the problem of Heaven and the problem of the Atonement


Theists ought to be consitent in their application of free will in both Heaven and Earth. Yet they ever special plead to keep the former different from the latter.We naturalists urge them to be consistent and stop the special pleading.
In “God and Evil,” Nelson Pike adumbrates that we would be robots had we free will yet could do no wrong. If consistent , he would acknowldge that would be the denizens of Heaven- robots!
John Hick uses the straw man based on the all or nothing fallacy to claim that we naturalists advocate paradise on Earth. We merely, rationally note there could be so much less evil; he then uses the slippery slope fallacy: he cannot discern the difference between some evil and the horrrors such as Shoa!
We naturalists now have the problem of Heaven to answer their pathetic appeals to free will and soul-making as answers to the problem of evil.
Michael Martin in 'Atheism, Morality and meaning" devotes just a paragraph thereto, but my friend Graham Robert Oppy devotes considerable attention to it in 'Arguing about Gods", and I quote :" [[II]]f the absence of temptation and the presence of divinity are not incompatible,with the existence of considerable freedom, then what explanation is to be given of the presence of temptation and the absence of divinity in the earthly existence of free human agents? Given these problems, it does not seem plausible to suppose that one can appeal to the nature of the heavenly enviornment in order to explain the contingent absence of evil from heaven.
, , ,
Given that it is a contingent matter whether there is evil in heaven, what reason do we have for believing that there is no evil in heaven or indeed, that life in heaven is any better than life on earth?"
Look for theists ever to special plead and quote the Bible! That book just makes matters worse with its appeal to Hell and the Atonement.
No divinity has the right to judge us or punish us, but an omnipotent,omnibenevolent would be obligated to keep us from unrequited harm, not all harm [ no all or nothing fallacy here!].
Now,if theists so claim the paradise of Heaven, then without special pleading and the might makes right of God, how could they defend their inconsistency?
No rational being would set up Hell. Rational beings merely forgive. And the notion of the Atonement sanctifies human sacrifice as much as that to Moloch . Moses’s Folly long ago gave up other animal sacrifice, but Christinsanity glorifies it [ Mohammed’s Lunacy, Smith’s Fraud, the Hindu Mirage, Buddha’s Wrong Path, the Dao Nonsense and the Shinto War].
See the old the definitive disproor of free will as an excuse, which this replaces.
William Row is ever expatiating on the evidential problem of evil. Now Nick Trakakis is underscoring Rowe in his new tome.

How do you exonerate God from His responsibility of not permitting evil?
God would not have the right to judge not to punish us nor to demand worship: it is a one-way streeet on His part to have put us in a decent enough place. it will not do for Keith Ward or John Hick to make the all or nothing fallacy or the slippery slope fallacy: they bray that if there were less evil, people wouod still demand even less.but we can discern that such horrors as the Holocause or tsunamis do not have to happen.Yet they claim that Heaven is paradose, so why the inconsitency then when the Earth itslef could be Heaven? ???
Pne begs the question of the soul and Heaven. Science reveals no soul, no matter what the Vatican avers. No one has ever given evidence of Heaven. Revealed religion is mere just fables.
What kind of body and at what stage of life would one there have? Would it be possible to sin there a la Lucifer? :’(


One of God’s most charming quirks is that he exists outside the arena of man made notions such as responsibility, rights and reason. God is conveniently immune to the scrutiny of science and philosophy. God is a goalpost fitted with wheels and internal combustion.

In that case, how do you exonerate an omnipotent uncaused first-cause creator god from his responsibility of contriving himself beyond the pale of man’s reach when plenty of more amenable possibilities are readily imaginable? This god would, for his supreme aloofness, still not have the right to judge nor punish us, nor to demand worship.

One way or another, this god inescapably remains a presumptuous shirker.

'Luthon64

When you refer to God’s responsibilities (duties) and his rights, you are appealing to God’s sense of what is right and wrong, and therefor God’s morals.

The function of morals (and its formalized form, the law) is to ensure that a society conducts itself ethically.

Suppose a modern Western expedition party happens upon a previously unknown island and there comes across a primitive (but luckily English speaking) tribe that practice ritual human sacrifice. They arrive at the scene just in time to stop the high priest from shoving a young girl into the the volcano, and overcome with moral outrage they arrest the high priest. The holy man and the sacrifice is carted back to the West where the priest is trialed for attempted murder. But the trial is a disaster. The victim, who’s evidence is pivotal, refuses to cooperate, and the case is dismissed. Both tribe members are delivered back to the island, and both are astounded by the gall of the inconsiderate Westerners who would deny them the opportunity to worship their God, and a young girl the chance to be a martyr princess in the afterlife.

The islanders were clearly left unimpressed by the Westerner’s idea of what is right and wrong. The Western moral code has lost its function in this case.

In general, person A can only reasonably and usefully accuse person B of ethical transgression C, if both A and B consider C immoral.

