Philosophy Now Forum

If the suffering of children bothered God, then God would have done something about it.

But that's another story.

phyllo wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2024 1:21 pm If the suffering of children bothered God, then God would have done something about it.

He has. He sent His Son to rescue us. Short of forcing us into obedience, what more could He have done?

But, we might ask, what have you done about the suffering... of children, or of anybody else?

God could have made food abundantly available.

God could have made purification of water easy.

God could have prevented many diseases.

God could have placed antibiotic plants everywhere and shown how to use them.


But I'm not going to turn this thread into a discussion of god(s).

phyllo wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2024 6:26 pm God could have made food abundantly available.

He did. It is. It's human behaviour that makes food unavailable. It's bad governments. There's plenty of food capacity, worldwide; but there isn't the means of distribution, because of war, tyranny, greed and corruption.

God could have made purification of water easy.

Well, the first question is why water is impure in the first place, is it not?

God could have prevented many diseases.

Likewise, isn't the question, why are there diseases?

But I'm not going to turn this thread into a discussion of god(s).

You raised it. I didn't. I've been debating the Compatibilism issue. But when you swung to that topic, I did not refuse.

I felt the need to release some gas.

You need not dwell on it.

Carry on with compatibilism.

phyllo wrote: ↑Mon Oct 21, 2024 1:41 pm
Iambiguous will sometimes posts his 4 or 5 questions about the existence of God, etc.

4 actually:

1] a demonstrable proof of the existence of your God or religious/spiritual path
2] addressing the fact that down through the ages hundreds of Gods and religious/spiritual paths to immortality and salvation were/are championed...but only one of which [if any] can be the true path. So why yours?
3] addressing the profoundly problematic role that dasein plays in any particular individual's belief in Gods and religious/spiritual faiths
4] the questions that revolve around theodicy and your own particular God or religious/spiritual path

Care to go there yourself?

And then the part where some insist that 1] their own God is in fact all knowing but 2] they are still free to do as they please.

Only, even here, that really comes down to doing what the ecclesiastics warn they must do or risk damnation.

phyllo wrote: ↑Mon Oct 21, 2024 1:41 pmI asked him what posters could write which would demonstrate the existence of God to him.

He replied that if God performed a miracle, then that would be a good demonstration for him.

As I recall, I noted that if I woke up one morning to the news that not a single child anywhere around the globe had suffered, and this continued on and on, and someone attributed that to a God, the God, my God, I'd be very, very impressed. But there's still the part where we are confronted with evidence so overwhelming that no rational man or woman could deny it. Like, say, Jesus Christ returning to vote for Kamala Harris?

phyllo wrote: ↑Mon Oct 21, 2024 1:41 pmIOW, no "mere human" can give him an adequate demonstration.

No, no mere mortal of late has been able to. So, go ahead, give it a shot yourself.

phyllo wrote: ↑Mon Oct 21, 2024 1:41 pmCan anything be proven or demonstrated to him? I don't think so. He wants absolute certainty from an infallible source.

I'm actually being rather generous here in describing this as preposterous. What I want is a reason to believe that human existence does encompass a teleological component, that human morality can be encompassed deontologically, that immortality and salvation are within reach, and that I am able to believe that I am expressing all of this here and now of my own volition.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Oct 21, 2024 1:55 pm
Yes, I think you're right about that...Biggie can't be convinced.

On the other hand -- click -- if IC can't convince others here to accept Jesus Christ as their own personal savior, they are damned for all of eternity in Hell.

There's nothing at all like that from me.

On the contrary, I want to be convinced that a God, the God does in fact exist. I want to be born again. I want to be saved. And perhaps if IC and I explore the "scientific and historical" evidence he claims that William Lane Craig provides to "demonstrate" His existence, I might come around.

Atla wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2024 1:53 am

iambiguous wrote: ↑Mon Oct 21, 2024 11:51 pm And it's not like anyone here ever "bashes" me, right? On the other hand, me bashing others and others bashing me may well be interchangeable in turn. Even in "everyday life".

