philosophy of science: meaning and functions (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, October 05, 2018, 09:29 (2024 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

DHW: When I say we have created a vast range of activities which we can enjoy, I am including the joy of creation, which includes my own. And I am so glad that, instead of having your God gearing every form of life to the production of the brain of Homo sapiens, you now have him observing the whole spectacle with interest and enjoyment, which suggests to me that he may have created the whole spectacle so that he could watch it with interest and enjoyment. Wouldn’t you agree? Perhaps now you will answer the question I asked you in my last post: what is the opposite of interesting?

TONY: I contention with this falls in line with my contention into your characterization of love. While I acknowledged that love does in fact bring the person demonstrating love pleasure, you take the position (or at least you seemed to in your rebuttal) that love is primarily self-serving, as opposed to the pleasure of it being a ancillary side-effect. The truism that 'there is more pleasure in giving then there is in receiving' encompasses this ideal. These words, attributed to Christ, only serve to illustrate my point. When you show selfless love you are rewarded with good feelings. Your view seems to be that if you do something pleasing to yourself, you can be loving too. This is the difference, and what I was unable to successfully articulate.
Yes, I believe Jehovah acted out of love. 1 John 4:7-8. Yes, I agree that he derived pleasure from acting out of love. That does not make love self-serving, it makes it rewarding. They are different concepts, and I do not, and can not, accept the way you try to flip them around and imply that selfishness is love and love is selfishness, regardless of whether you are talking about God or man.

It was you who objected to my hypothesis because you said “love is not self-serving”. I took up the literal meaning of this to show that love does serve the self, by enabling humans/God to have “good feelings” about themselves. That does not in any way entail selfishness, which for me contains all the elements that prevent love! If you’re selfish, you couldn’t care less about others. This has now become a game of semantics, and you have shifted the focus from your God’s possible purposes to a definition of love. You agreed that initially his purpose may have been to relieve his own isolation/boredom. If, in order to do so, he created the great spectacle of life which also gave him something to love and be loved by, that’s fine with me, but so is David’s objection:

DAVID: And I will stick to my position and Adler's: we cannot know that God acts with love. The view that God is love is wishful human level thinking and hope.

The thought of a God who really is “selfish”, and who punishes those who don’t love him by, for instance, killing them all off in a flood, is the worst of all nightmares. Your objection to my hypothesis, then, is based entirely on your belief that your God loves us, and his pride and satisfaction and relief of isolation/boredom and good feelings about himself are merely offshoots of this love. But your objection must be right because you agree with a man called John, who wrote that “God is love”. I'm not even sure what that means, but in any case your God could be all kinds of things, and we can only speculate on what those might be.

DAVID: Just consider: God may not need enjoyment. He may be filled with purpose and the joy of creation and nothing more. Just as likely as any other supposition about Him, since all we can do is analyze from his works, and He isn't giving any current expositions indirectly or in person. Opposite of interesting is uninteresting. He is obviously interested in what He creates.

Well, if he enjoys what he creates, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suppose that he creates things because he WANTS to enjoy himself. And why do you think he wanted to create something interesting for himself to watch and enjoy? I suggest that it was because not creating anything and merely twiddling his immaterial thumbs for eternity would have been uninteresting – a synonym of which is boring. Please explain why this seems illogical to you.