The Philosophical Thread

[The Legendary Shark]

I was listening to some philosophy lectures today while I was strimming the front field and the lecturer was addressing the question of why God allows evil, if God exists, that is. All the arguments were very clever, as were the counterarguments and side-arguments, but all of them assumed God to be a "complete and perfect being of infinite good."
But it struck me that this was a contradiction - how could a being be both complete and infinitely good? To be complete would require the perfect being to contain both good and evil, because to contain only one of these would make the being incomplete and therefore less than perfect and therefore not God.
I imagined God as a set of numbers from 1 to infinity. If this were so, then imagine the number 7, and all its multiples, as good numbers and 13 and all its multiples as evil numbers and all the other numbers as neutral. That would make the perfect being infinitely good, infinitely neutral, and infinitely evil.
Why does God allow evil? Because it's in His nature. If He exists.
Or is this just bollocks and I should stick to striming*?



*Which I'll have to continue with anyway because I haven't finished it yet. It's like a damned mutant copse with dock stems as thick as my finger and clumps of weeds like discarded mammoth skins. Lost count of how many times the bloody string snapped. Why don't these clever-dick philosophers ask why God allows that kind of thing to happen, eh? And why has He allowed me to suffer from a sore back?

[NapalmKev]

. Why don't these clever-dick philosophers ask why God allows that kind of thing to happen, eh? And why has He allowed me to suffer from a sore back?

It's all part of God's plan.

I was listening to some philosophy lectures today while I was strimming the front field and the lecturer was addressing the question of why God allows evil, if God exists, that is. All the arguments were very clever, as were the counterarguments and side-arguments, but all of them assumed God to be a "complete and perfect being of infinite good."
But it struck me that this was a contradiction - how could a being be both complete and infinitely good?

And at the same time have the capacity for extreme genocide against non-believers and first-born sons!

People can believe what they like and due to lack of evidence I choose not to believe any of it. Lack of evidence aside, an easy assumption can be made that the reason Religion(s) are so contradictory is that they were created by people rather than an Infallible being.

Cheers

[The Legendary Shark]

Well yes, but are religions contradictory because God (if such an entity exists) allows free will so people can invent their own religions?

My question was more about the human concept of God as a complete and perfect being of infinite good and whether it's possible to believe this is true regardless of religion. I don't think it's possible to believe that God (if He exists) actually can be infinitely good for the reason I suggested - that a complete God would also have to contain infinite evil otherwise He wouldn't be complete and therefore not God. It could be his evil streak that allows human moral evils from crusades to inquisitions to flying aircraft into buildings to occur; and also allow natural evils like plagues, earthquakes, and tsunamis. If God was infinitely good, then surely everything He creates will be infinitely good - and looking around at the Earth, this is evidently not true.

I suppose this view might lead some religious persons to believe that if God Himself contains both infinite good and infinite evil, it would be okay for people also to practice both good and evil themselves - which is what seems to happen anyway.

[The Mind of Wolfie Smith]

i was talking about this very matter a while back with a theologian. it was a good, respectful chat, despite my being a heretic n all. as far as i understood him, agency is granted to free will, to nature, and to chance. without such granting, existence and consciousness (and indeed religion) lose all meaning.
i can buy that. i don't believe it, tho.

[Trooper McFad]

How about this thought.

People like good things but too much of a good thing becomes bad. For example the first spoonful of your favourite dessert if fantastic but after a whole day of feasting on the same thing looses it's appeal and you no longer want it.

As Shark said people invent their own religions so what if those who invented religion allowed their God (if he exists) to allow bad things then when he does something good then he is fantastic all be praised and the minions can feast with pleasure. If their God only has/allows good and world was good then would we all get fed up and dismiss God (if he exists)

These up and down feelings are baked into the human DNA and there for baked into religion?

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

Sounds a bit Russell's paradoxy to me

[Funt Solo]

Jesus H. Malarkey.

I can't even join in the philosophy because I keep getting triggered by the forced uppercase 'G' and the assumption of male gender when discussing your entirely fictional supreme being.

It's like triple-trigger salt in almost every sentence. There's not even any room given over to the notion of pantheons, because of the cultural brainwashing that's forced our collective thought processes into monotheism as if it's the only mind-game on the table.

[JayzusB.Christ]

i was talking about this very matter a while back with a theologian. it was a good, respectful chat, despite my being a heretic n all. as far as i understood him, agency is granted to free will, to nature, and to chance. without such granting, existence and consciousness (and indeed religion) lose all meaning.
i can buy that. i don't believe it, tho.

I know it's not Sharky's original point but the 'gift of free will' thing has always struck me as a particularly insidious excuse for God letting so much evil happen.  Not much of a gift when the wrong choice results in eternal torture after I'm dead. On related matter, why not just show himself (or herself or itself) if he really wants everyone to believe in him? Old books based on hearsay don't cut it for some of us.

Pondering about how God could be infinitely good is, for me, like wondering how Garfield can stay alive for decades when he's only a cat.  Or, if that's too dismissive and flippant, like wondering how Odin's horse can fly when it lacks any kind of obvious aeronautical features.

