Chris Asked Me a Question
I am guessing the question you are seeking an answer to is the last sentence, "Why would an all good God make us free to [choose evil]?" I assume that this question was meant to be addressed in an academic fashion, confined to the narrow context of critiquing Augustinian Theodicy and its tenants, base assumptions, development, etc., but your answer, no offence intended, is an attempt to take up and actually answer the thing.
I have never read the book and won’t pretend to be able to address the academic issues at hand. However, I come to this subject with a few issues regarding concepts behind the question in general. First and foremost, to assume that there is a god, good, evil, or indifferent, is a bogus premise. It introduces magic to the discussion, making anything and everything possible. Who decides what the magic powers of god are? It is ridiculous, although it is definitely interesting and telling to examine these issues on a personal level or within a society.
Morality and reality need no god. If one chooses to understand the world through an explanatory model that includes one, or similar concepts, that is fine. I say whatever works. However, the constraints put on behavior are firstly physical, secondly emotional (as in “I cannot bring myself to do that, it grosses me out”), and social. Free will is better discussed, especially with respect to evil acts, in terms of what peoples world view is, what they are capable of conceiving and doing, and how that relates to interactions between individuals and groups. In the abstract we are free to do anything, but really our behavior is greatly constrained by forces outside our direct control and often outside our ability to understand or even notice, but not by anything magical.
A deity can be anything anyone decides it is. What is good? What is evil? Well, I think the cultural relativists are correct about it…it depends. They are big concepts that differ and change from place to place and over time. What does it mean to be a good god and how can people know what a god would think is good? It is a questions rooted in knowledge that is unattainable; mostly because it is make believe (cue Mr. Rogers)
Lets take a quick trolley ride to the land of make believe. Why does King Friday XIII let that witch Lady Elaine continue to exist when witchcraft is the evil work of the devil? Is the king good and what does that mean? How can he be careless and unthinking so often and still be good? Are withes really aligned with the devil and is that an evil that should not be tolerated? To all that I say: For fucks sake they are god damn puppets! They are not real and we just pretend that they have ideas and take actions, so the questions are meaningless. My answer to your question is essentially the same, trite though that may be.
Why would an all good God make us free to choose evil? Dude, god is not real. People decide what a god is, what powers they have, how they interact with the world, and people decide what is good and evil then pretend that the deity is the source of these things. The question is meaningless because the underlying premise is false (or at best useless). Philosophizing about such matters leads to a lot of hypothetical nonsense that in the end comes with the caveat that there is no god anyway and even if there were there is no way to know it. Let’s talk about what a good god means and how that idea works and who uses it and why. Those are the parts of the question that have meaning.
Sorry Chris, I am way too much of a secular humanist to go very far down the religious philosophy road. I may have mentioned this before, but I think it is hard enough just trying to figure out what is and isn’t, good and bad are judgments I would rather not get into.
posted by TOC | 3:58 PM
6 Comments:
You have a Grand Point throughout your whole argument. But say you were to play into the 'religion'. God created 'All', including Angels, including Lucifer, everything about Lucifer is a reflection of God...At least that is what my conclusion has come to. God created evil, and since his actions carry the tone of the 'word of God' he cannot destroy what he made without saying that he did something wrong. I smirk because to begin with religion is contradictory!
Personally how would you know what is good or bad if you did not experience the other. I love the conundrum of being human...without my choice to do 'good' or 'bad' what would be the point, how would life be interesting?
I'm sorry we didn't have any religious/philosophical discussions when we were in Belize, I'm sure they would have been interesting. At least I don't remember having any religious/philosophical discussions.
What's really interesting is that people keeping phrasing this question in this way. Or maybe that there is this continued drive to explain the existence of evil behavior. It seems to me that it's not a god issue at all, but rather an attempt to understand or explain behavior that seems unexplainable, or just downright nasty.
You're right, of course, when you write about relativity and multiple constraints on behavior, however, your mention of 'emotional' constraints, and this whole use of the word 'evil' in the first place, is curious. It's like there is an assumption that there is a kind of abstract internal barometer that exists within a person. Some people call this god, or knowledge of god, some just call it emotion. But does this really exist outside of the social and the constraints of others? I'm thinking not.
