Debate : 28034


Off-Topic / Debate / 28034	28033 \| 28035

Subject:	Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
Newsgroups:	lugnet.off-topic.debate
Date:	Tue, 14 Nov 2006 17:58:37 GMT
Viewed:	5181 times

In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal wrote:

Again, you are painting in a positive light this “leap” into irrationality that I think hardly deserves praise, and at the same time you paint me (and others who have chimed in) as if we are intellectually lazy by not just making something up out of thin air and believing it with entirely unwarranted certitude.

Not intellectually lazy, but intellectually dishonest. What I am saying is that instead of trying to explain something that cannot be explained rationally, you all simply are mute. This is a convenience.

You have now many times asserted that there can be no rational explanations for the origin of the universe, but mere repeated assertion has done nothing to convince me (or others who have chimed in) you’re right about this.

Even if we suppose that you are correct that there can be no rational explanation of the origin of the universe, it would seem the epitome of intellectual honesty for rational people to therefore remain mute on the issue and simply admit it cannot be known. But instead you somehow have the temerity to call such people intellectually dishonest. This really throws me for a loop.

If you want this reasoning to make sense to me or others, I think you’re really going to have to spell it out in greater detail, because you seem to be making the opposite conclusion of what would be warranted (if we suppose you are right).

How would it “convenience” a scientist to admit a limitation of scientific inquiry or theorizing? It would seem a scientist would be loathe do that, and only do so if it seemed entirely unavoidable.

What seems uncannily “convenient” is for people to posit supernatural entities with logically inconsistent attributes who can only be known irrationally.

The point is to help people live better; to give them direction; to give them purpose and meaning for their lives.

I am curious how you can even know what the point is? Is this something you deduced rationally, or another “leap”?

“I have come that they might have life, and have it in abundance.” John 10:10

You reprint this quote as if it somehow answers my question. If you think it does, you will have to explain how, because it is far from obvious. You quote Jesus explaining a parable about sheep, shepherds, and thieves. As best I can figure out (and as ever Jesus is unhelpfully far from clear even when he is explaining his parables), Jesus seems to be claiming that he saves people from some danger to their lives (although what that danger is is unclear), and that by laying down his own life, he gives others life “in abundance” (whatever that means). I find the whole passage to be pompous, obtuse, and unclear, and can’t help but have sympathy for the Jews who are recorded as reacting by saying, “He is possessed by a demon and has lost his mind!”

The gift of free will. We have been given total freedom (as far as we know) to do with our lives what we will.

I’ve never found this to be a compelling argument, though I can see how it might look like a promising lead for the theist who desperately wants to his beliefs in God to somehow square with the state of the world (when they obviously otherwise would not).

The idea, as I understand it, is that God wants us all to be maximally happy, but that desire is overridden by his stronger desire that we have total free will.

I suppose the immediate question is: what’s so good or important about total free will? Certainly we humans do not treat total free will as some sort of ultimate good, so why would you imagine God does? We humans limit free will all the time because even we (with our puny intellects) can see that it is better to limit free will in cases where it will destroy people’s happiness and/or cause avoidable suffering.

But you are talking about self-control.

I am? You’ll have to explain what you mean.

Freedom is about being able to make that choice for ourselves, not by some oppressive government or other person for us.

Being able to make what choice? You’ve lost me.

I’m still left wondering why you assume complete free will is such a highly treasured goal that it trumps God’s (apparently lesser) motivation to prevent suffering.

I’ve observed that theists often like to draw analogies between the God/humankind relationship and the parent/child relationship. Well, just think of how much parents limit their children’s free will. And they do it because they love their children, and because they are trying to maximize their happiness and minimize their suffering (or the suffering of others).

Now, you might reply that a parent is simply teaching a child how to exercise their free will properly. If that’s the case, you would then expect God as the ultimate parent to teach every single human ever to perfectly exercise their free will so as to maximize happiness and avoid suffering.

But of course, this is not what we find to be the case. And truth be told, we don’t even have total free will. Our options are always limited by our circumstances, and everyone is in different circumstances. So we all have different amounts of free will in practice. What could possibly explain this arbitrarily-assigned endowment of limited free will?

