RE: Do u want there to be a God? Any God?
December 15, 2018 at 10:51 am
(This post was last modified: December 15, 2018 at 11:11 am by Angrboda.)
(December 15, 2018 at 3:39 am)Agnostico Wrote: What if I rephrase the question.
"A gunman has a gun to ur head. Do u want him to shoot?"
Do u want to live or die?
It's more a vague hypothetical question, sort of, "If something, maybe it's a person, were holding something, maybe it's a gun, to one of your body parts, maybe the head, would you want that something to use that something to something your something body part?" You need to be more specific or the question simply becomes an exercise in people talking past each other because nobody knows what anybody else is referring to in the specific case. There are certainly gods that I can imagine that I would not want to exist. There are many gods I can imagine for which it would be of no particular consequence to me that they existed. The question is whether there are gods that we can imagine that you would want to exist? I suppose the answer to that has to be a very qualified yes, as there certainly can be gods that would make my existence better than it is without them, but to what point have we arrived? If a god existed that magically intervened in one out of every hundred acts of mine with bad consequences to insure those bad consequences did not occur, and did nothing else, then I'd probably want that god to exist. But that's not a particularly consequential point, as nobody is proposing the existence of such gods, and most would feel silly doing so. There is a certain sense in which many gods, or metaphysical systems of belief (religions) posit gods as cosmic horse traders, they'll give you Y if you do X. In most of those cases, it's not clear the bargain struck is a good one. Many such systems introduce hypothetical evils to be avoided by striking that bargain which may not in fact exist. The gods of Judeo-Christianity and Hinduism are such. Then the question, whether the bargain struck is a good one, depends upon whether these hypothetical harms are real? And that's a question which can't be objectively answered, so these 'bargaining' gods may or may not be desirable.
But again, what's the point? You seem to be setting us up for a bait and switch, that once we accept that any hypothetical god may be desirable that the gods that men have in mind when they use the term god may then be desirable. No, that's not the case. Moreover, I can imagine a billion and one ways the universe might be different than it is, say that money grew on trees, that don't involve gods, and I can ask the same question: Would I prefer that universe to this one? Well, maybe, but so what?