Sunday, July 17, 2016

Hate Mail

"If God exists, why doesn't he just tell us he does?"

I don't know.  God didn't tell me.  But I can think of one good reason.  If we knew, beyond any doubt, that God existed and what God wanted us to do but then we didn't do that then we would be more absolutely guilty of disobeying God than we can be since we always have the excuse of ignorance or uncertainty.   We would be as absolutely guilty of transgression as the story of Lucifer and the fallen angels in Genesis if we had as absolute a knowledge of God as they're presented as having.  And notice, in that strain of fable, people don't transgress until one of those fallen creatures preys on the ignorance, or innocence, of the two first people - something of a second try at making independent, intelligent, articulate beings.   Whatever else could be said of the man and woman in the fable, they aren't exactly creatures of light, I mean, they get duped by a talking snake, the first Trumpian snake oil salesman.

If they knew, absolutely, their guilt would be absolute instead of mitigated by their ignorance, or innocence.  If people are able to figure out that a state of unknowing excuses the one who is ignorant through their inability to know their guilt, I'd imagine that's a way in which we might be held to be made in the image, or reflection of God.  But, then, I am a universalist by both insight an preference, much to the dismay of both the lovers of retribution and atheists.

Given how annoying the fan boys of the gods of atheism can be, parroting such Brights™ as George Carlin and, Bill Maher and, heaven help us, Penn Jillette, I can imagine lots of us would have a lot of trouble establishing an independent identity if God manifested herself to us, directly.  I suspect that establishing an independent identity is one of the purposes of life and I fully believe that having inalienable rights and a moral obligation to respect those rights in other people is intimately connected to that purpose of life.  It's something that even the simplest of beings whose behavior we are able to observe seem, to me at least, to have,  an awareness of the more primitive aspects of individuality, though a sense of moral obligation would seem to develop quite late and our species certainly hasn't gotten the hang of that.  Some of us seem to have about the same idea of both of those not much developed from what can be seen in some single-celled organisms.  But I don't want to make this about Donald Trump.   Or Penn Jillette.

If your question is a problem for religion, there is a far bigger problem of ignorance in some of the assertions of most modern atheists I know of, the question of how, by random, chance occurrences, we can trust our perceptions and ideas of the universe that have nothing to do with our survival and reproduction, the means through which natural selection is alleged to have produced consciousness and intelligence, giving us real, as opposed to illusory, knowledge of the universe.   It is far easier to explain how those are an endowment of our Creator and to make logical conclusions leading to the idea that human beings perceptions and ideas can actually reflect the universe, that our minds can be made to hold the image of the universe than it is to explain how any materialistic explanation of that could produce reliable, accurate knowledge of the universe unrelated to what we need to survive to reproduce.  Given the choice between the two ideas, I think anyone who goes for your preferred explanation has a lot more explaining to do than I do.

3 comments:

  1. Well, crap, God intervened (or clumsy fingers) and wiped out my original comment.

    Boil it down to this: arguably, God has told us God exists: it's called the Scriptures and the witness to the Jews, Muslims, and Christians (all worship the same God in different ways).

    If that wasn't clear enough, what would be? In John's gospel God speaks to Jesus, and some hear the voice of God, and some just hear thunder.

    I suspect some didn't hear anything. Why? Humanity doesn't even agree that the earth is flat or, despite the evidence, that peace is better than war, kindness better than violence, sharing better than greed.

    So just how does God get humanity to agree about what God is?

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  2. Adding: the whole question of establishing an independent identity is one of the central concerns of modern Continental philosophy.

    It is the inability to establish an independent identity for the Other that leads to violence like we saw in Nice or Dallas, or even to a policeman shooting a man sitting in his car during a traffic stop. It is the need to establish that identity which is recognized as one of the stages of human development among young children, and the difficulty of doing so that we struggle with all our lives. Most wisdom literature of the world is fundamentally about that effort.

    And so the question is really asking "Why doesn't God convince me?", with the assumption that my conviction is the only one that matters, and my conviction is the only one that's true.

    Which, ultimately, is like demanding that physicists prove that quarks exist. Or muons. Or black holes, for that matter. I "know" they exist because I accept the veracity of news reports about them, or what it says in a science journal or textbook. But ultimately I'm taking that on faith. I've never seen evidence of a quark; I don't even know what difference it makes to me that they found evidence of the Higgs Boson.

    Well, they say they did......

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  3. How would God show them He existed and how would they know it was Him? *Hint: This event would require a non-naturalistic explanation and thus it could be readily dismissed as being "God of the Gaps". If God spoke to them directly wouldn't most committed atheists just laugh it off as delusion, a dream, or hypoxia? If an immediately available medical diagnosis failed to satisfy for whatever reason, the atheist could always assert that science will better explain it in naturalistic terms "in the future" giving the atheist just enough reason to remain optimistic and unbelieving.

    For a more in-depth treatment: https://shadowtolight.wordpress.com/2015/03/28/god-of-the-gaps-atheism-2/

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