I watched Bill O’Reilly’s show last night on Fox News. The Big Mick was going on about how the successful ditching of that plane in the Hudson River, and the rescue of all on board, must have been a miracle.
I’d be curious to see O’Reilly’s mailbag on that. Somewhere out there in TV-land there must have been someone watching who’d lost a loved one in a plane crash. That person would surely have been thinking to himself: “Wait a minute here, pal. My wife was as worthy of life as anyone. She was a loving wife and mother, a patriotic and hard-working citizen. Why didn’t she deserve one of these miracles your God hands out so capriciously?
Don’t religious people understand that when they talk like this, they are implicitly insulting people? This planeload of people was deserving of God’s attention and a subsequent miracle, but that one wasn’t? Why?
And above and beyond that, to the point Heather has made at least once: If God is so darn capricious in His judgments, how exactly is life with Him different from life without Him? The randomness of events like this doesn’t prove there is no God, but surely it proves that there might as well not be.
Daniel Dare:
Thanks for starting a list of all the insignificant contrivances that falsify the statement that silence is a response to a request. Let me know when you want to tackle the other 99% of situations in which that statement is true.
“Of course. A naturalist who says there is no such thing as good and evil has effectively dispensed with the Problem of Good. In fact, I think that’s the only reasonable position a naturalist can take. But doing so requires the naturalist to take a rather bizarre view of human nature and chuck aside as nonsense the routine experience of good and evil by billions of human beings.”
@Bill Tingley,
I did not say that there is no such thing as “good” and “evil,” nor do I belief that such an assertion is either necessary, reasonable nor appropriate for a naturalist to take.
But I challenged you to establish that “good” is something transcendent and enduring. On what rational basis would you (can you) reach that conclusion?? (Again, not about good’s existence, but about its transcendence and it’s enduring quality.)
“Thanks for starting a list of all the insignificant contrivances that falsify the statement that silence is a response to a request. Let me know when you want to tackle the other 99% of situations in which that statement is true.”
So if I pray to 99 “pagan” gods plus “the God of Abraham”, and I get no response, did I get 1 response or 100? And if I got 1, how do I know from which god the response came?
REPEATING A COMMENT LOCKED UP IN “MODERATION”
Links removed of course, they will show up later (hopefully)
============================================================
Bill Tingley
Through reason sans doubt.
Excuse me but we haven’t seen any “reason” from you yet.
Belief into any kind of supernatural is the ultimate dormitive purported “explanation”:
from the 1673 Moliére play Le Malade Imaginaire (The Hypochondriac), wherein a doctor explains that opium is a soporific “quiat est in eo / virtus dormitiva / cujus est natura / sensus assoupire” (”because there is a dormitive virtue in it whose nature is to cause the senses to become drowsy”). Explanations along these lines answer questions truthfully but vacuously.
Thus, claims that “God did this”, “God want that”, are neither “statements” nor “explanations”, just empty blather devoid of any meaning.
I do understand however that people can be fooled by their own feelings of transcendence.
A total disregard for actual evidence comes indeed very handy to justify any horrendous nonsense.
Read the saintly words of the Papal legate Arnaud-Amaury at the Siege of Béziers:
… Arnaud’s love of terror and killing was perhaps above average, even for a senior churchman. It was he who was responsible for the mass burning alive of “many heretics and many fair women” at Casseneuil”, for the massacre at Béziers, where some 20,000 men, women and children were killed in an “exercise of Christian charity”, and for the immortal words “Kill them all. God will know his own”. He was also responsible for the siege of Carcassonne, and for the seizure of Raymond-Roger Trencavel, Viscount of Carcassonne, Béziers, Albi and the Razès during a truce – leading to the fall of Carcassonne. He arrived at Minerve just in time to engineer the deaths of 140 people whose lives would otherwise have been spared.
(Sorry for more knowledgeable readers, I have to repeat the links, they have slipped down the blog)
“from the evil we have freely chosen to do, Gods brings about a greater good which serves us better than if He chose to eliminate all of our evil acts.”
Man, God sure is tricksy.
Why can’t an omnipotent God bring about the greatest good while at the same time not kill babies?
Why can’t an omnipotent God bring about the greatest good while at the same time not kill babies?
C’mon Tulse, God cares for the greater good of children.
As Saint Remigius wisely advises:
“Children should be burnt
if they had a witch as a parent.”
Hosannah, Glory, Glory!
Most significant link among those buried in moderation, about “transcendence”:
A spontaneous experience of a sensed presence caught on EEG
Shorter Bill Tighley: you’re wrong, but I can’t explain why. You’re ignorant, but I can’t be bothered to show how.
You make the mistake of thinking that just because you have standard rote responses to various arguments advanced against the sense of Christian theology that that’s the end of the discussion. But people are well aware of the retreats you’re offering as signs of our ignorance: and in the end, they just make the edifice look even more silly than it was to begin with.
