theodicy

[iambiguous]

Theodicy:

Theodicy means vindication of God. It is to answer the question of why a good God permits the manifestation of evil, thus resolving the issue of the problem of evil. wiki

Just as, in my view, the existence of God is often merely defined and deduced into existence, if we accept for the sake of argument that a God, the God, my God does in fact exist, how is the "vindication" of this God in the face of evil not also just defined and deduced into existence?

The point below [and my reaction to it] is taken from my own "on discussing god and religion" thread:

What’s New in….Philosophy of Religion
Daniel Hill describes how the work of Alvin Plantinga has revolutionised Philosophy of Religion.

One argument [against the existence of God] which has shown no sign of diminishing in popularity, still less vanishing, is the problem of evil. This may be expressed very roughly as follows. The set of propositions (1)-(4) is inconsistent, so at least one of them must be wrong:

(1) God is good, and therefore wants to remove evil
(2) God is omniscient, and therefore knows that there is evil
(3) God is omnipotent, and therefore can remove evil
(4) Evil exists.

Now you're talking. This matter is by far -- by far -- the most important question of all in regard to any God and any religion.

Indeed, imagine that we lived in a world where there was no human suffering. A world where no one ever spoke of evil because there was nothing that could be thought of that would allow us to make sense of what some say that it was. Now, in this world, we may well still be unable to demonstrate that an actual God did in fact exist. But when people spoke of Him as loving, just and merciful that would certainly make a whole lot of sense. We may not be able to communicate with or interact with this God, but how could anyone doubt that something "up there" must be sustaining a world totally without pain and suffering.

Let's run this by the religionists here. But, really, how could they not all be reduced down to this: God works in mysterious ways.

Or, for the Buddhists, the universe works in mysterious ways.

But, fortunately enough, for both, one of them results in immortality and the other in salvation. And all the evil in the world doesn't make that go away.

[Peter Kropotkin]

iambiguous:

[b]Let's run this by the religionists here. But, really, how could they not all be reduced down to this: God works in mysterious ways.

Or, for the Buddhists, the universe works in mysterious ways.

K: I am going to work out this one part of the post.....

I hold that those who use the "god/universe works in mysterious ways"
are using that as a cop out...... it allows them to punt on any real thought
about the religious viewpoint...it allows them to avoid doing any real thought
as to this question of "evil" for one....

"what is evil?"

and we can avoid dealing with that question, by just saying,
ah, god/universe works in mysterious ways.... and I'm off the hook...
no more thought necessary... god/universe works in a mysterious way.....

and I am not responsible or going to be accountable given "god/universe
works in mysterious ways"........

I hold that the very presence of "evil" negates, denies the idea of "god"....

god is good or god is about love.... and so, what about "evil?"

ah, god works in mysterious ways and I don't have to engage with that
question...see how that works.........

what does the presence of "evil" really mean?

and in fact, what is "evil?"

we can't even come up with a very good explanation of what "evil" is.....

define "evil"...........

and please avoid using the tired and cliche saying, "god/universe works in
mysterious ways"......

Kropotkin

[iambiguous]

Still, I also think the faithful fall back on the "mysterious ways" of God or the universe because it's either that or having to accept that human pain and suffering is essentially meaningless.

In other words, given what can be argued is but the brute facticity of an existence utterly lacking in anything that might be seen as the equivalent of a teleological foundation.

Instead, from the perspective of the Humanists, we have to create our own "human all too human" facsimile: reason, ideology, deontology, scientism.

Then [for me] it's how close to or far away from others are in regard to "I" being "fractured and fragmented".

This fucking thing:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values "I" can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction...or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then "I" begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

What I wouldn't give to actually figure out a way to yank myself up out of it. God or No God.

[iambiguous]

The Good, The Bad and Theodicy
John Holroyd on the pitfalls of academic debates about God and evil.

In the classic spaghetti western The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (directed by Sergio Leone, 1966), three gunslingers co-operate and compete with each other in search of a cache of gold. None of them trusts either of the others, and in the final shoot-out ‘The Good’ character kills ‘The Bad’, leaving the third in the trio tied up on top of his share of the loot.

In other words, any particular individual watching it can react to it from any number of conflicting perspectives. Construing and differentiating the good from the bad with or without a faith in God. But one thing doesn't change for any of them. This: that throughout human history in almost every community there were, are and probably always will be behaviors deemed good and behaviors deemed bad. And, if there is a God, then He is around to pass judgment on it when push comes to shove and we go up or down.

But, if there is a God, how to explain why there are any bad guys embracing evil at all?

And, sure enough, the faithful have any number of arguments to explain it. Just Google "God and the problem of evil": https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z ... revision/5

And, given any particular context, the arguments can be seen as more or less reasonable.

In debates about whether or not a benevolent, omnipotent, all-knowing God would allow evil and suffering in the world, both more and less is at stake than for the characters in the film The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. On both sides there is the honour of ‘winning’ or the indignity of ‘losing’ a public debate. But for many of the disputants who are religious these arguments are about matters of eternal significance for every person, whether they appreciate that or not. For some atheists, too, the issues have seemed imperative.

And who are we as mere mortals to grasp the "eternal significance" of, for example, the 24,000 babies who are stillborn in America alone each year, or the 3 million children who die from starvation every year, or the countless millions that have died, die, and will continue to die from one or another "natural disaster" year in and year out. Or from the next "extinction event" to thump planet Earth. That's for a loving, just and merciful God to file away under "mysterious ways".

[Meno_]

Here is an alterior take, albeit a relative one. What if we should agree to the indefinity of a god , a albeit a god who doesen't sack us into a pantheistic irreducibility.

A god of relative measure between substance and form.

What to a god who can co-experience our own self awareness with or without god himself.

One god without this focused awareness of each and everyone,may wish to perceive us teleologically through our eyes, as if he was a construct as You suggest, or matematico-phisically with evolving corresponding relation between them.

Then , god can actually look at men as if they were made of multitudes of sparks corresponding to our view of the heavens , lit up as do big manifold objects in the universe's night sky, the stars and other galactic objects.

In this sense of teleilogical accute-ism, stars may have life , existence, and being, as a potentially
significant relative quantum state.

The whole cosmos including consistence with the infinite multiplicity that ever recurs, reaches a specific state of infolded disattachment, where the particular habitable planet recurs into it's pre-enlighted past- experience it'self and it's stage of civilization as does a part of a photograph blown way out of proportion, and You may get the picture.

The absolute reducement of such toward absolute zero. persisting in a state approaching absolute anti matted, time, curves to form a near perfect absolute curve approaching The Ring, which becomes A strange phenomena like black holes and such. .....such attribution curve into a foundation ofabsolute sorts, Asimov may be aware if here, ....


To get the sense what transpires here are manyfold transforming forces, some likened to the opposite if cell division- causing the eventual collapse of the entire cosmic architecture into an infinitely pure absolute ....that is indefinitely definiable, over and above if what can currently be described as 'energy'beyond the indifineable nothingness beyond description.

[iambiguous]

The Good, The Bad and Theodicy
John Holroyd on the pitfalls of academic debates about God and evil.

Epicurus gave us an early formulation of the ‘problem of evil’, a logical problem to do with believing in God. He wrote:

“God either wishes to take away evils and is unable; or he is able and unwilling; or he is neither willing nor able; or he is both willing and able. If he is willing and unable, he is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God, if he is able and unwilling, he is envious, which is equally at variance with God; if he is neither willing nor able he is both feeble and envious, and therefore not God, if he is both willing and able, which alone is suitable for God, from what source then are evils? Or why does he not remove them?”

