The Big Bang (Origins)

by dhw, Wednesday, May 05, 2010, 14:30 (5098 days ago) @ David Turell

In the case of Creatures v. Creator, David is acting as Defence Attorney for the Creator:-"We can't stop earthquakes, but we can analyze quake zones and seemingly are learning to issue warnings beforehand. It appears that to develop a planet for life those zones are necessary. The same is true for disease and medical care. This tells me we have a tough-love God who challenges us to compete with the problems and solve as many of them as we can." -I don't know why a God capable of creating universes "at will" should be unable to develop a planet for life without earthquakes and diseases, not to mention floods, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, droughts etc. But as an agnostic I admit that I have no answers to any of the fundamental questions. My ignorance extends to my inability to imagine how the victims of all these God-made disasters might find any consolation in the suggestion that they have failed to meet God's tough-love challenge. We must, of course, make the best of what we've been given, and there's no doubt that we learn and even benefit from certain types of suffering, but personally I find it easier to accept these and other totally irrevocable, destructive injustices from a blind, impersonal Nature than from a conscious and supposedly loving intelligence. -DAVID: I have been given the gift of life, and I vowed to myself to make the most of it, and I am enjoying what I have done and how I have lived.-DAVID'S FRIEND: I, as an individual, have the obligation, as a child of God, to bring my best to everyone that crosses my path. And if I keep true to this cause then those who cross my path may bring my offerings to their circle of friends and family. And that is how an individual can make a difference...-I share all these sentiments, and love life just as you do. Your friend is welcome, of course, to the hope and encouragement he derives from the Bible, but I would like to point out, as a child of Man and Woman, that I feel precisely the same obligation to "bring my best to everyone that crosses my path". This admirable principle is the bedrock of humanism, which doesn't require let alone embrace the concept of a power that sets tough-love tests and punishes failure with suffering and/or death.