What about deism? (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, June 17, 2008, 11:09 (6002 days ago) @ Cary Cook

I wrote: "If there is/was a designer, the great advantage of these concepts [of deism] is that they do away with the need to explain certain anomalies: how could an all-good God create evil?" etc. etc. - Cary: "Who says we're dealing with an all-good God?" Cary then goes on to describe my list as "the above objections". - They are not objections; they are a list of conventional religious questions which deism effectively gets rid of! I wasn't asking them, I was giving them as examples. The point is that the God of deism, who simply watches the show (or has disappeared), makes "goodness" and arguments about the "true religion" irrelevant, natural disasters are part of the entertainment, and the millions of years of mindless organisms etc. are ... as you jokingly say ... the result of the fact that he's a slow learner, or he sat back while the process ran its course. The questions were not objections to deism, but on the contrary illustrations of how deism does away with what you call "the crap they sing hymns about". In other words, my arguments in favour of deism are the same as yours! - Me: "One objection would be that this is an anthropomorphization of God ... but why should we suppose that designers create things totally alien to themselves?" - You: "Uh...Doesn't the second part of the statement answer the original objection?" - Exactly. In your next entry, you say you like this "answering your own objections" thing. Another slow learner here? - You finish up: "So basically there are two relevant possibilities: afterlife or no afterlife." And then: "So what I REALLY want to get to is under what circumstances is life better than non-existence, and under what circumstances is life worse than non-existence?" A great subject for discussion, but that's not what we were talking about. The subject was deism ... i.e. the nature of God, if there is/was one. Maybe my comments on deism were hard to follow, since you misunderstood half of them, but there are times when following your train of thought is like trying to pin down the principles of our political leaders!