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July 27, 2006 Oddly, Tracey saw fit to bring this debate from the rebuttal forum to the main page. Usually, it works the other way around. I did respond in the forum, but I'll answer again here with fresh words – why Tracey would want to hear my response twice is beyond me, but I'll play along and get to the root of the issue in the process. What this all boils down too is that Tracey finds it hard to maintain his own view of God, namely, that God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and moral, in a logical manner. Tracey rejects the argument that “faith is all that is required” for religious belief. He is, in my view, someone on the verge of a personal change. He is currently somewhere between a hopeful desperation and a willful ignorance. He will either eventually become a fundamentalist or an agnostic. I don't mean this to sound insulting in the least – Tracey does what many Christians won't. Many Christians either refuse to analyze these topics too deeply for fear of losing faith or simply don't care or lack the intellectual curiosity to probe. The premise for this debate, then, is that these things can be analyzed using logic and evidence (scientific, historical, etc.). Naturally others would argue that God is above and beyond human logic, but then, so is Allah, Vishnu, unicorns and every other fantastical notion great and small. I would say that if faith-based belief is untouchable by logic, then it runs squarely into every faith-based belief and often, they conflict. This means that we must ask, how is one faith better or more correct than another? Invariably, these debates fall back into traditional forms, attacking the relevant holy texts, using evidences from history and science! One can find many writings online from Christians attacking the historical foundation of parts of the Koran and vice versa, for example. So, the framework is that we must use what Christians say are attributes of their supernatural God along with human analysis and logic. Here then is the set of relevant paradoxes, many such can be easily constructed: If God is all knowing, then he knew that Satan would revolt and that Eve would bite the apple, therefore, all evil is God's fault and it wasn't really a test at all in Eve's case. If God is all powerful, then he could have made a universe allowing us to love and worship God without learning lessons the hard way. Tracey loves to misunderstand the second one and compares parenting to God's plan; for example, his own children must fall down and scrape a knee in order to learn to be careful, or, they must be punished for not finishing their meal so that they remain healthier in the future. Tracey loves to use analogies comparing compassionate parents with a moral God. Parents do not have God's abilities, however. If I were God, why would I bother teaching my child a lesson the hard way? I might program her with the knowledge before hand (like Data and his ethical programming on Star Trek: The Next Generation), or, simply change the laws of the universe such that she will know what's right without pain. Having infinite power allow such, after all! The argument that God is merely harming us for our own good seems rather desperate to me; it seems like a way attempt to keep the illusion that omnipotence/omniscience can coexist with a world which allows suffering. Besides, think carefully about what God is teaching us – he isn't merely trying to protect us from ourselves, making sure we keep our shoes tied to avoid tripping down a flight of stairs, he is protecting us from HIMSELF! The punishment for not learning God's lessons are dire, we are told, ranging anywhere from no eternal life, to eternal life with torture. How could this analogy possibly work? It would have to be something like an abusive alcoholic father teaching his children to be careful not to raise his temper or suffer a beating with a bottle of vodka. There is no REAL moral lesson, is there? The father could simply deal with his own temper and his other issues. This alone can lead into lengthy debates – for example, why is the master of space and time worried about worship from his creation FIRST? That should be the last commandment. That poor Bible-bloke should have said, “No God, I will NOT kill my son! I know you could squash me like a bug, but I love my son”. To which God should have said, “Very good, you have passed the test, you are a good moral person, no go forth and live happily”. Besides, much suffering happens without man-on-man evil, hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanoes for example. What lesson is there in having your lungs burnt by volcanic ash or having your car fall 50 feet into a sinkhole without warning? This is my sig from the forum (a quote from Epicurus) which sort of compresses this complex discussion very nicely, followed by a lovely quote from Mark Train that I've only recently become aware of: ”Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” And now for the relative morality part of his spiel. First off, it's very easy to see how empathy can evolve. Now, Tracey doesn't accept evolution, rather, I think he does but he struggles with it, not the science, but the affect to his religious belief. This is a sad and unfortunate symptom of American evangelical power-seeking sects, for, in the rest of the world, evolution isn't controversial. To science, it's also not controversial and hasn't been for nearly a century, but that's another article. Assuming Tracey believed that anything can evolve at all, here's how empathy could have evolved. Many spiders take very good care of their children. Is that empathy? I'd argue no – it's pure instinct. Spiders don't have much room in their minds for free thought, they don't play, they don't do anything that we could identify with as leisure. Higher animals, like many mammals, have less instinct and more free will, to use an ironic term ;) Cats play, for example. They do have many instincts, but much of what they know they learn; this has many advantages, not the least of which is being more adaptable to new environments. They will try to pounce on a variety of food sources, for example, whereas a spider sticks to its internal program – if that food source is gone, the spider dies. A side of effect of less instinct is more choice, so for more advanced animals, reward mechanisms were evolved. It feels good to find shade when hot, it feels good to be clean, it feels good to have sex, and, yes, it feels good to bond with your child. Many mammals bond very closely with their offspring – that's already an example of empathy. As mammals began to live in groups, bonding with other members of the troupe also became essential. From the point of view of an individual monkey or primate, the more other eyes that can watch out for prey, the better the chances for individual survival. Birds and other animals do this too, but primates take this bonding to an extreme. Complex social connections exist. This kind of thing takes much brain power. Indeed, I've heard one zoologist say that one can tell just by looking at the size of the monkey or primate skull how many other critters lived in that group. The bigger the brain, the more room for complex social connections, the more rules you can observe, the more critters you can deal with on an individual basis. Empathy has obvious evolutionary advantages. Be it chimps bringing food to a fallen comrade unable to fend for himself, or elephants helping one of the herd out of a mud hole, empathy leads to success. Humans have perhaps even less instinct and even more free thought than other primates. As we organize ourselves into tribes we invent rules for ourselves, similar to other primates. While other primates can learn collective knowledge and pass it down, we can do something which they cannot – we can abstract our thoughts. This allows for writing, art, science, and, dogma. We can pass our tribal rules down through the ages much more efficiently. For a Muslim man, the thought of seeing his younger sister in a bikini might be as shocking as a modern American man seeing his wife covered from head to toe. Objectively, we really can't prefer one system over the other – there is no absolute backdrop of fixed morality. Each set of rules may work well in each culture for various reasons. Now, this doesn't mean that we can't say that their system is inferior from our point of view. To my way of thinking, it is, but I would never argue that this is because a set of universal rules makes it so. I could provide sound arguments for why women should be liberated, but ultimately, I must realize that these are just more inventions of man. Inventions that lead to better societies in my humble opinion, but certainly nothing of an absolute, fixed, stature. This bit about killing or murder in the Bible is foolishness, it simply takes relative morality into the realm of semantics. For example, one must first define what murder is! For a pacifist, it may be any killing that takes place in a war from either sides. As to war, what does the Bible tell us? Is the killing going on in our efforts in Iraq from our side murder or not? Is capital punishment murder, or not? According to the Bible, yes and no ;) To some Muslims, killing in the name of Allah is justified, to others, it is not. Incidentally, one can also find passage in the Bible along the lines of, “bring them before me so that I can kill them” - Jesus said such. Alas, we are left back where we started, we must reach our own conclusions based on our own biases and traditions, and hopefully, a healthy does of reason and rational thought. Tracey finds this notion of feeling around in the dark uncomfortable; I accept it as a reality. I prefer truth to comfort. I realize many do not, I realize many prefer a set of rules to follow and to know, with certainty, that they are universally correct. That doesn't work for me – there usually aren't easy answers, the quest for morality is often confusing. Relying on science helps, for nothing else approaches what we call truth as closely. For example, we can deduce those structures which cause creatures to feel pain, and then base actions towards such creatures on this knowledge. That's a pretty damn good direction to go, in my opinion. Finally, it seems that Keith is more than capable of speaking for himself, but I'll throw a quick comment out there since Tracey lumped it at the end of his piece: He also wonders (The Nature Of Religion) that if heaven or hell actually exist, then why haven’t found it? If you can see, smell, taste, touch or hear it, then it probably doesn’t exist. Well, how about thought? You can sense the after effects of a thought but the thought itself is immaterial. We also can't see computer software yet it, like thought, it isn't some ethereal mystical supernatural phenomenon. We also can't see energy - we can always only see the effects of energy on matter. We can test for thought, software and energy, however. We cannot test for gods, ghosts or Hell. ------------ About the author Frederick Smith: I enjoy writing about the positive virtues of humanism - humanists are the good guys. I now have a blog that I will start to increasingly maintain and update. Here is the link: fredsuberview.blogspot.com/ About my personal background and life: I was born, I got some education, worked, ate, and had some kids. It seems I like to write � something that was unknown to me until relatively recently...How's that for detail? ;) Hate mail is welcome unless you are from the Army Of God. Please! It's not that I mind seeing pictures of aborted fetuses in my inbox, but once you've seen one you've pretty much seen them all... Email: dahlek65@gmail.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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