The Root of all Evil : The God Delusion
POSTED BY: Calhoun
UPDATED: Thursday, December 17, 2015 06:12
VIEWED: 49488
PAGE 13 of 32
Quote:What if it's "Let's kill people because they believe in God". That would be a theistic motivation, wouldn't it?
Originally posted by citizen:
If, however, the statement was "Let's kill people because there is no God" the situation would be different.
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Quote:I think that's more difficult. It is motivated by the victims religion, but you can't say they're religion is at fault, any more than you can say a Theist killing an Atheist is automatically a killing motivated by Atheism. It would be not unlike saying the Woman who got raped brought it on herself by wearing a short skirt.
Originally posted by Khyron:
What if it's "Let's kill people because they believe in God". That would be a theistic motivation, wouldn't it?
It is anti-theists, either a specific theism, or all theisms, but it is not necessarily Atheist, which is one reason why I think you can't say Anti-Theism is to Atheism what Fundamentalism is to Theism.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Khyron:
What I don't get is why the discussion focusses on religion being the root of all evil, when it's clear that if there were a God, he'd be the root of all evil, since he created everything in the first place.
Which leads to the question: why do people insist on worshipping the root of all evil?
This, of course, takes us in a completely different direction than the rest of the thread. This is the argument against God from evil, or the so-called "Problem of Evil." In a nutshell, there are two versions of it: the logical problem and the evidentiary problem. The logical problem holds that it is not just mistaken but positively irrational to believe in God, because the attributes commonly predicated of him are such that they are incompatible with the existence of evil in the world. The logical problem, though at one time it had quite a following, is not argued with much frequency any more, due to the efforts of Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga's works God and Other Minds and The Nature of Necessity (and summarized in God, Freedom, and Evil) set forth a solution to the logical problem of evil that is accepted by most philosopers (theistic and atheistic alike) as having solved the problem. Hence most philosophers do not take this strategy in arguing against God. (By the by, I wrote a paper on the Plantinga's free will defense; it's on my blog: http://calebkeller.blogspot.com/2007/05/plantinga-and-problem-of-evil.
html).
Typically, your objection is answered as follows: if humans have freedom of will, then they and they alone are responsible for their choices. And if that's the case, you can have humans doing evil things that God isn't the cause of.
Interested to hear what you think.
Oh, and a P.S. to those who think that all thinking about God is illogical thinking: I'd challenge you to pick up a copy of God, Freedom and Evil and see what it looks like for someone to use logic to think about God.
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Quote:My point was a bit different from the standard "problem of evil" argument, though. I wasn't really saying it's irrational to believe in God because there's evil in the world, I was saying it's irrational to worship him because there's evil in the world. For argument's sake, let's assume God exists. He created evil in the world (or rather, a person's capacity to do evil), so does the good he created really make up for it? People worship him because of the good he's done and ignore the evil he enables and allows, which is sort of like thinking a mafia boss or a warlord is a saint since he gives money to charity or tells his henchmen to help build an orphanage.
Originally posted by Causal:
This is the argument against God from evil, or the so-called "Problem of Evil." In a nutshell, there are two versions of it: the logical problem and the evidentiary problem. The logical problem holds that it is not just mistaken but positively irrational to believe in God, because the attributes commonly predicated of him are such that they are incompatible with the existence of evil in the world.
Quote:I agree with that statement in itself, but it's part of the contradiction that I mentioned above: Evil is attributed to people and, presumably, good attributed to God. It seems like very selective reasoning, it's like he can't lose and people can keep worshipping him because they attribute him with only good intentions, but the argument forgets that God allows freedom of will to include doing evil things. If God had the option of allowing evil by giving people unlimited free will, or suppressing evil by allowing only limited free will that doesn't allow for actions that are evil, why would he not go for the latter? Is unlimited free will, which in most cases is restricted by upbringing and society anyway, really more important to him than the lack of evil?
If humans have freedom of will, then they and they alone are responsible for their choices. And if that's the case, you can have humans doing evil things that God isn't the cause of.
I haven't had a look at your paper yet since I'm still pressed for time (exams...), but I look forward to reading it.
Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.
