Question of Evil
May. 6th, 2008 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackIf you were the God, and all possible parallel universes existed side-by-side, what would you do? Would you delete most, or transform them into copies of the one where people were happiest? Or let them run?
To me, that thought experiment relates to several questions:
* The problem of evil "If God existed, and were omnipotent and good, why would he let there be bad things". If you can even conceive of God not reordering all his universes to be "best", that is one possible answer to the question. (Not that I think that's true, but it's possibly a rebuttal to the argument that "There are bad things, therefore God is at most two of good, omnipotent, and existing")
* A logical extension of local morality. People naturally care more for people close to them (both friends, and people similar to them, and people physically closer to them). To a greater or lesser extent depending on circumstance. This has bad effects, that far away tragedies can get ignored, but good effects, that people can choose to help some people close to them, even if this is a drop in the ocean compared to everything else, but a lot better than just freezing up. But if all possible parallel universes existed, it would make it obvious how every thing you chose to do was an essentially arbitrary decision about how people close to you matter more than everyone else,
To me, that thought experiment relates to several questions:
* The problem of evil "If God existed, and were omnipotent and good, why would he let there be bad things". If you can even conceive of God not reordering all his universes to be "best", that is one possible answer to the question. (Not that I think that's true, but it's possibly a rebuttal to the argument that "There are bad things, therefore God is at most two of good, omnipotent, and existing")
* A logical extension of local morality. People naturally care more for people close to them (both friends, and people similar to them, and people physically closer to them). To a greater or lesser extent depending on circumstance. This has bad effects, that far away tragedies can get ignored, but good effects, that people can choose to help some people close to them, even if this is a drop in the ocean compared to everything else, but a lot better than just freezing up. But if all possible parallel universes existed, it would make it obvious how every thing you chose to do was an essentially arbitrary decision about how people close to you matter more than everyone else,
no subject
Date: 2008-05-07 07:13 am (UTC)Of course the standard answer to Why does God allow evil things to happen is that there's a parent/child thing going on. No sane parent would allow their child never to be afflicted with pain/something hurtful in their entire lives, because they wouldn't have a child then, they'd have some form of jellyfish pet. However, while this is a reasonable-ish response to pain on an individual level, when you get mass famines, wars, disasters like this thing in Burma or the tsunami a few years ago, I'm not convinced it scales terribly well. Unless you also add in the idea of an afterlife, in which God can 'rescue' you from a bad world by killing you and granting eternal life. Eternal life there being a sort of get out jail free card.
Of course, that mentality led Marx to say that religion was the opiate of the people, and allowed considerable abuse of a compliant population by its masters.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-12 02:56 pm (UTC)Well said, I'd agree with all that.
No standard answer being acceptable to me (other than the one I actually believe, which is that there is no God, or at least no good, omnipotent one), I mused in my post that point one might suggest another.
Personal responsibility rings true for me in Narnia, but not in this world (where mass bad things are more obvious). The afterlife is logically an answer (the one that applies to Bujold's Chalion theology, which is wonderfully conceived), but most people, even people who claim to believe it, can't really seem to find it palatable.