Morality theodicy
Posted on: September 5, 2010 - 3:35pm
Offline
Morality theodicy
hi there!
According to a new kind of theodicy I've just heard:
(1) A malevolent, lunatic or imperfectly good deity cannot create beings who have the potentiality of knowing what's right and wrong for their life. =>because He is, by definition, greater than the moral sense He "embedded" in us.
(2) THUS, if a deity created us, He'd be perfectly and absolutely all-good. So ,whatever He does, He remains all-good.
(3) Consequently, an all-good and omnipotent God is compatible with natural disasters.
But what do you think about its 1st premise?
- Login to post comments
Just more self-justification.
What does what does "greater than the moral sense he embedded in us" mean? Greater in what sense? Are his moral senses larger? Are they more intense? Why can't a malevolent god/s/dess have a greater moral sense than humans? Or be generally greater than humans?
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
This already assumes moral objectivism.
I'm not sure what this means. It looks like this is going to be a simple non sequitur since this doesn't seem to justify the premise at all.
It states that God is "greater" than our moral sense. So, it might be a category error. It's also too ambiguous.
The virtue/moral goodness of a being is independent of its actions?
Not really sure how it got to this, logically.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
This is about as non-sequitor as taking a road to LA when going to NY.
You're conflating natural "evil" and moral evil, such that your suggesting compatibility with one somehow makes one compatible with another. Creating imperfect beings in no way entails anything about natural disasters. It at best entails that the beings is compatible with moral defficient beings
“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.”
It never ceases to amaze me how people(not you here, but all the time) will try to repackage an old argument.
The first premise is nothing more than "Since we don't know what his plan is, how can we assume he doesn't know what he is doing".
The fact that the claim is that he is extremely bigger than us, but wont clue us in other than to say "just trust me" is immoral. What is worse is that all this violence and death from disease, crime, war and natural disasters has never ceased in human history and never will. How quick, in reality would a child be yanked from a home if CPS discovered filthy environment and abuse?
What justifies the bad things in life is not some comic book battle between Superman vs Kriptonite, what justifies the bad in life is that those things happen, not that we want bad to happen, just that it does. When you take a magical super hero out of the mix, all the bad that happens makes sense.
The word "justifies" will wrongly be taken out of context by the believer as meaning advocating bad. NO! In the context of observational objectivity "justification" merely means that an action is observable. "Observable" does not mean desirable.
Cancer, tornados, anthrax, crime ect ect ect ect, are all things humans observe, but that doesn't mean we want those things affecting us.
I can hardly find the concept of 'all loving" or "all powerful" as being consistent with morality if these things happen.
I don't see how using humans as pawns for self glorification as being moral. I do see bad, without comic book villains, as being an unfortunate part of reality.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog