Gadianton wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 5:28 am
I'll admit the "officer" analogy assumes God with certain responsibilities that maybe he doesn't have, but "Q" has built-in aloofness, given he's a fellow evolved life form with no jurisdiction over humans. We don't expect Q to step in not primarily because he's 150 steps ahead, but because it's not his business. The Enterprise likewise has their prime directive. But had the Enterprise concocted these other worlds in a lab, it feels like the cop analogy begins to fit.
Yes, Q would be a bad analogy for God in that way. But my point was that the only thing that makes cops 5 and 9 seem absurd is that you can't take it seriously for a cop to have such superhuman knowledge or power. If it were plausible that these cops actually could have such knowledge or power then one might not like their answers but their answers would not have the obvious inadequacy that they seem to have in the story as written.
My problem with Officer 5 is that it's a cake-and-eat-too out. One contribution from Christian theologians is that God, to be God, isn't just a cause, but is personable. So, I can nearly buy into some kind of pantheism or alternative weird-ass depth to reality where something describable in some way as intelligence is ultimately behind everything, and that if we understood this massive depth, we would see everything differently. Well, would such a force be personable enough to be "God"? And if pain and suffering don't mean anything when we come to understand this massive depth, then why would moral norms and commandments stay meaningful, and worse, have eternal implications? It seems to me that if God is personable enough to share norms he's saddled humans with, and expects humans to live by, that he can't just play the "oh, if you knew what I knew card" so easily.
The Mormon God is just a highly evolved human, but classical theism has been comfortable for an awfully long time with the assumption that God really is not like us. But "not like us" is a big category. I don't think that God sharing all our priorities in any situation, and caring nothing at all about how humans behave, are the only alternatives. And the 5/Job "it's complicated" answer doesn't say that pain and suffering don't matter at all. It just says that sometimes other things, which we may not even be able to imagine, can matter even more.
My problem with officer 9 is similar. Granting this is all just a spec in the grand scheme, and the glory of the next world incinerates the pain of this one as a forest fire consumes a dry leaf, then why does what we do matter so much to our future in the eternal realm? Just as pain is fleeting, so is sin, and so are horrible crimes.
If God can remedy ills in the afterlife, that doesn't necessarily mean that nothing in this life matters at all. I mean, if somebody suffers painful but non-fatal burns while saving a child from a burning building, then it's a lot easier to call it a happy ending if the firefighter fully recovers, but we're still not saying that the pain of the burns didn't matter. I do agree, though, that if God can remedy even horrible evils in the afterlife then this must mitigate the damage done by any Earthly sins. This is another good argument against eternal damnation—if we needed any. I don't see it as an argument against a good God.
Right, I think the argument in the realm of the evidential problem of evil, is the mounting of accidental or meaningless evil. There's no firm line in the sand. Some people can let a fawn die in a forest fire without blinking, some can let a thousand or a million die.
Yeah, a lot of bad things happen when it's really not obvious at all that they had to happen. I get irate just when something rolls off the counter while I'm cooking; I yell at it that there was no need for it to do that, that it could perfectly well just have stayed in its place. At least sometimes I do then remember that I'm supposed to know that tomatoes do not have free will but simply follow their deterministic laws of motion, so if the tomato rolled off the counter then it actually did have to do that. It's a lot harder to think that way about worse things than rolling tomatoes but the principle may still apply: there may be reasons that we just don't see why bad things do have to happen.
I was a teenager before it was cool.