It's a great title. (The subtitle is Time, Tillich, and Transformation.)
What appears to be her doctoral thesis, Time and Tillich: re-examining salvation through the lens of relativity isn't quite as snappy, but appears to address the same issues.
It's available as a PDF on this page (Oxford University Research Archive):
When something random happens in our favor, God gets glory. When something random happens that afflicts us, God is "mysterious." As Sam Harris says, that's playing tennis without the net.
I think there is agreement from most or perhaps all of the people in this discussion that stuff that happens to people is identical if a deity exists or not. For example if you get cancer, that is not because you have been struck down by the deity. So the explanation from the theist is not much different to the explanation from the atheist; namely that cancer exists and in ways that we do not fully understand, it affects some people and not others.
So in that sense we are all accepting that we are materialist beings, that on general things that happened in the past are predictive about things that happen in the future, whether or not we believe in a deity.
The problem if one is a materialist/atheist/scientist as a previous discussion here highlighted is that the inevitable conclusion from a purely materialist frame is that lives are meaningless, species rise and fall and eventually very likely all life on the planet will be wiped out in billions of years when the sun melts or something. Our lives have, according to this, no more meaning than the interval between the ticks of a clock.
So one might say that the theist at least has the advantage in the sense that it offers meaning to the tiny human life lost in the vast depth of infinite space-time.
Pragmatically, maybe it makes sense to both hold the thought that there are useful ideas that we can get from science about how the universe works and also to find some kind of metanarrative to believe that gives meaning to our lives. Those things are only in tension if they are positioned as alternative explanations about how the universe works.
But do atheists live as if life is meaningless? Do they slink around with sullen faces, do they not love anyone, do they not enjoy food? My hunch is not. I wonder what this tells us about life?
But do atheists live as if life is meaningless? Do they slink around with sullen faces, do they not love anyone, do they not enjoy food? My hunch is not. I wonder what this tells us about life?
My suspicion is that metanarrative is more important than truth.
In the news today there was a story about an undersea cable which had to be moved because of objections that it would go through a beach memorial to a fictional character.
In some sense the things that the memorial represents matters more to some people than whether or not the person really existed.
When something random happens in our favor, God gets glory. When something random happens that afflicts us, God is "mysterious." As Sam Harris says, that's playing tennis without the net.
I write free verse. Robert Frost said that was also like playing tennis without the net.
Sometimes I write in rhyme.
Some posters have mentioned cancer. I lost my wife to cancer when she was at the relatively young age of 56. Other people die of cancer as young children. Terrible things happen to people.
When something random happens in our favor, God gets glory. When something random happens that afflicts us, God is "mysterious." As Sam Harris says, that's playing tennis without the net.
I write free verse. Robert Frost said that was also like playing tennis without the net.
Sometimes I write in rhyme.
Some posters have mentioned cancer. I lost my wife to cancer when she was at the relatively young age of 56. Other people die of cancer as young children. Terrible things happen to people.
What am I supposed to do? Abandon my faith?
Sorry to hear about your wife.
I would say that only you know what to do with your faith. It sounds like it has use to you, therefore I would hesitate to suggest you should abandon it.
It has been assumed Neanderthals inbred with homo sapiens in Europe and Denisovans inbred with homo sapiens in Oceana (Eastern Asia and Pacific islands). Now there is additional evidence two other lines inbred we know little about. The one line is called the ghost ancestor, and the other line is called the superachaiacs. We are simply complicated beings. Story here.
When something random happens in our favor, God gets glory. When something random happens that afflicts us, God is "mysterious." As Sam Harris says, that's playing tennis without the net.
I write free verse. Robert Frost said that was also like playing tennis without the net.
Sometimes I write in rhyme.
Some posters have mentioned cancer. I lost my wife to cancer when she was at the relatively young age of 56. Other people die of cancer as young children. Terrible things happen to people.
What am I supposed to do? Abandon my faith?
Sorry to hear about your wife.
I would say that only you know what to do with your faith. It sounds like it has use to you, therefore I would hesitate to suggest you should abandon it.
It was a rhetorical question.
FWIW I don't sit in judgement on those who do lose their faith as a result of bereavement or trauma.
@Gramps49, 'Denisovans'?
I've not heard of them. Intriguing.
