RE: Paganism vs. Monotheism
August 9, 2015 at 10:44 pm
(This post was last modified: August 9, 2015 at 10:46 pm by Mudhammam.)
(August 9, 2015 at 10:07 pm)Dystopia Wrote: The problem of evil doesn't disprove Christianity - It proves god is either evil or instead has a different conception of what constitutes good, evil and suffering - This, of course, assuming a priori that Christianity is true. If you were to discover some overwhelming evidence that the Christian god exists, you could still consider him evil - I'm happy that such a deity most likely doesn't exist.I'm a bit perplexed about wherein exactly lies the force of the so-called problem of evil; typically, people differentiate between human evil and natural evil. The latter is the only problematic attribute of the world that could be directly ascribed to the responsibility of a God, and yet I'm not really sure that it's appropriate to call the causes and effects of physical law good or evil in any moral sense, since morality seems to presume a rational will that is free to make moral decisions... and thunderstorms, tsunamis, earthquakes, diseases, etc. wouldn't exactly meet that criteria. So, is the blame placed upon God for not creating a sterile universe in which the laws of physics or evolution are incapable of adversely affecting sentient beings? Is that really an act - the creation of a universe that evolves according to certain laws, which resulted in this experience of life - wherein we, ignorant subjects that we are, are justified to claim the authority of moral judgment about such a being's culpability in doing so? If there is no God, is the moral quality of natural outcomes eliminated? Is it because there no longer involves a rational will? And why should we presume that such a being as God would be rational according to our axiomatic systems of logic?
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza