God and sin. A sheer unsolvable theological problem.
By means of three quotations I want to explain what is stated in the title.
The following quote applies in principle to all monotheistic religions:
"The need to harmonize the moral responsibility of man with God’s justice. The penetrating intelligence of Augustine did not fail to notice a most serious difficulty, which is so hard to remove that, as far as I know, all later philosophers with the exception of three, whom for this reason we shall soon examine more closely, have preferred to steal around it quietly, as if it did not exist. But Augustine utters it with noble sincerity in a quite straightforward fashion right in the introductory words of his books On Free Will: “Tell me, pray, whether God is not the author of evil?” And then more extensively in the second chapter: “But the mind is troubled by the problem: if sins come from the souls which God has created, and those souls are from God, how comes it that sins are not, at a slight remove, to be thrown back upon God?” To this the interlocutor replies: ”Now you have put clearly what I have been racking my brain to think out.” This highly dubious consideration was taken up again by Luther and brought out with the full force of his eloquence: “But that God must be such that he subjects us to necessity in virtue of his freedom, even natural reason must admit.—If we grant that God is omniscient and omnipotent, then it follows obviously and incontestably that we did not create ourselves, do not live nor do anything through ourselves, but only through his omnipotence.—God’s omniscience and omnipotence are diametrically opposed to the freedom of our will.—All men are inevitably compelled to admit that we become what we are not through our will but through necessity, that we therefore cannot do what we please in virtue of a freedom of will, but rather do what God has foreseen and brings about through inevitable and irrevocable decision and will.”" (Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essay on the Freedom of the Will Dover Philosophical Classics)
The next two passages concern more Catholic notions:
"The problem of human sin also presents a challenge for thinkers who uphold concurrentist approaches. It seems that the theologian must say that here at least, in the case of sinful human actions, there is an act where God is not acting, but where the human being acts contrary to the will of God. The mere conservationist seems to have less difficulty here: God is responsible only for our existence, but does not act directly in our free actions. Where the concurrentist tradition attempts to deal with this problem, it speaks of sin as a lack, or a defect in the proper created order. As Tanner acknowledges, this ‘simply pushes the question of the origin of sin back to the question of what brought about the first defect’: ‘The question has to stop somewhere since, according to our premises, God does not create a world of sin. But wherever one stops, God’s will would seem to be behind whatever created activity brings sin about.’ After exploring different strategies, Tanner concludes that the theologian ‘can offer no account of how sin actually arises that does not imply that God’s creative will is directly behind such an eventuality’. The implication that Tanner draws from this is not that concurrentism should be abandoned, but rather that we should abandon the attempt to find an explanation for sin: ‘To say that sin is an exception to the premise of God as creator is therefore to say that sin is ultimately without explanation; it is what, by all rights, should not exist in a world that God creates. If a good God is the ultimate explanatory principle according to our picture, is not this inexplicable character of the coming to be of sin what one should expect.’" (CHRISTOPHER J. INSOLE: Kant and the Creation of Freedom – A Theological Problem)
According to the concurrence position of Catholicism, both man and God perform the choice of sin and the sinful act together. God is anything but passive here. Nor does he simply allow the sinful act to happen, but is actively and immediately involved in it.
And:
"Human sin and the omnipotent God of the Thomists cause problems: Very briefly, though, at De Malo, 3, 2 Aquinas admits – indeed insists – that God is the cause of what he calls “acts of sin” (actiones peccati): an act of sin is something real, and everything real is from God, so an act of sin is from or caused by God. Thus Aquinas wants to distinguish between the act of sin, which is caused by God, and the sin itself (which is not). For reasons I cannot go into without making an already long section longer still, the distinction Aquinas wants to draw here seems to me obscure and problematic." (Hughes, Christopher. Aquinas on Being, Goodness, and God)
I agree entirely with Mr. Hughes.
The following quote applies in principle to all monotheistic religions:
"The need to harmonize the moral responsibility of man with God’s justice. The penetrating intelligence of Augustine did not fail to notice a most serious difficulty, which is so hard to remove that, as far as I know, all later philosophers with the exception of three, whom for this reason we shall soon examine more closely, have preferred to steal around it quietly, as if it did not exist. But Augustine utters it with noble sincerity in a quite straightforward fashion right in the introductory words of his books On Free Will: “Tell me, pray, whether God is not the author of evil?” And then more extensively in the second chapter: “But the mind is troubled by the problem: if sins come from the souls which God has created, and those souls are from God, how comes it that sins are not, at a slight remove, to be thrown back upon God?” To this the interlocutor replies: ”Now you have put clearly what I have been racking my brain to think out.” This highly dubious consideration was taken up again by Luther and brought out with the full force of his eloquence: “But that God must be such that he subjects us to necessity in virtue of his freedom, even natural reason must admit.—If we grant that God is omniscient and omnipotent, then it follows obviously and incontestably that we did not create ourselves, do not live nor do anything through ourselves, but only through his omnipotence.—God’s omniscience and omnipotence are diametrically opposed to the freedom of our will.—All men are inevitably compelled to admit that we become what we are not through our will but through necessity, that we therefore cannot do what we please in virtue of a freedom of will, but rather do what God has foreseen and brings about through inevitable and irrevocable decision and will.”" (Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essay on the Freedom of the Will Dover Philosophical Classics)
The next two passages concern more Catholic notions:
"The problem of human sin also presents a challenge for thinkers who uphold concurrentist approaches. It seems that the theologian must say that here at least, in the case of sinful human actions, there is an act where God is not acting, but where the human being acts contrary to the will of God. The mere conservationist seems to have less difficulty here: God is responsible only for our existence, but does not act directly in our free actions. Where the concurrentist tradition attempts to deal with this problem, it speaks of sin as a lack, or a defect in the proper created order. As Tanner acknowledges, this ‘simply pushes the question of the origin of sin back to the question of what brought about the first defect’: ‘The question has to stop somewhere since, according to our premises, God does not create a world of sin. But wherever one stops, God’s will would seem to be behind whatever created activity brings sin about.’ After exploring different strategies, Tanner concludes that the theologian ‘can offer no account of how sin actually arises that does not imply that God’s creative will is directly behind such an eventuality’. The implication that Tanner draws from this is not that concurrentism should be abandoned, but rather that we should abandon the attempt to find an explanation for sin: ‘To say that sin is an exception to the premise of God as creator is therefore to say that sin is ultimately without explanation; it is what, by all rights, should not exist in a world that God creates. If a good God is the ultimate explanatory principle according to our picture, is not this inexplicable character of the coming to be of sin what one should expect.’" (CHRISTOPHER J. INSOLE: Kant and the Creation of Freedom – A Theological Problem)
According to the concurrence position of Catholicism, both man and God perform the choice of sin and the sinful act together. God is anything but passive here. Nor does he simply allow the sinful act to happen, but is actively and immediately involved in it.
And:
"Human sin and the omnipotent God of the Thomists cause problems: Very briefly, though, at De Malo, 3, 2 Aquinas admits – indeed insists – that God is the cause of what he calls “acts of sin” (actiones peccati): an act of sin is something real, and everything real is from God, so an act of sin is from or caused by God. Thus Aquinas wants to distinguish between the act of sin, which is caused by God, and the sin itself (which is not). For reasons I cannot go into without making an already long section longer still, the distinction Aquinas wants to draw here seems to me obscure and problematic." (Hughes, Christopher. Aquinas on Being, Goodness, and God)
I agree entirely with Mr. Hughes.
Comments (55)
It's unsolvable for Abrahamists. There are more theisms than just the Abrahamic onces. Hindu (mono)theism, for instance, doesn't face such problems.
the Almighty Nintendo is responsible for Mario's world and Mario, and Bowser, and Princess Peach. But when you play the game, you become responsible for Mario's moves, within the limits of gameplay set by Almighty Nintendo. If Almighty Nintendo had made the game such that nothing could go wrong, or that there were no Bowser, it would have been a dull game that you would have complained about having to play.
That is to say; evil makes the world better.
However, we also take from John that God is the logos, word. As Sausser points out, a one word language, where a single term can equally be applied to all things, is not a language. It cannot convey meaning. In the same way, we cannot speak of a world of only Light, because Light only has meaning in relationship to Darkness.
Thus, I believe we can find darkness within God. We hear of God experiencing anger in the Bible. He "hates" in Amos. God encompasses all things. God is like a wavelength of infinite frequency. As the frequency increases, the peaks and troughs of the wave grow even closer, until the end result would be cancelation. For a sound wave, this would be silence, but a pregnant silence, filled with infinite potentiality.
