Stephen Fry was once asked what he would say if, after death, he found himself trying to justify himself to God in front of the Pearly Gates. His response:
"Bone cancer, in babies? Seriously?"
The full response is worth reading:
I’d say, bone cancer in children? What’s that about? Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain. That’s what I would say.
The only reasonably justification would for God to say: "I don't have the ability to meddle. I'm not omnipotent. I did create your part of the multiverse. I can only set the laws of physics and initial conditions. Here's how that works....Let me explain why you are here....something something multi dimensions...some creatures brains evolved quantum something something....which is what is commonly thought of as a soul..."
So we’re some jackass’s experiment.
The “god is a jackass” theorem. I like it.
There was actually a sect of Christianity that effectively argued for that kind of God.
They were quite influenced by Epicurean philosophy and naturalism though they disagreed with the Epicurean surety of death, arguing instead that while there was an original world of matter with original humans that developed spontaneously, that these original humans brought forth the creator of a copy of that original cosmos - not of matter, but of light. And that for the copies of humanity in that light-copy the finality of death was not inescapable.
But effectively, the world being a copy of one developed by naturalism for the explicit purpose of providing an afterlife largely skirts the moral quandaries. If the copy didn't have children with bone cancer then it means whitewashing the copy such that only the naturally privileged are entitled to salvation, while those originally getting dealt a bad hand are erased from representation.
And actually their explanations literally did relate to the quantized aspects of matter (embracing Epicureanism meant embracing not just natural selection but also atomism, such that they were discussing indivisible points making up all things and being the originating cause of existence).
You even got statements like this:
Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty."
You don't typically expect to see Jesus weighing in on naturalism as the greater wonder in contrast to the possibility of intelligent design.
Though if you really dig into it and notice that Lucretius 50 years before Jesus was even born was not only describing survival of the fittest and the emergence of modern life as the end result of indivisible seeds scattered randomly, but even described failed biological reproduction as "seed falling by the wayside of a path," the guy killed in Judea for talking about how only the seeds which survived to reproduce multiplied and the ones that fell by the wayside of a path did not begins to take on a different context, as does the oddity of that being one of the few public sayings in the Synoptics that the church felt was necessary to claim had a "secret explanation" given to only their leadership.
(In this sect's surviving text that parable comes immediately after a saying about how no matter if man ate lion or lion ate man that the lion becoming man was an inevitable result and how the human being is like a large fish selected from a bunch of small fish.)
Epicurus had great instincts. He was pretty damn close to things modern science has discovered. As you mentioned, he was an atomist. He also said you can generally trust your senses, but they can be wrong and deceive you at times. His ethics of moderation and valuing relationships is spot on when it comes to life satisfaction.
It's interesting you mentioned naturalism in the evolutionary sense. Have you read Darwin's book? Darwin's ideas aren't entirely original, he himself pretty much says that, but his data collection and observations were something that hadn't been done on that level yet.
Epicurus was great. It's a shame he's not more widely taught. People come up learning Aristotle and thinking the Greeks had their heads up their asses, but don't end up learning about the guy discussing light as quantized particles moving very quickly two millennia before Einstein wins a Nobel for experimentally proving that behavior, or writes about natural selection nearly two millennia before Darwin.
And yes, Darwin was actually familiar with the same book through his peers (though he claimed to have never read it). But you see rather remarkable level of detail for a lot of the core concepts:
In the beginning, there were many freaks. Earth undertook Experiments - bizarrely put together, weird of look Hermaphrodites, partaking of both sexes, but neither; some Bereft of feet, or orphaned of their hands, and others dumb, Being devoid of mouth; and others yet, with no eyes, blind. Some had their limbs stuck to the body, tightly in a bind, And couldn't do anything, or move, and so could not evade Harm, or forage for bare necessities. And the Earth made Other kinds of monsters too, but in vain, since with each, Nature frowned upon their growth; they were not able to reach The flowering of adulthood, nor find food on which to feed, Nor be joined in the act of Venus.
For all creatures need Many different things, we realize, to multiply And to forge out the links of generations: a supply Of food, first, and a means for the engendering seed to flow Throughout the body and out of the lax limbs; and also so The female and the male can mate, a means they can employ In order to impart and to receive their mutual joy.
Then, many kinds of creatures must have vanished with no trace Because they could not reproduce or hammer out their race. For any beast you look upon that drinks life-giving air, Has either wits, or bravery, or fleetness of foot to spare, Ensuring its survival from its genesis to now."