When something random happens in our favor, God gets glory. When something random happens that afflicts us, God is "mysterious." As Sam Harris says, that's playing tennis without the net.
I write free verse. Robert Frost said that was also like playing tennis without the net.
Sometimes I write in rhyme.
Some posters have mentioned cancer. I lost my wife to cancer when she was at the relatively young age of 56. Other people die of cancer as young children. Terrible things happen to people.
What am I supposed to do? Abandon my faith?
Sorry to hear about your wife.
I would say that only you know what to do with your faith. It sounds like it has use to you, therefore I would hesitate to suggest you should abandon it.
It was a rhetorical question.
FWIW I don't sit in judgement on those who do lose their faith as a result of bereavement or trauma.
@Gramps49, 'Denisovans'?
I've not heard of them. Intriguing.
In Christian, secularised-Christian and post-Christian societies, I'm inclined to think that a preoccupation with our death as something bad, to be avoided, is more a consequence of Christianity than a pre-existing problem that Christianity solves.
Achilles in the Odyssey says that he would rather be a workman on a peasant farm in the land of the living than king of the dead. Definitely pre-Christian.
Going back further, most of the plot of the Epic of Gilgamesh is driven by Gilgamesh's search for immortality.
Thanks, Dafyd. Would it be more associated with the development of linear beliefs about human existence?
Do other faiths centre death in the way that Christianity does?
Death and veneration of ancestors is a big thing in animist religions. That was very apparent in Madagascar. It can synchretise with Christianity too.
I'd always thought of these things as rural phenomena but urbanites in Antanarivo were into these things too, including people in mainstream Christian churches.
A degree of syncretism appeared to be tolerated apart from some of the more fundamentalist churches and recent imports from South Africa or East Africa, some of which had a 'prosperity gospel' edge.
@pease - is that a question about Islam in particular or other fairhs more generally?
When something random happens in our favor, God gets glory. When something random happens that afflicts us, God is "mysterious." As Sam Harris says, that's playing tennis without the net.
I write free verse. Robert Frost said that was also like playing tennis without the net.
Sometimes I write in rhyme.
Some posters have mentioned cancer. I lost my wife to cancer when she was at the relatively young age of 56. Other people die of cancer as young children. Terrible things happen to people.
What am I supposed to do? Abandon my faith?
I can't answer that for you. All I can suggest is that there are some of us who weigh a God who would include cancer and the eventual heat death of everything in his Creation as wanting indeed. There's no way to see God as Love under those realities, and it's tiresome to keep being told that. God doesn't care if people get cancer.
pease - is that a question about Islam in particular or other fairhs more generally?
A question that probably gets closer to what I was thinking is whether other faiths sacramentalise death, as commonly occurs in the Eucharist. ("Commonly", because while this might not be the case for all Christian groups, I believe that it has long been the dominant practice.)
As I understand it, Islam doesn't have sacraments as such.
It has been assumed Neanderthals inbred with homo sapiens in Europe and Denisovans inbred with homo sapiens in Oceana (Eastern Asia and Pacific islands). Now there is additional evidence two other lines inbred we know little about. The one line is called the ghost ancestor, and the other line is called the superachaiacs. We are simply complicated beings. Story here.
I have no problem that all/many of those lines of humanity count as “human” in God’s eyes, with the same kind of spiritual essence as modern humans (don’t get me wrong, I believe animals have a spiritual essence as well). We’ll find out when the time comes and we meet them face to face, I believe.
It [animism] can synchretise with Christianity too.
Certainly for me it does. It’s part of why I tend to describe myself as an Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian with a dash of Shinto. But this is shorthand—“Anglo-Catholic” here means in terms of sacramental theology, not “high church” liturgical style (and even then I have to clarify that I mean I’m not worried about the number of candles on the altar—the words of the liturgy mean a lot to me, as I’ve said on various threads—nice though a “bells and smells” service might be, it’s the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist that matters most to me, not how pretty the vestments are, etc.), and “Shinto” is the best shorthand for certain aspects of what’s called “animism,” but that has more to do with the notion of everything having its own spiritual essence (and other things existing as well, but that’s a long story and gets into paranormal/folk notions—all in the world God made and under Him, regardless, of course, all that is, seen and unseen) and not at all to do with worshipping it the way we worship God, and so on and so on.
It's pretty normal, here in Purgatory, to ask people to support their statements. @ChastMastr (and in his opinion, @Gamma Gamaliel, see the human realities of the affliction of cancer and eventual extermination of all life as we know it as evidence that God is Love. If you're not curious as to the theological mechanics of that, fine. I am.
It's pretty normal, here in Purgatory, to ask people to support their statements. @ChastMastr (and in his opinion, @Gamma Gamaliel, see the human realities of the affliction of cancer and eventual extermination of all life as we know it as evidence that God is Love. If you're not curious as to the theological mechanics of that, fine. I am.
I think there are two distinct questions as regards the compatibility of evil with a loving God. One, the strong problem, is whether the degree of suffering in the world is such that given a choice between creating this world and not creating any world, a loving God would not have created any world. The weak problem is why there is any suffering at all.
I don't think the strong problem holds up: I think that if this were the only possible world a loving God would create it.
The question then is why is this not the best possible world?
The religious intuition (if you go with it) or impulse (if you don't) is that psychological health requires is to think that everything is fundamentally ok and empirical experience requires us to think that rather a lot of things are not ok. Therefore, psychological health and empirical experience are only compatible if we think things are ok in a sense that goes beyond the empirical.
(Chesterton once said that the atheist charges that this world is a vale of tears and the religious response is that we had observed it.)
There are that I can think of three strategies for explaining the problem of evil: one is to say it's illusory (Christian Science, crudely; Buddhism, more insightfully), one is to say that evil is punishment (medieval Christianity and a lot of others), and the third is to say that evil in this life at least logically has to be permitted or can't be eliminated. Of which I think the third is the most aligned with Christian orthodoxy.
The Book of Revelation doesn't end by saying that there was no need for tears, nor that the faithful will shed no tears, but that God will wipe away their tears.
(One other option of course is that God has created all possible worlds which are worth creating, most of which will ipso facto not be the best possible world. I can't think of any theological positions put that forward though.)
People were dying unjustly and in pain before the three monotheistic religions came into being. And general there was no anaesthetic either. Yet Judaism. Christianity and Islam all in different ways proclaim that God is good and compassionate.
The problem of pain is not new. In previous times, human life was brutish and short. It still is in some parts of the world today.
All of the monotheistic religions see pain and injustice as resulting at least in part from people behaving badly to one another. Also there is some commonality about belief that the world being a spiritual battlefield. What we call natural disasters are seen in various ways either to be some kind of divine judgment or some kind of mysterious conflict between superatural forces. Beliefs in Satan or demonic forces form a part of that. Demonic forces are not creative, but destructive and deceptive. Not sure about Islam but the conception of a Fallen world fits in there somewhere.
So far as the vast heat death of the universe goes, that concept is not an obvious part of any religious end of time beliefs. You wouldn’t expect it to be.
@ChastMastr (and in his opinion, @Gamma Gamaliel, see the human realities of the affliction of cancer and eventual extermination of all life as we know it as evidence that God is Love.
They can certainly speak for themselves, but I suspect that’s not inaccurate characterization of their position; it strikes me as a characterization that borders on misrepresentation. I do not believe either has said they “see the human realities of the affliction of cancer and eventual extermination of all life as we know it as evidence that God is Love.”
Rather, I suspect they’d say they do not see the human realities of the affliction of cancer and eventual extermination of all life as we know it as evidence, or at least persuasive evidence, that God is not Love.
It's pretty normal, here in Purgatory, to ask people to support their statements. @ChastMastr (and in his opinion, @Gamma Gamaliel, see the human realities of the affliction of cancer and eventual extermination of all life as we know it as evidence that God is Love. If you're not curious as to the theological mechanics of that, fine. I am.
That's not what you did, and you know it. You said:
"There's no way to see God as Love under those realities."
ChastMastr replied:
" For you. For me and @Gamma Gamaliel and others, we do."
MEANING (as any sensible reader would take him to mean:)
"You believe that. For me and many others, we are still able to see God as Love even in spite of those realities."
At which point you replied as if ChastMastr had said cancer was Love:
"Please explain how, then. Please help me understand cancer as loving. "
You know, this is why so often I don't engage with you. Because we could have an interesting and who knows, possibly illuminating discussion of theodicy. But not if you're going to play these kinds of language games where you take a reply offered in good faith and use it as a giant "GOTCHA!" to make your fellow discussers feel like shit. I don't see why Chastmastr would want to go on with the conversation at all after that kind of bad-faith move--though maybe he will, being a very kind and patient person, far more so than I could ever be. But you need to decide whether you want the discussion or whether you want to just jump on people.