Jung has a relevant experience in his autobiography. During his childhood, Jung was possesed of an overwhelming compulsion to blaspheme the Holy Spirit. He also had been taught that this was the one thing that caused eternal damnation. He resisted the compulsion, afraid to finish his thought. However, upon reflection, he realized this desire did not come from him, as it was something he absolutely did not want to do, but must come from somewhere else, from God. He finished his thought of blasphemy, and then immediately felt relief and the grace of God. It was this grace, from Darkness, that was the true essence of Christianity for him. God made Adam and Eve to sin, but their sin was required for grace.
This is the theological felix culpa- the Fall was required for the Crucifixion.
A God of only light is meaningless, like the one word language. God's creation of meaning required sin. God is perfect, and so It's partial emanations are inheritally imperfect. We see this in the Gnostics' conception of the Pleroma. God's emanations must exist in pairs, much like Heraclitus' tension of opposites. We can only grasp aspects of God in our mind, only part of the balanced whole. Since the parts are imperfect, not the perfectly balanced whole, we will by definition see fault in God.
God exists outside time. Perfect knowledge of the future would be no different from experiencing the future. All existence occurs at once. Sin is a problem for us because we only see a sliver of the picture, not knowing that there is no distance between the Fall and the Heavenly Kingdom. Indeed, a close reading of Paul and Christ in the Gospels show that we are already in the Kingdom today, as we live on Earth, through God's grace. Hell, the speration from God, can also be upon us even as we live.
Or, to sum up, the "problem of sin" is not a problem of contradiction, but a problem of our frame of reference. We are like Parmenides, thinking Achilles can never overtake the hare, because our reference is wrong.
Therein lies the rub, friend and thank you for bringing it to my attention. I owe you for it but given the possibility that I could be utterly mistaken I'll refrain from thanking you immediately.
Imagine this: Initially I'd like to restrict the domain of discourse to humans only. The question that needs to be asked is, "is it possible (or not) that humans, if they put their heart and soul into it, can live in complete harmony, at peace with each other?" My hunch is that we can. While I don't wish to trivialize the difficulty of such an undertaking, I see no insurmountable barrier to, nothing that would make impossible, a world that's all happiness. If so, God didn't create a world of sin and the sin that we bump into every day of our lives is our own doing. Should you blame god for sin if one admits that living sinless lives is possible? That would be like accusing your boss of poor administration and, with the same breath, admitting that what you've labeled "poor administration" can be solved through interpersonal cooperation. You can't have the cake and eat it too.
This argument unfortunately can't be extended to animals. Why (did god) create carnivores that kill in gruesome ways that are bynames for excruciating pain?
Quoting 180 Proof
In other words, what kind of "all-powerful" (i.e. ultimately responsible) entity "creates" us sick and then "commands" us to be well (i.e. giving us "free will" which is too weak for us to "freely" choose to obey (righteousness) and refrain from disobeying (sin) in every circumstance)? And then threatens violence, like a rapist, for disobeying the entity's command to love the entity "with all thy heart, etc"?
This kind of entity is, all apologetic clichés aside (e.g. theodicy), either a sadist – "demon" – or a masochistic, self-abnegating, fiction, such that the latter amounts to a pathological feitsh and the former is too wicked to "worship". (The Gnostics (or acosmists re: "maya") surely have a point ...)
:up:
Quoting spirit-salamander
That does not follow. Obviously we did not create ourselves (nor did God create himself). But it does not follow from God's omnipotence and omniscience that he created us. If we, like God himself, exist with aseity, that is consistent with God being omnipotent and omniscient and omnibenevolent.
Problem solved. God does not author sin, we do.
Understatement, no?
His "will be done", choir boy, and we're doing it by "authoring sin"; thus, according to this "theodicy", we may be guilty of "sin" but He is ultimately responsible for "creating sinners". :eyes:
Ask yourself, given what we have - focus on our strengths rather than our weaknesses - is a sinless world possible? If you like answer the follow up question, would civilization have been possible if we were truly sick?
