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looking4princess -> GOD AND EVIL (9/30/2009 5:49:18 AM)
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This is a journal entry I wrote in response to another published on this site on Sept 29. If you have the patience and interest to read through his shit and mine and have some constructive comments by all means please enter the debate. This is what I sent as my response to his definition of "Natural Evil."
I disagree with your attempts to define evil in two categories .. moral and natural. I especially disagree that there is such a thing as natural evil. No, no. Nature is not evil. Nature is indifferent to human suffering. Nature is just matter and energy following its own inclinations. Earthquakes, hurricanes, etc are indifferent forces of the interaction of matter and energy. Viruses and other parasites are indifferent to human suffering. They are merely forms of matter and energy, differently organized perhaps by evolution, but forms of matter and energy nevertheless just performing what they are impelled to perform by their construction. They do not intentionally cause human suffering, although they may benefit from it.
Good and evil are value judgments. They are constructs of the human mind. The suffering of innocents at the hand of a tyrant is Evil because we have made that judgment. The suffering of innocents from earthquakes, tsunamis, disease, poverty, lack of potable water, etc. are evil but they are not natural evils. Nature is not evil. If the suffering of innocent children in natural disasters is evil, it is because we judge it so. In the strict sense of the propagation of the selfish gene pool it may not be so. An outcome of Nature is evil only because we say it is so. Nature does not give a shit! Only those who think that man is the ultimate achievement of Nature care. Man may be nothing more than a cosmic and insignificant burp in the eternal swirl of matter and energy.
To say that Nature is evil is to assign Nature Free Will to make choices between doing good and doing bad. You cannot have it just one way. Unless of course you wish to say that your pantheistic god is nature with a Will in which case you are forced to say that god-nature is Evil for causing human suffering. I suspect that is not what you intend to say.
As far as I can see, you leave unresolved the question of the suffering of innocents by natural forces. Accept the premise, I ask you, that Nature is indifferent. Accept that innocent children suffer from the forces of Nature - the indifferent, mindless forces of Nature. Set aside for the moment, if you can, that the perpetuation of the gene pool by Darwinian constructs is also mindless and therefore has no pity for the innocent, because that leads to an entirely different argument. At this point and with those givens, I ask you to resolve the question of why if there is an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god, it permits the suffering of innocent children in the havoc of mindless Nature.
Your god cannot be both omnipotent and omnibenevolent and allow the children to suffer. Perhaps there is no god that can be explained by this seeming contradition.
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