Skeptic griggsy makes reference to heaven, so I assume we are considering the Biblical God. I propose that this God’s morals, if any, are quite different to those of 21st century western society. I base this on the following:

  1. Man’s moral code is temporal, and God is said to be eternally unchanged
  2. My toes curl up when reading about God’s doings in the earlier chapters of the old testament. ( although my hopes of a universal moral code mometarily flared up after Moses received the tablets on the mount, but it was soon extinguished after reading the instructions on how to slaughter Canaanites later in the same story).

God therefor effectively exists outside the human moral domain, and cannot be contemplated in terms of human notions of responsibility, rights and reason…

So if God and man subscribe to seperate sets of morals, it is not rationally possible to define any responsibilities and rights for the other party.

Mintaka

Exactly, and that arrangement is this god’s own direct doing. It doesn’t absolve him of anything, least of all of responsibility for distancing himself from his creation, as I have pointed out.

Not so, unless you wish to posit that both god and man are necessarily subject to something that is greater than either or both. You point out that this god’s morality is allegedly absolute and universal, whereas that of humans is temporal, meaning presumably that it is in some sense transient and relative. This relativist flavour of the human moral canon is also by this god’s contrivance, yet there is no reason to suppose that this god had to contrive it that specific way instead of, say, imbuing mankind with his own absolute moral code or a subset thereof. Moreover, we are allegedly supposed to take our moral cues from this god. Where are these cues to be found with anything approaching consistency – another notable failure? In addition, this god is allegedly the author of humanity’s moral code, albeit that he’s left considerable wriggle room therein. Again one is entitled to ask why it had to be done in that way. Why does that moral code produce disapproval for this god’s behaviour that, if engaged in by any normal person, would produce widespread condemnation? After all, there’s again no reason to think that this god could not have arranged our moral code in such a way that any and all of his actions are automatically and without question viewed as right and moral and just.

Whichever way you slice it, this omnipotent uncaused first-cause creator god is not morally defensible, and claiming separatism only aggravates the problem by seeking to provide relief from contemplating it.

'Luthon64

Exactly, and that arrangement is this god’s own direct doing. It doesn’t absolve him of anything, least of all of [i][b]responsibility[/b][/i] for distancing himself from his creation, as I have pointed out.

But didn’t you just agree that our idea of responsibility doesn’t apply to God?

Whichever way you slice it, this omnipotent uncaused first-cause creator god is not morally defensible, and claiming separatism only aggravates the problem by seeking to provide relief from contemplating it.

Well, sure, you can debate God’s morality measured against that of your own. In that case I fully agree, God has a lot to answer for, and comes out wanting every time. But how is this useful (functional), except to reaffirm the moral chasm between this divinity and humanity?

One is unlikely to impress a God which harbours such foreign convictions about suitable conduct with one’s own thoughts on how he should act.

Mintaka.

Are we talking the same language here? I’m using “responsible” in the sense of “being a source or a cause” of something.

Assuming an omnipotent uncaused first-cause creator god, the inescapable conclusion is that we are what we are because he made us so, either directly or by proxy of the environment he has provided us with. There can be no other reason for our natures being what they are unless this god is also constrained in what he can and can’t do, a position that clearly contradicts the assumption of omnipotence. So too is our own moral sense inescapably a product of that god’s design, however imperfect that sense might be in practice. He made it that way. He cannot escape culpability.

Here’s an analogy. Suppose a man chooses to make a bomb with a ripcord trigger. He hangs the bomb in a tree in his garden, placing the ripcord within easy reach of his young children. He puts up a “Warning! Do Not Pull This Cord!” sign and sternly admonishes his children against doing so. Predictably, one of the children pulls the cord and is killed. In court, the man enters a not guilty plea on a charge of culpable homicide, and his lawyer’s defence is based on (a) that the man is not responsible because he provided ample warning and (b) that the court and the man’s moral code are not reconcilable and so the court is not entitled to judge him. The lawyer might well find himself locked up alongside his client for criminal and contemptuous incompetence.

Now it is no good arguing that all of this is assessed from a human moral framework. The only moral questions in the above scenario are whether the man should be prosecuted and for what crime, and if so, what punishment he should receive if found guilty. The question of causative responsibility is directly obvious: the man took deliberate actions in the full knowledge of their inherent dangers that led to someone’s death. Those facts cannot be painted over by some or other moral brush. The man is responsible for the events, irrespective of how deep and wide the moral chasm between him and those who judge his conduct might be, which makes up the main point of my prior post.

The usefulness of these considerations is that they point up severe ontological holes in the fabric of the god hypothesis. In particular, they belie a moral fluidity that is not consistent with the properties that are claimed for this god. By yet choosing to believe in (and revere) such a god in the face of these difficulties through relegating them to some nebulous realm beyond “human” reason/logic/analysis, one has in effect declared one’s preparedness to apply those tools only where they support one’s position and to ignore their wider implications when they fail to do so. One has in effect written off true, reliable knowledge as unworthy of scrupulous attention, and such intellectual lassitude has a way of soon becoming habitual. More immediately, the process of attempting to exempt some or other area of discourse from reason itself involves reason, and is thus self-defeating for being self-contradictory.

And as a sceptic, one would be less than conscientious in allowing such modes of argumentation to pass unchallenged, especially where they concern such universally important questions.