[M.I.K.]

I will now share some of my views via the medium of pop-culture references...

In The Dark Crystal, the evil Skeksis and good urRu were originally a single species. Being evil, the Skeksis want to hold onto their power over the other species and environments of the world, using them for their own selfish needs. The empathic urRu know that this cannot be left to continue, but are entirely pacifistic hermit-hippies who can't achieve what they need to by themselves. Things can only ultimately be really "good" if the two species are combined into a neutral whole.

But there's a problem when defining anything as completely "good" or "evil" because in a lot of cases it's entirely subjective. Violence may be considered by most people to be a bad thing, but most species would never have survived without using it, whether for food or defense. Shark mentions plagues as one of the "natural evils", but from the point of view of the virus or locust, (aye, that's a separate philosophical discussion), we're the ones trying to wipe them out while they're only trying to survive.

There's an episode of Rick and Morty in which the title characters purge themselves of "toxins", the toxins being the aspects of their personalities which they personally consider negative. Said toxins then become separate individual entities - "evil" doubles. Thing is, some of the things Rick and Morty consider "bad" are actually important parts of being a fully functioning human being. Eg; Rick thinks being too emotionally attached to people is a bad thing, meaning the "bad" version of him is the one who's left caring what happens to his grandson.

Things get even more messed up when you have certain religious types saying homosexuality is evil and others like Mother Teresa claiming human suffering is a force for good, saying, (and I directly quote), "There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering." An attitude I would consider unequivocally evil.

[Funt Solo]

There's an episode of Rick and Morty in which the title characters purge themselves of "toxins", the toxins being the aspects of their personalities which they personally consider negative. Said toxins then become separate individual entities - "evil" doubles. Thing is, some of the things Rick and Morty consider "bad" are actually important parts of being a fully functioning human being. Eg; Rick thinks being too emotionally attached to people is a bad thing, meaning the "bad" version of him is the one who's left caring what happens to his grandson.

Also one of the key plot points of Locke & Key.

Things get even more messed up when you have certain religious types saying homosexuality is evil and others like Mother Teresa claiming human suffering is a force for good, saying, (and I directly quote), "There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering." An attitude I would consider unequivocally evil.

Christopher Hitchens liked to point out how morally abhorrent Teresa's beliefs and behaviors were. Interestingly, society had so bought into the idea of her (rather than the reality of her) that they'd nearly always react with shock and disbelief at Hitchens' points, and not really take them on board.

[The Legendary Shark]

If there is a God, then for me it has to be the universe (or the multiverse) itself, because that's the only thing that is both omnipresent, omnitemporal, and omnipotent.

However, there is a theory that we are all part of a computer simulation. If this is the case, would that make the simulation itself God, or the programmer? Or, more likely, the team of programmers? Or just the head programmer? Or the head programmer's boss? Or the head programmer's boss's political leader? Or the head programmer's boss's political leader's God? Or the head programmer's boss's political leader's universe?

Would one of my own blood cells regard me as God? If so, I am certainly omnipresent in that blood cell's universe but not omnipotent as I cannot control, or even feel any awareness of, my individual cells. So, if the universe is God, and even if the universal whole does possess some form of consciousness, it doesn't necessarily follow that Hesheit has any awareness of or control over individual human beings, or even the Earth, solar system, or Milky Way.

I think it's only human hubris and ignorance that requires God (if Hesheit exists) to be in control of every fine detail and regard humanity as something special. If there is a God, then I think Hisherits perceptions, thoughts and actions are even further beyond our own as mine are from those of my own cells.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

If there is a God, then for me it has to be the universe (or the multiverse) itself, because that's the only thing that is both omnipresent, omnitemporal, and omnipotent.

I once heard a suggestion that brains evolved because the universe was trying to understand itself. It's a nice idea, but a bit too teleological for me.

However, there is a theory that we are all part of a computer simulation.

That hypothesis does exist, but it relies on the universe in which the computer simulating us exists, being more complex than our universe. It is impossible to create a computer that can simulate itself in its own universe without contradicting information theory. This was proposed as an attempt to explain quantum uncertainty. The supposed simulation can't compute both position and momentum simultaneously at the subatomic level, so it just does a bit of RNG to compensate.

[The Mind of Wolfie Smith]

nick bostrom's simulation hypothesis states that one of these sentences must almost certainly be true:

1. the fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero.
2. the fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero.
3. the fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

[Funt Solo]

I heard that popular physicist dude who's on the screens a lot talking about intelligent life. He pointed out that it took half the age of the universe for humans to mutate their way out of simpler life forms. So, despite all that "we're not special given the size of the universe (or even galaxy)" - maybe we are a bit.

[sintec]

Maybe - depends if other intelligent life has evolved anywhere else during that time frame. It might be we're the late bloomer and all the other intelligent life managed the transition from simpler life forms in a fraction of the time. As far as I'm aware there's no real evidence either way on that one, just because we haven't found anything doesn't prove there's nothing to find.