One could presumably say that the ways of the deity are far beyond the understanding of men and whilst cancer is obviously an awful thing for an individual to experience, clearly it is part of a larger divine plan where individual pain is of lower importance.
To use an uncomfortable metaphor, sometimes to save a life you have to remove a limb.
To me this seems like a reasonable point to make, I do not really understand why there is a hang-up about the "problem of pain" given we all experience short-term losses for long-term wins.
You know, this is why so often I don't engage with you.
If only you had chosen not to engage this time. Ah, well.
You’re not getting it, are you? Intended or not, your posts are demonstrating twisting of words and bad faith. And then you criticize people for not supporting their statements. If you want people to support their statements, you need to demonstrate that you’re discussing in good faith.
I’ve just watched images of the total eclipse of the sun. And of course I know exactly what causes it. And the fact that the moon and the sun are similar sizes in the sky even though they are vastly different in size in practice.
Does that make the view of a total eclipse any less awe inspiring? Not for me it doesn’t. I actually find it even more inspiring because I know how it happens.
And that’s the aspect of our visible universe that”gets” me.
On a human level I’m appalled by ancient and modern acts of human cruelty. And I’m also devastated by suffering caused by floods and earthquakes and other natural disasters. The same sense of loss even though I don’t know the people. They are somebody’s loved one. And I know from my own experience what loss and suffering mean. My reaction is horror and sympathy.
I really don’t engage with these things as a proof of anything about God. Or some kind of disproof. My immediate engagement of awe or sympathy seem more real than philosophical reflection.
I think The Riv would do well to read C S Lewis's 'The Problem of Pain'.
Several shipmates have been thru terrible times but found, lke me, God shares this and it can become redemptive.
I didn't bring up cancer. @Gamma Gamaliel wanted to ascribe glory to God in [checks notes] "all things." Now, he didn't give God any glory for his wife's cancer, and of course not. But he did give God glory for the retroviral insertion that facilitates the function of our nervous system's myelin sheaths. (Hat tip to @KarlLB for that tidbit.) I think that's an interesting if not remarkable distinction. Is that not at least somewhat adequately summarized by When something random happens in our favor, God gets glory. When something random happens that afflicts us, God is "mysterious."?
So now we're into the semantics of everything, because that's where things go to avoid addressing the hard things.
@Gamma Gamaliel, I hate that your wife both endured and succumbed to cancer, and that you are bereaved. I'm so sorry.
I didn't bring up cancer. @Gamma Gamaliel wanted to ascribe glory to God in [checks notes] "all things." Now, he didn't give God any glory for his wife's cancer, and of course not. But he did give God glory for the retroviral insertion that facilitates the function of our nervous system's myelin sheaths. (Hat tip to @KarlLB for that tidbit.) I think that's an interesting if not remarkable distinction. Is that not at least somewhat adequately summarized by When something random happens in our favor, God gets glory. When something random happens that afflicts us, God is "mysterious."?
But what all of that is not is @Gamma Gamaliel saying that he sees “the human realities of the affliction of cancer and eventual extermination of all life as we know it as evidence that God is Love.”
Not sure if this falls under your heading of semantics but qualitative appreciation isn’t the same as subjective or emotional appreciation.
“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” did a pretty good job of exploring that. “What is Quality? What the hell is it?” “Assembly of Japanese motorcycle require great peace of mind”.
My response to @KarlLB was meant to convey a mixture of the following:
'I don’t know how these things work but ain't that something?'
And, 'As a theist then I accept that God works in and through all that in some mysterious way.'
I don't go round trying to read meaning into my wife's cancer and death. People get cancer. They die.
My daughters lost their Mum at a relatively early age. I got choked up in the National Gallery earlier today as she wasn't there to see the Flemish altar-pieces and early Renaissance art she loved.
Perhaps she's seeing the 'originals'?
I was with my very devout mother-in-law when she died. She had a 'good death' in the old-fashioned sense and even Dawkins I think would have been moved by her simple and steadfast faith in the weeks leading up to it.
Not everyone has a 'good death.'
