posted
Imagine that one day God comes to you and offers you the chance to eliminate all of the pain and suffering of the world. He says that if you choose to do so, everybody will be happy all the time, everybody will always do the right thing, and there will be no suffering whatsoever.
However, imagine that in order to do this, God says that everybody must lose their free will and give up the freedom to do what they so choose. Nothing can ever go wrong, so nobody can be allowed to have the freedom to choose any wrong option in any situation. There is no possibility of failure, so there can accordingly be no possibility of achievement. There can be no dreams because everybody already has everything they want. There can be no advancement because the world is already as advanced as it can be. The whole world is content, but at the same time it is static.
Imagine God gives you that choice... Would you choose to throw away our current painful world, and move all of us into this potential "utopia" where there is no suffering and no free will? Or would you choose to stay where you are, in this painful world, for the sake of free will and the chance to achieve something? Imagine that you must choose one way or another...
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posted
Hm, out of curiosity, have you been reading OSC's Worthing stories? They posed a similar question of a painless existence versus the greatness that can grow out of suffering.
There have definitely been times in my life when I would just have said "make it stop hurting"- quite a few of them- but in the end, I think that it's that suffering that has made me who I am today, and I'm grateful for the lessons it's taught me.
I'll freely admit, though, that I wasn't in the 'privileged' position I'm in today (food, roof over my head, clothes, etc), or if I was in the middle of a depressive episode that I didn't know how to get out of, then I might not be so willing to accept the responsibility and pain that free will entails. Under those circumstances I'd say the decision would be motivated by my own wish for release rather than a general wish for the world, however.
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posted
Well, here is a question I asked my world religions class when I taught about the problem of evil: could God, being omnipotent, give us free will AND a world free of evil and happiness? or at least a world where the least amount of evil is seen?
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posted
I'd like to see a world in which humans, through their own free will, work to end as much suffering as possible. I wanna have my cake and eat it too.
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posted
It's not the tasty flavored sodas, Rico, just the caffeine in them. *lovingly strokes a soda can* Yesss, my sweet, sweet addiction.
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Then no one would be able to inflict suffering on another.
If the world has free will, then it must be that people have choices; but these choices don't include hurting people.
So you could flip on the radio, if music was good for you and your passengers, but you couldn't listen to things that would harm you.
You could say nice things to people, but if you wanted to tell them something hurtful, your mouth wouldn't work. Or else their ears wouldn't.
No guarantee that God's estimation of harm would match ours. It might be that you decide that only having choices God (or government) approves is like having no meaningful choices at all.
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quote:Originally posted by Humean316: Well, here is a question I asked my world religions class when I taught about the problem of evil: could God, being omnipotent, give us free will AND a world free of evil and happiness? or at least a world where the least amount of evil is seen?
If God is omnipotent, yes. He can also make a boulder he can't lift and lift it, too. I see no reason why omnipotence needs to conform to logical boundaries.
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posted
Whereas many people see no reason it shouldn't
Omnipotence is ill-defined at best. While the sentence "He can also make a boulder he can't lift and lift it, too" seems to make sense because it fulfills english's syntactic requirements, to me it makes little more descriptive sense than "He can also penguin piano elephant tick-tock ignite". While one is syntactically sound and the other not, neither one seems to have any practical semantics.
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posted
I get the humor in that! I'll still add what C S Lewis had to say about that boulder thing: you can't make nonsense into sense by putting the words "God can" in front of them!
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posted
The definition of omnipotence that I'm familiar with is being all-powerful, having the ability to do anything. I see no way for that to not lead to logical contradictions. So I don't try to apply logic to it.
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posted
Ah, so you do believe God can penguin piana elephant tick-tock ignite!
Or do you believe God can (literally) make a mammalian flamingo in the shape of blue? (that one's even syntactically acceptable)
Personally, I think that blue doesn't have a shape might be a minor impediment. Or that flamingos aren't mammals (definitionally).
Note that redefining concepts (for instance, redefining what a flamingo is) is not actually a way of circumventing these objections, as what's problematic is the concepts represented by the terms, not the terms themselves.
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posted
the thing about Omnipotence is that even if god could give a flamingo the shape of blue we wouldn't reconize it as such, we would only be able to see things that are brain could properly interpret.
So even if "God can" doesn't mean we could reconize it as such. It's all about interpretation.
As for Free Will vs Utopia, this is a hard question I have no problems with Utopia as long as it was Free Will that got us there. And can still have the free will to leave the hypothetical garden.
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posted
I tried to write an eloquant post earlier but gave up after failing.
As Sid said:
I have no problem with Utopia as long as it was Free Will that got us there.
But I could never choose it for others, nor want others to choose it for me, nor choose it for myself. I have to put in the work in order to get there.
To which I'd add, if I didn't have Free Will then I would be suffering. So no Utopia for me in that half of your scenario Tres.
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posted
Maybe God can make colorless green ideas sleep furiously, and maybe He can't. In any case, I absolutely and without reservation choose free will.
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posted
Does boredom qualify as suffering? Does not being quite as happy as your next door neighbor qualify as suffering? I think that's the problem with "eliminate all suffering in the world" scenarios: where is the line drawn between what is suffering and what isn't?
What about people who never seem happy unless they have something to complain about? What about masochists? Or goths? Would we have to stop all our guilty pleasures, like junk food or caffeine?
quote:I can't fly, though, because it's not possible.
Birds do it, so it must be possible.
The fact that you cannot just shows that you can't do anything possible - not that flying is impossible.
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quote:Originally posted by Enigmatic: Does boredom qualify as suffering? Does not being quite as happy as your next door neighbor qualify as suffering? I think that's the problem with "eliminate all suffering in the world" scenarios: where is the line drawn between what is suffering and what isn't?
What about people who never seem happy unless they have something to complain about? What about masochists? Or goths? Would we have to stop all our guilty pleasures, like junk food or caffeine?
I don't think there's really any choice here.
--Enigmatic
What he said. I'll go further though and say that free will is an illusion.
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I'm not just making a joke. If we conclude that free will is an illusion, that conclusion is based on deterministic brain processes, which inevitably lead us to conclusions, not becuase they're true, but because this chemical adds to that chemical to make that impulse. There's no particular reason to trust that these reactions give us truth! And the conclusion that free will is an illusion is one of those conclusions, and is therefore not trustworthy -- unless we can find some other reason to trust it.
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quote:Originally posted by fugu13: Ah, so you do believe God can penguin piana elephant tick-tock ignite!
Or do you believe God can (literally) make a mammalian flamingo in the shape of blue? (that one's even syntactically acceptable)
Personally, I think that blue doesn't have a shape might be a minor impediment. Or that flamingos aren't mammals (definitionally).
Note that redefining concepts (for instance, redefining what a flamingo is) is not actually a way of circumventing these objections, as what's problematic is the concepts represented by the terms, not the terms themselves.
I disagree. In your scenarios, the language is the problem. You may as well ask, "Can God asdlfasdj?" That word has no meaning (in the English language) and so cannot be used in any sensical way. Your queries aren't quite so obvious, but the error is the same. Those sentences do not contain meaning.
quote:Originally posted by Tresopax: Unless "anything" means "anything possible".
With regards to omnipotence, all things are possible. That's what it means. Once you start placing bounds, it's no longer omnipotence.
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quote:With regards to omnipotence, all things are possible. That's what it means. Once you start placing bounds, it's no longer omnipotence.
If that is true, then God could be omnipotent while simultaneously having limitations, no? After all, if He were not able to be omnipotent while simultaneously having limitations, there would be something he couldn't do. Thus, if He is omnipotent, then He could very well also simultaneously not be able to do anything.
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posted
No, Miro, you're missing the point. The point is that they don't contain (practical) semantics, as I stated. Which means meaning. Neither does your sentence. Why are you arbitrarily excluding my sentences that don't contain meaning but not excluding your own?
After all, if God really can do anything, and that means no boundaries, then who are you to say he can't "asdlfasdj"?
Or are you now restricting what God can do to what has meaning in English, or at least some earthly language?
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posted
I think I would rather be free and suffer than be a slave. What sort of happiness can there be for one who is not free?
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I always hated Rush. Not only does the singing suck, but the lyrics are redundant: "I will choose free will." Well, duh.
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quote:Omnipotence is the power of God to effect whatever is not intrinsically impossible. These last words of the definition do not imply any imperfection, since a power that extends to every possibility must be perfect. The universality of the object of the Divine power is not merely relative but absolute, so that the true nature of omnipotence is not clearly expressed by saying that God can do all things that are possible to Him; it requires the further statement that all things are possible to God. The intrinsically impossible is the self-contradictory, and its mutually exclusive elements could result only in nothingness. "Hence," says Thomas (Summa I, Q. xxv, a. 3), "it is more exact to say that the intrinsically impossible is incapable of production, than to say that God cannot produce it."
There are two types of intrinsic impossibility:
quote:1. Any action on the part of God which would be out of harmony with His nature and attributes; 2. Any action that would simultaneously connote mutually repellent elements, e.g. a square circle, an infinite creature, etc.
An example of the first type:
quote:The absolute power of God extends to all that is not intrinsically impossible, while the ordinary power is regulated by the Divine decrees. Thus by His absolute power God could preserve man from death; but in the present order this is impossible, since He has decreed otherwise.
A more subtle example of the first type:
quote:c) The creation of an absolutely best creature or of an absolutely greatest number if creatures is impossible, because the Divine power s inexhaustible
It is sometimes objected that this aspect of omnipotence involves the contradiction that God cannot do all that He can do; but the argument is sophistical; it is no contradiction to assert that God can realize whatever is possible, but that no number of actualized possibilities exhausts His power.
The classic example of the second type of intrinsic impossibility:
quote:Another class of intrinsic impossibilities includes all that would simultaneously connote mutually repellent elements, e.g. a square circle, an infinite creature, etc. God cannot effect the non-existence of actual events of the past, for it contradictory that the same thing that has happened should also not have happened.
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I see no reason why omnipotence needs to conform to logical boundaries.
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