Sometimes children take after their grandparents instead, Or great-grandparents, bringing back the features of the dead. This is since parents carry elemental seeds inside – Many and various, mingled many ways – their bodies hide Seeds that are handed, parent to child, all down the family tree. Venus draws features from these out of her shifting lottery – Bringing back an ancestor’s look or voice or hair. Indeed These characteristics are just as much the result of certain seed As are our faces, limbs and bodies. Females can arise From the paternal seed, just as the male offspring, likewise, Can be created from the mother’s flesh. For to comprise A child requires a doubled seed – from father and from mother. And if the child resembles one more closely than the other, That parent gave the greater share – which you can plainly see Whichever gender – male or female – that the child may be.
You can sometimes see a criticism of the first passage claiming that Leucretius saw those intermediate mutations as all existing all at once at the start, but that interpretation really seems to be putting too much weight on "in the beginning" and ignoring things like:
They take us by the hand and show that animals arise From things with no sensation at all.
Especially since this world is the product of Nature, the happenstance Of the seeds of things colliding into each other by pure chance In every possible way, no aim in view, at random, blind, Till sooner or later certain atoms suddenly combined So that they lay the warp to weave the cloth of mighty things: Of earth, of sea, of sky, of all the species of living beings.
And it's been pretty wild seeing a Christian sect quoting from a book that contains such an on point description of naturalism as we see it today.
For example, another parallel is the Epicurean attitudes about avoiding false negatives. They were adamant not to prematurely discard explanations for why something occurred, but rather to keep them around concurrently (it's a large part of why they got so much right). Which is a bit similar to the discussion of leaving seeds alone when you don't know which is wheat and which is weeds as eventually it will become clear and you can harvest the one and discard the other. An even more interesting saying in the context of a sect's claiming the mustard seed was about an indivisible point as if from nothing or that the sower parable was about seeds scattered upon the world "through which the whole cosmical system is completed."
Even laws of physics are bound by logic...logic supercedes even me...so a lot of my adjustments were to things like the gravitational constant and force magnitudes
I would actually respect this god. Not worship, but respect.
Remember the time he had to have everyone paint blood on their doors so he knew which babies to kill.
You mean the time he had to repeatedly harden the Pharaoh's heart to keep punishing him and his people?
Front page news story today about an 8 year old boy with a brain tumour suffering from partial paralysis and seizures.
Thanks God.
Available options include:
Most people choose option 3.
Those really aren't the only options.
For example, it disregards the theology of a naturally occurring physical reality born out of entropy which eventually creates a god-like being which recreates the pre-god universe in order to resurrect it non-physically (a minor theology from around the first to fourth centuries CE).
A more modern version of a similar paradigm is simulation theory.
There's a pretty wide array of options out there, it's just that the most common tend to effectively fall into your groupings.
Sounds like variations on 'Not paying attention to reality and believing whatever delusion you feel like.'
None of these have any bearing on or foundation in actual physical existence. They do nothing to describe or predict. There is nothing to them. They just fulfill some desire in the believer.
I learned a long time ago that any god that does exist doesn't care about our suffering, doesn't love us, and is at best indifferent to us.
The Christian, all loving, all powerful, all knowing God is illogical.
You could have a God that is all loving and all knowing, but powerless to help us.
You could have a God that is all knowing and all powerful, but doesn't love us enough to help us.
You could have a God that is all powerful and all loving, but ignorant of our suffering.
But more likely than that, there is no God at all.
Apologetics has an answer for all of those questions. Those answers are mostly informal fallacies, but you're not going to convince someone who is already convinced there is a God and just needs some talking points.
Weeelllll.... God does like to kill kids after all so he's probably having a ball watching all this go down!
Psalms 137:9 - Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
1 Samuel 15:3 - Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
Exodus 12:29 - And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle.
Sorry, He is too busy helping athletes win in sports to care about some tiny little conflict.
God needs an ass whooping.
I’m functionally an atheist. I certainly have a disdain for religious orgs.
I’d accept the argument that this, in fact, a test. If so, religious people are failing it.
There is a novel, and damned if I can remember the title, where a rabi proposes that god commanding Abraham to kill his son was a test, which he (Abraham) failed.
Have no fear, I am now here!
I demanded an immediate cease fire.
Let me know if that worked? Send info via prayer since my cloud WiFi is sort of lame.
That implies that "God", whatever that means, actually cares about hairless apes on a (quite likely) unremarkable rock.
It's always been innocent children's lives. Cancer, sexual abuse, war crimes, starvation, the Church TM. It's always been their lives and he's never stepped in before. But maybe the land is more important to him. Oh wait... People have been fighting over it for thousands of years you say? Well then.
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