The Bible as largely a history of God. Through time, and as portrayed by whatever of chronology applies to The Bible, the God concept changed from the cruel and vain deity into the reasonable and just deity as portrayed by Jesus. The concept of God is still plastic and I hope is changing from a huge PERSON into a set of ethics and caring feelings with a lot of input from the wisdom ancient and modern of recent millennia. So we can cherry pick from various religious traditions. Freedom of thought , speech, and assembly are needed to be maintained.When I consider what an existent god could possibly be like, the cruel and vain deity of the Old Testament would seem to be its antithesis.
If there is a God, why is there evil?
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Re: If there is a God, why is there evil?
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Re: If there is a God, why is there evil?
That God is ontologically distinct from anything that has being means that being is not an attribute of God. This again is what Routledge says:"Being" is another word that can have more than one meaning. Look at what the Routledge Stanford entries are actually saying: they describe something ontologically distinct from anything that has being, like Thor, a tree or a mountain.
Small stating that God is not "a" being is precisely what makes him a classical theist. If you had read The Experience of God [/] book review -- or anything else about classical theism (in the formal sense of the word) -- instead of cherry picking your quotes, you`d know that.According to classical theism, God is also:
Eternal – in the sense of timeless, that is, alive without past or future, living a life neither containing nor located in any series of earlier and later events. Much traditional perfect-being theology converges on this claim. Boethius, for instance, argued that a perfect being must be timeless because timeless existence is superior to temporal existence. Temporal beings lose their pasts and lack their futures, and so enjoy only an instant-thin slice of their existences at any one time. Timeless life has no past or future. A timeless being enjoys its entire life in one timeless present.
Necessarily existent – perfect-being theology yields divine necessity. To exist contingently is to be able not to exist. A being is more perfect if wholly immune to nonexistence (see Necessary being).
Omnipresent – present in all space and time, though not contained by either (see Omnipresence). This follows via perfect-being theology: a God not in some way everywhere and everywhen would be more limited and less perfect than a God with these attributes. As creator and sustainer, God is present everywhere and everywhen in the sense that he sustains in being and knows immediately every place and time and their contents.
The ontological difference between the being of God and the being of all else is different than the “ontological difference” as formulated by Heidegger, taken up by Tillich, and repeated by Small. And here is the difference between classical theism and what Small propounds. God as the ground of being is not the supreme being. God as the ground of being is not the perfect being, the necessary being.
In his ontological argument Anselm said:
By "God" we mean an absolutely unsurpassable being, a being that cannot conceivably be improved upon.
Aquinas cosmological argument:
Every being (that exists or ever did exist) is either a dependent being or a self-existent being.
Not every being can be a dependent being.
So there exists a self-existent being.
-- Updated April 3rd, 2017, 11:12 am to add the following --
Perhaps this will help you to begin to sort out what is at issue. From the Tillich entry on Wiki:
Throughout most of his works Paul Tillich provides an apologetic and alternative ontological view of God. Traditional medieval philosophical theology in the work of figures such as St. Anselm, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham tended to understand God as the highest existing Being, to which predicates such as omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, goodness, righteousness, holiness, etc. may be ascribed. Arguments for and against the existence of God presuppose such an understanding of God. Tillich is critical of this mode of discourse which he refers to as "theological theism," and argues that if God is Being [das Seiende], even if the highest Being, God cannot be properly called the source of all being, and the question can of course then be posed as to why God exists, who created God, when God's beginning is, and so on. To put the issue in traditional language: if God is 'being' [das Seiende], then God is a creature, even if the highest one, and thus cannot be the Creator. Rather, God must be understood as the "ground of Being-Itself".
Tillich not only rejects the idea that God is a being, he rejects the idea that God is being or Being itself. He rejects classical theism and Small follows suit in denying the “classical picture of God as a supernatural being”. Small’s "re-imagining God” is not a return to classical theism.
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Re: If there is a God, why is there evil?
