04.17.2004
what goes up?
There's a post about "the argument from evil against the existence of God" over at fidlet.com, and, as often happens when I inadvertently start reading this sort of thing, I've got myself rambling here and I can't really stop. I started thinking I was just going to post a response to a comment in the comments, but I've gone past that. So it starts a little abruptly here. But I doubt you expect me to actually try to say anything coherent, anyway.
Tina said:
"The only worry I have with such a God [a god that's not omnipotent and omniscient], is that this kind of God - a God who is much like us in that he is not perfect, but is learning from mistakes and growing and so on - is not really a God we want to WORSHIP (but, if you are not really worried about a worship-worthy God, then this isn't going to apply to you). That is, it's one thing to adulate, bow-to and worship a magnificant, perfect, all-powerful bieng. It's another to worship some imperfect being much like us, who just happens to be somewhat more powerful. Does that make sense?"
Why want to worship any god at all? Further: why does is an omniscient/omnipotent god more worthy of worship than some other? If there was a baseball team that could NEVER lose, would that mean everyone would or should want to be their fan? Seems to me it would mean that most people would just IGNORE that team, choosing to pick which teams to root for out of the remainder. There's nothing interesting about a team that can never lose.
This is how I feel about an omnipotent/omniscient god. What about that would make me want to worship it? That god is basically "winning" in accordance with all odds.
Of course the analogy here could be completely false. I don't really root for sports teams. I also don't really "worship" anything or anyone. I find things to respect, to think highly of, in lots of things, and lots of people. But I don't really understand what it even means to worship something. Trying to understand, then, I came up with the baseball analogy. One of the reasons it seems to me to fit is this: if there were such a team, I can perfectly well imagine that there'd be some percentage of baseball fans rooting for them, cheering them on. Those people would know full well that their team would win, and would somehow be comforted by that. In fact I imagine they'd be the type that would enjoy rubbing it in everyone else's face.
So what makes anyone want to worship anything? And what makes some people want to reserve that worship ONLY for something that's all knowing and all powerful? Is it fear? I can't figure out where any kind of sense that that god somehow earned anything would come from. "So you can make anything happen? You could make it so I were able to fly? Big deal. Try going to work and concentrating on getting your work done with a huge-ass hangover. That's actually a challenge." There's no reason, for me, to feel like that kind of god is somehow more worthy of my respect just based on the fact that it's naturally able to do whatever it can imagine.
Regarding the "argument from evil," I honestly don't even get it. Basically what this argument does is to assume that we know what is good and what is evil. Against the scope of an omnipotent god, good and evil might disappear. There is an idea that, while time is a real property of the universe, it's our perception of it that give meaning to the difference between "past" and "future." Those differences could be, from some other frame of reference, the same as the difference we perceive between "left" and "right." In the same way, admitting the possibility of an omni-everything god in the first place is admitting to the existence of a frame of reference unknowable to us. We can't know what it'd be like to know everything anymore than we can know what it would be like to exist without the restriction that time only flows in one direction; that time naturally flows at all. We can imagine and postulate about what it'd be like, but we certainly can't prove anything about what it'd be like.
(An interesting aside: In the comments to Tina's post, someone named Geoff makes a similar argument. The big difference here is his foundation: he's presenting this argument against the "argument from evil' as a believer. What I'm doing is continuing my struggle with understanding any position that's NOT the agnostic one.)
(in a later comment Geoff says this: This leaves us with two MAJOR issues: 1) God is indeed real, but the Bible is a device created by men to try and instill *their* beliefs and desires in others and 2) God is not real and merely a device to give people a false hope, and for some people to gain a measure of control over others.
We can discard 2 altogether, because if it's true, the whole question of a "God" is nonsensicle, so we must assume that there *is* a God of some sort.
To which I ask: Huh?)
More: Tina's statement of the argument actually includes a third "omni", and it turns out to be the one that I'm arguing against here. "Omnibenevolent." Of course this goes back to my statements about whether "good" and "evil" can even be said to exist in a meaningful way when you remove the human scale. I'm going to dwell on that for another minute:
Take yet another scale: the time between when the first humans occupied the earth and the time when the last one dies. Against that scale, what's the net ratio of good vs. evil? I can't answer that, I don't think anyone can. The first thing that question assumes is that, within that scale, all humans have been born and died. Is death evil? Usually in discussions about this subject it comes up a lot: all the deaths caused by natural disasters, for instance, is something mentioned in Tina's post. If death is evil then this is easy: there's no omnibenevolent god. Because we're talking about a 100% ratio of evil, here, with everyone being dead and all.
But wait: is birth "good?" If birth is good, then in simplest terms we eliminate birth and death from the picture. There's no net gain on either side. Everyone's born, everyone dies. No good, no evil.
So then there's this "suffering" thing. Surely human suffering is evil. While it's possible that no one suffers, I'd say the number of humans on our scale here who never suffered is pretty minimal. So we're back to a nearly 100% ratio of evil over good. No omnibenevolent whatnot and all that.
Slow down: surely life's not all about suffering. What about that time when you saw your first rainbow? That time spent making love to your wife? That first time you heard your child's heart beating inside the womb?
How many perfect 70 degree afternoon walks through the woods does it take to balance out one debilitating car accident? How many clear nights spent laying on a hill staring at the stars does it take to counteract the suffering caused by a serial rapist? Would it be worth being born into a life of slavery just for one free morning to read a book?
Can anyone answer any of this? ANYONE? Is there a calculus of good vs. evil that I'm not privy to? I think not, and that's because the words don't have definitions without their opposite.
Maybe we could make it so that every afternoon is a perfect 70 degree day, and every afternoon you get to walk through the woods. Except it wouldn't be very exciting then, it would no longer be a "good" thing. It'd just be the way things are. We'd then have to define a good day as a day on which we found a shiny pebble, maybe. A bad day is a day when we scratched ourselves on a tree branch. Evil, evil tree branches. Wonderful, beautiful shiny pebbles.
I think we have good and bad because you can't NOT have that. Same reason we have up and down. Past and future. What is the absence of "up?"
You can't use the existence of up and down to prove or disprove the existence god. God is not omnidown. And the question of whether or not there's a god does not rely on its being not omnidown.
