RE: free will paradox
February 10, 2013 at 6:31 am
(This post was last modified: February 10, 2013 at 6:35 am by Angrboda.)
(February 10, 2013 at 4:44 am)fr0d0 Wrote: What is so bad about justice any way? Do you have a problem with fairness? I'd be interested to hear your world view where injustice is desirable. Seems crazy to me right now.
Whether a world in which there is no ultimate justice is desirable or not is completely irrelevant to whether or not it is true that we live in a world without ultimate justice. What you want to believe to be true is immaterial; wanting something to be true doesn't make it true. That's just wishful thinking. Whether you find the prospect that there is no justice unpleasant or not, your desires in the matter are not evidence one way or the other as to whether there is ultimate justice or not. So until you either demonstrate the actual existence of this daddy who's gonna make everything all right, or show that we do not live in a world in which there is no ultimate justice, all your mewling about what is desirable is just so much pointless fantasizing.
To be sure, I believe there are strong biological reasons why humans yearn for some form of ultimate retributive justice (whether Karma, divine punishment, or this modern theology of reactivity to the love of, and distancing from, God [which itself is strikingly similar to certain conceptions of Karma]). The fact that people interpret reality in terms of fairness has deep roots in our nature as a social species, so I can forgive it's flowering in terms of wishful thinking. I'm not going to go any deeper into the biology and psychology of this phenomena other than to point out that the existence of explanations for your "felt need" for there to be ultimate justice, explanations which pan out in evolutionary terms, means that your "God explains it" isn't the only horse in the running, and so you need to demonstrate that your god hypothesis explains the facts themselves, not simply that god "could" explain it, that god "seems like a plausible explanation," or even that there doesn't appear to be any other explanation. (The latter an argument from ignorance.)
So, without assuming the existence of God:
a) what is your evidence that we don't live in a world (afterlife included) that is ultimately unfair and lacking in ultimate justice?
b) why do you feel there needs to be ultimate justice, or even that it would be desirable? (This ties back into the biology; the biology explains why we feel there is a need for fairness and ultimate justice; the question is, what facts independent of that feeling suggest that there "should be" ultimate justice?)