theodicy

[Gary Childress]

Mike okay.

Gary okay.

Read the Noble Truths from Buddha and learn the only unfailing solution to suffering . Note that Buddha advocates no deity whatsoever as instrumental to the solution.

I looked it up on ChatGPT. If the Buddha is right, then God is not a personal God or anything remotely like it. However, the notion that life must necessarily be suffering is perhaps an unwarranted assumption. Life could be very fulfilling and satisfying (if there were a benevolent God out there to make it so).

Since you are such a Pollyanna , sorry but I cannot talk you you any more.

[MikeNovack]

I looked it up on ChatGPT. If the Buddha is right, then God is not a personal God or anything remotely like it. However, the notion that life must necessarily be suffering is perhaps an unwarranted assumption. Life could be very fulfilling and satisfying (if there were a benevolent God out there to make it so).

Gary, a neural net trained "large language model" is good for certain things. Can give you a starting point, since perhaps some lower probability "answers" are in the mix.

But I have not been making a case based on "most probable". In effect I am turning part of the usual description around.

I will repeat ---- Can living things suffer and experience evil? Can non-living things suffer and experience evil? I am NOT asking "are living things constantly suffering and experiencing evil?" That would NOT be the same as "Do living things sometimes suffer and experience evil?"

If you had in front of you some thing/being for which it was true "never suffered or experienced evil"how would you say this differed from a non-living thing/being

[Gary Childress]

I looked it up on ChatGPT. If the Buddha is right, then God is not a personal God or anything remotely like it. However, the notion that life must necessarily be suffering is perhaps an unwarranted assumption. Life could be very fulfilling and satisfying (if there were a benevolent God out there to make it so).

Gary, a neural net trained "large language model" is good for certain things. Can give you a starting point, since perhaps some lower probability "answers" are in the mix.

But I have not been making a case based on "most probable". In effect I am turning part of the usual description around.

I will repeat ---- Can living things suffer and experience evil? Can non-living things suffer and experience evil? I am NOT asking "are living things constantly suffering and experiencing evil?" That would NOT be the same as "Do living things sometimes suffer and experience evil?"

If you had in front of you some thing/being for which it was true "never suffered or experienced evil"how would you say this differed from a non-living thing/being

Of course, living beings can suffer. Does that mean that living beings must suffer?

[MikeNovack]

If you had in front of you some thing/being for which it was true "never suffered or experienced evil"how would you say this differed from a non-living thing/being

Of course, living beings can suffer. Does that mean that living beings must suffer?

Try answering the question that was asked. If/f you have an answer that, it might have a strong bearing on the one you are asking.

For example --- if you can't come up with a fundamental difference between living and non-living EXCEPT suffering/experiencing evil you then ARE saying "living beings must suffer"

[Gary Childress]

If you had in front of you some thing/being for which it was true "never suffered or experienced evil"how would you say this differed from a non-living thing/being

Of course, living beings can suffer. Does that mean that living beings must suffer?

Try answering the question that was asked. If/f you have an answer that, it might have a strong bearing on the one you are asking.

For example --- if you can't come up with a fundamental difference between living and non-living EXCEPT suffering/experiencing evil you then ARE saying "living beings must suffer"

The difference between living and nonliving is that living beings can experience things, including joy and suffering. Is that not obvious?

[MikeNovack]

The difference between living and nonliving is that living beings can experience things, including joy and suffering. Is that not obvious?

Then you have answered your own question: "Of course, living beings can suffer. Does that mean that living beings must suffer?"

If creation is dynamic (not frozen in tome) things happen, and some of those things will be experienced as suffering by some living beings. In which case God, however omnipotent, could not make creation dynamic, include living beings, but not also introduce suffering and evil. Not lack of power but logical contradiction.

[Gary Childress]

The difference between living and nonliving is that living beings can experience things, including joy and suffering. Is that not obvious?