We can only hope and pray that ours will be so.
Meanwhile, if anyone is near Trafalgar Square get into the National Gallery's Sainsbury Extension and see the Zurbaran exhibition. It's only on until 23rd August and admission is steep at £20 (the rest of the Gallery is gloriously free) but it was worth every penny.
I'm generally not a fan of High Baroque religious art but I found the exhibition intensely moving as well as technically astonishing. 'How can anyone paint fabrics like that?
Anyhow - thanks @The_Riv for your commiserations. I did feel you'd twisted what @ChastMastr and I wrote but I won't get 'personal' about that nor call you to Hell.
It's not that I blithely ignore issues of 'theodicy' or know how to reconcile the eventual end of the universe with the 'new heavens and the new earth' of the New Testament. I don’t.
It's pretty normal, here in Purgatory, to ask people to support their statements. @ChastMastr (and in his opinion, @Gamma Gamaliel, see the human realities of the affliction of cancer and eventual extermination of all life as we know it as evidence that God is Love. If you're not curious as to the theological mechanics of that, fine. I am.
I never said that cancer or the heat death of the universe was evidence that God is Love…?
…
Ah, @Lamb Chopped pointed that out, so there we are.
I think The Riv would do well to read C S Lewis's 'The Problem of Pain'.
Several shipmates have been thru terrible times but found, lke me, God shares this and it can become redemptive.
I recommend it highly (and of course Lewis in general) to everyone. I need to reread it myself! ❤️
A scientific tangent: I don't think the 'Heat Death of the Universe' is the current consensus amoung cosmologists. The latest thinking is the universe (well, this one anyway) will go on expanding forever. It will be empty, cold and dark. Ho Hum!
I suppose my difficulty is the juxtaposition of believing in a deity who is interested in you and your ability to find a car parking space, or your ability to get a job or house, or your nephew's application to college on the one hand and the same deity seemingly uninterested in you long-term degenerative illness or your ID theft or whatever.
It seems to me that the idea of a personal deity who wants a relationship with you, individually, seems hard to maintain when the deity seems interested in the one but not the other.
To me it makes more sense to believe that the deity is not involved in individual human lives on this level, perhaps in the same sort of way that a farmer is concerned about the overall health of his wheat field more than the moment to moment growth of individual heads of wheat.
I also think that the Islamic conception of the deity makes more sense to me than anything I have ever heard from Christianity. My understanding of Islam is limited but the main attitude to the deity appears to be submission - I am a human and you are an all-powerful deity and my responsibility is to submit.
The attitude of Christianity seems to be more confusing.
My understanding of Islam is limited but the main attitude to the deity appears to be submission - I am a human and you are an all-powerful deity and my responsibility is to submit.
I think that is a limited understanding, even within non-Sufi Islam. Allah's chief epithets are (or the standard translation is) merciful and compassionate. In Sufi Islam, there are major poets in whom it's not clear whether the addressee is God or a human lover.
(God found me a parking space is in my experience a catchphrase more often used by Christians to criticise a perceived attitude of other Christians than used seriously. Philosophically, of course, nothing is too small or too big for the attention of a deity with infinite attention; but most Christians wouldn't consider parking spaces to be a mark of special divine favour.)
My understanding of Islam is limited but the main attitude to the deity appears to be submission - I am a human and you are an all-powerful deity and my responsibility is to submit.
I think that is a limited understanding, even within non-Sufi Islam. Allah's chief epithets are (or the standard translation is) merciful and compassionate. In Sufi Islam, there are major poets in whom it's not clear whether the addressee is God or a human lover.
(God found me a parking space is in my experience a catchphrase more often used by Christians to criticise a perceived attitude of other Christians than used seriously. Philosophically, of course, nothing is too small or too big for the attention of a deity with infinite attention; but most Christians wouldn't consider parking spaces to be a mark of special divine favour.)
I've known this sort of thing. The word "Godinstances" seems to get used at about that point.
A scientific tangent: I don't think the 'Heat Death of the Universe' is the current consensus amoung cosmologists. The latest thinking is the universe (well, this one anyway) will go on expanding forever. It will be empty, cold and dark. Ho Hum!
That’s heat death. You’ve described it perfectly. Maybe you thought I was talking about our Sun expanding and either swallowing up Earth or toasting it to a cinder, which will also happen, but way before the heat death of everything.
