also accordingly, God is responsible for the suffering of his creatures (though in the case of humans, part of the entertainment is that they also create some of their own suffering). NB I'm not asking you to believe in this scenario, but I find that the goal and the outcome fit the history of life as we know it, and I challenge you to find anything that doesn't fit (discounting the question of God's existence in the first place). It is not pain I object to, but an image of God that seems to me to bear only half a relationship (the good half) to the world which you think he created, glosses over the other half with a don't-know-but-let's-have-faith, and offers consolatory promises along with dire threats that have no foundation except visions reported by authors we know nothing about.
 
At least David refrains from this kind of divine mind-reading. However, he does attempt to do some mind-reading of his ownAVID: Perhaps dhw would prefer life never existed. I cannot imagine another arrangement for an evolutionary process, if there is a large element of competition to test the genetic advances. It is amusing to think dhw might prefer that God made everything in advance so as to get around the process of evolution, and gave Man dominion over everything as in Genesis, with no free will and gentle human personalites.-I am delighted to be alive, I accept the conditions under which I am alive, I accept that evolution happened, and I cannot imagine another arrangement for an evolutionary process. I am sceptical, however, of Tony's image of God, and of your idea that God preprogrammed evolution right from the start to produce humans, since this conflicts with the higgledy-piggledy bush. I am, however, delighted that you have switched from this idea to: "It is as if God said let's throw everything at the fan and see where it lands..." We need a scenario that will fit in with whatever we know of the world. It may not be true, but it has a better chance of being true than one that runs counter to what we know. I have no idea why you think a non-anthropocentric version of evolution would deprive man of his dominance, his free will, or ... in some cases ... his gentle personality.