Then you have answered your own question: "Of course, living beings can suffer. Does that mean that living beings must suffer?"

If creation is dynamic (not frozen in tome) things happen, and some of those things will be experienced as suffering by some living beings. In which case God, however omnipotent, could not make creation dynamic, include living beings, but not also introduce suffering and evil. Not lack of power but logical contradiction.

Keep telling yourself that, I guess.

[iambiguous]

Excusing God
Raymond Tallis highlights the problem of evil.

To some it may seem arrogant, even blasphemous, to suggest that the Creator should have looked before he leaped, and hesitated before switching on a universe with properties that eventually gave rise to sentient creatures so vulnerable to dreadful suffering.

Here, however, given my current frame of mind, as long as "a God, the God, my God" continues [by far] to be the font most mere mortals choose to put all of those terrible things into perspective, don't expect God and religion to go away anytime soon. After all, in regard to morality, meaning and metaphysics it all comes back to God for many. And it's not like there is a philosophical or ideological -- secular -- equivalent. Or none that I am aware of. Sure, those such as Ayn Rand insisted that morality and meaning are grounded metaphysically in Objectivism. But a lot of good that does those of her ilk in regard to immortality. Let alone salvation.

To wit:

This is the part that matters most to me. In fact, I still recall the first time I really began to think about it. I was reading a book about Jean-Paul Sartre. I believe it was a printed companion to a film/documentary about him.

In it, the author spoke of a friend of Sartre’s who had traveled to the Soviet Union to experience first hand the so-called New Man that was being created by the Marxist Revolution. Only when the discussion got around to death – to oblivion – it turned out that the New Man was really no better off than the Old Man. Sure, one might manage to think him or herself into believing that they “lived on” after death through the Revolution. For some that worked.

But, for others, who was kidding whom?

No God? No religious path? Forget about it. You die, disintegrating back to star stuff. Both Communists and capitalists.

Some apologists, however, have defended God’s choice on the grounds that the suffering is redeemed, possibly justified, or even to be regarded as a hidden good; for instance, on the grounds that it is character-building, or that it gives us the opportunity to devote ourselves to alleviating the suffering of our fellow humans.

In other words, back to the part where some believe "in their head" particular things about their own God while others believe "in their heads" particular things regarding human interactions in a No God world.

Then what? People believe what they do about God and theodicy. The part I root existentially -- historically, culturally and experientially -- in dasein. In part, perhaps, because there is that which we believe about something in the either/or world because in fact it's true for all of us, and there's that which we believe about something in the is/ought world because first and foremost, it comforts and consoles us to believe it.

This type of explanation, however, hardly applies to the suffering experienced by most non-human organisms; and it also seems irrelevant to the point of obscenity if it’s invoked in relation to those humans like Professor Maynard’s little patient who spent the last hours (or days) of her short life in unrelieved agony on the floor of an emergency room. The evil that caused this hideous suffering is in no way redeemed by the opportunity it provides for the exercise of goodness.

Or, from my perspective, many come up with something, with anything, God or No God, that keeps them from having to accept that this little girl's terrible suffering and death is essentially meaningless and purposeless.

[iambiguous]

Excusing God
Raymond Tallis highlights the problem of evil

The Imbalance of Good & Evil

More to the point, however, is that in the absence of a God, the God, good and evil themselves are largely existential constructs rooted historically, culturally and experientially in dasein. After all, it's not for nothing those like IC here will insist that in the absence of a God, the God, their God, Good and Evil are beyond the reach of mere mortals. Instead, they are derived largely from one or another sacred text. Moral commandments that then revolve around immortality and salvation. In other words, depending on which One True Path you are on, these commandments might pertain to any number of ofttimes contradictory assessments of conflicting goods.

Goff’s ‘God of limited power’ is at least benign. But then there is Steven Law’s ‘The Evil God Challenge’ (Religious Studies, 2010, 46:3). Law reminds us that there are, after all, good things in the world – beauty, wonder, love, nobility, pleasure, happiness – which may allay the suspicion that the universe has been created by an ‘all-evil’ omnipotent God.

