Well, I’m in comversation with you, aren’t I? Quite different from, “leave it to others” and name-dropping.
What do you mean, “nope”? Back that up with an agument, if you can. Are you not familiar with informal argumentation? It looks like the way I presented premise and conclusion in my last post.
There’s not much to discuss on the PoS. Epicurus, our hedonist mastermind, was the author. Hume rendered it more poetically and it’s deconverted many.
Come now to PoH. Happiness implies God, doesn’t it? Remember to compare the PoH with the PoS. If you disagree, why? The ToE is just another theory and although it works, it’s just one among many possibilities. In fact I would club it with FSM.
Happiness and suffering are part of life.
God, as conceived in theism, is incompatible with suffering. What about happiness? Suffering relates to God (PoS). Does not happiness? My position is that happiness is evidence for God. Do you disagree?
You’ve what-is-the-case statements. Same class of statements as, “2 + 2 = 4”. Is that all? If yes, then you’d be an interesting member.
Yes, defining “happiness” and “suffering” can be done in various ways. I could for example define “happiness” as eating ravioli on Mondays and “suffering” as wanting to pee in bear territory.
The PoS is well-studied. Tracing back to Epicurus and features in Hume’s skepticism. A good God, a powerful God, and suffering are not going to fit together in the same box.
What about happiness then? A good God would want happiness in the world. Isn’t there happiness in the world? Yes, there is. And so happiness \implies God exists.
I ate the most delicious fig last summer, it was like eating a piece of heaven. Therefore God exists, by your metric. But it was after eating at least a hundred figs that didn’t quite hit the spot. Either a bit too dry, not sweet enough, too sweet and a bit fermented etc. Therefore the chance that God exists must be at least 100 to 1. Not very good odds for an OOO God, so on balance he doesn’t exist.
I think it’s mistaken to say that the presence of suffering is ‘incompatible with God’. By being born, one is already ‘in harm’s way’, so to speak. Accident, injury, old age, illness and death go with the territory. There are natural calamaties, many of which are unavoidable consequences of nature herself. And then humans are obviously capable of great cruelty. None of this negates belief in God.
What you’re describing is ‘the problem of evil’ which has been known in religion since the beginning, in fact is one of the rationales for it. I don’t have deep knowledge of the theological theories of the problem of evil and suffering. But one profound point that is found in many religions is expressed by the so- called pessimistic philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer:
So, the reason we suffer is that suffering is intrinstic to existence. In what possible world would beings not be subject to accident, injury, deprivation or ill-health? Why, that would be heaven.
So there is a possible world in which there is no suffering. And yet, so the story goes, god chose to place humanity in world other than heaven. I don’t see an out, if that was what was intended.
Are you saying that we are in heaven? No. Is heaven possible? You say so. Was god able to put us in heaven instead of here? Seems so, his being omnipotent and all. But you argue that our not being in heaven is inevitable. So if there is a god who created us, he did so in order to allow us to suffer.
None of this makes much sense. The idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent being does not square with the way the world is, without stretching credulity.
You’ve made your attitude to religion clear over many years of posts. I am in profound disagreement but I also realize the pointlessness of debating it.
Nevertheless, I will respond further. I say that this description of God is nothing like what is really understood by those who believe in Him (taking as the mean, the various mainstream Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant denominations.) Nowhere in the Bible is it said that humans ought not to suffer or are entitled to a life of peace, health and tranquility. It was a promise that was never made. It seems more like a projection of the modern middle class existence which has expectations about what life ought to be. It is the ‘hotel manager theodicy’ as I said in an earlier post.
The Augustinian view of evil as privatio boni (privation of the good) is also instructive. Evil, on this view, is not a substance or a power in its own right, but the lack of something that ought to be. Like rot in wood or shadow in light, it is a deficiency, a defect, not a thing in itself. Augustine writes in Confessions, “For evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being.” This view does not explain evil away, but it places it in a broader context: creation is good, but also finite, and finitude allows for, indeed entails, distortion, error, and suffering. This is not an answer in a managerial sense, but it reframes the issue in a broader context.
The Buddha, too, begins with suffering — not as something to be blamed on a creator, but as a — or the — basic fact of existence. The First Noble Truth states that existence inevitably entails suffering, and the Buddhist path begins by recognizing and understanding that it has both a cause and a way to bring it to an end. It is not an appeal to divine justice so much as a liberating insight. But it doesn’t try and gild the lily of suffering in this world.
In both Christian and Buddhist cosmologies, the condition of suffering is not incidental but intrinsic to our state of being. In Christian theology, suffering is bound up with the Fall — not simply as a punishment, but as the consequence of a turning away from the divine source. In Buddhist thought, there is no single event of “falling,” but rather a beginningless ignorance (avidyā) that gives rise to craving, rebirth, and the cycles of suffering (saṃsāra). In both cases, the fact of being born into the material world is itself an index of spiritual estrangement. Worldly existence, in these traditions, is not expected to be perfect. On the contrary, it is marked by imperfection as the very condition that makes liberation or salvation necessary.
The modern indictment of God on the grounds of suffering is, therefore, based on false premisses. It seeks from religion what religion never promised: a world without pain. The real question is not why suffering exists, but what it means, and what it points to. For that, one must look not to a cosmic customer service desk, but to the depths of the soul and the mystery of being.
This only betokens a misunderstanding of these terms. None of them are intended as warranties against suffering.