ciphergoth | The Problem of Unfishiness

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I am extremely flattered that my favourite atheistic blogger, Greta Christina, has taken a comment I made in her journal and made a post about it. I'm not sure she's quite nailed it on how what she discusses is different from questions like the nature of abiogenesis, but all the same I like the post and am very happy to have played a part in bringing it about.

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From:

wildeabandon.livejournal.com

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.)

From:

valkyriekaren.livejournal.com

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?

From:

wwhyte.livejournal.com

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 Date: 2008-08-04 05:40 pm (UTC)

From:

ciphergoth.livejournal.com

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 Date: 2008-08-04 06:37 pm (UTC)