General Discussions
The Root of all Evil : The God Delusion
POSTED BY: Calhoun
UPDATED: Thursday, December 17, 2015 06:12
VIEWED: 49488
PAGE 15 of 32
Saturday, May 26, 2007 4:56 PM
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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
The alternative is that god created man to be a slave to him, and there are those who believe that is precisely why god created man. That actually seems fairly irrational to me. But this is actually an attitude that we tend to associate with evil, not good. The enslavement of man has never been views as preferable, even by those who’ve practiced slavery.
But isn't that still the case, humans being a slave to God's will?
After all, we have "free will" but if we actually exercise it and choose to do evil, we go to hell.
That sort of "You're free to do what you want, but if you don't do as I say, you'll be punished" attitude seems more like a mockery of free will.
That's not to say I'm endorsing evil. Just saying, it's creating free will with the condition of not really exercising it by threat of punishment. How is that not slavery?
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Saturday, May 26, 2007 4:57 PM
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Originally posted by leadb:
So, your logic follows, that since people feel VERY strongly about religion, ipso facto religion isinaccurate'bad' and thus should be stomped out? (I'm sure the stomping in your case would be limited strictly to non-violent, caring methods.) [ edit to remove 'inaccurate' and substitute 'bad' ]
No. My logic is that the good that comes from religion can come from other sources that do not have to potential (or at least have reduced potential) for abuse. I did not state that religion itself is bad, merely that it (like many other things) can have evil effects. If you can achieve the same (or better) results with something that has less negative side-effects why shouldn't you? I would not shed a tear at the death of religion, but I would not advocate a systematic purge of religion either. I do believe that organized religion should be "stomped out" since the potential for abuse is very high and the benefit of organized religion over personal religion is small. However, religion itself is not something I feel strongly about either way (except when I see another story about an abortion clinic being bombed or the Phelps clan picketing another funeral).
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So, to be very clear, I will state:
Secular Humanism can be easily used to justify peaceful co-existance.
We agree on that point. However, arguing that religion is the root of all evil (remember the original premise of this discussion) does -not- lead to peaceful co-existance; it tends to lead to hate, war, death and destruction. My position is better stated as such:
Belief in God (god, goddess, gods, etc), and hence religion of some variety, is not intrinsicly evil; it is often a force for good. Thus, religion is -not- the root of -all- evil.
Agreed, I don't believe I ever said I agreed with Dawkins, in fact I may have posted (and I know I considered posting) a response saying that I think he does more harm then good (at least lately, he used to be pretty kick-ass but then he got religious about his atheism). My position, more clearly stated, is that religion is not necessary and is more harmful and less beneficial then some of the alternatives. However, I am all for allowing people to harm themselves, I just don't want it to affect me.
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To further stipulate, I will maintain that some people lack the intellectual capacity to be a "good human secularist"; if you 'liberate' them from the 'controls' of religion, you can end up with a Stalin.
Agreed...to a much lesser point. Psychopaths exist, this cannot be denied, but religion doesn't necessarily make them any better and in some cases religion can have a hand in creating them (Ed Gein anyone?).
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But Stalin is proof positive we should not go clammering off following the lead of an athiest blindly (which I will acknowledge a 'Human secularist' would tend not to given the 'test beliefs' convictions they uphold).
Right, but that's just it, there is no power structure in atheism, there are no prophets there is no reason to follow someone because they are atheist. People didn't follow Stalin because he was an atheist, they followed him because he promised them things they wanted. On the other hand many religions stress obedience to the leaders of the religion giving over control of their lives to someone else.
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Saturday, May 26, 2007 5:10 PM
Quote:No, we’d have to become even more then just simpletons. Even animals kill each other. In order to accomplish what you are suggesting it seems to me that humans would have to be devolved down to some sort of inert amoeba. I don’t think that it makes much sense to say that we would be free thinkers if we were told what we could and couldn’t think.
Originally posted by Khyron:
Curtailing freedom of will by eliminating evil is hardly like making humans simpletons, and it wouldn't limit our capacity to be free-thinkers except when it comes to evil thoughts. You'd still have most of the things you cherish.