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Quote:Are you actually accusing me of being a “Dawkinite?” It seems like you’ve bought hook line and sinker into Citizen’s word play.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Gotta side with Cit here man. That's some extrodinary word play. You're almost convincing that any battle, whether religiously motivated, or motivated by the absolute non-existance and disbelief of religion are all religious battles. No wonder you Dawkinites are doing such a bang up job destroying religion in the West.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:Quote:
Or it can be easily used to justify peaceful co-existance
So can Secular Humanism, even pure science can give us a reason to be nice to each other*, religion isn't necessary to get people to play nice.
I do think that you're right that there are forces other than religion that can be used as a source of motivation or inspiration for peaceful co-existence. But that doesn't mean that it's wrong to say that religion can't or shouldn't (and I realize you're not arguing that, but some might). I think that it's the case that if you look at the most egregious abuses of Christianity, you'll find that they occur in the period after Theodosius established Christianity as the official (and only legal) religion of the Roman Empire. Prior to that period, Christians had been a persecuted minority--obviously not in any position to perpetrate large-scale abuses of the type we've been discussing this far. Galen, the Roman physician, took up the subject of the Christian faith (which was steadily moving throughout the empire) in the middle of the second century. Although he criticized the Christians for not being able to present a philosophical defense of their beliefs, "Galen was impressed that Christians were able to lead men and women to a life of virtue in the same fashion as the leading philosophical schools of the day. Through Christian practice, Christian morality, the early Chrstian movement made its first bid for acceptance within the Greco-Roman world." [ 1 ] Wilken asserts that in the world of second century Rome, Christians, while they were reviled for going against the grain of traditional Roman religion, were also living decent lives, and it was the quality of those lives that legitimized the Christian religion to their contemporaries.
By the time of the "Great Persecution" in 303 CE, Ralph Martin Novak notes that, "The tetrarchs found it difficult to enforce wide-spread compliance with the measures directed against the Christians because many local officials only half-heartedly carried out their instructions. This lack of zeal among the local officials may lie in the facy that by this time the Christians were a known quantity: people who, even if they were prone to a rather embarrassingly strident monotheism, were nonetheless respectable in their personal and ethical conduct and performed many works of charity." [ 2 ] Novak, then, thinks that the reason the Great Persecution wasn't more devastating to the Christian church was that while the Christians did certainly have strange beliefs, they were also benefitting their communities.
Contrast this to the situation after Constantine's legalization of Christianity: "Constantine appears to have believed that Christianity could be made to serve as a source of unity and strength for Rome's empire." [ 3 ] He embarked on this project enthusiastically, even exerting his control over church councils in order to enforce his "one church, one empire, one emperor" doctrine. By the time of Theodosius, Christianity had been incorporated fully into the apparatus of the Roman Empire and vice versa, such that teasing them apart would have been impossible. And this interweaving of the Church and the structures of State power persisted for another thousand-plus years. It was during that time that the "religious" violence took place. To be fair, a thing like the Spanish Inquisition ("Fear, surprise, and a fanatical devotion to the Pope!!") does certainly seem to be fully and wholly religiously motivated. But if we were to look at other instances of "religious" violence, I suspect that we'd see that in many cases, such violence was a bid for power couched in religious terms, more so than it was legitimately religious violence.
I guess my main thesis here is that while, yes, there have been and continue to be instances of purely religious violence, much of the violence carried out in religion's name is not religiously motivated, but rather motivated by a desire for power. I mourn the fact that my f
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Quote:First of all Stalin and Al Qaeda are not equivalent because one is an organization and one is man. But the atheism in Stalin’s purges, among other religious purges in the Soviet Union, had to do with the ideology of the Soviet Union, not with Stalin’s atheism.
Originally posted by citizen:
I don't accept that Atheism is a type of Theism. "Stalin was Atheist" is not an equivalent statement to "Al Qaeda is a religion based organisation". If Stalin was a Christian would that mean the purges were Christian? I don't think so, I don't see how the beliefs of the head man automatically make his actions based entirely on those beliefs.
Quote:“Let’s kill people because they believe in god.”
Originally posted by citizen:
If, however, the statement was "Let's kill people because there is no God" the situation would be different.
Quote:You’re arguing my point. In other words, you're not willing to make the same provisions for the theistic side that you are for the atheistic side. Your claim requires that the religious justification used by Al Qaeda is just a subset of the religious opinions held by the majority of peace-loving religious people, but then the brand of atheism espoused by the Soviet Union in its religious purges was something different from peace-loving atheist. And until we are willing to apply this language fairly, I don’t think it should be used, because it is not internal consistent and it will just become a justification to hate religion in general.