Again, Bill, I can’t accept original sin, or innate evil, or whatever the proper theological term would be, as the causative agent for childhood leukemia, or Tay-Sachs, or any of the other mortal diseases to which a child might fall victim. How would an infant’s or child’s body be so “weakened by wickedness” as to allow him or her to be punished in such fashion? Similarly, how would a child crime victim have had the opportunity or means–or even inclination–to commit such wickedness as to be raped and murdered in return? Similarly, I can’t see a “good” adult being wiped out by a tornado or hurricane as being punishment for his or her wickedness when other truly wicked people might have survived the same disaster. It simply doesn’t make sense. If all the ills and misfortunes that befall us are a result of our own inherent wickedness (and I reiterate, I can’t accept the concept of an infant as being THAT wicked)then why do so many of the wicked escape? Yes, I realize they’re supposed to receive punishment in the afterlife, but we’re talking about human life cut short or made miserable.
The message seems to be: God will give you leukemia when you’re three years old because you’re wicked, but because you’re so virtuous, He’s giving you a fatal illness because He so badly wants you in heaven that He can’t wait till you reach puberty, much less adulthood.
I’m not being facetious. This…does…not…compute. You can’t have it both ways.
“The message seems to be: God will give you leukemia when you’re three years old because you’re wicked, but because you’re so virtuous, He’s giving you a fatal illness because He so badly wants you in heaven that He can’t wait till you reach puberty, much less adulthood.”
That’s even more true when one considers that Christians necessarily view God as not being constrained by time or see him as being “beyond time and space” (whatever THAT is supposed to be), so that, if that is true, he wouldn’t even be “waiting”, as such a time-based thing would have no meaning to him.
Actually, Grant, on the basis of some discussions I’ve had with fundamentalist Christians (before they terminated the discourse with the prediction that I was going to burn in hell) about God’s concept of time, I think that fundamentalists, at least, believe that it’s identical to ours. I.e., that our year, or day, or hour, is also God’s. So a two-year-old to us is a two-year-old to God, just as a 24-hour day to us is a 24-hour day to God. Those who believe this are, of course, those who believe in the literal rather than the allegorical interpretation of the Bible.
But again, one of the first things I noticed about religion in general and Christianity in particular, is the contradictions inherent in it. The one I pointed out earlier–that God makes you die early and badly because you’re inherently wicked, but also because you’re inherently good, and he wants you in heaven ahead of schedule–is perhaps the most logic-defying.
For a Darwinian Agent, good is a trivial problem.
Good is anything that increases our inclusive fitness, and so, in the long-run (probablistically), it helps our genes to survive. Evil is the opposite.
Of course, the chains of cause and effect can be very long and complicated. Natural selection sorts it out empirically. Millions of genes over millions of years – Cumulative trial and error.
Consequence: We instinctively understand “good” and “evil”.
In humans the understanding is subtle, because the contexts can be so intricate. A large part of tribal ethical wisdom is passed on by culture. Culture being a new social channel of information transmission, made possible by language and imitation, facilititated by the genes.
In the long run culture is also subject to natural selection. But it can propagate memetically, brain to brain. This can give rise to many complications. In the longest run, natural selection always wins.
The argument that the evolutionary ethics also allows murder ignores the fact that murder does in fact exist. So we are not programmed not to murder. We are programmed not to murder most of the time.
Also lets not ignore that culture has its own purpose. Life in primitive lawless conditions includes the constant risk of murder. The fact that murder is restrained by laws, is one of the reason why culture itself is selected for – Murder is one of the problems that culture mitigates. Sometimes there’s a trade off though. Cultures restrain intratribal murder, private battles, but facilitates intertribal murder – war.
On balance, our genes survive better in a matrix of laws imposed by culture. Among other things, it restrains our otherwise natural murderous tendencies.
In reality this is only a thought-experiment, because Man without culture has never existed for long. We were cultural before we were human.
Susan:
Our interchanges have concerned what Christians think and do about moral and natural evil. And I know from my own experience of traveling from naturalist and (practical) atheist to Christian, that Christian religious beliefs are far more sound in grasping the truth of human nature than the “just so” stories told by naturalists of how it’s all matter in motion (even in contradiction to what they normally encounter everyday).
However, my saying what is about Christians doesn’t mean I’m telling you what to think. If you reject certain Christian tenets, that’s your business. Just be aware that a tenet you disapprove of, like Original Sin, may not function as you believe — such as babies are wicked creatures because of it.
Ben Tingley,
I really would be interested in knowing the basis upon which you assert that “good” is something transcendent and enduring. On what rational basis would you (can you) reach that conclusion?? (Again, not about good’s existence, but about its transcendence and it’s enduring quality.)