philosophy of science: meaning and functions (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, September 21, 2018, 16:05 (2043 days ago) @ dhw

PART TWO

TONY: But I suppose the type of being that things of all that and so much more, while managing to make it all beautiful and wonderful, and creating creatures with the capacity to appreciate beauty and all the wondrous things, was just 'bored', 'vain', and frivolous. Oh, and he should just come one out and tell it all like it is, because that's how people learn and grow into intelligent, resourceful creatures, right?

Wrong, and I don’t know why you keep putting such words into my mouth. I have never denied the beauty or the wonder, just as I have never ignored the ugliness and the horror (which you have just done), I have not suggested that he should come out and tell it all (but I challenged the idea that he wanted to prove himself by exhibiting his powers while remaining hidden), and in relation to your God’s growth and development I asked David why he thought it was “trivial” for God to learn “what it is to love, to hate, to enjoy, to suffer, to win, to lose”. He did not answer. Perhaps you will.

TONY: I wasn't trying to be rude about it, but that is how his line of thought comes across. If we point to purpose, he almost always reverts to "God was just bored"(frivolous, capricious).

I know you are not trying to be rude (we have always been frank in our exchanges!) but you are unwittingly distorting my arguments. "Not “just” bored. Bored. Now please tell me why your God's creation of this fascinating world in order to end his isolation and give himself something new to experience (my hypothesis) is frivolous or capricious, or more trivial than the desire to grow and develop by ending his isolation (your hypothesis).

TONY: If I answer a question about why he may have done something a certain way, he generally reverts to some variation of "God didn't do it in a way I like, so he must be egotistical (arrogant, less powerful, vain, more ignorant(experimenting/dabbling/making corrections).

Again, why are you making up all these negatives which I have never expressed? The only genuine references here are to the possibility that your God experimented, dabbled, made corrections – all part of the great learning experience which you call growing and developing, and which I suggest was motivated by his desire to end the boredom of eternal isolation.

TONY: And when push comes to shove, he reverts to "Well why doesn't he just pop out and set us straight?", implying either cowardice, indifference, apathy, or a sadistic sense of voyeurism

By “set us straight”, I presume you mean to end the evil and the suffering humans have both caused and endured. That is a very different question from those we have been discussing, but I have never “reverted” to it. You are confusing me with someone else.

TONY: The part that bugs me is not simply that DHW says these things…

I do not. You have extrapolated them all from the single hypothesis that your God may have grown tired of isolation and in order to relieve his boredom had created the world as we know it.

TONY: …but rather that I rarely, if ever, see an honest review of the flip side of the possibility coin from him. What if God were intelligent, powerful, wise, loving, and had a sense of fairness/balance/justice, that is simply not our own? Might he have done or allowed the things that occurred for a loftier goal than we can conceive? Does he have the right/power/authority/knowledge/power to do so? Would his other qualities, if they exist, provide some balance to his allowing/causing things to happen?

I suspect that all this boils down to your misplaced belief that I have somewhere attacked your God for creating evil and ugliness. However, it is a very common argument and a fair question and I will try to cover it briefly below:

DAVID: At least we are not secretly psychoanalyzing him behind his back. He has a problem he does not see in himself, and you have explained it better than I have in the past.

No, to my face you are setting up straw men for yourselves to knock down. Here in summary are my problems: I do not know if God exists or not. If he does, I do not know why he created life, but I can well imagine him having done so in order to relieve the boredom of eternal isolation. I do not know his nature, but again I can well imagine that if he created us, he will not have created something unknown to himself, and so he himself will have known love, hatred, boredom, interest, beauty, ugliness, good, evil within himself as first cause. And I would argue that it is the very existence of the negatives that give full “value” to the positives (summarizing an answer I have given in the past when discussing the subject of evil). On the other hand, I can also accept the possibility raised by Tony that God himself has learned some of this from his experience of life through his creations (maybe even in past universes – who knows?).

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There is a distinct possibility that I may not have time to post any answers until Sunday, and Tuesday and Wednesday may be blank as well. My apologies in advance.