Did you not have an answer to the above?

Of course, to anyone not encumbered by the mental albatross of irrational axiomatic belief in an all-powerful, all-good God, the amounts of suffering and happiness in this world (not to mention the fact of people being born into wildly varying circumstances that drastically affect their happiness, suffering, and actual amount of freedom) are no longer quite so bedeviling a mystery. Thanks to science, we now have a good (and ever improving) body of knowledge of about how natural selection has lead humans to have natural impulses both to help and to harm, to be kind and to be cruel.

You are not talking “science” here, Brendan. We no longer are being naturally selected; quite the opposite I believe.

Whether or not we are “still” being naturally selected (and I see no reason to imagine we’re not--it’s just usually a very slow process), I think it is very safe to assume that our current propensities toward kindness and cruelty have been the result of hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection. Scientific study of the conditions under which humans evolved, and other areas of study like game theory, can elucidate why humans have come to have the motivations they do, both toward kindness and cruelty.

And I can’t help but think that such study will be far more enlightening than simply attributing cruelty to “sin” or the influence of demons and kindness to the “spirit of God” has ever been.

We have somehow forsaken instinct and grow more independent of it (which is what I believe becoming fully human means).

Would a person become “more fully human” by forsaking the naturally-selected-for impulse to care for their children? You seem to be assuming that natural impulses are all “bad” and that forsaking them is therefore necessarily “good”. I don’t think it’s nearly so simple. I think it would be more accurate to say that modern humans use their intellect to amplify certain impulses and suppress other ones.

I have not even said that the universe “suddenly came into being”. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe it has always existed.

Illogical.

What is illogical about something having always existed?

Simply that you can’t explain it logically, that’s all.

I’m still confused by what you’re trying to say here. Are you saying that it’s logically impossible for the universe to have always existed? Are you saying an eternally existent universe is somehow self-contradictory?

I’m not sure what you mean by “you can’t explain it logically”. If you’re looking for a “why” explanation, it’s true, I would not be able to tell you why the universe has always existed. I’m not sure it would even make sense to look for a reason why something always existed. But unless you can find a convincing argument that an eternally-existing universe is incoherent, it seems like a perfectly plausible possibility. And if the universe has always existed, that does explain the “origin of the universe” by showing that there was no origin at all, and we were simply mistaken for assuming there was.

Would it be illogical to posit that the universe will continue on forever?

Yes, because you couldn’t prove it.

I was not aware that the inability to prove something made it therefore necessarily illogical.

If not, and the universe can head infinitely in the future direction of time, I see no reason why it could not extend infinitely in the past direction as well.

If you care to be rational, then you must restrict yourself to rational suppositions. But again, you slip into the irrational when it is convenient to do so.

I don’t see that I do. You’re really going to have to do a more thorough job explaining this so I can see the error of my ways. The mere repeated assertion is not getting us anywhere.

But that’s mere speculation on my part. My understanding is closer to what DaveE was saying about the question really not being framed properly. Over the past 100 years scientists have come to think of time quite differently, and it would now seem that time simply did not exist before the big bang.

This isn’t a rational conclusion.

Again the assertion with no explanation.

Right. It’s unknowable. And yet here it is. So how are you going to explain the unexpainable?

But why on Earth do I have to have that answer?

Because the universe exists!

I feel like we’re talking past each other here, John. Yes, the universe exists, and yes, I cannot explain why. I do not see any reason to think that simply making up an explanation (especially an internally inconsistent one) and holding to it, could somehow be seen as a positive instead of a negative. It would seem especially misguided and dangerous if such ad-hoc explanations became grounds on which to base your major life decisions. It would seem as dangerous as tossing a dart at a cork board full of random beliefs that could drastically affect how you would conduct your life.

What I am trying to get you to realize is that your explanations of how the universe began are just as irrational as mine.

But just saying so does not convince me.

