philosophy of science: meaning and functions (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, September 21, 2018, 20:51 (2254 days ago) @ dhw

PART TWO

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?

dhw: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.

dhw: 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?).

Yes, how knows?! Your problem is ours. None of us 'know' if God exists. We cannot 'know'. That is where faith has to appear. Belief in him for me is a logical conclusion. You cannot reach that result for some innate reason, which I believe is that you want absolute truth. That is never available. And I know you know all this about yourself.