Again, however, the beauty of religion is that it no less subsumes logic in God's "mysterious ways" than it does everything else. And there it is: faith. You don't even have to demonstrate how or why this is true. You merely take that leap to God and even the Holocaust and pandemics and natural disasters are all "explained away" is beyond the reach of any mere mortal grasping the ways of a "loving just and merciful" God. Then it just comes down to your own personal agonies. Any particular horrors that become apart of your existence. God then is testing your faith. And, besides, what's the alternative? You lose your beloved son or daughter or mother or father or husband or wife or close friend to the coronavirus or the earthquake or the volcanic eruption and it's either God and your religion or accepting that it is all subsumed instead in the brute facticity of an essentially meaningless existence that for each of them is now the embodiment of oblivion.

In more recent times Gottfried Leibniz coined the term ‘theodicy’ to refer to systematic attempts to defend belief in God in the face of evil and suffering, such as the arguments offered by St Augustine. In the last twenty years the New Atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, have brought such debates about theodicy to the fore, excoriating the God of the Bible and the God of the Qur’an for their alleged misdeeds. We might think of these writers, alongside sceptical philosophical heavyweights such as David Hume and John Stuart Mill, as anti-theodicists.

On the other hand, what did any of them know of God's "mysterious ways"? Misdeeds? Mere mortals attributing to an omniscient and omnipotent God acts that mere mortals themselves decide are either good deeds or bad deeds? Come on, both the old and the new atheists here come up short in doing battle with God. Just ask the faithful.

Theodicy is and will ever remain a stacked deck. And the last time I checked I am myself still a "mere mortal".

So, I recognize the futility of bringing this up to the true believers. On the other hand, what else is there? One of them might have an explanation that I can make some sense out of.

Someone here, perhaps?

[iambiguous]

The Good, The Bad and Theodicy
John Holroyd on the pitfalls of academic debates about God and evil.

Obscuring Evil

I want to focus on the fact that there has been, for some time, a reaction against the type of philosophical debate that argues back and forth, critiquing and defending specific concepts of God in relation to problems of evil. This reaction has come from some philosophers who are themselves religious believers. Terrance Tilley, for example, in his 1991 book The Evils of Theodicy writes:

“The usual practice of academic theodicy has marginalised, supplanted, ‘purified’, and ultimately silenced those expressing grief, cursing God, consoling the sorrowful and trying practically to understand and counteract evil events, evil actions and evil practices. I have come to see theodicy as a discourse practice which disguises real evils while those evils continue to afflict people.” (Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy)

Got that?

Of course when you approach theodicy "academically" in a "philosophical debate" how does this not come down to a battle of wits? Who has a greater command over the definitions and deductions generated in discussing God and evil.

Real evils?

We'll need an actual context of course. Or is that just my thing here? Am I simply too naive to grapple with theodicy on their level?

Let’s consider two closely related points that Tilley makes here. First, theodicy obscures the nature of evils actually occurring in the world. I would like to broaden this first point and add that on the other side of the debate the anti-theodicists are just as guilty of this.

Seriously, someone here please make the attempt to bring this out into the world of human interactions...interactions involving behaviors that some see as good and others as evil. How would a conflict of this sort be connected to a particular understanding of an omniscient and omnipotent God argued by many to be "loving just and merciful"? Evil from the perspective of theodicy construed academically and evil as fiercely debated by mere mortals given a specific situation or set of circumstances.

Forget broadening his point, how about narrowing it down to a discussion of theodicy [pro and con] in regard to abortion, or homosexuality, or social justice.

Second, and implied by the first point, philosophical debates about problems of evil and suffering in relation to God are problematic because they detract from other ways of coping with suffering, coming to terms with it and countering it. Because these other ways are of moral value this is a moral problem.

Yes, you can discuss evil "philosophically" or you can go out into the world and actually do something about it. Be less problematic and...make things worse?

That's the thing about reconfiguring words into worlds when confronted with moral and political value judgments in conflict. Both sides can prefer "action" and from the perspective of each side things are only that much more abominable. Especially when the "action" revolves around one or another authoritarian or ideological or dogmatic agenda. Which is why those like me suggest instead that, to the extent it is feasible, practical and realizable, moderation, negotiation and compromise is likely to become the "best of all possible worlds".

Providing of course that in regard to things said to be good or evil your own "I" is not as torn and tattered as mine is.