Did I miss something? It’s been a long discussion and we’ve been away from it for a while. Was there some point at which you explained this point in clear fashion rather than just stating it?

In fact, an internally inconsistent supernatural being is one of the few theories we could safely rule out as an explanation for the origin of the universe, because the idea literally makes no sense.

Merely because we can’t understand or comprehend something doesn’t necessarily negate it.

Oh, I’ll grant you that. There are many difficult-to-understand aspects of physics or chemistry that are probably true despite my limited ability to understand them.

But this is quite different from defining a supposed entity in a way that is internally inconsistent. It is precisely because I do understand what a married person is and what a bachelor is that I can know that a hoohoo (defined as a married bachelor) cannot possibly exist.

Your attempts to define God were a mix of inconsistencies and apparent gibberish.

He gives us life and free will and says, “enjoy it.”

Even to those babies who live a matter of hours, suffer, and then die? What free will do they have the chance to exercise, and how could “enjoy it” be taken as anything but a sadistically ironic sentiment for them?

Now, that’s an extreme example (but one which your view would still need to explain), but everyone else can be seen as falling somewhere on the very wide spectrum between that wretchedly cruel existence and someone born into a life of opportunity and ease.

I don’t claim to understand it; I just know that that is how it is. But I trust that it is somehow good, or will be good someday.

I feel like your whole side in this debate can be succinctly summed up in those two sentences. And perhaps we should leave it at that.

But my overall question about free will remains: why would God allow us enough free will to harm others when not even a half-decent human parent would allow their child such leeway.

Is it so hard to imagine a world your God could have created in which people get even more freedom than in this world (say, by never having people be born into limiting circumstances), and yet where God could still protect us from the harm our freely willed choices might otherwise cause (such as when a parent sees their child about to hit another child and grabs their arm, or stops their child as he’s running into the street so he doesn’t get hit by the Ice Cream truck)?

And once again, if you are positing an all-powerful being with such motivations, and even I can think of a more efficient way for that being to bring about his goals more completely, that seems to strongly imply that this being does not exist, or that you are mistaken about the being’s powers or motivations.

I think that things are more complicated that you and I could ever imagine.

Why would you think things are so complicated? What sort of complications do you think there are?

There is something quite arrogant about supposing that one could create a better scenario than God.

This is like having an argument with someone who does not believe in Santa Claus and saying to him, “There is something quite arrogant about supposing you could love Christmas more than Santa Claus!” What is the person who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus supposed to make of that comment?

I am not literally trying to argue that I can create a better scenario than an actual god that exists, I am trying to demonstrate that because I (or just about anyone) can easily come up with a better scenario than God as you have defined him, it lends support to the idea that either you are fundamentally mistaken about the attributes of the actual God, or (far more likely in my view) no such God exists.

But really, what are you saying here? You acknowledge that wishful thinking about an afterlife does nothing to increase the chances of their being an afterlife. Are you suggesting that people should try to make themselves believe in an afterlife anyway for the misguided hope it provides?

For the hope it provides. How do you know (rationally) that this hope is misguided? If hope is a comfort and a source of strength and meaning, how can you rationally deny it?

I think there is excellent evidence that brain death is the end of people’s existence as selves, and no evidence for some sort of non-brain-based existence as a continuous self after death. That is why I would say placing hope in an afterlife is misguided.

You could argue that belief in an afterlife improves people’s lives, but I think it could just as easily be argued that believing that you will live on for an eternity after you die can cause you to seriously devalue your “earthly” life (ie. your one actual life).

Besides that, it just doesn’t seem like the wisest policy to believe things against which there is great evidence simply because it will make you feel better. That’s just my take, I suppose, but it seems like it would lead to some ugly consequences. Should scientists avoid studying the brain if doing so lends support to the finality of death? How much “downer” knowledge about the world should we suppress in the interest of feeling better? How many false beliefs should we promote for such a cause?

If you judge beliefs by the actions that come of them, how did you originally judge your Christian beliefs approvingly if your morals also derive from your religious beliefs?

Truth is truth.

Oh! I thought it was the other way around. I thought truth is falsity. Thanks for the clarification.