Don't know what that means, here both your bashing of others and others bashing you, was mainly caused by you.

Unless, of course, you're wrong.

And what it means depends entirely on what assumptions you make regarding how the "human condition" fits into the existence of existence itself. And then how arrogant some then become here when insisting that their own and only their own assessment encompasses it.

Maybe it's just me but this sure sounds an awful lot like someone asserting things that they believe in their head about things they have no capacity to actually demonstrate are true for all rational men and women.

And this thread revolves more around the extent to which this exchange itself is unfolding either autonomously or autonomically.

Atla wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2024 1:53 am Yes imo it's just you, for rational men and women it can be demonstrated that meaning, purpose and morality are human subjective psychological features, and so far we haven't found the universe to have any. And the biology of birth and death is pretty damn clear.

Birth and death. No getting around them for any of us here. But what on Earth are we to make of either of them...ontologically, teleologically? And those subjective psychological assessments in regard to meaning, morality and metaphysics are all up and down the moral, political, philosophical and spiritual spectrum.

Then the distinction I make here between the either/or world where all rational men and woman actually can agree on any number of things empirically and experientially, and the is/ought world where truly epic confrontations have unfolded throughout all of human history.

Atla wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2024 1:53 amTo me you sound more and more like an objectivist in denial, who has a beef with other objectvisist for not being good enough objectivists.

To me that is ridiculous. Determinism as I understand it today is no different from how I once understood Christianity, Marxism, Trotskyism, democratic socialism, existentialisn, deconstruction and on and on. Except I have no illusions whatsoever that my understanding of these things here and now really, really has led me to my very own rendition of the One True Path.

How then, given your own interactions with others, is "free will" different from free will.

Atla wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2024 1:53 amSince I know a lot about how the world actually works via determinism and how much we can change psychologically, I can make more everyday choices than the average person who fully believes in libertarian free-will heh heh. I can sometimes make choices where most people just glide by automatically.

Over and over again, the assumption on your part that you really, really do know how "the world works via determinism". As though this part...

All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was "somehow" able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter "somehow" became living matter "somehow" became conscious matter "somehow" became self-conscious matter.

...will, what, end up having little or no real importance at all here?

Atla wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2024 1:53 amI hold that at any given moment I can stop and think and then do whatever the f I want, if my current biological body is capable of doing it.

Okay, but how far is "holding something" to be true in regard to the human brain itself not always going to be problematic.

Again, we think about this differently. If everyone of us defines compatibilism only as our brains compel us to, how can we then be held responsible by others for defining it either "right" or "wrong"? Other then because in holding or not holding others responsible that too is just another manifestation of the only possible reality.

Actions and reactions are all embedded in this only possible world.

Atla wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2024 1:53 amYes, and imo your thinking is wrong, because then the average human's brain is also "compelled" to make sense, and the standard definition of compatibilism doesn't make sense. Frankly you just sound to me like someone who wants an excuse to shed responsibility.

I have no idea how this pertains to the point I made. As though we can come up with "standard definitions" of complexities of this sort and, what, be certain that when we did so it was of our own volition.

And, of course, to others, you sound like someone who is unable even to accept the possibility that what they thnk and feel and say and do is not entirely autonomous.

Okay, how about this part then: "a man can do what he wants but not want what he wants".

Of course, Schopenhauer was himself no more able to demonstrate that this is true either.

Atla wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2024 1:53 amDon't know what that means: looks to me that wanting what one wants is just wanting said redundantly.

No way, they'll tell you. You can come to want any number of things from day to day, but if your brain is generating all of these wants it makes all the difference in the world.

It might be akin to watching a film unfold in which the characters want all sorts of things. But they want only what the director and/or the screene writer compel them to want. It's called a script. Well, what if Mother Nature is generating our own script from, say, the cradle to the grave?

Just so long as you are willing to accept that believing something which makes you feel psychologically comforted may actually be why you believe it in the first place?

Thus, it's sort of settled for you here and now. But not perhaps there and then?