A scientific tangent: I don't think the 'Heat Death of the Universe' is the current consensus amoung cosmologists. The latest thinking is the universe (well, this one anyway) will go on expanding forever. It will be empty, cold and dark. Ho Hum!
That’s heat death. You’ve described it perfectly. Maybe you thought I was talking about our Sun expanding and either swallowing up Earth or toasting it to a cinder, which will also happen, but way before the heat death of everything.
Yep. It's called the heat death because everywhere is the same temperature so no useful work can be done. All the heat is dead.
One could presumably say that the ways of the deity are far beyond the understanding of men and whilst cancer is obviously an awful thing for an individual to experience, clearly it is part of a larger divine plan where individual pain is of lower importance.
Believe it if you can, I guess, and be sure to take your joy in all circumstances.
A scientific tangent: I don't think the 'Heat Death of the Universe' is the current consensus amoung cosmologists. The latest thinking is the universe (well, this one anyway) will go on expanding forever. It will be empty, cold and dark. Ho Hum!
That’s heat death. You’ve described it perfectly. Maybe you thought I was talking about our Sun expanding and either swallowing up Earth or toasting it to a cinder, which will also happen, but way before the heat death of everything.
Yep. It's called the heat death because everywhere is the same temperature so no useful work can be done. All the heat is dead.
Many thanks for the correction - I'll have to brush up on my cosmology!
Comments
What appears to be her doctoral thesis, Time and Tillich: re-examining salvation through the lens of relativity isn't quite as snappy, but appears to address the same issues.
It's available as a PDF on this page (Oxford University Research Archive):
When something random happens in our favor, God gets glory. When something random happens that afflicts us, God is "mysterious." As Sam Harris says, that's playing tennis without the net.
So in that sense we are all accepting that we are materialist beings, that on general things that happened in the past are predictive about things that happen in the future, whether or not we believe in a deity.
The problem if one is a materialist/atheist/scientist as a previous discussion here highlighted is that the inevitable conclusion from a purely materialist frame is that lives are meaningless, species rise and fall and eventually very likely all life on the planet will be wiped out in billions of years when the sun melts or something. Our lives have, according to this, no more meaning than the interval between the ticks of a clock.
So one might say that the theist at least has the advantage in the sense that it offers meaning to the tiny human life lost in the vast depth of infinite space-time.
Pragmatically, maybe it makes sense to both hold the thought that there are useful ideas that we can get from science about how the universe works and also to find some kind of metanarrative to believe that gives meaning to our lives. Those things are only in tension if they are positioned as alternative explanations about how the universe works.
My suspicion is that metanarrative is more important than truth.
In the news today there was a story about an undersea cable which had to be moved because of objections that it would go through a beach memorial to a fictional character.
In some sense the things that the memorial represents matters more to some people than whether or not the person really existed.
I write free verse. Robert Frost said that was also like playing tennis without the net.
Sometimes I write in rhyme.
Some posters have mentioned cancer. I lost my wife to cancer when she was at the relatively young age of 56. Other people die of cancer as young children. Terrible things happen to people.
What am I supposed to do? Abandon my faith?
Sorry to hear about your wife.
I would say that only you know what to do with your faith. It sounds like it has use to you, therefore I would hesitate to suggest you should abandon it.
It was a rhetorical question.
FWIW I don't sit in judgement on those who do lose their faith as a result of bereavement or trauma.
@Gramps49, 'Denisovans'?
I've not heard of them. Intriguing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisovan
I'd always thought of these things as rural phenomena but urbanites in Antanarivo were into these things too, including people in mainstream Christian churches.
A degree of syncretism appeared to be tolerated apart from some of the more fundamentalist churches and recent imports from South Africa or East Africa, some of which had a 'prosperity gospel' edge.
@pease - is that a question about Islam in particular or other fairhs more generally?
I can't answer that for you. All I can suggest is that there are some of us who weigh a God who would include cancer and the eventual heat death of everything in his Creation as wanting indeed. There's no way to see God as Love under those realities, and it's tiresome to keep being told that. God doesn't care if people get cancer.
As I understand it, Islam doesn't have sacraments as such.
I have no problem that all/many of those lines of humanity count as “human” in God’s eyes, with the same kind of spiritual essence as modern humans (don’t get me wrong, I believe animals have a spiritual essence as well). We’ll find out when the time comes and we meet them face to face, I believe.