God is Absolute Morality. You can learn it from the Bible, or from someone who learned it from the Bible, or from someone who knew someone, etc. God is the source of Good.

This doesn’t seem like you’ve answered my question. Many times in this discussion, you’ve stated your maxim that you judge beliefs by their fruit. But to judge these actions, you must already hold some moral beliefs. For example, to judge that a suicide bomber’s actions are wrong, you must already have some beliefs about what makes something morally wrong.

So what I’m wondering is: how did you originally decide what is morally right and wrong? How did you come to decide that the morality of Jesus or God in the Bible is right? You can’t say you judged it by its fruits because you wouldn’t have had any reliable moral standards by which to judge things at that point, right?

If you originally came to base your morality on Jesus and God in the Bible based on a nonrational revelation of its absolute truth, you haven’t really judged it by its fruits at all.

And so we come back to my parallel with an Islamic fundamentalist. Presumably he too got his original moral code based on what he perceived as a religious revelation of the truth of the Koran and its moral code. Once that was set, he then proceeds through his life judging beliefs by their fruit. And yet you and he will come to very different moral conclusions though your methodology is the same. You judge beliefs based on the fruit according to a moral system dictated by your understanding of the Bible, the Islamic fundamentalist judges beliefs based on their fruit according to a moral system dictated by his understanding of the Koran.

I draw this parallel for a number of reasons. It’s meant to show why belief systems based ultimately on nonrational revelation can lead to absolute certainty in any number of propositions about the world and any number of moral codes about what is right and wrong. It’s meant to show the seemingly unavoidable irreconcilability that basing belief systems and moral codes on nonrational revelation can bring about (how could you and the Islamic fundamentalist ever find a moral common ground if your revealed moral codes happen to be irreconcilable?) And it’s meant to show that since both of your belief systems and moral codes have equally nonrational bases, yours will not come across as any “better grounded” than his by anyone who did not share your nonrational revelation.

I only wish their demise because they wish mine.

An eye for an eye, a wished demise for a wished demise. So you don’t buy into the whole “love your enemies” or “turn the other cheek” thing?

I am a sinner. If you were about to kill my wife, and I had the opportunity, I would kill you first. Justified? I don’t know, but I’d do it anyway.

OK, but there’s a difference between a heat of the moment situation where your wife is directly threatened and the rest of life where you and your loved ones are not under immediate threat and you can think more calmly and (dare I say it) rationally about what’s right and wrong. In these other cases (which is probably 99.99999% of life, do you make any attempt to show love for your enemies or turn the other cheek?

And do you really think Jesus would want you to love the dude who killed your wife? And “turn the other cheek” to him by, say, offering him your son’s life as well? (I’m not asking here about what you’d do, but about what you believe Jesus/God really wants from you.)

But as you are = peaceful because you believe that’s how God wants you to be. By the same token, as they are = violent because that’s now they believe God wants them to be. So they can’t tolerate you how you are, and you can’t tolerate them how they are.

And so we fight.

Except your moral code is supposed to be about not fighting your enemies.

As long as they are peaceful and respectful to all, I have no problem with them.

Peace, or else BLAMMO!

No, it’s “My Way, or BLAMMO!” (THEIR words)

It seems like you’re both saying “My way or BLAMMO!”, it’s just their way is universal Islam and your way is peaceful coexistence, and when they say “My way or BLAMMO!” they are following their professed moral code, and when you say “My way or BLAMMO!” you are going against your professed moral code.

That’s pretty much what Jesus said, right?

If you mean to imply that Islamo-fascists are acting against Jesus’ teachings, then I completely agree.

No, I mean to imply that you and other militant Christians are taking actions that fly in the face of Jesus’s teachings. I wouldn’t expect a Muslim to follow Jesus’s teachings, but I would expect a Christian to (if it weren’t for a lifetime of seeing Christians routinely ignore or take actions diametrically opposed to Jesus’s teachings).