Atla wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2024 1:53 amI think if that was fundamentally true then I would throw out my entire "absolute level" view and just be a blind irrational objectivist. But I can't do that because I value the smaller psychological comfort of truth over the great psychological comfort of blind irrational happy beliefs.

Unless, of course, "somehow" your brain is also behind everything you delude yourself into thinking is not a delusion at all.

Okay, given where the universe stops and "I" begins, how might that be understood more effably in regard to you participating in this exchange?

Atla wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2024 1:53 amThere is no place where the universe stops and the "I" begins, the "I" is a part of the universe. Did you honestly mean that?

Of course, if there is a God or a Pantheistic entity "out there" able to provide us with both a teleological purpose and a soul infused with free will to embody it...? In any event there would seem to be some way in which to connect the dots between "I" and all there is.

Just as it cannot yet be proven or disproven that we do in fact have free will. And that "true meaning" is whatever we are compelled by our brains to believe it is. But this quandary becomes particularly problematic because all we have available to us to broach, examine and assess all of this is the brain itself.

Atla wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2024 1:53 amErr no I disagree, 4D libertarian free will was pretty much disproven at this point by neuroscience and psychology etc., unless some big miracle is going on - not counting on that.

Okay, but you are using your brain to disagree. Or are you actually going to insist that you've got that covered. Your brain as opposed to other brains knows when to hand the reins over to you.

phyllo wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2024 1:21 pm If the suffering of children bothered God, then God would have done something about it.

But that's another story.

Of course, maybe God Himself is just another inherent manifestation of the laws of matter.

And yeah, I suppose if it came to pass that God isn't bothered at all by the suffering of children, that would be another story. And that one actually makes sense to me given all the truly terrible suffering that children are forced to endure day after day after day.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2024 6:10 pm

phyllo wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2024 1:21 pm If the suffering of children bothered God, then God would have done something about it.

He has. He sent His Son to rescue us. Short of forcing us into obedience, what more could He have done?

But, we might ask, what have you done about the suffering... of children, or of anybody else?

I'm sorry, but what are we to make of a mind that rationalizes things like this...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... _disorders

...by claiming Christ came to rescue us! As for forcing us into obedience, what's that got to do with all of the ghastly pain and suffering any number of children have endured as a result of these "acts of God":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_earthquakes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ... _eruptions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ... l_cyclones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tsunamis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landslides
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fires
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_floods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ... ore_deaths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_diseases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events

And I have always done everything that I possibly could to help children. On the other hand, I'm neither omniscient nor omnipotent.

iambiguous wrote: ↑Wed Oct 23, 2024 2:45 am Unless, of course, you're wrong.

And what it means depends entirely on what assumptions you make regarding how the "human condition" fits into the existence of existence itself. And then how arrogant some then become here when insisting that their own and only their own assessment encompasses it.

Birth and death. No getting around them for any of us here. But what on Earth are we to make of either of them...ontologically, teleologically? And those subjective psychological assessments in regard to meaning, morality and metaphysics are all up and down the moral, political, philosophical and spiritual spectrum.

Then the distinction I make here between the either/or world where all rational men and woman actually can agree on any number of things empirically and experientially, and the is/ought world where truly epic confrontations have unfolded throughout all of human history.

Ok you seem to be committed to not getting anywhere, yet you seem to want to get somewhere. Make up your mind.

To me that is ridiculous. Determinism as I understand it today is no different from how I once understood Christianity, Marxism, Trotskyism, democratic socialism, existentialisn, deconstruction and on and on. Except I have no illusions whatsoever that my understanding of these things here and now really, really has led me to my very own rendition of the One True Path.

One True Path = objectivism. Compared to that, I'm a legit non-objectivist.

Over and over again, the assumption on your part that you really, really do know how "the world works via determinism". As though this part...

All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was "somehow" able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter "somehow" became living matter "somehow" became conscious matter "somehow" became self-conscious matter.

...will, what, end up having little or no real importance at all here?

Yeah that was a lot of Western philosophy confusion. You split the world into irreconcilable categories: material and immaterial, living and non-living, non-conscious and conscious etc. And then wonder why your (by definition) irreconcilable categories can't be reconciled.

