Thu 13 Mar 2008
An oldie but a goodie. Interpretations for different values of “God” welcome; personal belief not required, but personal/practical as well as philosophical/abstract takes would be great.
Posted by Josh Millard15 answers so far!
-
About the Site
A question gets posted each day. You smart folks answer.
- Why Big Big Question?
- Post a new question
- Read the FAQ
- Register or log in -
Recent Questions
- Converting matter to energy. What kind of matter to use?
- What did you get for Christmas?
- Songs that speak to you
- Is spam a metaphysical motivator?
- Happy Approximate Birthday, Big Big Question!
- Is nostalgia a thing of the past?
- Do New England’s trees have a really good lobbying firm?
[To the archives!]
Recent Comments
- Brandon on Songs that speak to you: "Yeah, “I Like Big Butts”"
- Brandon on Why do people like Apples to Apples?: "Played this over the Christmas. It was surprisingly addictive for..."
- ross on Converting matter to energy. What kind of matter to use?: "er… you mean “…ARE there..."
- ross on Proof that we’re living in a computer simulation?: "The concept is too complex for a one or two..."
- debwarr on What would happen if we cured cancer?: "I think there’s a much bigger philosophical/societal issue..."
- kangaroo on What did you get for Christmas?: "I got a slow cooker, a calendar, some socks from my in-laws and some..."
- Saffron on Ketchup on your hotdog?: "And then the ketchup bottle accidentally bumps the hotdog next to it and all..."
- effenwolf on I mean, really, are you THAT important?: "What’s a “high priority” flag ??? I guess I..."
- effenwolf on What’s your most embarrassing eggcorn?: "My problem has always been picking up new words through..."
- BitterOldPunk on How would you want to live forever?: "Immortality is a long, long time. How about intermittent..."
Big Big Question is a Josh Millard project.
Because he’s God and not your personal bodyguard, ensuring that all is sunlight and roses just for you and yours.
The book of Job in the Bible is a pretty good example of why this could occur. In fact, that’s exactly what happens.
I believe that everything happens for a reason and that it’s all part of God’s plan–both the good and the bad. We can’t expect to know the reasons why things happen, because our logic isn’t the same as God’s.
Or rather, this question is pretty irritating, as it’s seemingly asked from the perspective of a child, even when asked by an adult (though not to call you a child Josh). The world is not completely good, so of course bad things will happen to people, whether they’re good or bad. Plus there’s the question of what is good and bad? Who gets to decide? Hell, is there even a God and if so, which one?
The truth, I think, is that there is no God, that whatever pattern and meaning we get from this life is what we impose upon it or what we allow imposed upon us. The idea that there is a someone around who is watching out for the good people is piece of fiction we tell ourselves to make the hard times a bit more bearable. Life is essentially random, even when we are directing ourselves to a particular goal. Just ask all the people killed a random accident or murder as they went about their lives. Yeah, we feel those killed deserve better or it shouldn’t have happen to them, but other events transpired that caused their course in life to go another way, probably a series of seemingly unrelated random events.
This is not an easy view to take or think about, so maybe that’s why people ask “Why does God let bad things happen to good people?”
Because there is no God. (Apologies to believers, but I shouldn’t sugar-coat my beliefs)
Life is not random, but there are enough contributory factors that we are unable to perceive, sometimes it seems that way. I’ve known people who always seem to do well and land on their feet, and those who can never seem to catch a break. All too often, the good or bad experiences they’ve had are well outside their control. It’s all too easy to thank (or blame) God for those occurrences.
Well, it’s intended not as a childlike perspective per se, so much as a broad topic-broacher: I suspect people have, collectively, a wealth of differing experiences in approaching the question.
That experience exists both practically — those who have some sort of spiritual/metaphysical belief system having to find a way to make the core of that match up with their daily experience of the world itself and their emotional reactions to same — and philosophically –looking at belief in general, whether one’s own or that of others, and trying to understand this human system of thought/belief.
Theodicy and the problem of evil. For those interested in this topic, the articles actually aren’t that bad, although they are of course Wikipedia, so take them with a grain of salt. (Did you know the population of African elephants has tripled over the last six months?)
I remember when the June 10, 1991 issue of Time came out. The cover story was about evil, and inside, it detailed the theologian’s paradox: “God is all-good. God is all-powerful. Bad things happen.” Reading that, a feeling inside my heart and head suddenly crystallized, and it was, probably, the moment I lost the naive childhood view of religion.
Slowly, I began to disbelieve Christianity and to have problems with the concept of a Supreme Being. Years later, I tentatively adopted the answer of evil being the consequence of God permitting humans to have free will, but I then asked myself, what is the use of a God who declines to stop genocide and murder simply to preserve humanity’s free will? If he abstains from human life by declining omnipotence, I concluded, it seems like he has little relevance for my life.
Nowadays, a good decade and a half has passed since that happened. I’m still questing. I believe there’s something unseen and powerful and presumably sentient that involves itself in human affairs; I’ve seen far too much serendipity and unrandomness to believe it’s a dice game. But as to the nature of that something, I’m still looking at how different religions and faith systems describe it.
I came from a strongly religious home, and I started think about this while I was in college. (At Bob Jones University, no less.) The more I thought about it, the less good God seemed.