I hope that they are acting against Mohammad’s teachings, but I don’t know for sure. This war on terror SHOULD be a CIVIL WAR within Islam IMO. Why isn’t it? Why aren’t peaceful Muslims acting out against the violent ones?

It may simply be the case that Mohammed’s teachings are not very peaceful. If that’s the case, what is to be done about it? What does Jesus say to do when millions of members of another religion wish your demise? He didn’t really have a pithy saying for that situation, did he? I guess “love your enemies” is as close as he got. Might have been nice of him to clarify how one might express such a love. Apparently he preferred to not specify the details even if it meant many of his followers would interpret it as “bomb the crap out of them”.

Even if it is necessarily true that without God or any “moral authority” we are lost in a sea of relative morality, this would still make it 0% more likely that God actually exists. Again to posit that would be an argument from wishful thinking.

I don’t offer any proofs of God’s existence, because I believe there to be none.

OK, then maybe I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying that since we need God to be a moral authority, God must therefore exist.

It’s not an argument that God necessarily exists, but more that he needs to exist.

I’m not sure I see the distinction. I could say: if I fall off the Empire State Building, I need superman to exist so he can save me. This obviously would not mean that Superman does exist, so what does the emphasis on need mean here or in your example?

Is it that you’re saying “God needs to exist if we are to have absolute morality”? Even if that were true, it still leaves the door wide open for God not to exist and for there to be no absolute moral authority, right?

But just as wishful thinking doesn’t bring things into existence, neither does your perceiving a need for them. And really, all that can be said is that you perceive a use. There may well be no authority to which we can all defer. If that’s just how things are, that’s just how they are. You might wish it were different, but that doesn’t make it so.

Upon what can all people find common ground? This is my answer.

John, your one-line responses to me are sounding more and more like riddles than explanations. I don’t really have the inclination to try to decipher what you might mean (since I end up guessing wrong a fair bit of the time), so I’ll have to ask you to explain yourself more clearly.

OK, but if you were in a 2-D universe and saw a cube passing through, it would still not make sense for you to describe it in inconsistent terms. For example, if you described it as a “square circle”, that would not make sense. It would still not make sense even in a 3-D, 4-D, or 84,000-D universe.

Not at all. You’d say, “It’s this strange kind of square that consists of a pile of triangles and quadrangles.” The point is that no matter how you would describe it, it wouldn’t make sense. It couldn’t make sense.

I don’t think you’re right about this. Why would the description of the cube passing through a 2-D world not make sense? The 2-D denizens would describe it in 2-D terms since that’s all that they are familiar with. They would describe it as a shape that starts as a point and then expands over time into a triangle, then a quadrangle, then a triangle again, and finally ends as a point. There’s nothing unintelligible or self-contradictory about such a description. It may not be an accurate description of the cube from a 3-D perspective, but it is and accurate and sensible description from a 2-D perspective. If a 2-D denizen described the cube as a “triangle with four sides”, that would be an inconsistent description in the 2-D realm, the 3-D realm or any realm.

Just because your definition of God makes no sense in our world does not mean there’s some higher plain where hoohoos and your God can happily exist and make perfect sense despite their having inconsistent definitions.

And just because you cannot explain something rationally doesn’t mean that there isn’t some irrational explanation.

You just exploded my head.

I don’t know how to respond to that.

I think we’re hitting a wall in this discussion.

It is irrational and illogical for something to suddenly just exist, wouldn’t you agree?

When it comes to the universe as a whole, I don’t know.

Be honest! Use the Laws of Conservation of Matter! Be rational.

If my understanding is correct, the Law of the Conservation of Mass governs how things behave within the universe, but the law would not have existed “before” or “independently of” the universe itself, so it could not rule out the universe’s coming into existence out of nothing.

What the evidence points to is that the universe expanded in a “big bang” 13.7 billion years ago. It expanded out from a singularity, but we don’t know if that singularity always existed, was formed by the “crunchcing” of a previous universe, or what. There are many possibilities, and they are considered possibilities precisely because they are possible in the sense that they are not logically inconsistent or internally incoherent.