Quote:I don’t know how omniscient god is. Certainly more then me probably, but in any event, the choice of evil was left up to us. If we choose to be evil, I can’t see that as God’s fault.
Originally posted by Khyron:
By hypothesis, God is omniscient and he should've seen bad things were going to happen, and it's not like evil is something modern, it was part of society from the dawn of civilisation.
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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Saturday, May 26, 2007 5:15 PM
Quote:It sounds to me that you’re complaining about Newton’s Third Law. The ability to be sentient and free thinking is not the same thing as the ability to operate without consequences.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
That's not to say I'm endorsing evil. Just saying, it's creating free will with the condition of not really exercising it by threat of punishment. How is that not slavery?
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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Saturday, May 26, 2007 5:32 PM
Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:Quote:It sounds to me that you’re complaining about Newton’s Third Law. The ability to be sentient and free thinking is not the same thing as the ability to operate without consequences.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
That's not to say I'm endorsing evil. Just saying, it's creating free will with the condition of not really exercising it by threat of punishment. How is that not slavery?
But it's God who made the consequences.
What is the point of free will if the only option that doesn't draw bad consequences is obeying God's will in the first place?
It seems like mindgames at best.
All over the Old Testament God gets pissed off when people don't worship him and don't obey his laws. He killed all but a handful in the story of the great flood for that exact reason.
He created people, apparently, just to worship him. Slaves, whether they theoretically have a choice or not, because in the end they all get judged and only the "good" ones don't go to hell. Hell is a pretty damn big God-made consequence.
And even if you count that people lived in paradise and ignorance when they were first created, he still gave them a just mockery of free will. Obey my one rule or be thrown out of paradise to suffer and die. What's the point of that? The temptation to make a choice that's not the Correct One is already sin.
Slaves and toys to a bored, vain deity, that's all I ever took away from that. Which is why Jesus, to me, is a wonderful philosopher with an amazing message but I just can't connect him to an actual God.
God, to me, is not a judging entity or loving father figure, but rather the indifferent order of the universe. Indifference I can deal with, but not the pretense of caring.
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Saturday, May 26, 2007 5:34 PM
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Originally posted by Malachite:
Hey Fredgiblet:
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment
Everything that I've seen shows that the current understanding is that a reducing atmosphere is likely, if you can show me links to sources that say otherwise I'll consider them. Additionally the entire atmosphere doesn't need to be reducing it could have had a reducing pocket (a cave perhaps) that just reduces the number of experiments being run at any given time.
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The second flaw in using the Miller experiment as justification is that it was built with a "trap", to separate out more complicated molecules.
The main purpose of the experiment was to show that complex organic chemicals could form, to show that they need to able to see the results, they could have done the experiment without the trap but that would have made the experiment more difficult for no reason.
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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.
I'll get back to this at the end.
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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.
The assumption of need for the 4 nucleotides can be stipulated, but the earliest self-replicators would not necessarily have needed all 22 amino acids. Also the Miller experiment was just the first there were others done later including at least one that created all 4 nucleotides.
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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).
So? It isn't written in stone anywhere that we had to have these particular building blocks, it's entirely possible that we could have ended up with a mixture of handedness or exclusively right-handed acids. It is possible that right-handed acids are somehow less fit then left-handed acids and thus that replicators that used left-handed acids outcompeted the right-handers. Also I've heard that this might be evidence for panspermia as the polarization of radiation might have forced a handedness in the acids developed in space.
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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...
I'll get to this at the end.
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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.
The only necessary ability out of the ones you listed is the ability to replicate, the rest are tertiary, though one you didn't list, heritable variation, is necessary for life to have developed after abiogenesis. Once self replication with heritable variation has developed everything else c
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Saturday, May 26, 2007 5:38 PM
Quote:
Originally posted by Khyron:
y 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.
Well, the reason I bring up the logical problem of evil is that "atheologians" (to use Plantinga's term) want to argue these sorts of questions to establish God's non-existence. They boil down to objections of the sort: "But surely God could have done better!" From there, atheist will say that the fact that he could have done different, but didn't means either he's not the three-omnis God (as traditionally conceived) or that he doesn't exist.