Again, however, back to the part where any number of these folks...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philosophies

...will insist that only their own assessments actually count.

And really what are the odds that of all these assessments of "beauty, wonder, love, nobility, pleasure, happiness" etc., your own is always going to be the one smack dab in the bullseye?
 

As Law points out, however, it does not support the notion of a god who is all-good. In general, any attempt to rest the answer to the question of the benevolence of God on a ‘felicific calculus’ performed to determine whether the sum total of goodness or happiness exceeds that of evil or suffering, must fail.

As I [and other moral nihilists] point out, however, any number of moral objectivists [God and No God] will insist that, on the contrary, you are either "one of us" or...

..."or else"? 

Thus this part...

Firstly, we cannot add up the quantity of happiness and the quantity of suffering over the history of the universe in order to see which is the greater. To put it mildly, we lack the data. And in any case, happiness and suffering cannot be quantified on a single scale, so the relevant sums cannot be performed.

...is no less problematic.

Still, "in reality" they are performed all the time. The objectivists' "calculations" are derived from the assumption that their own One True Path to Good and Evil had better be the one that others choose. It's then only a matter of just how fiercely dogmatic they are in insisting on it. And here we can go all the way to...to the reeducation camps, the gulags or the gas chambers.

Go ahead and ask them to explain that.

[popeye1945]

There is no such thing as evil; there is what is, and what is has gradients of that which is pleasurable, painful, life supporting, or life negating, and you get down and feel about it. Leave the pretentious mythologies/religions behind where they belong.

[Greatest I am]

There is no such thing as evil; there is what is, and what is has gradients of that which is pleasurable, painful, life supporting, or life negating, and you get down and feel about it. Leave the pretentious mythologies/religions behind where they belong.

Correct. Things cannot be better than at "this" point in time.

Only what we do from "now" on can improve what we do not like.

Realists recognize that there is a hell of a lot more good in most lives than evil.

[popeye1945]

There is no such thing as evil; there is what is, and what is has gradients of that which is pleasurable, painful, life supporting, or life negating, and you get down and feel about it. Leave the pretentious mythologies/religions behind where they belong.

Correct. Things cannot be better than at "this" point in time.

Only what we do from "now" on can improve what we do not like.

Realists recognize that there is a hell of a lot more good in most lives than evil.

EXCELLENT!

[Belinda]

There is no such thing as evil; there is what is, and what is has gradients of that which is pleasurable, painful, life supporting, or life negating, and you get down and feel about it. Leave the pretentious mythologies/religions behind where they belong.

Do you mean there is no objective evil? I ask because there is certainly subjective evil.

[popeye1945]

There is no such thing as evil; there is what is, and what is has gradients of that which is pleasurable, painful, life supporting, or life negating, and you get down and feel about it. Leave the pretentious mythologies/religions behind where they belong.

Do you mean there is no objective evil? I ask because there is certainly subjective evil.

That is your thumb on the pulse of it. Biology/organism/individual is the measure and the meaning of all things.

[Alexiev]

There is no such thing as evil; there is what is, and what is has gradients of that which is pleasurable, painful, life supporting, or life negating, and you get down and feel about it. Leave the pretentious mythologies/religions behind where they belong.

Do you mean there is no objective evil? I ask because there is certainly subjective evil.

That is your thumb on the pulse of it. Biology/organism/individual is the measure and the meaning of all things.

"Measures" and "meanings" are cultural constructs. We can't "measure" the distance between two points except by referring to "miles" or "inches" or "kilometers". "Meaning" suggests using language to describe something.

IN fact our biological selves were shaped by supernatural (or at least super-biological forces. Once language began developing, the frontal lobes of human brains became enlarged, presumably because of the advantages the successful manipulation of language provided.

NO "meanings" or "measures" exist without culture.