Evil, really, is all about social relationships. From where I sit (slouch... recline..), evil and god arose around the same time- about 10,000 years ago with the Neolithic Revolution. People+land+more people=evil (and good stuff, too- like corn and cool buildings, ha!)
Social hierarchies necessitate that evil be defined socially and god helps us do that by serving as ultimate judge. Tell Chris that god lets evil exist for the sake of his own creation and preservation (and for the purpose of allowing groups of people to come together and grow food).
Amelia,
I totally agree that there are plenty of interesting things to think about regarding religious beliefs and how the help people view the world and their place in it. It is somewhat laughable that the totally contradictory and inconsistent ideas that swirl around and spawn endless passionate debates can be taken so seriously for all the wrong reasons. Attempting to understand the framework people construct and yada, yada, yada…all the cool (or all too often insipid) ideas cultural anthropologists gnash their teeth over..is great sport, but when you start assuming premises that accept the supernatural and magic, academic takes on its least flattering meaning.
Kristina,
I think that is pretty much what Chris decided and I think is the classical answer to the question, although that is a total guess. I am not sure I agree with you about the lack of an emotional constraint on behavior, but probably because I didn’t express the idea very well. I was thinking in a large part about visceral reactions, even instinctual (a word I don’t think most people like to, or even think does, apply to humans). There are plenty of visceral responses to situations that moderate my behavior. I spent a good deal of time regarding stoicism as something interesting, if not laudable, but have come realize that although it is not desirable to be driven by emotions, they are as real as anything, more maybe, and should not be ignored or unconsidered. Certainly experience and socialization play a large role in emotional responses, but so does stupid shit like lack of sleep or too little chocolate in ones diet. There is a lot of overlap and I actually have a little more trouble with the idea of the social constraints, but all of this is ill formed stream of consciousness spoutings at an old friend stupid enough to ask me a serious question.
I like to think of myself as a "humanist", a thing for which I wouldn't apologize. The philosophers from Thales to Aristotle wrestled with the notion of what makes things go. What is the origin of the motion of the universe. Without satisfactory answers, Ideas and Truth became the focus. What makes a just soul? What is virtue? If you believe there is a such thing as these, in your cosmology, then there is a conversation to be had. Are truth, virtue and justness what we call "God"? Don't know, Chuck. But the idea of these things exists and so we ask the question "If these things exist, why do their opposite counterparts have to exist?" God or no, the question asserts itself now, before in history and later no doubt. To me, the journey toward these ideas of truth and virtue is the exciting part. Sometimes scary, in that things happen in life which we don't like too much and to which we ask the question "Why"?
God is and has been an easy target and a knee jerk reaction to some. Is God's existence really the crux of the matter? No. the Ideas to which we aspire are the real focus.
Chris,
I was not apologizing for being humanist, just for not wanting to engage in religious philosophy. As to the rest, truth, virtue, and justness are disparate ideas, concepts that categorize and organize our perceptions of the world. God is a red herring. The existence of their counterparts is a trivial matter more related to reductive thought processes that focus on dialectics than any deep meaning to life, the universe, and everything. What we conceive of as the world around us is a construct of our minds, Plato’s dancing shadows on the cave wall if you will (it’s an oldie, but a goodie), and whether we can reach out and touch it like a rock, or it is totally conceptual, like calculus, it is equally real in the sense that there is something physically going on in our head that makes us understand it (well maybe not the math so much, but you know what I mean). Even god counts as something real in this way of looking at the world.
So, “If these things exist, why do their opposite counterparts have to exist?” The simple answer is: because somebody decided that good and evil are opposites. I don’t think it is necessarily so, but it works in most people’s minds. We make up the categories, draw the lines between things, include and exclude elements of groups to make it easier to deal with the incomprehensible amount of information we encounter on a moment to moment basis. You gotta have some way to sift out the important shit or something is going to sneak up on you and eat you while you are concentrating on trying to do the same thing to something else (or at least that is where it all comes from). There is no a priori reason that I am not part of the tree that grows outside my window, we are both alive and part of the same system of ever rearranging biomass, but I cannot imagine many people truly finding it a sensible approach to life not to draw a distinction between the two of us. Are we opposites because I am an animal and it is a plant, well I can see that as a legitimate way of organizing the ideas of what I am and what a tree is, but again there is no necessity to this. It is a decision, deliberate or not, about how things are and how they relate and should be organized.
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