Originally posted by citizen:
I don't think we do Finn, at least most people don't. Though I have, at times, been one of the few people on this site who doesn't want to say "all Muslims are Terrorists". But necessarily a given fundamentalism is a subset of a given Theism, but I don't accept that Anti-Theism is a subset of Atheism.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Hey Fredgiblet:
At the risk of being to tangential, I appreciated your comment and wanted to respond.
Anyways, it sounds like you are using the Miller experiment to justify the possibility of a naturalistic origin of life. However, the Miller experiment does not even apply to the question. Why? Because 1) It presupposes an early atmosphere of methane, hydrogen and ammonia. The current understanding is that the early environment was mainly water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen which do not interact to form the building blocks of life. Therefore, the Miller experiment makes no contribution to a naturalistic explanation of the origin of life -- it doesn't even apply.
The second flaw in using the Miller experiment as justification is that it was built with a "trap", to separate out more complicated molecules. Nature, however, does not have a trap to deliberately separate the more complicated molecules. In real life, even presupposing that the early atmosphere they used was correct, these molecules would have interacted with anything else in the "soup", generally forming long chain hydrocarbons -- not amino acids and nucleotides.
One more side note: as far as I know, the Miller experiment never demonstrated that it even formed the 4 basic nucleotides of DNA and all 20 essential amino acids. And the amino acids it did form were a mixture of right and left handed versions (modern organisms only use left handed versions in the construction of proteins). It gets even more complicated, but I think you get the idea that producing and organizing these building blocks into something life-promoting defied the odds...
As far as your point about needing some kind of precursor cell that is simpler than any of the one-celled organisms we have today, the problem is, the simplest organism we can conceive of that meets criteria for being alive (um, I guess that would mean having the ability to replicate, repair itself, move, grow, eat, and excrete) is still incredibly complex and still beyond anything we can create in a lab. I think it takes some degree of faith to believe that this could have formed naturally.
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Quote:I assume you are missing the point on purpose.
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
First of all Stalin and Al Qaeda are not equivalent because one is an organization and one is man. But the atheism in Stalin’s purges, among other religious purges in the Soviet Union, had to do with the ideology of the Soviet Union, not with the Stalin’s atheism.
Quote:I've already addressed that.
"people because they believe in god.”
Quote:You saying it doesn't make it true. You seem unwilling to accept that Atheism isn't a form of Theism.
You’re arguing my point. In other words, you're not willing to make the same provisions for the theistic side that you are for the atheistic side.
Quote:Someone can be anti-Theist without being Atheist, but you can't be a religious fundamentalist without being a Theists, therefore it is entirely incorrect to say Anti-Theism is to Atheist what fundamentalism is too theism. Saying “No it isn't” because you are unwilling to make the same provisions for the Atheist side that you do for the Theistic side, is not an argument
You claim that the religious justification used by Al Qaeda is just a subset of the religious opinions held by the majority of peace-loving religious people, but then you claim that the brand of atheism espoused by the Soviet Union in its religious purges was something different from peace-loving atheist.
.Quote:Saying that a Fundamentalist Muslim Fanatic has to be a Muslim isn't internally consistent? You're going to have to explain that one.
And until we are willing to apply this language fairly, I don’t think it should be used, because it is not internal consistent and it will just become a justification to hate religion in general.
Quote:It is not I who is using 'word play', it is you. Secondly it's obvious Jack wasn't talking to you, he's trying to insult, and straw man the arguments of, everyone on the side of the debate he doesn't agree with, and he agrees with your side.
Are you actually accusing me of being a “Dawkinite?” It seems like you’ve bought hook line and sinker into Citizen’s word play.
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
No one can see their reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.
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Hey Citizen,
My point in mentioning that some people here tend to focus on religion as being evil/negative was to say that much good has been done in the name of religion, yet they don't take that into account.
Also, I was a bit surprised to see that in the span of a few keystrokes, you were able to weigh all the good ever done throughout time by religiously motivated groups versus all the good ever done by non-religiously motivated groups and deduce that they "canceled out". Wow, I knew firefly fans were intelligent, but this borders on omniscience... 
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