@The_Riv said
For you. For me and @Gamma Gamaliel and others, we do.
@Gamma Gamaliel said
Certainly for me it does. It’s part of why I tend to describe myself as an Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian with a dash of Shinto. But this is shorthand—“Anglo-Catholic” here means in terms of sacramental theology, not “high church” liturgical style (and even then I have to clarify that I mean I’m not worried about the number of candles on the altar—the words of the liturgy mean a lot to me, as I’ve said on various threads—nice though a “bells and smells” service might be, it’s the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist that matters most to me, not how pretty the vestments are, etc.), and “Shinto” is the best shorthand for certain aspects of what’s called “animism,” but that has more to do with the notion of everything having its own spiritual essence (and other things existing as well, but that’s a long story and gets into paranormal/folk notions—all in the world God made and under Him, regardless, of course, all that is, seen and unseen) and not at all to do with worshipping it the way we worship God, and so on and so on.
Please explain how, then. Please help me understand cancer as loving. We can move on to the heat death of the universe next.
Discussions with you are like being invited to a firing squad.
You're missing my point, never mind.
I don't think the strong problem holds up: I think that if this were the only possible world a loving God would create it.
The question then is why is this not the best possible world?
The religious intuition (if you go with it) or impulse (if you don't) is that psychological health requires is to think that everything is fundamentally ok and empirical experience requires us to think that rather a lot of things are not ok. Therefore, psychological health and empirical experience are only compatible if we think things are ok in a sense that goes beyond the empirical.
(Chesterton once said that the atheist charges that this world is a vale of tears and the religious response is that we had observed it.)
There are that I can think of three strategies for explaining the problem of evil: one is to say it's illusory (Christian Science, crudely; Buddhism, more insightfully), one is to say that evil is punishment (medieval Christianity and a lot of others), and the third is to say that evil in this life at least logically has to be permitted or can't be eliminated. Of which I think the third is the most aligned with Christian orthodoxy.
The Book of Revelation doesn't end by saying that there was no need for tears, nor that the faithful will shed no tears, but that God will wipe away their tears.
(One other option of course is that God has created all possible worlds which are worth creating, most of which will ipso facto not be the best possible world. I can't think of any theological positions put that forward though.)
The problem of pain is not new. In previous times, human life was brutish and short. It still is in some parts of the world today.
All of the monotheistic religions see pain and injustice as resulting at least in part from people behaving badly to one another. Also there is some commonality about belief that the world being a spiritual battlefield. What we call natural disasters are seen in various ways either to be some kind of divine judgment or some kind of mysterious conflict between superatural forces. Beliefs in Satan or demonic forces form a part of that. Demonic forces are not creative, but destructive and deceptive. Not sure about Islam but the conception of a Fallen world fits in there somewhere.
So far as the vast heat death of the universe goes, that concept is not an obvious part of any religious end of time beliefs. You wouldn’t expect it to be.
Rather, I suspect they’d say they do not see the human realities of the affliction of cancer and eventual extermination of all life as we know it as evidence, or at least persuasive evidence, that God is not Love.
That's not what you did, and you know it. You said:
"There's no way to see God as Love under those realities."
ChastMastr replied:
" For you. For me and @Gamma Gamaliel and others, we do."
MEANING (as any sensible reader would take him to mean:)
"You believe that. For me and many others, we are still able to see God as Love even in spite of those realities."
At which point you replied as if ChastMastr had said cancer was Love:
"Please explain how, then. Please help me understand cancer as loving. "
You know, this is why so often I don't engage with you. Because we could have an interesting and who knows, possibly illuminating discussion of theodicy. But not if you're going to play these kinds of language games where you take a reply offered in good faith and use it as a giant "GOTCHA!" to make your fellow discussers feel like shit. I don't see why Chastmastr would want to go on with the conversation at all after that kind of bad-faith move--though maybe he will, being a very kind and patient person, far more so than I could ever be. But you need to decide whether you want the discussion or whether you want to just jump on people.
One could presumably say that the ways of the deity are far beyond the understanding of men and whilst cancer is obviously an awful thing for an individual to experience, clearly it is part of a larger divine plan where individual pain is of lower importance.
