rationalskepticism.org

catbasket wrote:How do you get from this:

Zadocfish2 wrote:

[Reveal] Spoiler:

SpearThrower, you seem to be operating under the assumption that death = bad = evil. That's not really how it is. We die, so we see death as a terrible thing; objectively, death and the fear thereof is more normal than anything else in the world. I think it's a difference in viewpoints: with an atheist worldview, death is the end of life, and a terrible thing. To a deist, death is just another transition; there's a world beyond.

You think that theists have the same priorities that atheists do when it comes to the value of life. That is just not true. To a theist, life and death are just a part of a larger scheme that we don't quite understand yet.

More importantly, humans see things life by life; God sees things all at once, the lives and deaths of everything ever. Not just life, but space, the universe, the stars, everything... What I mean is, a Being beyond human comprehension, and who sees and knows everything that ever will happen or ever has, would not see life as a whole the same way a human being would.

In summary, an atheist sees life as being very important, since that's all anything truly has. To a Christian, God subverts that; there's something more. What that more is, we don't understand all the way yet. But we believe in it, and we know that God is faithful to those who have faith in Him, in the next life even if not always apparent in this one.

To Rumraket: The beauty of Theistic evolutionism is that we can have the science by knowing how evolution works while also having belief in God.

The hows are for evolution, the Theism is for the Why, not the How.

To this:

Zadocfish2 wrote:

[Reveal] Spoiler:

Frankly, Zadoc - your response seems to have explicitly ignored the entire thrust of my post. I doubt you did it purposefully - actually, I don't think you want to contemplate the enormity of the suffering over hundreds and millions of years that evolution represents. The problem is that it doesn't tally with your concept of a loving God.

I think you missed my point. I understand that suffering as well as the next person. But the thing is, that's just how things are.

To be honest, I have barely scraped the surface here, because I can also show how the universe, if it is designed for biological life, can only represent an evil humanity can barely comprehend - it would be staggeringly depraved had the entire thing been conceived, designed, and built in order to house a multi-billion year experiment necessitating the suffering of hundreds of billions of organisms just to achieve a goal which could have been arrived at by numerous other ways to a god which is omniscient and omnipotent. If your contention is true and this system is designed by your God, then this being is beyond description - evil personified. Fortunately, it's all make-believe, and all this bad shit just happened because we live in a thermodynamic universe.

Again, missing the point of what I said the same way you think I did to yours. I'm saying that human concepts of good and evil, and human concepts like sadism, can't properly apply to a Being capable of seeing everything at once. It's funny; a stereotype of religion is that "man creates god in his own image", but you're personifying a theoretical deity more than I am. I'm saying that, and I want you to listen because you haven't yet responded to this sentiment:

God is not human. He does not think as a human does. That's part of what Jesus was; a personified view of an undefinable Deity.

Actually, you can have cognitive dissonance, because you certainly cannot hold that evolution is a system created by a loving god. You don't have the 'whys', you just have the suppositions and a hesitance to reflect on how these 2 contrary positions can be concurrently maintained.

I think that the love we feel from God is for soul and spirit, not life; life is ephemeral, soul is eternal. There really isn't a problem from that viewpoint, at least not to the extent you seem to think there is.

However, Zadoc - I don't want to set about demolishing your faith.

Again, seriously overestimating the strength of your arguments here. You're arguing against religion from a viewpoint of physical suffering; to the theistic mindset, physical suffering does not preclude a love for humanity. It precludes a love for animals, sure, but loving animals and loving people are two very different things. And I think I can save us both some time by posting the answer I will inevitably end up giving to anything you point at:

I don't know why God does or did things. And to try would be impossible.

[Reveal] Spoiler:

God, for me, cannot be understood as one would understand a human being. Apparently you disagree with that theoretical view on God, and believe that if the God of the Bible was real, He would have to be human in mind like those Greek gods.

At any rate, no I don't really take this personally. I have nothing against you at all; I'm just trying to explain how the form of cognitive dissonance you point to just isn't as great as you think it is.

Or vice versa?