If the laws of physics did not become laws until after the big bang, I would not know how to judge the likelihood of things just coming into existence in the absence of any laws of physics.

And from where would “the laws of physics” originate? You are speaking completely irrationally!

I don’t know from where the laws of physics came or if it even makes sens to ask such a question. The one thing I can feel quite confident about, though, is that they did not come from a supposed internally inconsistent supernatural entity.

And yet at some point in time, this universe DIDN’T exist. How is that rationally possible?

As stated earlier in this post, I’m still not sure why it’s not a possibility that the universe has simply always existed.

Because you can’t prove it scientifically.

And we’re back to where this post started. Something doesn’t have to be provable scientifically in order to be logically possible.

Why did God create you? Not sure; but He did, and not only that, He gave you a free will to do whatever you want with your life.

Free will limited by my arbitrary circumstances, but OK.

He wants you and everyone else to get the most out of life, and so He provides clues as to how to do that. The clues are somewhat mysterious, because part of the wonder of life is the mystery of it and He didn’t want to be heavy-handed in telling you how to live your life.

OK, so not only are the clues mysterious, I don’t even know what God means by the phrase “get the most out of life”. It seems entirely plausible that, just as two different people could have wildly different ideas of what it means to “get the most out of life”, so might God and I. And in that case, who’s right? Who’s the better authority on what it means to get the most out of my life, me or God?

Let’s say God does, since He created you.

But how does creating someone make the creator a better authority on how the created person should live than the created person himself? That doesn’t seem to follow at all.

If I wrote a computer program that eventually became sentient, I’m not sure what it would even mean to say I am therefore the “authority” on how my sentient program should live. If the program and I have different goals and values, I don’t see on what basis you could say mine are superior and should be deferred to.

So I find it very hard to believe I would actually come around to this view, but it’s your hypothetical, so OK, if I was convinced God knew what was “best” for me, I suppose I’d try to do what God wanted me to as long as I continued to trust God.

I think I would also find it very difficult not to resent God’s being coy, especially if he’s withholding knowledge that would absolutely improve my life. It would be very difficult to trust such a being.

He’s not. “Be good”. We all know that admonition. But many want to live their lives their way. And that’s fine with God. Your life, your perogative. But your consequences, too. And consequences for me and others, for that matter.

So God creates us and says “be good”, but also gives us a mind rational enough to figure out that God’s idea of good is just as subjective as my own, and holds no actual moral authority, only threat of “consequences”.

His plan is that everyone would live together in harmony with each other, helping each other to make the most out of their lives by exploring the mystery of it.

That sounds so vague!

It’s better that way!

And this existence is only the beginning, but what lies beyond it is yet another mystery.

Great. Could be heaven, could be hell. It’s a mystery! Isn’t that much more fun?

What if I said that it’s YOUR choice?

Great. My choice is between God’s way or the highway (to hell). That’s a very free choice, isn’t it?

Here’s another completely free choice for you. A mafia boss tells you you can either spend the day relaxing at the beach or can carry out a hit on the local priest who’s hasn’t being paying his “protection” fee. It’s your choice. Totally free. But you should know that your choice will have consequences. If you you carry out the hit, you get paid $50,000. If you go to the beach, the mafia boss kills your family.

If this is your idea of the “free will” that God values so ridiculously highly that he’s willing to allow immense suffering in the world in order to preserve it, I’m more confused than ever how someone would ever call a God who operates this way “good”.

We can define “hell” as “separation from God”.

Hmm... I’ve heard you mention this definition of hell before too, and I guess I meant to question you on it. Is this idea of hell based on the Bible or on the writings of C.S. Lewis? I’ve read the Bible and can say that that is not really a very adequate summation of how the Bible presents Hell. Do you take C.S. Lewis to be a religious authority that trumps the Bible?

As for whether I’d choose “separation from God”, it all depends on how I’d judge life with and without God, but it’s very hard for me to do that in this still relatively bare-bones hypothetical scenario. So far you’ve got me committed to believing that God knows better than I do what’s best for me. If that’s a given in this scenario, it seems like I’d choose heaven over hell. Unless it’s the case that although God knows what’s best for me, his being around me prevents me from actually doing what’s best for me according to God. In that case it would be more rational for me to choose hell (and presumably God would agree).

BTW, read a great little book by CS Lewis (if you haven’t already): The Great Divorce.

Telling people who hold widely divergent views from your own to “go read this book” is usually not very effective. I can think of several books I’d recommend to you (and others), but I am a realist in this regard.

I read the short plot summary on Wikipedia, and you’re welcome to try to encapsulate what you find profound about the book and I’ll comment on that, but right now I’ve got a large number of other books I’m far more interested in getting to.

If Hell can really be defined as “separation from God”, I think I’ll define Qell as “separation from Brendan”. When I die, I’m going to judge God according to my own arbitrary moral values, and then send him straight to Qell. Unless he gets his act together. You’ve been warned, God! You’ve got free will, but there are consequences!

But the point is to make the most of THIS existence.

But what does that mean?

Live life to it’s fullest. Enjoy it. Help others to enjoy it. Make the world a better place.

These are all extremely subjective value statements that could mean very different things to different people.

And I would bring up the point again that on my reading of the Gospels, Jesus doesn’t seem to share your view that we should be living this life to the fullest. He seems extremely preoccupied with an apocalyptic judgment that he believes is imminent (within the lifetime of his disciples!) and which must be prepared for in what little time remains by forsaking most of what we would normally value in life and living by a super-strict moral code that goes above and beyond The Law of Moses so that we don’t inadvertently sin and get sent to eternal torment in hell instead of taking a place in the Kingdom of God.

How would you tweak it to make it more tolerable? (assuming that you begin with the Creator Entity Guy)

Oh, it sounds quite tolerable. :) At least you don’t make this God out to be some sort of malicious being who would make life awful. He sounds well-intentioned, if maybe a bit misguided in execution.

I’m not sure what my options are for “tweaking” things. Can I tweak anything? Do I have god-like powers to change anything in this scenario (except for the Creator God’s existence)? I’m not really sure what I’d do with such power!

I guess I’d tweak God to actively drastically lessen the amounts of suffering in the world. That’d be a good start. And then he can explain his own existence. :)

But if He interferred, He’d be limiting free-will. And given the slippery slope of intervention; wouldn’t free-will soon be history?

I think it’s quite possible to interfere and still allow free choice. You can let someone freely choose to commit murder, but then interfere with their carrying out the murder. You could further interfere by explaining to the person why they should not murder people. They would then still have the free choice to commit murder, but you could interfere again to prevent it from actually happening.

Another possibility is the way many people envision heaven. Most people would probably say that “it is impossible to sin in heaven”, but then if you asked if people in heaven had free choice, they would say “yes.” If it’s possible to imagine heaven working this way, why would a good God not just simply create heaven and not bother with Earth and certainly not Hell.

Again, it seems silly that I can come up with these scenarios so easily, and yet you posit a God who either didn’t think of this stuff, or was somehow constrained such that our current state of affairs on Earth was “the best he cold do”.

He is the Hypercube. You can’t comprehend His existence in this world. Maybe in the next....? :-)

The hypercube analogy falls flat for the same reason as the regular cube in the 2-D world. The analogy is doesn’t hold. A hypercube would actually and measurably interact with our 3-D world and we would be able to describe it in concrete and coherent terms. The same cannot be said of a God whose own definition is logically inconsistent and therefore could not exist in any world.

-Brendan

Message has 1 Reply:

		Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
(This has been sitting in my draft folder for weeks. Though I doubt you'd care to respond at this point, I thought I'd finish it up and post it anyway.) (...) Brendan, for a rational person such as yourself, you only accept explanations that can (...) (18 years ago, 29-Nov-06, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)

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		Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
(...) Yes, the medium is cumbersome, but at least it allows for a dialog with people with whom you might not normally engage. For me it is very time consuming, and many times I've left an interesting discussion because suddenly work pops up and I (...) (18 years ago, 13-Nov-06, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)

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