To use an uncomfortable metaphor, sometimes to save a life you have to remove a limb.
To me this seems like a reasonable point to make, I do not really understand why there is a hang-up about the "problem of pain" given we all experience short-term losses for long-term wins.
If only you had chosen not to engage this time. Ah, well.
Does that make the view of a total eclipse any less awe inspiring? Not for me it doesn’t. I actually find it even more inspiring because I know how it happens.
And that’s the aspect of our visible universe that”gets” me.
On a human level I’m appalled by ancient and modern acts of human cruelty. And I’m also devastated by suffering caused by floods and earthquakes and other natural disasters. The same sense of loss even though I don’t know the people. They are somebody’s loved one. And I know from my own experience what loss and suffering mean. My reaction is horror and sympathy.
I really don’t engage with these things as a proof of anything about God. Or some kind of disproof. My immediate engagement of awe or sympathy seem more real than philosophical reflection.
That’s just me. But I don’t think it’s just me.
Several shipmates have been thru terrible times but found, lke me, God shares this and it can become redemptive.
This is getting personal. The place for personal disputes is hell.
Hostly beret off
la vie en rouge, Purgatory host
So now we're into the semantics of everything, because that's where things go to avoid addressing the hard things.
@Gamma Gamaliel, I hate that your wife both endured and succumbed to cancer, and that you are bereaved. I'm so sorry.
Much less is it @ChastMastr saying that.
“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” did a pretty good job of exploring that. “What is Quality? What the hell is it?” “Assembly of Japanese motorcycle require great peace of mind”.
Logical analysis isn’t everything.
'I don’t know how these things work but ain't that something?'
And, 'As a theist then I accept that God works in and through all that in some mysterious way.'
I don't go round trying to read meaning into my wife's cancer and death. People get cancer. They die.
My daughters lost their Mum at a relatively early age. I got choked up in the National Gallery earlier today as she wasn't there to see the Flemish altar-pieces and early Renaissance art she loved.
Perhaps she's seeing the 'originals'?
I was with my very devout mother-in-law when she died. She had a 'good death' in the old-fashioned sense and even Dawkins I think would have been moved by her simple and steadfast faith in the weeks leading up to it.
Not everyone has a 'good death.'
We can only hope and pray that ours will be so.
Meanwhile, if anyone is near Trafalgar Square get into the National Gallery's Sainsbury Extension and see the Zurbaran exhibition. It's only on until 23rd August and admission is steep at £20 (the rest of the Gallery is gloriously free) but it was worth every penny.
I'm generally not a fan of High Baroque religious art but I found the exhibition intensely moving as well as technically astonishing. 'How can anyone paint fabrics like that?
Anyhow - thanks @The_Riv for your commiserations. I did feel you'd twisted what @ChastMastr and I wrote but I won't get 'personal' about that nor call you to Hell.
It's not that I blithely ignore issues of 'theodicy' or know how to reconcile the eventual end of the universe with the 'new heavens and the new earth' of the New Testament. I don’t.
But I press on ...
I never said that cancer or the heat death of the universe was evidence that God is Love…?
…
Ah, @Lamb Chopped pointed that out, so there we are.
I recommend it highly (and of course Lewis in general) to everyone. I need to reread it myself! ❤️
It seems to me that the idea of a personal deity who wants a relationship with you, individually, seems hard to maintain when the deity seems interested in the one but not the other.
To me it makes more sense to believe that the deity is not involved in individual human lives on this level, perhaps in the same sort of way that a farmer is concerned about the overall health of his wheat field more than the moment to moment growth of individual heads of wheat.
The attitude of Christianity seems to be more confusing.
(God found me a parking space is in my experience a catchphrase more often used by Christians to criticise a perceived attitude of other Christians than used seriously. Philosophically, of course, nothing is too small or too big for the attention of a deity with infinite attention; but most Christians wouldn't consider parking spaces to be a mark of special divine favour.)
I've known this sort of thing. The word "Godinstances" seems to get used at about that point.
That’s heat death. You’ve described it perfectly. Maybe you thought I was talking about our Sun expanding and either swallowing up Earth or toasting it to a cinder, which will also happen, but way before the heat death of everything.
Yep. It's called the heat death because everywhere is the same temperature so no useful work can be done. All the heat is dead.
Many thanks for the correction - I'll have to brush up on my cosmology!