ArtCatDom
Posts: 478
Joined: 1/20/2005
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quote:
ORIGINAL: SL4V3M4YB3
I'll think about this more, also would be nice to know what the entry you responded to said to be able to judge how good the response was.
It was in response to:
Someone wrote me a message today asking me: "How can you believe in any kind of God in this world? Everything is so screwed up! Do you really believe in a God that authored this world?"
A surpising number of people have asked me this question. I'm not sure what it is about my profile that spurs the response, but I suppose it's time to put something up to head things off at the pass.
I will gloss over my conception of God, as that is a much larger topic, except to say that I am a panentheist that equates God with the labels "Tao", "Creator", and "Source".
What that person was asking me is called the question of evil. Basically, it is a classical conundrum about the existence of God. It asks how an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God can create a world that contains evil. (That's alot of assumptions about the nature of God, but we'll work with it.)
First, we must understand that there are two kinds of "evil". There's moral evil, or rather the evil that people choose. There's natural evil, which is "natural" causes of evil, such as disease and natural disasters. One can posit a variety of other evils, but all of them have their root in the actions of a sentient creatures (like humans, in theory) or of the natural world, or both.
Moral evil is considerably easier to answer. It comes down to free will. Evil of this sort exists because people are free to choose and some will inevitably choose evil. Some philosophers answer that God, being omnipotent, could create a world where people would only freely choose good. This is, at best, a very limited form of free will. Indeed, I reject any definition of free will that leaves the range of free choice so narrow. It's as though I offer you a choice between a food you love and a food you hate for a main dinner course. By the nature of the options given, I did not really give you much free choice. (I admit that analogy is a bit inaccurate, but it's a good illustration that conveys the sense of things well.)
Natural evil is considered more difficult to answer. However, I posit that the universe is extremely fine-tuned. Anyone with some grounding in physics can confirm that even extremely miniscule changes in the fundamental constants of our physical universe would result in quite a distinct existence. Small changes in one place means that stars and planets never form. A tiny change in another place makes it extremely unlikely for planets like Earth to take positions around stars and otherwise evolve in ways amenable to life (as we know it). When life occurs, it evolves in response to its environment. (However, popular to common conceptions this process does not always lead to more complex or more intelligent organisms.) Complex relationships and forms of life develop, including perhaps less pleasant varieties, such as parasites and predators. The very fundamental forces of the universe that formed our planet and caused our species to evolve, also lead naturally to viruses, earthquakes, and other "natural evils". All other potential universes are purely theoretical; they are little more than plausible imaginations. Even despite that, we know that our universe exists and that with even the tiniest changes in the rules of our reality that planets and life would not exist. So, it is reasonable to presume that in order to create a universe with life and sentience, that the universe and interaction of life must be dynamic.
As a short and cheekier response to the problem of natural evil, I find it interesting that it is almost always (called) evil when a bear kills man, but rarely (said to be) evil when a man kills a bear.
On a another note, no, I am not a creationist. I believe that science has a pretty good idea of how the universe and our planet came about. I'm quite inclined to defer to the physicists, chemists, and other scientists on the natural laws of our universe.
*meow*
< Message edited by ArtCatDom -- 9/30/2009 4:43:49 PM >
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RE: GOD AND EVIL - 
Profile
) against a group of people instead of a single section with information that has nothing to do with some of those people. 
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