The Pixie wrote:
The question is, now that God has created mankind, what does he do? His entire purpose is done now, from what you say here. He has created beings he loves and who are capable of internalizing through experience love of him and of the good. Does he put his feet up, after a good job done?
Creation is eternal.
The point about the hypothetical quantum fluctuation is that once it has engendered the universe, it too does nothing more. Once mankind is created, the soulless quantum fluctuation does just the same as the love of God. I.e., nothing at all.
You're thinking of creation as happening at a point in time. God upholds the world in an ongoing manner. That's the causal story.
God is the reason for the world, not the purposeless cause of the world. Quantum fluctuation would not even be the cause of the world, but at most the cause of this universe. Our reason for being is God and God's love. It's the difference between the "why" and the "how", even tho quantum fluctuation would not even be the "how" of the world. It's a metaphysical difference between the two that is crucial, not a causal difference, which is all you seem to be able to focus on.
Remember, this overarching meta-principle is supposed to justify God breaking the rule he invented for himself of not intervening. If you read the Bible, those occasions when God did intervene after the first couple of chapters, it was not to creating beings he loves and who are capable of internalizing through experience love of him and of the good.
Does he have some other agenda?
This is obfuscation. This theodicy is an attempt to reconcile the world
the way it actually is now with an omni-God. It's not an argument about Biblical hermeneutics or about quantum theory. Is an omini-God logically compatible with the world as it is now? Yes or no?
That is right. The purposeless quantum fluctuation that hypothetically engendered the universe and so mankind has created beings he loves and who are capable of internalizing through experience love of him and of the good.
This is silly even by your standards! You're using teleological concepts and language to talk about a purposeless force. What would be the reason for the quantum fluctuation? Does it carry its reason for being as an essential attribute? Is it purposive? Are you focusing only on outcomes?
To return to the issue:
Is an omni-God logically compatible with the world as it is?
Of course, you may object that the quantum fluctuation does not love, but according to your use of the word here, it does, just by virtue of creating a species capable of love. And by assuming it loves, of course, but you do that for God too.
This is a diversion.
The point surely is the expected outcome. You cause the suffering in the expectation that the cat will benefit in the long term.
Ah, but with the quantum fluctuation notion, there is no expected outcome. Expectation is a teleological idea. So I guess you agree that outcomes are not sufficient for moral evaluation, and you're not a consequentialist after all?
Previous we had an action, a, and the evil of the act, the negative impact on the greater good, E(a). What we really need to consider is E'(a), the perceived evil of the act. For what you did to the cat, E'(a) < 0, i.e., you expected your actions to have a positive effect; your action was morally right. Even if you were incorrect, and the cat ended up suffering more, you acted morally given what you knew at the time.
By the same logic, allowing smallpox to flourish cannot be morally evaluated apart from the expected effect. You cannot look at E(a), but have to look at E'(a). All of my posts so far on this thread have been attempting to unpack E'(a), whereas you keep bringing it back to E(a), just the outcome of the evil of smallpox. We cannot look just at the evils of the world, whether amenable by humans or not, as counter-evidence of an omni-God. We cannot look just at the suffering quotient of my cat to evaluate my actions as opposed to my neighbors and as opposed to the cat getting hit by lightning.
But here is a different approach. Take a few examples from the Bible that you believe actually happened, and show how God's intervention was morally right for him, given love as his overarching meta-principle. Then we can compare that with "Love, creating beings he loves and who are capable of internalizing through experience love of him and of the good, that is his purpose."
Is the world as it is logically compatible with an omni-God?
That is right. I am not allowing for the possibility of equivocation. I have stated it like this specifically to deny that possibility:
Allowing smallpox to flourish was, from God's perspective, and within the full, wider context for the greater good, or, from exactly the same perspective and in exactly the same context it was not.
The way you stated it originally was not that way. That's why the original formulation had an equivocation embedded in it. Yes, from God's perspective, allowing smallpox to flourish was for the greater good,
which entailed the possibility of human eradication of smallpox. The two clauses are essentially joined together. God's greater good entails free actions to ameliorate the logical consequences of the greater good. It's paradoxical at first blush, because the concept of freedom is paradoxical.
1.Causing my cat to suffer is for his greater good.
2.Causing my cat to suffer is not for his greater good from exactly the same perspective and in exactly the same context
Is this a violation of the law of excluded middle?
No, as I said.
There is that false dichotomy again. Or is it a straw man perhaps?
I am not saying God should eliminate all bad things.
I've argued for why it is not a false dichotomy. You haven't answered that argument but merely labeled it a false dichotomy. And you are saying that God should eliminate all bad things, or at least all the bad things that humans can eradicate or lessen. Smallpox operates as a placeholder for that class of things in your argument.
I am saying if God existed we would expect him to eliminate smallpox.
You haven't argued for what the difference is in principle between smallpox and that class of evils it's a member of. If it weren't smallpox, it'd be polio and if not polio then ....to evil n. Maybe he wiped out 100,000 diseases far worse than smallpox. You're assuming we know far more than we know. This is a silly argument.
Wiping out a strain of bacteria before it got widespread would have far less effect on the integrity of the world than, for example, resurrecting someone. Somehow the integrity of the world survived when mankind wiped out smallpox.
You can deny that the resurrection happened, but you can't say for sure that God did or did not prevent an evil before anyone knew it existed. Beyond this, you're left with asking why there is any evil at all that humans can remove, like headaches, hangnails, etc...
Wiping out smallpox is entailed by the integrity of the world.
It is also possible we are living in a computer-generated virtual reality. Ultimately nothing is certain outside mathematics. We have to rely on what knowledge we have to draw inferences about the universe. So yes, it is possible that God has reasons mankind does not understand, just as it is possible that the chair you are sat on does not really exist.
So you think that IF there is an omni-God, his having reasons for acting we cannot grasp is just as improbable as that we are in a computer-generated reality? Recall that I am
not arguing for the existence of such a God, but only for the
logical compatibility of this God with the world.
I am arguing for a world without smallpox. We know that that is logically coherent, because we are currently living in such a world.
It's logically coherent in terms of the effects of the world as it is but not in terms of the cause of the world as it is. You continue to confuse two different contexts of justification.
the cat? The Cat in the Box?