Speaking of video games, there’s a great one called ‘Sa?s?ra’. It plays out over ‘aeons of kalpas’ - that means ‘very long periods of time’. Beings are born into various levels of sa?s?ra which include ghastly hell realms and blissful heaven realms, as well as the Human Realm, where this post is being composed. (Others include the animal realm, Demi-god realm, and the realm of hungry ghosts.) Depending on their motivations, actions, and insight~wisdom, which can be gained or lost over whole series of existences, beings are reborn into the various domains of sa?s?ra over the aeons, sometimes remaining in one realm for what in earth terms would be millions of years. The ultimate resolution of the game is to escape the ‘wheel of sa?s?ra’ for once and for all, which happens very rarely, although according to legend, those who have succeeded in escaping (known as ‘Buddhas’ in Buddhist tradition) periodically return to the realms to provide guidance and inspiration for those still trapped.
Here’s the cover art.
I'm a big fan of the American and internet meme versions of these I've found.
No. Nothing in this universe can exist without God willing it and making it possible.
Clue: it doesn't.
You think God created everything for one simple and embarrassingly stupid reason: it says so in the bible.
That's all you got, right? Not a philosophical reason, but a scriptural one. Way to go!!
And here's a quick demonstration the God did not create everything.
1. If God created everything, then he created sin.
2. God did not create sin
3.Therefore, God did not create everything.
:fire: :clap: Yet, isn't sin, understood as immorality/bad independent of god re Euthyphro's dilemma?
Nevertheless, your statement brings to the fore the fact that morality's beginnings can be traced back to humanity's theological instincts.
I'd like to closely examine the word "disobey" vis-à-vis morality. I suspect that the first humans to encounter the notion of morality discovered that morality boiled down to a list of dos and don'ts. Thus, if one were either good/bad one would be, in a sense, obeying/disobeying moral injunctions as they appear in the list mentioned above. Quite obvious is the fact that people would then invent or imagine some entity, a perfect moral agent, who they were obeying/disobeying when they're moral/immoral. In very simple terms that morality seems to take the form of laws, it's quite natural, almost inevitable, that people would conceive of a supreme law-maker (god).
Also worth mentioning is the difficulty in making morality a human affair. If it were me, as I am now, my first question to someone trying to school me on ethics would be, "why the hell should I do/not do as you tell me to?" This question, though simple prima facie, blows the lid off morality, exposes as it were a dark secret at the very center of ethics viz. that either morality has no foundation or that attempts by moral theorists to produce one have all failed miserably.
Ergo, necessarily that early moral theorists turned to or came up with a being/entity that can both prop up morality and also oversee its practice by people; this entity/being god. They had no choice - morality is just too god damned important to be left without a strong support structure and since none could be found, none have been found to date, the wisest move was to posit a god who, the hope was, would become morality's bedrock.
Despite the fact that this step - basing morality on a god - is ultimately nothing but interposing a more acceptable, even if false, belief system - theism - between humans and our pitiful ignorance of morality, it has an overall good track record I must say.
Not so. IIRC, "sin" is an ancient Judaic concept (re: violation of any the Torah's '613 mitzvahs') and not a Greek concept (like "hubris" or "impiety"). Besides, in the Euthyphro, Socrates calls Euthyphro's definition of piety (i.e. divine command theory) into question showing its incoherent as a justification for morals; I don't read that, however, as 'therefore morals are independent of – completely unrelated to – piety for G/gs'. At his trial, remember, Socrates denies – defends himself against – the charge of impiety (prosecuted by Meletus who also features in the Euthyphro) of which he's condemned anyway along with the crime of corrupting Athen's (elite) sons.
NB: Two and a half millennia later, Camus says committing philosophical suicide (i.e. willful irrationality: e.g. "leap of faith", "utopianism", "denialism", "physical suicide", etc) is akin to 'sin, or impiety, even without g/G.'
That, I think, is only a (primitive) theocratic-totemic or autocratic-martial notion.
Yeah. "Taboos" are what anthropologists call them. I think other customs (mores) grew from observing "taboos" and then laws (nomos, polis) followed as populations increased in size and diversity of customs. Ethics is the latecomer, deliberately (even dialectically) developed for individuals living among crowds of strangers (& foreigners) in cosmopolitan locales also as a stranger, who must survive and who seeks to thrive (i.e. cultivate well-being, or physical health plus mental ease (i.e. living a more satisfied than dissatisfied life)) with as little conflict (i.e. fear, violence, harm, injustice) as possible.
That resonates with me. Thanks for letting me in on some of your philosophical insights. Much appreciated señora/señorina.
