ciphergoth | The Problem of Unfishiness

Mostly my reaction to that is to panic slightly and think "oh God, it wasn't me, was it?" [grin]

No, it wasn't you :-)

I had the same reaction, although I think it unlikely, since I'm quite happy with the necessity of evil for good to be meaningful as a solution to the problem of evil.

I'm not naming them on purpose because I'm always aware of the possibility that I'm misrepresenting them horribly, so I'll have to stop playing twenty questions on who it is now I'm afraid :-)

Well, unless I'm very much mistaken, it was me, about sixteen years ago, and I don't mind outing myself :-) I don't think you're misrepresenting me horribly, and in fact seeing this has cheered me up on a day when I was feeling fragile, because I have fond memories of the conversation. I do think there's a basic logical error in Greta Christina's post, and also probably some theory of knowledge that she's missing, but those things are her responsibility and not yours. I feel frubbly for you that someone you admire liked something you said, so between that and not wanting to start feeling fragile again, I won't start a debate about it now. Feel free to ask me over a pint sometime if you want, though...

Aw, I'm so flattered that you remember, and I'm glad you remember that conversation fondly!

To be honest, I mostly try and stay away from the argument from the problem of evil (or similar arguments like the argument from divine hiddenness) because I think it's the wrong argument for atheists to get into, but still I think they are good arguments and I'm always interested to hear about the counters people come up with, so I hope we share that pint soon.

I like that, I think. Well, 'like' is entirely the wrong word, but you know what I mean!

it depends whether you're talking about human evil (which you can argue is a side-effect of free will or because of original sin), or 'natural evil' such as earthquakes and so on. I find it hard to think that a god who would allow/cause thousands of people to die in order to give a few the chance to be heroes is 'benevolent'.

To me the killer argument isn't even earthquakes, it's diseases. Do we need all the nasty diseases we have, to make this the best world God could have made? Do we need malaria or smallpox?

My Dad spent a little time in the Sudan; the example he used to this end was "why did God feel the need to invent bilharzia? Couldn't we have gotten along just fine without that?"

David Attenborough uses a similar example:

My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind. And [I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy'

"All things dull and ugly
"All creatures short and squat..."

etc.

Well exactly. If there is a God doing all this (which I sincerely doubt) then we should be with all haste turning our backs on Him, for he's clearly a mindlessly violent sociopath.

I don't think this argument works on non-creationists. We certainly do need things_that_kill_other_things for evolution to work.

Right, but they don't have to be as nasty as bilharzia, or the eye parasite.

Assuming an omnipotent creator who could have made the universe work any way he wanted, though, why would he make it that way? Why not make it so that everything lives in universal happiness forever and there is never any pain, death or suffering? Why does an God want to sit by and see terrible things happen? Presumably he knew they would anyway, since he knows everything. So the only conclusion I can come to is that if he exists, he's done it on purpose.

I know the Bible explains this by original sin - that this was how things were in the Garden of Eden, until Eve handed her fella that fruit, and that pain, suffering and death were mankind's comeuppance. Even as a metaphor that seems pretty harsh!

Edited 2008-08-04 15:45 (UTC)

I think we've arrived at the middle of this conversation...

Because happiness isn't meaningful with reference to the existence of pain and suffering.

Not from where you're standing, no. What about from where God's standing? If God is truly omnipotent, surely concepts like 'meaningfulness' aren't significant to him? Or are you suggesting that logic and meaning transcend God?

If God is truly omnipotent, surely concepts like 'meaningfulness' aren't significant to him? Or are you suggesting that logic and meaning transcend God?

I wouldn't describe it as transcending God, but I don't think that the inability to do the logically impossible is a bar to omnipotence.

But then... why bother?

It just seems so much more likely that mankind made up gods in order that they'd have someone to blame when things went wrong, and someone to ask to make things better, than that an omnipotent, omniscient being made mankind just as... a game? An experiment? Not even that, though, since God already knows the outcome.

I find "Why bother?" a very difficult question to answer because it's so axiomatically obvious to me that any attempt to answer is going to sound frivolous, but basically, existing is way better than not.