'Luthon64

I was using responsible in the sense of “accountable”, not “causative”.

To be sure, my idea in short was that God is painted as existing in a domain outside the reach of human reason and morals. Therefor we are not “qualified” to ponder his actions, or more to the point, lack of action. And even if we do have an opinion we still cannot apply judgement or punishment, unlike the court in your example. This convinced me that there is really no point in contemplating God’s “accountability”. It seems akin to asking what came before the Big Bang.

But I must admit I’m now somewhat convinced by your rhetoric, especially

The usefulness of these considerations is that they point up severe ontological holes in the fabric of the god hypothesis.
and
One has in effect written off true, reliable knowledge as unworthy of scrupulous attention, and such intellectual lassitude has a way of soon becoming habitual.

I am prepared to consider God in real world terms henceforth. Mintaka learns something today! :smiley:

With thanks,
M

But the point of the analogy was to illustrate the essential difference between “responsibility” (as belonging to a causative agent) and our cultural or subjective assessment of same. That is why I wrote, “The only moral questions in the above scenario are whether the man should be prosecuted and for what crime, and if so, what punishment he should receive if found guilty.”

Superficially, one could argue that this god is beyond our comprehension and any analysis is futile. But the one cardinal and looming question in this context remains: why is our moral sense so essentially different from that of our ostensible creator? To answer that we cannot know because we are operating in entirely different realms, is just a sneaky foot in the door that would permit “god” to become an explanation for anything else. And still we would be horrified when a “natural” disaster disrupts the lives of the unsuspecting.

Sorry, but that simply will not do as any kind of “explanation.”

'Luthon64

But the point of the analogy was to illustrate the essential difference between responsibility (as belonging to a causative agent) and our cultural or subjective assessment of same.

Yes, I got that part: responsibility (causative) is not a moral question, while accountability is.

But the one cardinal and looming question in this context remains: why is our moral sense so essentially different from that of our ostensible creator?

Prolly because he was made up years ago by people who had different values than we have today.

Mintaka

Touché. That would be the simplest, most plausible and elegant answer, yes.

'Luthon64


Thanks, everyone.
As David Ramsay Steele observes, if in Heaven there’s a guarantee that there is both free will and a guarantee not to err, then the same would apply here if one be consistent. This is no " hobgoblin of little minds."
Folks, all discussion of omnipotence and the other attributes belong in my arguments about God… thread. Arguments about morality belong in my new covenant morality for humanity thread.
Luthon, ever the great thinker! And you write like me!
As Burton Porter observes, there is so many tsunamis and genocides that take away people’s fee will forever, there could be a good ,better and best contrast rather than a good and evil one, and some people are blessed with good fortune, yet do quite moral acts-no tests involved,eh?
I realize that theists will yet continue to obfuscate the matter and special plead.
So, please folks continue this discussion anew!

This is a nice new point for me to add to my arsenal.

I had problems before where they refuse to accept that omnipotence meant God could have (should have?) created us free of evil and pain with (precious) Free Will intact.

Sadly it won’t work, just nice to have something else to point out. :stuck_out_tongue:

8) cyghost, you mean that Heaven won’t be heavenly: there will be wrong doing there! My point is no consistency of little minds; what works well there, would likewise work well here. You refute yourself! :frowning:
Read again Burton’s points, which indicate that even if Earth and Heaven were the same, conditions here still could be humane. Your all or nothing approach refutes itself. :-[
Were there God, His would be the responsibility of putting us in a much better place, which would be a one way street for Him as He would neither the right to demand worship nor condemn us! This goes to the theistic jugular! :’(


I’m not really sure how I have refuted myself here but then I don’t quite follow your post all that well anyway.

I don’t know if heaven won’t be heavenly or not, my position is basically in agreement with yours tbh, unless I misunderstood that as well.

The reasons given by theists for why we have pain and evil and suffering in this world, is that truly elusive Free Will. But if it is so fantastic, why will we not have Free Will in heaven? And if we do, without the pain and suffering, then we could have had it here. Which is, I believe, your point?

T’is I who misunderstood your position,cyghost. Yea, we are in agreemen! Moses’s Folly no longer demands animal sacrifice, so it is ahead of Christinsanity. There are better ways to do penance, and no God has the right to demand worship or condemn us anyway: His is the one-way street of doing that consistency!
We fault religion for being the scam of the ages. Reason doth that to people!


Why would a just God allow so much evil/ As Burton Porter notes, there could be less evil in contrast to the good or better still- the contrast could be amongst good, better and best. Some people supererogate - go beyond their duty- in helping others without ever suffering. Nature and evil people take away the free will of millions.
We humanists just declare that a world with much less evil would suffice; yet, to believe theists, then why not a nicer place for us animals here? Those tests as discussed above just won’t do, and again, it is moral to do right by us animals rather than to glorify any god1! Nay, it won’t do to aver that He has superior knowledge as we have all that morality requires!
It is absurd to claim that we aren’t meant to understand His ways, but that mocks and- undermines morality! Nay, it isn’t His will :P, but what is morally right. :wink:
There are no divine rights of God! Just that one-way street- His duty do do put us in a nicer place! :wink: