Theodicy and the cosmos

Comments (12)

1. I’ve tried to raise the question before, but let me try one more time. Some theological questions remain interesting after one ceases to take theology seriously. For example, the notion of a separable soul may be a non starter, but we still have the problem of relating language about material things to language about conscious activities and states. But what is the continuing relevance of theodicy? Myths and their conceptual restatements produce insolvable riddles. Indeed, religious thought is endlessly creative/irritatingly interminable precisely for that reason—as every logician knows, any conclusion whatsoever follows validly from a contradiction. The believers have emotional reasons to continue to play this game, but I don’t understand the motives of the nonbelievers. It’s not that I’m offended by the continuing discussion. My question isn’t hostile.

   Maybe one continues to discuss this issue in the same way that an adult might pretend not to understand how to get out of a Chinese finger puzzle so as not to spoil a child’s fun. I assume that the motive is not to provide ammunition for atheist missionaries. To religious people, the inner incoherence of their ideas is a feature rather than a bug, mysteries of the faith. As Scott Atran and others have pointed out, theological ideas need to be counterfactual to impress the natives. Not much of a spiritual exercise to believe six possible things before breakfast. If the Weiner cartoon really were aimed at religious folks, it would just be another instance of the heathen raging in vain.

   Well, maybe the exercise is just a form of intellectual play rather like wondering whether Hamlet met Faust at Wittenberg.

2. Oddly, the site says there are two responses to this post, but I can see only one, Jim Harrison’s. Is your web site having King Arthur’s problem?

   Anyway, I don’t actually see how the proposed “answers” really deal with any of the 5 legs of the stool. That is, not only is the ball itself nonsensical, so are the leg-shortenings.

   1. One is a pingback.

      Note that Zack has the shortening lose the “omni” – this is deliberate. If God is not omni-one of these things, then the problems can be resolved. It’s the tripartite assertion that raises the Euthyphro Dilemma.

      As to why it matters, of course I don’t think there is a substantive issue, but God acts as a kind of limit function on our imaginings. I like to discuss God not because I think there is one but because he stress tests our logic.

      1. All true. But my complaint was about the descriptions of the leg-shortening. How, for example, does “God has bigger concerns than you” dispose of omnipotence? Perhaps by implication, as it suggests that God has a limited capacity for attention? I’m sure this argument is used by theists, but I doubt it’s intended by them to rule out omnipotence. Similarly, free will may not be compatible with omniscience, but nobody who makes the argument ever says it is. And “God moves in mysterious ways” is intended to save omnibenevolence, not dispose of it.

3. I don’t agree with the cartoon, especially the last panel. Why is “skepticism” offered as some kind of alternative to religious belief? I know it’s meant to be humorous, but this really is a prevalent attitude, and only serves to justify a cynical relation to things we (admittedly) do not understand.

4. Surely the cosmos cannot, by definition, ever give a shit about anything, lacking any consciousness, therefore the final panel is a bit silly? To describe an ‘uncaring universe’ implies (and I admit I’ve no philosopher, as if it weren’t apparent) that it could choose to do so? We condemn an uncaring government (or individual selfish bastard for that matter) because we are sure they could give a shit if they were, morally, a wee bit better.

   And surely it’s not scepticism but science that offers a wondrous, beautiful universe, while faith would appear to offer a cosmos that is little more than a vast, almost empty antechamber to some combination of bizarre fantasy afterlives?

5. So the Darwinism is the “answer”? Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy about “Darwinism”:
   
   I think that a theory so vague, so insufficiently verifiable and so far from the criteria otherwise applied in ‘hard science’ has become a dogma, can only be explained on sociological grounds. Society and science have been so steeped in the ideas of mechanism, utilitarianism and the economic concept of free competition, that instead of God, selection was enthroned as ultimate reality.–Perspectives on general system theory, p. 142.
   
   Enjoy.

6. First things first: who said that Darwinism was the answer, and what was the question again?

   Also, who is Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and why should we care about his unsupported opinion?

7. I was wondering if there was also an implied comment on Christian theology by likening it to stools.

   1. “I go from stool to stool in singles bars hoping to get lucky, but there’s never any gum under any of them.”
      Emo Philips

8. Wrong, wrong, wrongity, wrong. This is what you do with a table. http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/10/23/bedside-table-breaks.html

9. Theres a big difference between young earth creationists who believe the earth is maybe just 6 000 years old and those creationists who believe in evolution albeit with varying doses of divine intervention. Some old-earth creationists believe evolution has been primarily responsible for speciation but that a supernatural designer has stepped in along the way to help evolution bridge gaps that it otherwise couldnt overcome like the step from apes to humans .

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