I imagine there have always been, and will always be, those who can peer more deeply into the abyss of the unknown than most of us and piece together a story of unity in diversity. The stories will be conditioned by personal experience, culture, genetic tendencies and everything else one can imagine, but the basic theme will always be the same: the Ground of Being is an undivided One.Belindi wrote:Greta wrote:
The Bible as largely a history of God. Through time, and as portrayed by whatever of chronology applies to The Bible, the God concept changed from the cruel and vain deity into the reasonable and just deity as portrayed by Jesus. The concept of God is still plastic and I hope is changing from a huge PERSON into a set of ethics and caring feelings with a lot of input from the wisdom ancient and modern of recent millennia. So we can cherry pick from various religious traditions. Freedom of thought , speech, and assembly are needed to be maintained.When I consider what an existent god could possibly be like, the cruel and vain deity of the Old Testament would seem to be its antithesis.
Theistic personalism and “sacred books”can and have been used as ways to manipulate and control people, but those days are numbered. The hair-splitting sophistries of the intelligentsia are more and more being seen for what they are: tools to cloud and confuse personal freedoms and judgment.
In short, I'm very optimistic about the future.
-- Updated April 3rd, 2017, 2:01 pm to add the following --
F4: Do you not understand what I said? "Your argument is so Clinton-ish ("It depends on what the definition of is is") that I'm going to henceforth dismiss your posts as willful ignorance."
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Re: If there is a God, why is there evil?
I find it somewhat romanticising to claim that there is no evil in God, given the reality that both good and evil exist. If nothing good existed, it could be claimed that the creator was evil, as there would be no evidence to the contrary. Just as if there was no evil it could be claimed that the creator was all good without being problematic. But the fact that both good and evil exist makes it seem to me that if there was/is a creator, they would be some type of balance of good and evil, simply because that is what the evidence of reality reflects. So I think that the problem of evil is valid, which apologetics cannot properly resolve.
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Re: If there is a God, why is there evil?
Yes, I understand - more evasive tactics. What I said is that the ultimate being is still a being. I provided several examples from classical theism that clearly identify God a being. It is not willful ignorance on my part but willful blindness on yours. Which is not to say that there is not also ignorance on your part, whether it is willful or not depends on how willing you are to look more deeply.F4: Do you not understand what I said? "Your argument is so Clinton-ish ("It depends on what the definition of is is") that I'm going to henceforth dismiss your posts as willful ignorance."
The fact of the matter is that the concept of God has changed over time, and, as I said much earlier in this discussion, within the category “classical theism” there are a wide variety and sometimes conflicting claims.
What you do is force an interpretation on earlier texts in order to make the conform to latter concepts. So, for example Thomas Aquinas says in his five ways of proving the existence of God (emphasis and parentheses added):
Third way: (necessity) Therefore we cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others their necessity. This all men speak of as God.
The fourth way: (gradations) ... so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest, and, consequently, something which is uttermost being
Firth way: (governance) Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.
https://www.ewtn.com/library/ANSWERS/GODIS.HTM
you close your eyes and insist he does not mean being when he says being, evidently on the assumption that your favored theologians all present the correct and true concept of God who is not a being, and so Thomas could not have meant what he said.
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Re: If there is a God, why is there evil?
No. In classical theism God is pure act (pure actuality) whereas everything else is a compound of act and potency (potential).Fanman wrote:If God's creation contains both good and evil, doesn't it follow that God is capable of both?
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Re: If there is a God, why is there evil?
Theoretically speaking, neither the universe nor God has an outside environment that acts upon it. Rather, its activity is entirely internal - being. A rule of thumb is, the bigger something is, the more its existence is shaped by internal activity and the less it is influenced by environment. In theory, God has no environment, so that suggests that it's not like anything within it.
What does it mean to be without an environment - to be everything? To be not contained? We only understand these concepts in a relative sense because everything we know, aside from the cosmic web, has an environment that acts upon it to some extent.
-- Updated 03 Apr 2017, 18:50 to add the following --
Hi Belinda. Yes, and it is incidentally another example of human moral and intellectual progress, that DM and I mentioned earlier. To be fair, it seems that "an eye for an eye" remains more popular, and seemingly efficacious, than "turn the other cheek". Meanwhile we remain always "seven meals away from anarchy". Evil strikes me as relative and conditional. In a post-catastrophe dog-eat-dog world would it be evil to steal food from another family if that was the only way you could save your own?Belindi wrote:Greta wrote:
The Bible as largely a history of God. Through time, and as portrayed by whatever of chronology applies to The Bible, the God concept changed from the cruel and vain deity into the reasonable and just deity as portrayed by Jesus. The concept of God is still plastic and I hope is changing from a huge PERSON into a set of ethics and caring feelings with a lot of input from the wisdom ancient and modern of recent millennia. So we can cherry pick from various religious traditions. Freedom of thought , speech, and assembly are needed to be maintained.When I consider what an existent god could possibly be like, the cruel and vain deity of the Old Testament would seem to be its antithesis.
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Re: If there is a God, why is there evil?
I thought you might like this excerpt from the UB, Greta.Greta wrote:Re: the ontological difference, the difference has a parallel between the way entities in the universe and the universe as a whole are considered.
Theoretically speaking, neither the universe nor God has an outside environment that acts upon it. Rather, its activity is entirely internal - being. A rule of thumb is, the bigger something is, the more its existence is shaped by internal activity and the less it is influenced by environment. In theory, God has no environment, so that suggests that it's not like anything within it.
What does it mean to be without an environment - to be everything? To be not contained? We only understand these concepts in a relative sense because everything we know, aside from the cosmic web, has an environment that acts upon it to some extent.
Partial, incomplete, and evolving intellects would be helpless in the master universe, would be unable to form the first rational thought pattern, were it not for the innate ability of all mind, high or low, to form a universe frame in which to think. If mind cannot fathom conclusions, if it cannot penetrate to true origins, then will such mind unfailingly postulate conclusions and invent origins that it may have a means of logical thought within the frame of these mind-created postulates. And while such universe frames for creature thought are indispensable to rational intellectual operations, they are, without exception, erroneous to a greater or lesser degree.
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Re: If there is a God, why is there evil?
Do you think the concept has a referent? Put differently, do you think the changing concept is getting closer to something that is or God a human construct, and ideal we aspire to? Something like what Nietzsche says?The concept of God is still plastic and I hope is changing from a huge PERSON into a set of ethics and caring feelings with a lot of input from the wisdom ancient and modern of recent millennia.
Greta:God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto." (Parable of the Madman, The Gay Science)
This raises questions about the relationship of the universe as a whole to God. Does the universe include God? Is the universe everything? Does everything include God? Is the universe within God or something distinct from God? If the universe within God wouldn’t God the environment of the universe?Re: the ontological difference, the difference has a parallel between the way entities in the universe and the universe as a whole are considered.
Theoretically speaking, neither the universe nor God has an outside environment that acts upon it. Rather, its activity is entirely internal - being. A rule of thumb is, the bigger something is, the more its existence is shaped by internal activity and the less it is influenced by environment. In theory, God has no environment, so that suggests that it's not like anything within it.
What does it mean to be without an environment - to be everything? To be not contained? We only understand these concepts in a relative sense because everything we know, aside from the cosmic web, has an environment that acts upon it to some extent.
With regard to the ontological difference, is the universe something other than the totality of the entities within it?
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Re: If there is a God, why is there evil?
For a long time science deduced from the bottom up while religions inferred from the top down. There has, however, been some movement towards the middle (I consider most a/theist debates as important politically and socially but largely meaningless philosophically) with theoretical physicists working top down mathematically in their search for a ToE. It was not always popular in the scientific community, with sticklers for convention pointing out that science is empirical so, without experiments or observation, it's "not science".Dark Matter, quoting from the Unrantia Book wrote:Partial, incomplete, and evolving intellects would be helpless in the master universe, would be unable to form the first rational thought pattern, were it not for the innate ability of all mind, high or low, to form a universe frame in which to think. If mind cannot fathom conclusions, if it cannot penetrate to true origins, then will such mind unfailingly postulate conclusions and invent origins that it may have a means of logical thought within the frame of these mind-created postulates. And while such universe frames for creature thought are indispensable to rational intellectual operations, they are, without exception, erroneous to a greater or lesser degree.
However, due to natural limits, such as the impossibility of building a large enough particle accelerator to interrogate reality at the Planck scale, increasingly such top-down modelling is needed. The ancients clearly also worked from the top down once their empirical limits were reached. Hence the gradual downsizing of the god of the gaps as experimental limits expanded.
There are moral and practical risks in thinking either too small or too big. Thinking too big was a problem for, say, societies that sacrificed virgins to appease an non-existent deity thought to control the weather - as opposed to taking practical steps to alleviate their farming problems, often self-inflicted. They assumed that they had less control over their local weather and pests than they did.
By contrast, thinking too small is the issue for moderns who mindlessly plunder the planet without thought for tomorrow. They figure that no practical steps can be taken to improve the situation and then make things worse, as did their virgin-sacrificing forebears.
It seems to me that reality is all about balance, finding the "sweet spot" where everything concentrates to a harmonious point. Not too much, not too little. The further one gets from a particular point of optimal harmony the more we encounter "evil", aka entropic influences.
Theism, deism, pantheism, panentheism, Spinozan panentheism or de Chardin's emerging Omega Point deity or just metaphor?Fooloso4 wrote:Greta:This raises questions about the relationship of the universe as a whole to God. Does the universe include God? Is the universe everything? Does everything include God? Is the universe within God or something distinct from God? If the universe within God wouldn’t God the environment of the universe?Re: the ontological difference, the difference has a parallel between the way entities in the universe and the universe as a whole are considered.
Theoretically speaking, neither the universe nor God has an outside environment that acts upon it. Rather, its activity is entirely internal - being. A rule of thumb is, the bigger something is, the more its existence is shaped by internal activity and the less it is influenced by environment. In theory, God has no environment, so that suggests that it's not like anything within it.
What does it mean to be without an environment - to be everything? To be not contained? We only understand these concepts in a relative sense because everything we know, aside from the cosmic web, has an environment that acts upon it to some extent.
With regard to the ontological difference, is the universe something other than the totality of the entities within it?
There may be an objective structure to reality as a whole but, in lieu of information, there is no correct answer, only ideas that resonate with individuals. Ultimately worldviews, spiritual and secular, are conduits through which one bases their behaviour. In a sense, a worldview is a form of programming, a prescribed series of limitations imposed on oneself that ideally helps people find direction in a life with numerous confusing and conflicting options.
To some extent people will either choose their "filters" (values) or trust their innate nature.
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Re: If there is a God, why is there evil?
At a rudimentary level, God of the bible is a person, he is described as having things that he wants and in the history of the Bible he goes about obtaining those things. He causes great destruction and plenty of death, and though it is said to be “for the greater good” many of his methods can I think be described as “evil,” such as killing all the first-born males of Egypt. To the religious, the sacrifice of Christ (his own son) is the paramount act of God's “goodness” offering salvation for all mankind and a path to eternal life, but to the secular minded person, this may seem barbaric and unnecessary. Why would God require a blood-sacrifice in order to save people, and furthermore his own son? Would this be considered “good” if a person did a similar thing based upon their beliefs/mindset? Why does a “God” require suffering and death to appease him? Surely these are attributes that can be considered as “evil” as their necessity seems only for the purpose of appeasing God. From my now agnostic perspective, God of the bible seems capricious and vilifies anything which is outside of his will, because anything outside of his will is “evil.” As such, if God of the Bible was our creator, based on the biblical account of his existence, it cannot be said without being problematic that he is not capable of evil. So my question is, why is God considered “all-good” when he commits acts that if done by a person would be considered as evil? One would assume that God is going to get what he wants no matter what choices he makes, so why choose a history of such violence and bloodshed?
If evil was so abhorrent to God, and he has the ability to change it, why does it exist in such abundance? Given this consideration and others about God of the bible, I don't think its logically consistent to claim that he is not capable of evil. This doesn't preclude him/it from being “good” in the sense that he may be acting for the greater good, but believers seem to (as I did) reify “the goodness of God” such that they shrug off anything which points to him being capable of evil, but I find this is done through religious phrases, top-down arguments and maxims, rather than through cogent discussion. Perhaps the reason for this is that it cannot be done? Maybe its paradoxical to claim that God/The Creator is not capable of evil?
