From: Terry Donaghe
<snip>
>Now, replace the man with our all
powerful, all good, all knowing God.
> The baby gets eaten and God does
nothing. Should we blame him? He
>saw the wolf coming and knew what he
was going to do and could,
>according to our definition, stop it.
Our "God" is also all good, so
>how can he let this happen? Obviously
there is something wrong with
>our definition of God. Or perhaps with
good. If God isn't all good
>or all powerful or all knowing, is he
worthy of our mindless worship?
We had to make a truckload of (astute)
assumptions to arrive here. I enjoyed
the ride. But it
doesn't matter, because God does not
exist (as his brother, I should know
<g>). This explains how
God can let this happen. He can let
anything happen. He doesn't exist. God
can have whatever
attributes any hallucinating brain
assigns to God.
As you probably know, people invented
God so that they could continue their
lives without the stress
involved in recognizing and
acknowledging their own mortality...
their own eventual dive into
oblivion. We can easily understand the
motive of belief in the supernatural.
When reason settles
into a transient life form, it has an
unsettling effect. Belief systems
assuage the discomfort of
cognitive dissonance.
Anyway, I appreciate your compelling
argument against the nonexistant God. At
the age of twelve,
many savvy kids figure out that if the
universe needs God to create it, then
God needs something to
create God.
The diety functions as a father-figure
for people who crave attention from
daddy. Sadly, too many
real live daddies don't even want to
think about attending to this hunger for
father love.
BTW, if we define God as the set of
genetic algorithms and self-organization
that results in complex
life forms and the universe they
inhabit, then God becomes more
intricate, but not more ethical.
Which means that we cannot blame the God
of self-organization and genetic
algorithms for permitting
(or, more significantly, for creating)
the cruelty in life. We should rather
thank God for rendering
us able to