Christians, Prove Your God Is Good

[The Reality Salesman01]

I have already clarified that a thing does not "project" an abstract "satisfaction" or "desirability" with which a human can form an abstract judgment about a thing without ever interacting with it.

Agreed, and would you also agree that in the absence of any agent capable of abstracting judgment, the thing does could not possess any intrinsic quality other than its existence. For example, if a rock exists, and there is no other object that exists, the rock does not possess any quality other than existence.

The judgment of whether or not a thing is desirable includes both the seeking of that thing and obtaining it

And it does require an agent capable of making judgment, correct? Since the thing possesses no intrinsic desirable traits, without an agent capable of judgment, the potential for any additional prescribed quality does not exist either. The rock can only be. And it is, or it isn't, and nothing more can be abstracted about the nature of this rock in addition to it being true that it "is" or "is not" a thing. The word "rock" would not even be required. Does that make sense?

From the very first moment I felt a human desire (does not even have to be consciously) and tried to sate it, I have been judging things as either satisfying or not.

I agree.

If I said, "That song was better than that other song", then OF COURSE I necessarily must have formed a judgment about that other song as well (how could I make a comparative reference to a different object without having judged/evaluated it? That would be irrational). Could I not say, about both songs, "That song was good"?

Upon listening to the first song, yes. I see your point, it is possible to identify your experience as "something". You and I can speak very plainly about things that bring what we both understand as "pleasure" because we have experienced many different things and it's not hard to explain that something like a song can just be a "good" experience without having heard any other songs. Given our shared experience of life, words such as "pleasure" and "goodness" have meaning. I'm trying to address why it is that those ideas mean anything at all.

How can you compare two songs without forming a judgment about the two individually?

You couldn't, I agree. My point is, why does this judgment a coherent concept to us? And can you imagine what it would take to render it incoherent?

If you eat a <insert your favorite food> for the first time when you are hungry, you will experience the satisfaction of the desire.

Because it is in my nature to eat, I can have this desire. And because I have the experience of being exposed to more than one option, there is a possibility that I will form a preference. I think I agree so far.

Even if you don't formulate the thought "That was good", your experience of desire and satisfaction is real, specific, and particular to the circumstances. Any formulation you use to describe that particular experience of satisfaction is what I mean by "That was good".

If this is the single exposure to the stimulation, whatever it is that you decide to label it isn't really relevant yet. It is the only thing you know. It is what it is, and it is not, whatever it is not. In retrospect, you can begin to analyze the chain of events that lead to your current state of mind and identify a causal chain in the course of events that lead to it. But is it at all relevant or useful? Can it be reliably applied to future experiences? The next time you experience the same desire, what use does this idea of the thing you've decided to call "good" have when faced with your second experience? Say you do the exact same thing and the second time, you get the exact same experience, and it too is "good". Now, in your experience, all things are good, no? You could include that the nature of experience is "good" and by doing so, you've renamed experiences with the name "good". If the results were not desirable on both occasions, the opposite would be true. If the first thing you ate lead to food poisoning that lasted 3 days and all you did was vomit and shit yourself, that would not be good, but it would be your first experience with eating. You couldn't say it was bad, could you? You could probably say that you certainly didn't enjoy it and as you say, it isn't desirable, but at this point, you don't know that any experience could be any different, the very word "different" has no meaning to you yet. So, the second time you eat something you get a worse case of food poisoning, and this time it lasts a 5 days and is equally lacking in pleasure. Now that you have more than one experience, the existence of difference between the two has given rise to the meaning of "better" or "worse" and it is only in retrospect upon having the second experience. You could conclude that of all experiences you've had, being sick for 3 days is "better" than 5 days. And if these are the only two samples of experience, does the word "good" have any coherent application?

Now, it seems to me, that you are equivocating this meaning with the meaning of "good" as "better". "Better" would mean something like, "This food satisfies me more than that food."

I can see why it may appear that way. What I'm trying to say is that the word "better" can only describe experience from a reference point that acknowledges the possibility of some other experience. I agree that you can have an experience such as listening to a song, and you can call that experience "good" or whatever you please. But without a reference point, whatever word you use does not describe the nature of the thing you have described because our experience of reality is wholly dependent on the existence of independent objects that are set apart by the characteristics of their distinct nature. If all things were the same, the description of each thing would be the same, and so too would be the description of the experience. Each word used to describe anything, describes the nature of "x" in relation to "y". If all that exists is "x", then "x" is whatever it is, and it is not whatever it is not. It exists, or it doesn't, and a description of "x" is only coherent in relation to some other thing.