Christians, Prove Your God Is Good

[The Reality Salesman01]

Sorry. I actually had non-internet things to do! =)

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It sounds like you're wanting me to imagine a scenario with just me and an apple (no other things required, correct?). You want me to imagine the moment I feel compelled to sink my teeth into it. At that moment, I make a judgement about my Apple-biting experience, and that judgement will be based only on whether I got pleasure from eating the apple, or experienced a decrease in pleasure, correct?

No, that is not correct. I backtracked in our discussion to try to figure out how we have come to be talking past each other on this point, and I may have found it here:

You say "we don't need to encounter both an apple and a rock to judge that the apple is better", but you do need to encounter what it feels like to be hungry and what it feels like to be satisfied.

I used the terms "desirable/good" which you quoted and translated as "better". Does "good" and "better" mean the same thing to you? Because, I ABOSLUTELY think it is true that you need to encounter BOTH an apple AND a rock in order to judge that the apple is better.

As for the hypothetical scenario including ONLY you and ONLY an apple, that was my attempt to answer YOUR question here:

"Why do you think that is? If all that existed was a single option, how might you classify that? What meaning does the word "classify" or "judgement" have when there is no basis to compare anything?" -you, pg. 26, #255

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. The judgment of whether or not a thing is desirable includes both the seeking of that thing and obtaining it (and the subsequent experience of either a decrease or increase in the desire for which it was sought).

"Could you judge [some thing] as either causing an increase or a decrease in desire upon obtaining it? Yes . . . In order to judge something as good, bad, whatever, it does not require other things. It merely requires the test of satisfaction or not satisfaction." -Me, pg. 26, #258, emphasis mine

I just wanted to make sure that we nailed that down. Sometimes it seems like people believe that if something is subjective then there is nothing objective to be extracted from it. We're making tracks here, making tracks!...lets nail some more of this down...

I agree entirely. It is a greatly misunderstood aspect of ethics, and I am glad we seem to have a more or less clear understanding of that point!

One last thing...I don't believe you've ever said "that song was good" without ever having heard other songs...This may be where this "Judge/Classify" distinction is causing confusion. I'll come back to this.

Your incredulity here is certainly justified. Of course that has not been my experience. I probably heard songs before I had the capacity to say a word much less form a rational thought about the experience. However, do you also doubt that I withheld judgment about the first song I ever heard (assuming that I had the ability to express a rational thought)?

If I had said "that song was good", I implicitly meant that it satisfied some particular human desire in some more or less complete way. I was able to say that as a rational person because my entire life up until that point was a continuum of "feeling" and sating human desires with an ever evolving and (hopefully) more accurate capacity to judge different things' ACTUAL capacity to sate those desires. 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.

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"?

But, again, here is my point. How can you compare two songs without forming a judgment about the two individually?

"Things must first be judged individually before they can be compared as more or less desirable than other things." - Me, pg. 26, #254

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

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."

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[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.

[robvalue]

Can anyone explain to me what ignorant's actual point is? I mean... I just don't know. I see stuff like this all over the place from theists, and I can't understand the motivation. It seems like an attempt to muddy the waters to a point where.... Something. I don't even know what.

Like I was trying to understand that thoughtage guy.

Sure, this philosophical stuff is interesting, morality and all that. Good and bad. Of course nothing is clear cut. But...

What's the actual point? Am I being really thick? I may be being really thick.

[comet]

how god is describe by a person is better than an ink blot test. A description "all good only" or "all bad only" is a sign of a personality type.

[The Reality Salesman01]

@Rob

I'm really trying to figure out what he's trying to get at too. I get the importance of finding the right word to describe the thought in question but at this point, it feels more necessary to address why a word would be more suitable than any other. He's said that "good" could have meaning even if there were no such thing as bad. But to me, there is no reason to describe anything as "good" if good is all there is. The very use of the word describes an aspect of something in relation to something else. Bringing additional attention to the state of experience that cannot be anything but what it is, whatever this thing or experience could be, it seems like it would be the least interesting thing or experience in the universe.

[robvalue]

@Comet: Haha, good point. Yeah, my current theory is that "god" is entirely a personal god: it's a version of themself. An idealised version.

How else could god agree with everyone, while the people disagree with each other?

When some people on this site say "god says slavery is OK" and others say "no god says slavery is not OK", just replace "god says" with "I say" and you've hit the jackpot.

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@TRS: Yeah I see, thanks. Maybe it's trying to justify bad because good can't exist without it blah, blah. Well exactly, if all is good, you don't need the word good. Absolutely everything could be good. I can imagine it, heck I do most of the time, I live in a fantasy land in my head because this reality sucks so bad. But too much work for "god" the idle slacker and goat fucker.

[The Reality Salesman01]

^ that made me chuckle out load^

[The Reality Salesman01]

**loud! Lol

[dyresand]

The only reason why people would call god good is because he "created" life.

[robvalue]

Right. And why? For his amusement, we're given no better reason.

Humans produce life, too. Should they demand worship from the children, and claim to be righteous while not feeding them and throwing stuff at them? Not cool.