When various personal tragedies strike, the way that fundamentalist Christians handle it is to say that God must have had a reason for it. Commonly, for example, if a Christian relative dies, his other Christian relatives will comfort each other with the thought that this will remind their unsaved friends and relatives of their mortality and provide an opportunity to lead others to the Lord.
But when the tsunami hit in Asia that killed more than a quarter-million people, I came to the conclusion that there was no way to justify that kind of disaster. A good, just, and omnipotent God would have stopped it.
My other disputing point with God was when he would order the Israelites to performs acts of outright evil: When he ordered the conquest of Jericho, for example, he demanded that Israel kill all the men, women, and children of the city. This sort of order is commonplace throughout the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua. Were a nation today to a claim that God told it to commit genocide on its neighbors, the world would turn on it in revulsion.
Therefore, either A) God is not good, because he ordered evil acts, or B) the Bible is an untrustworthy source, because it records God ordering acts which he never commanded. In either case, the whole Fundamentalist worldview, which demands that the Bible is the literal, inerrant word of God, falls apart.
So, what do I believe now? I think that if there is a God, he isn’t the God of Abraham. I think that it’s more likely that there is no God, and that if there is one, he’s got bigger things to worry about than the lot of us on our tiny blue speck.
While I live, I’ll try to do what’s right, harm no one, and care for my own. When I die, I’ll find out where dead men go.
Sorry that I went on so long.
I’m not a believer myself, but I’ve always found this to be one of the strongest arguments against the existence of God (or at least, the existence of a God who is worthy of worship). It does lead to some interesting religious byways, though, such as the Gnostic view that a dark force is occluding us from the sight of God and preventing him from reaching us.
The riddle of Epicurus is one of my favorite formulations of the problem, because it’s very concise and it sets up the essential opposition between God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and goodness so well. I’ve often thought that this demonstrates that one can use logic to sort of constrain and limit the attributes of God, even though you can’t use logic to prove or disprove God’s existence.
DMan, my own take on the book of Job is that it’s mostly notable for going to great lengths not to explain why evil exists, after which God decides that he’s through trying to speak directly to humanity (that’s if you see the bible as a single continuous narrative, as in the book God: a Biography).
It is possible to believe that “Good” is in the overall direction of evolution and “bad” is just random, statistical grinding, part of the price to pay for the machinery to work.
Nature is incredibly wasteful and messy. Only one in 200 million sperms will reach an ova, not even counting the thousands times when there is not even an ova. The success rate of the “normal, natural” process is less than 1 in 200 billions.
So, even if half of all people born were killed or maimed before reaching 50, it would be is a fantastical progress from “nature way”.
As someone who attended a spiritually abusive church, perhaps the question should consider whether “god” is letting bad things happen to people, or whether it is misguided “christians” who think they’re doing the right thing destroying peoples’ lives.
Amusingly, I was reading the philosophy-related MeTa when someone linked BBQ again, so I decided to pop over and look, and lo and behold, there’s a question to which one answer comes from philosophy (those lame hum classes weren’t a complete waste!).
Liebniz took up this question, and offered up the idea that this is the “best of all possible worlds” that God could possibly have created or chosen. [wiki] Basically, the idea was that there was some huge but finite number of possible outcomes for the world, and the one that God chose to use, for lack of a better word, is this one, which maximizes good, but inevitably contains some bad, as it’s sometimes necessary for ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ to be present in order for a greater amount of ‘good’ to manifest itself.
Of course, the question itself, despite the “interpretations welcome” clause, basically requires that you make the assumption that god is an omnipotent being who can and does intervene in the course of human affairs. Granted, the Christian bible does establish this (I’m not nearly familiar enough with other religions’ texts to make any statements regarding them), but even then god isn’t presented as something that is actively interested in preventing bad/evil things from happening, and in some cases is directly responsible for them.
I tend to think God is pretty hands off- not just with “letting bad things happen,” but also in terms of miracles. Rather, He mainly lets us do our own thing and screw up if we want and suffer the consequences.
This is basically the issue that ended my belief in God sometime around the age of 14.
Liebniz took up this question, and offered up the idea that this is the “best of all possible worlds” that God could possibly have created or chosen. Basically, the idea was that there was some huge but finite number of possible outcomes for the world, and the one that God chose to use, for lack of a better word, is this one, which maximizes good, but inevitably contains some bad, as it’s sometimes necessary for ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ to be present in order for a greater amount of ‘good’ to manifest itself.
I find it hard to see how Leibniz could seriously have thought that even in his day, but anyone who could think that after the 20th century would (IMHO) have to be clinically insane. To describe Hitler/Stalin/Pol Pot/etc. as “some bad”… well, it just doesn’t work.
Hmmm. A few folks have said that this very question is what lead them from their faith. I’m curious (having not been raised with much religious influence) — why the leap straight to disbelief, when belief in a wrathful, vengeful God would seem to reconcile that doubt?
Of course I can completely understand not wanting to place faith in a cruel deity, but, human history is full up of that sort of worship. Perhaps what I’m asking is, is their something about Christianity or a post-industrial revolution West that is incompatible with faith in a vicious God?
The Bible refers to God as being kind, loving, merciful, righteous, and just. If he is, in fact, cruel and malevolent, then the Bible can’t be true, and we know nothing about God.