I see what you mean by the distinction between it being irrational to believe there is such a being and it being irrational to worship such a being. That said, your argument seems to turn around your assertion that "he created the evil in the world (or, rather a person's capacity to do evil)." In the first place, we're going to have to tease these apart. Which is it? Did he create the evil? Or did he create the human capacity for evil? It could be argued that you can conflate these two (such that to create the capacity is sufficient for having been the cause of the evil. But the typical view of human freedom is such that a person is alone responsible for the decisions they make (when it comes to moral culpability). Being that I accept a more libertarian view of human freedom I have to insist that God's being the cause of freedom on the will is not sufficient for his being the cause of evil.
The next interesting bit of your argument (and at this juncture I'm grateful that we both seem to know the philosophical application of the word "argument") is this: "does the good he created really make up for it?" Well, that's the real trick, eh? There are some philosophers whose entire theodicy is based on the belief that all evil will work out for the best in the end (even if we don't know how). This is a pretty difficult view to attack, because no matter what objection is raised, the answer will always be, "I don't know how, but it will work out for the best in the end." But this is hardly a thoroughgoing philosophical defense. Plantinga's proposal is that it might be possible that God could not have created a world with moral good but no moral evil. Now, because he was defending against the logical problem of evil, all he had to establish is that that is possibly the case--not that it is the case. But consider the nature of moral goods. Suppose Smith happens upon Jones, who's fallen into a lake and can't swim. Smith is in a position to save Jones. If Smith dives into the lake and saves Jones, I take that act to be a moral good. But the reason I think that that was a morally good act is because Smith could have done otherwise. Just as morally evil acts seem to involve free choice, morally good acts also involve free choice. But if Smith had no choice in the matter, if he was forced in some way to do what he did, I would hardly say that what he did was morally good. The upshot is that it might turn out that you can't have any moral good unless moral evil is also a live option.
In addition, I'm a little confused on how we might go about measuring evils and goods and comparing the two. It does seem like there's an awful lot of evil in the world. But there's also a lot of good two. I'm not sure we're going to be able to find an objective way to measure and compare, so there's some element of subjectivity inher
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Saturday, May 26, 2007 5:38 PM
Quote:Yes they do, almost always in order to survive or for related reasons. That's not evil. In most cases a person killing somebody for his survival isn't evil either. A murderer, though, doesn't kill for his own survival, and his actions would be evil.
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
No, we’d have to become even more then just simpletons. Even animals kill each other.
Quote:No it doesn't, unless you think free-thinking people who don't have evil thoughts are inert amoeba.
In order to accomplish what you are suggesting it seems to me that humans would have to be devolved down to some sort of inert amoeba.
Quote:No, but he gave us the choice and so he has to share the responsibility. If a parent gives a child a gun to play with and it kills someone, is it the child's fault or the parent's fault?
If we choose to be evil, I can’t see that as God’s fault.
Before that analogy gets taken out of context, note that I don't think people who do evil things are innocent, as the child would arguably be in such a situation; the analogy was supposed to highlight the aspect of responsibility of the parent-figure, not the innocence or lack thereof of the child-figure.
Causal, I'll get to your post later, an interesting read though (as always).
Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.
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Saturday, May 26, 2007 5:39 PM
Quote:That wouldn’t seem to solve your problem though. There are just as many consequences to disobeying the laws of the Universe. We are as much slaves to the laws of the universe as to god.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
God, to me, is not a judging entity or living father figure, but rather the indifferent order of the universe. Indifference I can deal with, but not the pretense of caring.
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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Saturday, May 26, 2007 5:45 PM
Quote:
Originally posted by Malachite:
[BAlso, 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...
Amazing how that works, eh? I just want to know how you would even go about making such a calculation. By what measure could we empirically determine the ammount of good and the amount of evil such that we could compare them? And then by what measure could we determine what outweighs what? I think that it's going to turn out that there is no way to figure this out, and so any "evaluation" will turn out to be little more than mere opinion.
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