If there were a god, are they fair?
I find it hard to identify what fair means in general. But assuming there was an all knowing and all powerful god that created us and wants the best for us. Are they fair? It is easy to imagine how we'd do things differently, but can we determine if such a god is fair?
Comments (64)
No. They're not fair. There I said it. They're not. The ones at a disadvantage pray to them for help, the ones doing well pray for more.
i. created nature that is wastefully indifferent and ravaged by gratuitous suffering
and/or
ii. created us sick but commands us to be well
and/or
iii. eternally punishes us for our temporal crimes
is certainly not "fair" (just).
1. Deservingness
2. Equality
We seem to have fixated on equality; hence, to some, life isn't fair.
Deservingness is a double-edged sword: sometimes it seems to misfire so to speak (bad things happen to good people, that sort of thing), other times, it works perfectly (some do get their just deserts, what goes around comes around, karma).
The long and short of it, fairness needs to be labeled FRAGILE. This side up [math]\uparrow[/math]
You speak of some religious references. We don't know if there is a hell. Buddhists believe in a temporary hell and Jews don't believe in a hell at all. I am only asking about all that exists that we can observe.
If what is best for us is fair then god, as stipulated, must be fair. If what is best for us is not what is fair, then, for our own good, god is not fair.
Suppose God - an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent person - exists.
Well, by hypothesis, they are fair in their dealings, for they're morally perfect.
Thus they are fair in their dealings with us.
If that seems inconsistent with what you think is happening to you and to others, then you have faulty beliefs about what is happening to you and others.
Or, the gods are just not omnibenevolent.
I think most theists don’t see the world itself as fair (some people are born into poverty, some die early or in childbirth, etc) but if they believe in judgement would believe such judgement to be “fair.”
Often times, by definition, God is ascribed the virtues of fairness or justice (perhaps by nature of omniscience) so in that case it is sort of a tautology.
Assuming they made us in their image we could say they are not fair. So unfairness as well as fairness are part of creation. There will be no judgment day. Maybe an occasional slap in the face to show mankind the roads that have been chosen lead us astray and nature into misery. Preventing species to exist or showing them an eviction warrant from paradise is not exactly how they planned it.
So cute! Did you try to hide this? :snicker: :flower:
And since we are made in God's image, God must be fair....
Sorry, just thought I'd offer a glib and bullshit argument to fit in with some of the others. :yikes: :razz:
Quoting 180 Proof
iiii. proffers us his will obliquely via oral traditions written down by men, which are copied and translated and copied and translated and peddled by gatekeeping preachers who interpret God's will in contradictory ways, so we are left to work out what He actually wants without Him as much as showing up to say hi.
Yeah, God's a fuckin' righteous peach.
No. Wanting the best for us includes wanting us to be our best morally. In all fairness, the good deserve rewards and the bad deserve penalties. but if it were the case that good deeds were always rewarded and bad deeds always punished, bad people would do good deeds for the rewards and to avoid the penalties. There would be no difference between good and bad, except that to be bad would be foolish and self-defeating.
Moral freedom requires injustice. therefore God necessarily created the world such that the scum always floats to the top, and the gold sinks to the bottom.
It's a reasonable question, maybe you could liken it to a programmer or a gaming dev: let's say you create a program and it has a few errors, does that mean you are unfair? Let's say you create a game like the sims, where there are people living their lives and they have certain abilities, like walking, talking, procreating, they have pets, and eat and sleep, etc. And in their little game their little deep thinkers create a system of money, and little fields like science and history, and some people end up living a really bad life, etc., would that make you an unfair developer? Or let's say there are some errors in the game and some people are born like missing an arm, or their coding makes them die for no apparent reason. Does that make you an unfair developer? Most devs try to create a good game that people will enjoy.
The intention is not to make a perfect game because unless it's tic-tac-toe any decently complex game will have errors. Usually what devs try to do is upgrade the game in real-time putting out patches to try and fix the really bad errors. Who knows how many upgrades there have been, we could be on version ten thousand or something and the devs finally said okay this game is as good as it's going to get. Does that make the devs unfair? Or what if we are just avatars like the sims and we are playing out a game for some kids in an advanced world? Is our life inherently unfair just because we can process things like self-awareness, love, fear, joy, and all the other emotions that people care about? Those emotions might not even matter to the advanced species.
Are you a vegetarian? Do you think its fair to kill animals so you can eat them? When you walk around are you constantly checking the bottom of your shoes to make sure you did not kill an ant? I'm quite sure you have killed plenty of insects by accident. There are tiny microorganisms on your face, you have probably killed a few when you wiped your nose, does that make you unfair?
Do we know the will of this god to know if we are doing the right things to the world they created?
How do you measure the gratuitousness of the human suffering? We aren't all offing ourselves? I don't understand your statement about creating us sick.
Would an all knowing and all powerful being need to make upgrades? And couldn't they fix all issues in a space of time and in a way that it goes unnoticed or unremembered?
Are we just characters in a heavenly TV show?
Quoting Tom Storm
Thou blasphemous pagan!
That's only one of them! The peach tree god.
Quoting TiredThinker
Good question! I wonder about that myself too. Do they oblige us to follow morals? Do they punish with hell or reward with heaven? Don't think so. I think the just recreated heaven by creating the universe. They had good reason to do so. If you consider all life having a god counterpart part in heaven, so not only human beings, and consider the universe and life in it as a collective creation, after a collective heavenly effort (so not an effort of some aliien, so-called technological advanced culture, which posits the creation myth within the universe itself and assign unrealistic power to universal life, namely the creation of life), then all of life should deserve a fair chance. You might ask if modern humans reflect their counterparts in heaven in destroying nature to a considerable extent. If the natural world resembles paradise is it wrong to destroy nature? How did the humans exist in nature? Were they eager to know everything as they are in the modern day, thereby breaking apart the very thing they want to know everything about? Well, there wasn't a universe to know things about in the first place, as the created the basic stuff to let it evolve into life resembling heaven. But I think the human gods are somewhat different from the others. Did they maybe played some faul game in the preambles to creation? Didn't the other gods watched them properly. Did something just go wrong accidentally? Dunno, but in heaven they wouldn't stand a chance to mess things up. From where comes this desire to understand the workings of the universe? Why not just live and act like is acted in heaven? That would be a good life, which trancends good and evil and morals. Good and bad were part of heaven, so they are part of the universe too. A world in which the bad is not allowed to exist is worse than one in which it can exist. Many bad things emerge from a way of life withdrawn from nature. Like fighting with atom bombs instead of body and teeth.
Is that you, listening to Spinal Tap?
If there is a "creator god", then suffering (e.g. animals eating animals, incapacitating birth defects, catastrophic natural disasters, psychopathologies, mass extinctions, etc) is either gratuitious or it's not. And "god-given" gratuitious suffering isn't fair, is it? :mask:
According to Genesis, god gave human beings a form of "free will" lacking in strength, or capability, for us to freely refrain from "sinning" and yet god punishes human beings precisely because we are afflicted with this "god-given" weakness, or incapability. :brow:
Here is the first word on sin in Genesis, direct from God to Cain:
Paul's teaching to the gentiles is quite different. Here sin rules over man rather than man being able to rule over sin.
I don't know to which God you are referring to but:
i. is necessity for free will to be unconditional and real
ii. is generalization
iii. is false because there is forgiveness of mistakes or crimes
The gift of free will constitutes fairness.
If such a being exists, then God is not treating us unfairly. Whatever happens to you, God was not being unfair in allowing it to happen to you.
Some have difficulty accepting this because they're already convinced that they're loveable good people who deserve nothing but milk and honey.
That's another hypothesis than mine. I consider beings with true creation power as a god.
Nice.
So they should accept it as fair that someone pisses in their milk and steals their honey once in a while or even the major part of their life?
What if you never did something wrong and when you wanna drink your milk you see someone pissing in it while putting your honey jar in his plastic bag to take it from you, grinning atya while doing it?
We gotta face it. There are sneaky bastards among them gods...
If God exists, then God isn't treating you unfairly. No matter what happens to you, God wasn't being unfair in allowing it to happen.
Why? Because God is omnibenevolent. So he doesn't treat anyone unfairly.
So, again, when someone pisses in your milk and steals your honey, God wasn't being unfair in allowing that to happen.
When might a good person allow someone else to piss in someone else's milk and steal their honey? Why, when the person in question is themselves a milk pisser honey stealer.
Now, look around you: you live in a world of milk pisser honey stealers. So guess what you might be? What, you think you're a saint? You think you don't deserve to have your milk pissed in and honey stolen? Think again boyo.
awww :flower:
Who says that I'm no milk pisser or that I don't steal? If someone pisses in my milk I steal some new at the local supermarket and some honey along with it. When I come home, I listen to the theme of Interstellar and realize all life is just a copy of the life in heaven. We're not going to a hell or to heaven. Life just eternally starts over again. In endless variations. Good and bad included. We should thank the gods for that. Thieves and murderers are creations of the gods too. Excesses though appear if we distance ourselves from paradise which has succeeded already...
To me, there is a very clear distinction between (as you say) God existing and someone having free will to "piss in your milk and steal your honey." In other words, since God didn't actually piss in your milk, the fact that your milk was pissed in does not mean He is unfair. I tend to side with Plantinga on Plantinga vs Mackie on the Logical Problem of Evil (if I remember correctly, even Mackie thought so too).
However, I do wonder that if God intervenes in some cases (and for some people), is it fair for him not to intervene in others. For instance, is it fair for him to intervene in my life and, say, make sure that I meet my future partner, but not have Hitler choke on a piece of bread as a child or something?
I will say the theists I have talked to on this matter (mostly Christian) have given me suitable responses, so I do think their view is consistent.
Sure TiredThinker, but you are not seeing the forest for the trees. The point is that this world is not perfect, and if it were any different it would not be the same. ;)
How about this, tell us what you think a fair world would look like, and you'll probably just as soon realize why that cannot be. ;)
Btw, what the heck is going on with all the winking around here?
:wink:
Weirdo!