Mind if you take a look at my post (above) again? I added some of my, what I believe are, insights in the last few paragraphs.
In a nutshell: Setting aside the matter of bitter truths which we could safely do without, in general we tend to fear the unknown. It's my understanding that, given the fact knowledge itself - Agrippa's trilemma, The problem of the criterion, etc. - seems deeply mired in controversy, every system of beliefs that we have at our disposal is, simply put, just a shoddily constructed buffer zone between ignorance and ignoramus (us).
From God's point of view, there is no evil. Indeed there cannot be, because Xe (I'm woke now) is omnipotent.
From the point of view of a relatively impotent creature, like a human being, there are going to be loads of things that happen against their will. And that's just the definition of evil: x is evil if and only if it is against my will. "Good is that which is willed."
Adopting this view fixes the problem of the thread. Although many theists will want to keep the idea that some things exist that are against Xe's will. But I don't see how that is tenable.
Quoting 180 Proof
Señor works better for me, amigo. Gracias.
Quoting TheMadFool
Yes and yes – the latter because, like in epistemology, the former is incoherent in so far as "foundationalism" is just a species of "justificationism". Non-justificationist, or naturalistic-pragmatic, ethics such as (agency-centric) negative utilitarianism / consequentialism or aretaic eudaimonism are performative, not propositional, and work more often (as advertised) than not work. As for "why should one be moral ...?", substitute a concept like healthy or adaptable or rational for "moral" and the question self-evidently answers or negates itself.
:rofl: My apologies Amigo!
Quoting 180 Proof
I'm genuinely curious, what other kinds of "approach" to knowledge are there over and above, beyond, justificationism (I hope I got the word right)? Would you, for instance, accept whatever alternative "approach" you wish to recommend or endorse sans justification? Wouldn't that make you something you seem loathe to be labeled as - irrational?
Quoting 180 Proof
I like how the general thrust of that. Since rationality has been brought to bear on ethics for the better part of two centuries to my reckoning, I've always wondered why moral theorists never got to the point where they said to themselves, "enough is enough, let's reduce morality to logic" à la how Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, et al tried but eventually failed I believe to reduce math to logic. Is there something irrational about evil or conversely is good ultimately reason itself?
Spoon-feeding ain't fun, Fool.
Quoting TheMadFool
Try the philosophers I mentioned here as a start:
Quoting 180 Proof
Also, "rationality brought to bear on ethics" goes back at least as far as the Aristotleans, Epicureans & Stoics ... and Spinoza predates Kant et al by at least a century. Ethics, like the rest of philosophy, is a performative exercise (reflection, contemplation) and not a propositional discourse (theoretical explanation), so it's inherently interminable, perhaps occasionally converging (by processes of eliminating patent nonsense and falsehoods) but never converging upon settled-once-and-for-all-positions. We're Sisyphusean rodeo clowns striving, at best, for better questions, Fool, not scientists with lab results or self-help gurus pimping fortune cookie (perennial) answers. Why ethics continues to preoccupy so many philosophers? Same reason "health" still preoccupies physicians & homeopaths. Both indicate horizons within which we humans exist together and that we are always approaching but never reaching, thus enabling us as they constrain us.
That sounds suspiciously like science but then you go on to say:
Quoting 180 Proof
Did I miss the point you were making?
That aside, I suppose I do catch your drift to the extent allowed by my own abilities and...disabilities, let's not forget.
It also seems like you overlooked what I'm actually deeply interested in viz. is morality logic itself? Now, that sounds, even to me the questioner, wrong. To mention one obvious error in this line of thinking - logic is, after all, merely a tool used to study, analyze, and, with a little bit of luck, build the a/the moral theory from its foundations up to its highest point whatever shape or form that might take. I may have committed other gross mistakes but I'm presently not aware of them. Feel free to point them out to me.
While this isn't exactly what I had in mind, being rational/logical or being proficient to some extent in critical thinking seems to be the best option we have to navigate the moral universe given the conspicuous absence of a moral theory that is both, in Godelian terms, complete (covers all the bases) and consistent (is free from contradictions). In short, being rational/logical is, as of the moment, the least worst option available to us i.e. in a certain sense, being rational = being good or that LOGIC/RATIONALITY = MORALITY!!!
What say you?
Apparently.
What disabilities?