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DM:
How would you explain this in more down to earth terms? As is seems rhetorical. How do we evidence this claim?No. In classical theism God is pure act (pure actuality) whereas everything else is a compound of act and potency (potential).
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Re: If there is a God, why is there evil?
I should preface this by saying that Aquinas held that reason can never penetrate the truths that can only be revealed. On my reading (which is not original) Aristotle too was aware of the limits of reason but worked to protect philosophy from the claims of revealed truths.
The question, “is God a being?”, led me back to Aristotle’s Metaphysics and what he calls “first philosophy”, and, interestingly enough “theology”. It is the study of “being qua being”. It seeks to know the causes and principles of being, that is, of substance (ousiai). Substance is the “the what it was to be” of a thing. This was translated in Latin as, essentia, a term invented to translate the Greek, meaning “the what it is”. Substance, according Aristotle, is not matter or what stands under something, but rather, what it is to be what it is.
Aristotle says that being is not a genus, and Aquinas reaffirms this. What this means can be illustrated as follows: Life is the genus of living things but life is not itself a living thing. If being is the genus of beings then being itself would not be a being. But,according to both Aristotle and Aquinas, being is not a genus. The question of the being of beings for Aristotle is the question of the causes and principles of being. The answer cannot be being, but not because the being of beings is not a being, but because the same question could be asked of the being who is the being of being . With Aquinas, however, God is the cause of beings.Where Aristotle held that the universe is without beginning, Aquinas follows the teaching of creation as ex nihilo. And so, for Aquinas the answer is to the question of cause of beings is the uncaused being, the supreme being, God. What God is (his essence) is his own being [quod Deus est sit suum esse].
That God is “being itself” does not mean that being is God, for if being is God then all that is is God. Now there are some who hold this position, but Aquinas did not. All other things are contingent beings, including composite beings, not being itself. Their existence is not their essence.
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Re: If there is a God, why is there evil?
The question was: "If God's creation contains both good and evil, doesn't it follow that God is capable of both?"Fanman wrote:How would you explain this in more down to earth terms? As is seems rhetorical. How do we evidence this claim?No. In classical theism God is pure act (pure actuality) whereas everything else is a compound of act and potency (potential).
God's existence is radically different than our own, or even that of the universe. Our love for another emerges from our potential and is therefore an attribute that may or may not be exercised. Love, for us, is something that can be separated from our total being. Hence, we are compound beings. God's love, on the other hand, is not an attribute: it IS his acting nature. When we talk about God's love, we are speaking analogically -- we are attributing to God's acting nature something like the love we find within ourselves.
God's acting nature cannot possibly be intrinsically improved upon, but its character and personality are amplified by the divestment of the nonpersonal and nonspiritual. We originate in, or emerge from, the nonpersonal and nonspiritual and have the potential to self-actualize, or evolve, in the direction of the purified Self. What we see as "evil" is a privation, an absence of God's personal and spiritual Self. God's love does not allow him to deprive us of the opportunity to self-actualize, and to fret about the difficulties we must endure is proof positive of our immaturity.
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Re: If there is a God, why is there evil?
The inescapable truth is that how one answers that question depends on the concept of God that informs the answer. There are various concepts of God and thus various answers. The answer that DM gave you when stated baldly is that you do not understand what God is and so you think there is a problem, but that he does understand and does not see a problem, therefore there is no problem. What ensues is a song and dance that ultimately blames the victim - don’t be whiny, self-centered, and immature,and don’t be stupid enough to think that God is the kind of god that will do anything to eliminate or mitigate pain and suffering. Problem solved.The question was: "If God's creation contains both good and evil, doesn't it follow that God is capable of both?"
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Re: If there is a God, why is there evil?
The First Source and Center is much more than personality, but we are so far removed from the spirit-personality of God that direct contact without destroying our self-actualizing self is impossible. Nevertheless,we are not left to fend for ourselves. Not only is there a vast hierarchy of intermediaries, or “demiurges,” there is within ourselves a fragment of the undifferentiated God, the God prior to any divestment. For a whole host of reasons, some people are more sensitive to these influences than others.
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