The god of Abraham (i.e. religious theism). Ask the OP; I think my assumption is consistent with his / her query.
Only fictions are "unconditional". Choosing and acting – manifestations of "free will" – are conditioned in fact by consequences.
Hardly. Read the book of Genesis about what Augustine calls "original sin". In "paradise", the first man and woman created free of "sin" eventually – inevitably (i.e. set up by god to "fall") – sinned, which afflicted their descendents and all of the rest of "creation".
False. There is both forgiveness (for "the elect few") and punishment (for the vast majority). For example, Mosaic Law consists of "613 mitzvahs", etc.
NB: Some familiarity with Torah, NT and/or the Qur'an, for a start, would go a long way to helping you make intelligent remarks on matters of theology ...
Life is not fair because the gods are not fair. Why should your hypothesis about one omni god be correct? If we view life in the light of different creators, fairness and unfairness gets a new meaning. Why should you view god as one omni creature? The God?
If so it's not a tv show, it's a movie, and I'm in a romcom.
I winked at you! In all fairness... :wink:
:rofl:
:lol:
Free will is unquestionably valuable, but that doesn't mean that good, powerful people let other people use it to visit great harms on others. They intervene and stop it.
Note, we exercise free will over our decisions and Roger got to make his decision to piss in Tim's milk, even though God would intervene and prevent the actual pissing from occurring.
We live in a world in which people get their milk pissed in all the time. God would not knowingly allow that to happen to good, innocent people. So we're not innocent good people then. God isn't allowing all this milk pissing and honey stealing to go on out of respect for our free will. God is allowing it to happen because we're all a bunch of milk pissing honey stealers who deserve to languish in each other's rotten company.
God would not allow anyone to piss in your milk or steal your honey if you were a nice innocent person. Yet here you are living in a world in which anyone can piss in your milk and steal your honey at any time.
Therefore you are not a nice innocent person. Nor is anyone else here.
What about babies?
But the answer to your question is clear. Based on what one sees in the world, god is not fair. nailed it.
Here's the image I use to explain fairness to children:
Now that is just another part of the inconsistency of the notion of god. So much the worse for theism. The various attempts here to make god appear moral are inadequate. The only resort left for theism is to claim that life is fair despite the facts; an act of faith.
But if fairness is something to be valued, if it is worthwhile, then it is up to us to make things fair.
Of course if someone does not value fairness, that's about them. But I would put money on them squealing like a stuck pig when they think their favourite computer game is unfair.
Folk see unfairness more clearly when they are subject to it.
You, I think, must be assuming that babies are innocent. And this, I imagine, is because you also assume that babies do not contain the souls of those who did wrong in another place, but rather that souls come into being at the same time as the baby body, or thereabouts.
Those assumptions of yours are false if God exists. For God would not deal with anyone unfairly - someone who thinks otherwise is simply conceptually incompetent.
Yet clearly it would be unfair - unjust in the extreme - to subject an innocent baby to life here, in a world such as this one, surrounded by idiotic evil doers, yes?
So he hasn't.
So babies are not innocent, then.
We're obliged to assume they are - I do not dispute that. Prisoners in a prison are obliged to treat the other inmates 'as if' they are innocent and that is precisely what our situation is (if God exists). But they are not actually innocent. For it is absurd to suppose God would put an innocent soul into a pathetically incompetent body and then push it through another person's grotty parts and into a world of arseholes, is it not? That is not the behaviour of an even half-way decent person, never mind a morally perfect one.
Needless to say, my view prompts ghastly righteous indignation from many, who think it a terrible thing to say that babies are not born innocent. Yet invariably these self same folk have themselves forced what they believe to be an innocent person into this world - a world of rapists and murderers - despite knowing full well what kind of a world it was (and thereby demonstrating that they themselves deserve to be here).
If we achieved fair as defined by that image would events still occur or would it be like universal cooling whereby entropy affectively ends?
Notice that effort, work, was required to lift the boxes, one onto the other? Equity is cooling, making things the same, leaving the boxes at the same level.
Equity is heat-death; fairness is its antithesis.
[Why should god(s) be moral examples?
Typically human. Already in heaven the human gods were something else...
The antithesis of heath death is total order. Fairness and unfairness lay between them. Between the heat and the cold. Between day and night. Between sleep and wake. Between the Moon and the Sun.
What is fairness in the first place? You could just as well switch the "equality" and "fairness" signs in the great picture you showed. And call the first "unfair".
Notice that it's equality, not equity, in the image? Some versions of the image have "equity" in the place of "fairness". In the first image, the boxes are shared equally - each person has one. In the second the boxes are not shared equally, but there is equality.
I use this to show children why someone might need more attention or support than someone else.
It's a great image! Telling about everything about fairness, equality, equity (fairness?), sharing, etc. I don't even think the words are needed.
Yep. I've not been able to find out where it is from. It is widely used, making it hard to find the artist.
The middle child has the least problems...
What if the tall guy were a white boy and the small a black boy (but equal heights). If the white boy gets the jobs easier than the black boy, how should the boxes be interpreted to establish equity or fairness?