RE: The Good
April 3, 2019 at 9:37 am
(This post was last modified: April 3, 2019 at 9:44 am by The Grand Nudger.)
The particular manner in which contemporary christianity posits a god (and the nature of man) necessitates or makes desirable a theodicy that isn't required of islam. Privation theodicies are meant to explain natural evil, but islam tends to prefer soul making theodicies for that, instead (christianity also makes use of these...but there's an important choice to be made between privation and soul making). As in judaism, as another poster pointed out, the notion that god created evil or disaster just hasn't weighed on the minds of muslims like it has on christians. It's not an issue for secular ethics at all, not only because of the lack of any god in a secular explanation..but because those things that these theodicies seek to address may not be relevant in the first place, in this view.
In christianity we have privation.
In islam we have the final value of evil.
In secular ethics we have an irrelevant question/postulate.
Take, for example, the notion that good and bad are in some meaningful way evolutionary products, just one of many secular povs. Evolutionary processes aren't an intentional agent, let alone an intentional moral agent. It's only because we posit that it would be bad for an intentional moral agent to create evil (or create disasters) that we might then require some justification for such an agent to have done so, or to posit that this agent did no such thing, just as it's only because we posit that natural evil may have no final value that we might then require a privation theory.
(as an interesting side note, soul making and privation theodocies are, respectively, the best arguments against each other if we limit ourselves to the context of intentional moral agency and realism)
In christianity we have privation.
In islam we have the final value of evil.
In secular ethics we have an irrelevant question/postulate.
Take, for example, the notion that good and bad are in some meaningful way evolutionary products, just one of many secular povs. Evolutionary processes aren't an intentional agent, let alone an intentional moral agent. It's only because we posit that it would be bad for an intentional moral agent to create evil (or create disasters) that we might then require some justification for such an agent to have done so, or to posit that this agent did no such thing, just as it's only because we posit that natural evil may have no final value that we might then require a privation theory.
(as an interesting side note, soul making and privation theodocies are, respectively, the best arguments against each other if we limit ourselves to the context of intentional moral agency and realism)
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