Vendetta
"Oscar the grouch"
How is it a contradiction? You and Koldo have to be more detailed
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If God created everything why didn't he create it perfect?
- Thread starter FDRC2014
- Start date
How is it a contradiction? You and Koldo have to be more detailed
PolyHedral
Superabacus Mystic
There is no imaginable reason for a charitable God not to create a world that is perfectly good. (i.e. there are no diseases, deformities, etc.) The world is not perfectly good. Thus continuing to believe in an omnipotent, charitable God is a contradiction with reality.
lunamoth
Will to love
"Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but love don't make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and *die*. The storybooks are **********. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and *get* in my bed!" - Ronnie Cammareri, Moonstruck
Volgin
Member
"Verily in the heavens and the earth are signs for those who believe. And in the creation of yourselves, and the fact that animals are scattered (through the earth), are signs for those of assured faith. And in the alternation of night and day, and that fact that Allah sends down sustenance from the sky, and revives therewith the earth after its death, and in the change of the winds, are signs for those who are wise" (45:3-5) Holy Quran.
Just restating or rephrasing the Problem Of Evil doesn't accomplish anything.
Koldo
Outstanding Member
I don't understand your question.
We were talking about the creation of an imperfect world.
Is there any connection between this question and the former subject?
Katzpur
Not your average Mormon
It sort of sounds like you're saying little old you knows what's perfect and what isn't. I can guarantee you that my idea of perfect would probably be pretty different from yours. If life did, in fact, have a designer, this designer obviously knew what He was doing. Maybe He even had a better understanding of what He was going for than you do, hard as it may be for you to understand. I mean, seriously, if you were actually able to design a universe and create all life that would inhabit a world such as the one we live in, wouldn't you be able to make it work exactly the way you wanted to? I guess that what I'm saying is that your question strikes me as disingenuous. You're not really looking for an answer, or even for a good debate. You're just making a statement and it's, "I don't believe in God."
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Your examples of what's not "good" equate to "things that I don't like."
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Koldo
Outstanding Member
It would be inaccurate to describe it this way.
It more accurately equates to suffering.
PolyHedral
Superabacus Mystic
Yes, you would. Hence, properties of the Creator can be inferred from the creation.
Most people don't believe in a God that doesn't share our value of "good."
Koldo
Outstanding Member
Not really. Suffering isn't disease, it isn't a broken arm, it isn't a house burning up, it isn't a village wiped out, it isn't the Earth destroyed.
Suffering is a condition of being in pain.
That's because "most people" recognize a "God" that created both "us" and "good".
Because if you had been born into that world, your sensibilities would be shaped by that world. I think it's reasonable to speculate that people who are born into 2 different worlds with 2 different sets of potentialities would develop 2 completely different sets of standards.
Put it this way: if you were born into a world where the worst thing that could happen to anyone would be to stub their toe, do you really think you would be walking around going "Isn't it great there are no mass extinction events in our world? Isn't it wonderful that there's no such things as diseases? or mental disorders? or genetic defects? or insanity?"
Of course you wouldn't. If those things were unknown in your world they wouldn't play any role at all in whatever standards you set to determine what is and isn't a satisfactory existence. No more than you're likely to walk around in this world thinking "Gee, isn't it great that there are no such thing as 5000 lb radio active spiders in our world?"
No matter what world we can envision, it's reasonable to predict that your set of standards would reflect the conditions of that world.
"Reason" has nothing to do with it. We're talking about human psychology more than anything here.
Most people don't live in the world you describe above. For most people, those things aren't realities, just ideas. Most people living under the conditions you describe above would no doubt consider the world we live in here in a developed country a "less imperfect" world. Yet the people living here don't usually equate that with perfection.
If we decide to consider the average living conditions of the average, middle class to upper-middle class US citizen the starting point and work from there, my theory still holds: most of us don't consider the world we live in a perfect world even when compared with 3rd world or war torn regions.
By the same token, using your formula of substituting some hypothetically perfect world with a less imperfect world and trying to use that to address the POE, all we have to do is look at people living what many or most people in our culture would consider the ideal life: extreme wealth, fame, beauty---people whose lives many would call "perfect"--- and realize that these people obviously don't consider their personal worlds perfect either: people like Heath Ledger, Brittany Spears, and Curt Cobain who have all of the above and still find life unbearable to the point of willingly ending it or losing their minds.
"Minor" as compared to what? If the worst thing that could happen in a particular reality would be something that we, looking at it from the perspective of this reality, considered minor, it wouldn't be minor to the occupants of that reality.
Major/minor are relative terms.
I showed you how. I showed you 2 formulas: one was meant to demonstrate that perfection is a logical impossibility. The other was intended to show that the idea of our living in a "better" world is also a logical impossibility.
When I asked you how you would go about fixing the world, I wasn't looking for specific details I was looking for a formula that, relatively speaking, didn't land us right back where we started.
The formula that you seem to be suggesting is Reality minus Imperfections equal Perfection (or close enough).
This doesn't resolve the POE. If the POE is meant to demonstrate that the idea of an Omni-beneficent God is incompatible with a world that includes suffering, then your formula, according to the examples you've given, doesn't give us a perfect world, just a less "imperfect" one, and it doesn't accommodate the possibility of an Omni-beneficent God, just a slightly nicer one.
So yes, even if we create a world by your formula, we're still stuck with the POE.
Yes, it really is.
I've met people in this world who consider the fact that they're only going to be able to take one vacation to Europe or Caba San Lucas in a given year, instead of 2 or 3, "grievous suffering". Water finds it's level. So does whining.
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Koldo
Outstanding Member
Diseases and deformities usually cause suffering in this reality.
They exist in direct relation.
Which is why we can more accurately equate them to suffering.
The group "things i don't like" consists of many items, and most of them are of little importance. To say that that diseases and deformities are simply "things i don't like" doesn't say much about them.
They do, indeed. And you could eliminate them all and still have suffering. Suffering is not dependent on any of them.
That was my point. A world free of "things I don't like" will not necessarily eliminate suffering.
True, we would still have "things I would like but don't have".
And "things I wish were different," and "things I can do nothing about," etc.
To "fix" suffering you would have to change what a human being is. It's not a part of the world, it's a part of us.
Bismillah
Submit
That's what I was saying a few pages back: we would have to eliminate human imagination.
If we got rid of our imagination we would all already be living in the best world we could imagine.