Why did God create the world this way?

[Eduk]

Of all animals only men seek reasons. Other animals don't need to seek reasons as they either act from biological instincts or from stimuli and responses.

Men reason in order that they may predict what lies ahead and thus augment our pleasures and keep ourselves safe.

How do you know animals don't reason? They certainly appear to.

[Belindi]

Of all animals only men seek reasons. Other animals don't need to seek reasons as they either act from biological instincts or from stimuli and responses.

Men reason in order that they may predict what lies ahead and thus augment our pleasures and keep ourselves safe.

How do you know animals don't reason? They certainly appear to.

I try to keep my part in these discussions as simple as possible, Eduk. There may be animals besides humans that reason but it's unlikely that their reasoning is anything like as complex as ours considering that they don't use language.

[Eduk]

Er animals do use language?
I agree humans are more complex.

[Fooloso4]

Belindi:

Of all animals only men seek reasons. Other animals don't need to seek reasons as they either act from biological instincts or from stimuli and responses.

That may be, but, of course, we do. And so, questioning our demands for reasons is something we should consider.

Men reason in order that they may predict what lies ahead and thus augment our pleasures and keep ourselves safe.

That is only one way in which we reason. Philosophy did not begin with practical considerations but with wonder. It was a leisure activity, something that those who did not have practical demands could afford. Or so the story goes.

For those of us who believe that "the world" does not reason about stuff "Why did God create the world this way?" is senseless regarding both God, and "the world".

There is a persistent assumption that there must be a reason for everything. In the Hebrew Bible what is most fundamental is God’s will. One might ask why God wills as he does, but that assumes that God’s will is determined by reason. And that misses the point. From the Greeks we inherit the notion of cosmos - a well ordered whole, an intelligible order that can be known via intelligence. Thus Intelligence or Mind or God orders the whole and can be known by human intelligence or reason. The God of the Hebrew Bible is replaced by the God of Greek philosophy.

The problem is that although we can observe regularities we do not know that such regularities have always pertained or will continue to pertain invariantly forever. The dominance today of Determinism is not itself something unchanging. As has always been the case with the state of the art of knowledge, the present state is not complete, fixed, or unchanging. Under a belief in God we cannot conclude that God is not free, that God must conform to the laws of nature, that God must obey reason. Under a rejection of God we cannot conclude that things as they are is the way they must be according to laws of nature or reason.

[h_k_s]

When you really look at it, the world is just full of living beings that are constantly making meals of other living beings. Carnivores eat herbivores, and herbivores eat living plants. Big fish eats small fish which eats smaller fish. Viruses reproduce by exploiting the cellular mechanisms of a host and then they slowly destroy that host. Humans in the developed world eat things like beef, chicken, pork, and fish that, by the time we eat it, is so butchered and processed beyond recognition that one often forgets the meat used to be a part of a living, sentient being. Violence, agony, dismemberment, destruction -- these things are not just qualities that exist in the world but are a fundamental law of the world. Here https://youtu.be/fmwC9HzcWbQ is a video of a deer being eaten alive and disemboweled by two komodo dragons. A scene like this is a great visual reference of the concept I'm discussing. An innocent animal is being unceremoniously butchered and consumed in front of its own eyes by uncaring predators. This is not "evil"; this is part of God's design.

What I'm getting at is not about the problem of evil or the problem of suffering as those issues are normally discussed. I'm saying that this innate cycle of violence and bloodshed is the very engine by which the world operates. It is not an unsightly blight upon the world, it is the world.

Some Christians might propose that this state of the world is the result of the fall of Adam. But I don't see how this is the case. When Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit, God did not pronounce a general curse upon the whole world but rather a specific set of curses as punishment.

Genesis 3:16-19 - To the woman he said, "I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you." And to Adam he said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, 'You shall not eat of it,' cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

As you can see, the concept I'm describing here is not stipulated in the above passage.

The world's "engine of violence" cannot be explained away as a mere curse, as one would find it hard to conceive how the world could exist without this engine. Unchecked reproduction cannot be maintained. The phrase "Be fruitful and multiply" must be accompanied by the phrase "be merciless and kill".

So, I suppose my question is this: Why did God create the world this way? I'm not asking why did God create violence or why does God allow violence. The question is more fundamental than that. Why did God choose to make this "engine of violence" the very substance of the world that he created?

According to Leibnitz, God created the World and the living things in it as best he could.

You've heard this before? Yes? No?

[Belindi]

Philoso4 wrote:

Men reason in order that they may predict what lies ahead and thus augment our pleasures and keep ourselves safe.

That is only one way in which we reason. Philosophy did not begin with practical considerations but with wonder. It was a leisure activity, something that those who did not have practical demands could afford. Or so the story goes.

I see what you wrote here as the explanation of art. I claim that religion is an form of art, and that wonder and awe are the biological bases of art.

There is a persistent assumption that there must be a reason for everything. In the Hebrew Bible what is most fundamental is God’s will. One might ask why God wills as he does, but that assumes that God’s will is determined by reason. And that misses the point. From the Greeks we inherit the notion of cosmos - a well ordered whole, an intelligible order that can be known via intelligence. Thus Intelligence or Mind or God orders the whole and can be known by human intelligence or reason. The God of the Hebrew Bible is replaced by the God of Greek philosophy.

The problem is that although we can observe regularities we do not know that such regularities have always pertained or will continue to pertain invariantly forever. The dominance today of Determinism is not itself something unchanging. As has always been the case with the state of the art of knowledge, the present state is not complete, fixed, or unchanging. Under a belief in God we cannot conclude that God is not free, that God must conform to the laws of nature, that God must obey reason. Under a rejection of God we cannot conclude that things as they are is the way they must be according to laws of nature or reason.

I am fond of John Keats's idea of "negative capability".(Regarding Greek philosophy and the uncertainties of reasoned truths.)

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

This sort of pantheism puts beauty where for instance Spinoza puts reason. Beauty has the superior claim that it covers both arts and mathematical logic. I think that Solzhenitzin said this about beauty that it infiltrates arts and sciences and points to truth.

So perhaps the old trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is not simply the decorous and antiquated formula it seemed to us at the time of our selfconfident materialistic youth. If the tops of these three trees do converge, as thinkers used to claim, and if the all too obvious and the overly straight sprouts of Truth and Goodness have been crushed, cut down, or not permitted to grow, then perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, and ever surprising shoots of Beauty will force their way through and soar up to that very spot, thereby fulfilling the task of all three.

[Fooloso4]

Belindi:

I see what you wrote here as the explanation of art. I claim that religion is an form of art, and that wonder and awe are the biological bases of art.

I see philosophy as a kind of poetry - poiesis, a making, an art.

I am fond of John Keats's idea of "negative capability". (Regarding Greek philosophy and the uncertainties of reasoned truths.)

As I read Plato and Aristotle they are two-faced. The public face is one of reasoned truth, but the other face, kept somewhat hidden, faces aporia, uncertainly, skepticism, and the inability to attain knowledge of the whole.

This sort of pantheism puts beauty where for instance Spinoza puts reason. Beauty has the superior claim that it covers both arts and mathematical logic.

I agree with regard to reason and beauty. It is interesting that a topic that begins with a kind of ugliness moves toward beauty by way of reason.

[Mysterio448]

When you really look at it, the world is just full of living beings that are constantly making meals of other living beings. Carnivores eat herbivores, and herbivores eat living plants. Big fish eats small fish which eats smaller fish. Viruses reproduce by exploiting the cellular mechanisms of a host and then they slowly destroy that host. Humans in the developed world eat things like beef, chicken, pork, and fish that, by the time we eat it, is so butchered and processed beyond recognition that one often forgets the meat used to be a part of a living, sentient being. Violence, agony, dismemberment, destruction -- these things are not just qualities that exist in the world but are a fundamental law of the world. Here https://youtu.be/fmwC9HzcWbQ is a video of a deer being eaten alive and disemboweled by two komodo dragons. A scene like this is a great visual reference of the concept I'm discussing. An innocent animal is being unceremoniously butchered and consumed in front of its own eyes by uncaring predators. This is not "evil"; this is part of God's design.

What I'm getting at is not about the problem of evil or the problem of suffering as those issues are normally discussed. I'm saying that this innate cycle of violence and bloodshed is the very engine by which the world operates. It is not an unsightly blight upon the world, it is the world.

Some Christians might propose that this state of the world is the result of the fall of Adam. But I don't see how this is the case. When Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit, God did not pronounce a general curse upon the whole world but rather a specific set of curses as punishment.



As you can see, the concept I'm describing here is not stipulated in the above passage.

The world's "engine of violence" cannot be explained away as a mere curse, as one would find it hard to conceive how the world could exist without this engine. Unchecked reproduction cannot be maintained. The phrase "Be fruitful and multiply" must be accompanied by the phrase "be merciless and kill".

So, I suppose my question is this: Why did God create the world this way? I'm not asking why did God create violence or why does God allow violence. The question is more fundamental than that. Why did God choose to make this "engine of violence" the very substance of the world that he created?

According to Leibnitz, God created the World and the living things in it as best he could.

You've heard this before? Yes? No?

I'm not sure what you're asking.

[Mysterio448]

Since the question was asked in the context of the Hebrew Bible I will point to the two books that address it: Ecclesiastes and Job. The answers given, however, are not likely to satisfy you. Human beings do not have the capacity to understand the will of God. There are things far greater than us in the world, and incomparably more so, is the greatness of the God who created it all.

If human beings don't have the capacity to understand the will of God, then why should human beings worship him? God must have some measure of relatability, his values and morals must coincide with our own to some extent, otherwise singing his praises is an empty exercise.

[Belindi]

Mysterio448 wrote:

Why did God choose to make this "engine of violence" the very substance of the world that he created?

As Leibnitz said.

This Pancreator is not the god we prefer to worship . There are two Gods. The version of God that man made is God of human justice, truth, and beauty. Men have not attained the absolute values of their God however the idea of this God of goodness survives .

[Fooloso4]

Mysterio448:

If human beings don't have the capacity to understand the will of God, then why should human beings worship him?

The premise of the topic is that God created the universe. Is this not enough to worship him?

God must have some measure of relatability, his values and morals must coincide with our own to some extent, otherwise singing his praises is an empty exercise.

For some it is God’s transcendence, his complete otherness, his surpassing of all that is human that gives cause to worship him. His values and morals do not have to coincide with ours, we must be obedient to his commandments.

In the Hebrew Bible we find on the one hand, in Psalms for example, the idea of a protective God who has our best interests close to him. But on the other there is Ecclesiastes and Job. On this view God is beyond our comprehension. The unfairness and injustice of the world is without satisfactory explanation. The world is not ours and we should not expect it to accommodate us.

[h_k_s]

According to Leibnitz, God created the World and the living things in it as best he could.

You've heard this before? Yes? No?

I'm not sure what you're asking.

I'm asking if you have heard of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz the philosopher from the early 1700's ??

It's a simple question. Not a loaded question.

[Mysterio448]

I'm not sure what you're asking.

I'm asking if you have heard of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz the philosopher from the early 1700's ??

It's a simple question. Not a loaded question.

I've never heard of Leibniz.

[Mysterio448]

The premise of the topic is that God created the universe. Is this not enough to worship him?

No. Just as if I had an abusive or absentee father, he would not deserve my respect merely because he begat me.

For some it is God’s transcendence, his complete otherness, his surpassing of all that is human that gives cause to worship him. His values and morals do not have to coincide with ours, we must be obedient to his commandments.

In the Hebrew Bible we find on the one hand, in Psalms for example, the idea of a protective God who has our best interests close to him. But on the other there is Ecclesiastes and Job. On this view God is beyond our comprehension. The unfairness and injustice of the world is without satisfactory explanation. The world is not ours and we should not expect it to accommodate us.

I think one thing that needs to be determined is what the term "worship" actually means. Does worship come from a sense of awe and wonder or from a sense of admiration and adoration. If it is the former, than God's building the world on a foundation of blood and pain is not a problem; but if it is the latter, then I can only be mystified as to why anyone would want to worship God.

[Fooloso4]

Mysterio448:

No. Just as if I had an abusive or absentee father, he would not deserve my respect merely because he begat me.

I think one thing that needs to be determined is what the term "worship" actually means. Does worship come from a sense of awe and wonder or from a sense of admiration and adoration. If it is the former, than God's building the world on a foundation of blood and pain is not a problem; but if it is the latter, then I can only be mystified as to why anyone would want to worship God.

Well, you are free to make and worship any image of God you create.