Logic is not ethics just as the brain is not the heart (or mouth is not the anus), respectively.
How can it be independent if all that is creation is creation of and by god?
In the beginning there was nothing. God created everything.
Maybe there was god and evil? Before creation? The bible vehemently denies that.
You CANNOT divorce evil from god. he is fully responsible for its creation.
The only way to reconcile this by LOGIC (not by faith) is to
1. Ignore it
2. Abandon the faith.
However; if you have faith, then you can bully your mind into believing absolutely everything you've ever wanted to believe.
Let sleeping dogs lie. If you believe in god, a god which has the attributes Christianity ascribes to it, despite all reasonable thought that tells you that that unit is impossible to exist, then so be it, I am happy for you, and you should go in peace and spread the good news.
There is no mention here of original sin, or inherited sin, or being born in sin, or being powerless against sin.
Not doing what is right is not called sin, sin appears to follow from not doing right. In this context I think this means something like heading in the wrong direction, taking a dangerous path. The ways of man is a central concern of the Hebrew Bible. The path we take is our own choice.
Immediately after this warning Cain kills his brother Abel. Cain is angry because God looked favorably on Abel's offering but not on his own. His anger toward his brother is the first step in the wrong direction and leads to murder.
Sin, evil, is not only sin and evil because we call some actions sinful or evil. Sin and evil exist because the concept required a word for itself to delineate it, describe it, and make it usable in the language. Concept came first, word second. Because the word sin appeared in the story of Cain and Abel, one -- at least I think so -- can't deny that the concepts had been already in place before such moment as the concept was named a unique name.
Three points. The fact that the term was not used may not be insignificant. Second, if they did not know good and bad then in their innocence they did not sin. They would have no concept of sin. Third, it was only through their seduction, their disobedience, their desire for wisdom (3:6), the blessing of procreation (to know), and so on, it seems to me it differs from the path Cain chose.
All of this is meant to be suggestive. I do not insist that it is correct.
Thank you for being lectured by you in a paraphrased form by telling me what I had just expressed. After refuting your own argument so eloquently; what should we do next time you claim something that we do not agree with?
Sorry for being so blunt. But once in a while it would be nice to hear from you, "Yes, you're right."
Well if we attribute to God the highest and noblest, why not attribute to Him the lowest and most degenerate?
If God were not only the author of the good, but also of the bad, there would be less brain-wrecking than trying to explain how the bad could possibly exist if an omnipotent being is responsible.
I never understood why and the answers given seemed evasive. If God permits good, he permits evil. Then we are left with an image of an omnipotent being which is not "benevolent", in any way that we understand that term.
Thanks for this paragraph it brought be considerable pleasure. :up:
In my thoughts I had explained that very well. Never verbalized it or written it down. Here it is, for the first time:
God was first (whether a singular monodeity, or a pluralistic deity) attributed with human qualities: anger, evil, goodness, compassion, brains, stupid decisions, etc.
Concurrently, people prayed to their gods for favours. People paid sacrifices to their gods.
Then they figured, "maybe god (the particular god(s) they worshipped) does not like being called stupid, inconsiderate, a rapist. (Zeus and Jupiter.) Maybe he will grant more favours if I praise him more, and berate him less."
After a while the berating declined, and the putting on pedestal accelerated. This became a trend; then a competition. The sections "proverbs" and "psalms" are full of quotes that supply evidence for this trend.
Eventually god, THE god, became all-powerful, by getting praise, and all-good, due to not wishing to insult him, and all-forgiving and infinitely merciful, despite the billions of souls who burn in hell in incredible pain for all eternity.
There was no turning back. After God garnered an all-encompassing capitulation to his power by accelerated sucking up to him, people became stuck in the calling him good, merciful, powerful and sometimes angry.
But then some smart-alecs like a whole number of us on this forums, started to think, "hey, how is this possible?" It is not possible. It is the end process of kiss-ass to the limit of its possibility, and the ensuing logical self-contradictions.
If any one of you, 180 Proof, Tom Storm, et al, CARED to read my very long post, an article no publisher of philosophy would even look at, you would not say this.
It is still on this site, for anyone to see and read. Unfortunately it is very long, because the purpose originally was to publish it in a magazine that is peer-reviewed.
Please don't hesitate to read it.