Yes, for the individual, but not for the deity doing the creating - it doesn't matter whether he creates people or not.

"Because happiness isn't meaningful with reference to the existence of pain and suffering."

I do personally accept that there can be intelligent argument about how the existence of pain, suffering and, most importantly, trial is important to bring meaning to happiness, but even accepting it is we still have to confront the sheer quantity and intensity of pain and suffering.

Would happiness be less meaningful without bilharzia as mentioned by

ciphergoth or parasitic worms that eat human eyes as mentioned by

valkyriekaren?

Did we make life less meaningful when we eradicated smallpox?

I think that's part of the problem. Maybe removing all pain and suffering from the world would be a bad thing, but if you had the power to remove AIDs from the world would you think twice before doing so? Would you find it morally dubious for a human who had that power not to use it?

Ironically though, I do think the 'I don't know' answer isn't a bad one :oP Religion isn't science after all :o)

Everybody dies. Why is one particular kind of death worse than another?

If it were me who put the parasitic worm in the boy's eye, you wouldn't make this argument. When people say "God is good", they clearly aren't thinking of the kind of "good" that you can apply to ordinary people in their everyday life.

Exactly!

Honestly love, if you were killing people in any way at all I would have a fair few problems!

If I gave you the choice of being boiled alive slowly or going to sleep and never waking up, would you say they were the same?

Okay - this is quite different from the earthquake example, and is less about death and more about pain. And if you accept that some pain is necessary then any questions about "why must there be so much pain" fall over on the stubbed toe argument. (Suppose the worst pain anyone experiences were a stubbed toe. With nothing worse to compare it to people would be asking why God had to make stubbing your toe so horribly painful.)

I think part of what I'm getting at is, why would God bother? He already knows how the story's going to end, and he's the only one who's ever going to get to read it, so why bother writing it down?

That's an interesting point and one I hadn't heard before. Having said that, horrible though bilharzia is, we can imagine something worse than bilharzia (bilharzia PLUS leprosy!). So I don't think this is entirely fair.

And I do think that "why does a loving God make necrotizing fasciitis?" is a different question from "why does a loving God let us stub our toe?" Pain from trauma serves a purpose -- to help us learn to avoid trauma. Pain from disease is just content-less suffering.

Edited 2008-08-04 17:40 (UTC)

With nothing worse to compare it to people would be asking why God had to make stubbing your toe so horribly painful.

I think I speak for an awful lot of people when I say that I'm more than prepared to cross that bridge when we come to it.

Supposing God abolishes bilharzia, AIDS, parasitic worms etc today.

We will definitely appreciate the improvement for a while, it will be at least a generation before people rail at the heavens for the terrible pain of a stubbed toe. At which point, God can just reduce the total pain in the world by some enormous factor again, and achieve the same effect. He can repeat this as fast as He likes. Either He can carry on forever, which sounds good to me, or He will eventually bottom out at an effective zero pain point, which contradicts the assumption we started with about stubbed toes but is also fine with me.

If you trust that God's decision to keep bilharzia around is a good one, I can't imagine that He could really do anything that you might consider violated that trust.

Edited 2008-08-04 18:37 (UTC)

Great post. So... if Christians are filling in everything with a blue crayon and calling it "God"... does that mean being a Christian is "taking the blue pill"? :)

I actually didn't much like the blue crayon analogy - a far more accurate one would be to say that science is colouring in the empty spaces one by one, but the whole colouring book is on blue paper.

But then, that would be pedantry :-)

Edited 2008-08-04 09:47 (UTC)

Fame! Don't forget us all now, will you? ;-)

Heh, thanks! Are you going to reply to my reply to your excellent question in the other thread? I'm curious to know what you think - I don't think it can have been a reply you were expecting...

Thank you. It was a really good answer, but I only spotted it after midnight last night (was house hunting), so I didn't get a chance to give it a proper reply, and I only really do brief checks of new LJ during the day from my phone, which isn't so conducive to long/thoughtful answers. I shall try to respond later, after we've done our house visits for the day.

I'm still giggling at your unfishiness example. :) Not because it's "Rude To Christians", but because, well, it's such a funny way to put it. :D

The Problem of Unfishiness

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