I have no idea how this pertains to the point I made. As though we can come up with "standard definitions" of complexities of this sort and, what, be certain that when we did so it was of our own volition.

And, of course, to others, you sound like someone who is unable even to accept the possibility that what they thnk and feel and say and do is not entirely autonomous.

What are you even on about? How can you accuse a determinist of being unable even to accept the possibility that what they think and feel and say and do is not entirely autonomous? And what does that have to do with coming up with "standard definitions"?

Okay, but how far is "holding something" to be true in regard to the human brain itself not always going to be problematic.

No way, they'll tell you. You can come to want any number of things from day to day, but if your brain is generating all of these wants it makes all the difference in the world.

It might be akin to watching a film unfold in which the characters want all sorts of things. But they want only what the director and/or the screene writer compel them to want. It's called a script. Well, what if Mother Nature is generating our own script from, say, the cradle to the grave?

Unless, of course, "somehow" your brain is also behind everything you delude yourself into thinking is not a delusion at all.

Okay, but you are using your brain to disagree. Or are you actually going to insist that you've got that covered. Your brain as opposed to other brains knows when to hand the reins over to you.

Dualistic gobbledygook. I AM (a part of) my brain.
I don't subscribe to Western philosophy that pretends that reality divides into mental and material. Those two are the same thing.

Of course, if there is a God or a Pantheistic entity "out there" able to provide us with both a teleological purpose and a soul infused with free will to embody it...? In any event there would seem to be some way in which to connect the dots between "I" and all there is.

If if.. so deep down you never gave up on objectivism and theism and dualism/souls and free will, you're just looking for someone to fully bring these back for you? Or maybe you're really so fractured that it's practically multiple personas with different wants and beliefs?

Good enough arguments will never come, so just forget about the wait and fully commit to theistic objectivism if that's better for you.

Or wait for a big miracle - wouldn't count on that.

(Ps. what does your burning need for theistic objectivism have to do with my take that compatibilism is incoherent when we use the standard meaning of free will?)

iambiguous wrote: ↑Wed Oct 23, 2024 3:13 am I have always done everything that I possibly could to help children.

And...what would that be?

iambiguous wrote: ↑Wed Oct 23, 2024 12:33 am On the other hand -- click -- if IC can't convince others here to accept Jesus Christ as their own personal savior, they are damned for all of eternity in Hell.

Perhaps that's because you're presently one of them.

1 Cor. 1:18 "For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God."

But I'll let you decide that.

I want to be convinced that a God, the God does in fact exist. I want to be born again. I want to be saved.

Were that actually true, I suspect you would be already. But in case you're sincere, here: https://www.gotquestions.org/what-is-the-gospel.html

And perhaps if IC and I explore the "scientific and historical" evidence he claims that William Lane Craig provides to "demonstrate" His existence, I might come around.

Well, you'll have to give them some consideration, then. Here you go: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Oct 23, 2024 5:11 am

iambiguous wrote: ↑Wed Oct 23, 2024 3:13 am

iambiguous wrote: ↑Wed Oct 23, 2024 3:13 am

I'm sorry, but what are we to make of a mind that rationalizes things like this...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... _disorders

...by claiming Christ came to rescue us! As for forcing us into obedience, what's that got to do with all of the ghastly pain and suffering any number of children have endured as a result of these "acts of God":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_earthquakes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ... _eruptions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ... l_cyclones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tsunamis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landslides
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fires
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_floods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ... ore_deaths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_diseases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events

And I have always done everything that I possibly could to help children. On the other hand, I'm neither omniscient nor omnipotent.

And...what would that be?

Uh, you skipped a few points.
Again.







Now that's entertainment!

iambiguous wrote: ↑Wed Oct 23, 2024 5:24 am Uh, you skipped a few points.

You didn't make a point. All you did is list websites. And I already know how to Google. Absent a question, a comment, or -- God forbid -- some original insight from you, I've got no idea why you want to send me to websites, or what question I'm supposed to answer.

But I'm even more mystified about what all this has to do with Compatibilism. Now, there's a real mystery...