You can see it on this site, here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/10744/ethics-explained-to-smooth-out-all-wrinkles-in-current-debates-neo-darwinist-approach
I am puzzled by the fact that you think that what I said was a paraphrase of what you said.
Quoting god must be atheist
But I do not know that you are right. I gave you three reasons why I think you might be wrong. That what they did was not called sin because the authors of the story did not regard it as such.
Quoting god must be atheist
It is the storyteller who uses the concept and name. My point is that Adam and Eve did not have that concept of sin, they were innocents without knowledge of good and bad. For may be for this reason the storyteller did not use it to name their act.
Nevertheless, I won't argue, for a number of PERSONAL reasons. Let me just say this: you are not counter-arguing, you are just negating by uttering negatory responses to my claims. You don't typically supply evidence when countering my points, whereas with all other people you argue with here, you do. And this is not the first time you do this while debating with me. The best you can do to argue against my points are presuppositions, and not hard, irrefutable arguments.
This leads me to thoughts of personal opinions that make it advisable to not always respond to your counter arguments, such as they are. I will still engage with you in debates, but won't carry it beyond the point when you use presuppositions, without providing solid arguments, at least as I see them to be.
That makes sense. Thanks for sharing.
I also think there may be an element of us wanting to feel better about ourselves so we put the good in some otherworldy domain and try to imbue the bad with human error or folly, or the nebulous term "evil".
But if you attribute to God evil, then there are less paradoxes. Not that this means such a thing exists, we are simply attributing all human attributes to a "supreme Being" and dialing our attributes to infinity...
Wonderful to hear that. Thanks.
Yes, I agree, and I'd call it "hope"; to hope that our future is nice is easier to do if the person who decides on it is good.
Don't think what? I am interpreting a story. I don't think that any of this actually happened. I don't think the storytellers did either.
Quoting god must be atheist
I honestly do not know what you mean. A counter-argument to what?
If you have issues with my responses to you or lack of responses feel free to send me a message.
Though there's more, these four criticisms suffice for me to judge that, in sum, your essay doesn't belong in any reputable publication of serious philosophical interest. Others, of course, may think otherwise, finding me too uncharitable – so be it. Please don't mistake critical honesty for assholery; you sought out a considered response and there's a salient sketch of one.
Lastly, I've read nothing that substantially calls my position as stated previously on this thread into question: we disagree on ethics, god must be atheist, which is okay with me, but there's simply no more substance to our disagreement, I regret, than that between a "Lamarkian biologist" and a neo-Darwinian evolutionist (or between an "astrologer" and an astronomer) because you don't bring any substance to the table with this essay..
I admit, I don't understand some of your criticism. When I say I don't understand it, I don't mean I disagree with it; I literally don't understand some of your objections. It is written in unfinished sentences, in incomplete sentences, in syntactically incorrect sentences ("because you don't being any substance to the table with this essay..") and using jargon I don't possess knowledge about.
I bow to your superior background to mine in philosophy.
A few words on what I understand:
It is not irrelevant; it is precisely the kernel topic of my paper. You dismiss its relevance, which I aim to prove in the paper; and of course you will find my paper meaningless, since you dismiss its major thrust ab ovo. Consensus is not required; but if a proven solution is found, then consensus follows automatically.
My paper does not consider Moral Agency because Moral Agency is irrelevant to the topic. You insist, maybe, because of your bias of looking at morality? Well, this paper is about a different angle of morality. I obviously failed as a writer to make you see my point or points -- I don't blame you, I blame my inferior writing skills to get the points across. Or else maybe you sought old, rehashed, and repeated ideas repeated again, and were incredulous, because you found none. A brand new concept normally encounters huge resistance for acceptance in the community. One of the reasons is precisely that expectations of the readers are not fulfilled by the presentation of new ideas. A paper about morality is null and void without mentioning moral agency, because that is your favourite approach, as you have said it so clearly in your criticism. A different reader may want to see something different, but also old and re-hashed over and over again, something that they are familiar with, and have rehashed in their minds, and can take sides on and argue it well. The lack of the mention of moral agency is something that PERHAPS bothers you because you expected it to be there, and you don't quite say why it is needed, or why its absence destroys the paper... I believe (don't know, but beleive), that your expectation is not met, that's the only problem. The paper makes sense without integrating moral agency.
Habituation is NOT the only driving force of natural selection. What you are saying is a huge admission to ignorance about natural selection and evolution. Of course my thesis fails on this account, as this account you insist on is part of neo-Darwinism, but not the only type of criteria that is part of the evolutionary mechanism. And I actually never mentioned such a thing as "innatism".
This is something where you hit the nail on the head. My paper reeks of insufficient academic background and lacks in referencing. However, you yourself said in one of the points, that consensus is non-existent and not required. I beg to ask: why then the insistence on comparison to established (and accepted) theories? Consensus is either there, or not, If there, then yes, I need to relate my theory to past theories. But consensus is not required. Therefore I claim I have not failed on this portion of the paper, but I agree with you: because of the lack of referencing, though logically not important to integrate, again fails to satisfy those who want to read that material that they have read a thousand times in a thousand books, and they very much expect to see the re-hashed ideas getting re-hashed again. Again, I fail because of the bias of expectations, not because of the logical mechanism of explaining my point.
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I do admit I do have insurmountable difficulties in this paper. Its main idea is maverick, original, and I believe it's right on the button. However, the community is resistant -- that is not only expected, it is a natural law. I can't overcome the resistance of the community unless I put my idea into a form that meets their expectations... and that is not something I can do.
I believe you skimmed over my paper, and not read it to internalize its points, 180 Proof. My claim that you handled it superficially is not a factual claim, but a description of my gut feelings. Some of your criticism was valid, but you invalidated your own valid points (think consensus and its requirement, vis-a-vis referencing). Some of your criticism was ill gotten (your remarks about habituation). Some of your criticism was irrelevant (by expressing the need to read what you expected to read). And none of the critical reasons had to do with the meaning of the paper. Your criticism only referenced the premises of my argument, and you believed you proved my premises wrong. You tried to invalidate the assertions on which my discussion was built; and therefore you did not bother with reading the argument in it and its conclusion. That is understandable, should your criticism have stood ground. But it did not.
My paper presents a brand new way of looking at morality, by completely separating what I called in the paper involuntary morality and learned morality. No text to my knowledge before separated the two and pointed out the similarities and the differences. The similarities and differences I described are constants.
To charge that I did not do my research, is understandable, as it was an expectation by you that was not fulfilled, like I said earlier, but it is not necessary to the kernel topic of the paper. The only research that was necessary was to say that this concept has not been thought of before. No more reference is needed.
What got me upset, was your charge that I messed up the evolutionary aspect. Evolution (species separation) occurs on localized differences of survival options that adaptations favour, and adaptations develop by random mutations, but evolution also occurs by the survival of the fittest. The fitter the society's survival capabilities, the more likely it is to survive. And if the components (denizens, humans) of a society all have a certain mutation that carries this survival advantage forward, then the mutated DNA is more ready to spread and be transmitted to future generations than those society's members' DNAs that don't have the mutation. This is so when the two groups need to fight for a scarce resource that is needed for survival, and there is not enough of the resource to support the survival of all competing groups.
This is essential to understanding evolutionary theory. To misrepresent this as a Lamarck's type of "wishing to mutate" is what hurt me. I did not think, still don't think, that that interpretation was warranted.
I did not spell out this mutation part in the paper, because I assumed that readers would connect the dots themselves easily -- between the role of mutation in my theory, and my theory. Not in my wildest dreams would I have thought that there would be someone who understands my claims as needing support from Lamarck's version.
Well, God's omniscience and omnipotence is the only thing we can be certain of. Of course man has some freedom of will but that is necessarily limited by God's own omnipotence.
Personally, I tend to believe that man's "free will" is ultimately negligible if not illusory. The more spiritually advanced a soul becomes, the more it acts in harmony with the will of God. The upper hierarchies of souls such as saints, angels, etc. would be more in harmony with the will of God than the lower ones, so that ultimately, the whole of reality is subject to the will of God. Whether it constitutes a "problem" or not is a matter of perspective. It can't be a problem from the perspective of God and those who live in harmony with him.
The commandment "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and mind, and soul" means to unconditionally submit to his will. Once we do that, all doubts disappear. As we can't spend all our lives doubting and asking questions, there comes a point where faith becomes more important than reason. This is precisely why many Pagan philosophers, Augustine included, gave in to Christianity. Others embraced Christianity but retained some philosophical methods of inquiry, etc. But it has never been a problem to ordinary believers.