Yes, God gave us glands and hormones. And then God allowed us to override them. He gave us faulty brains, but allowed us to see the faults and train ourselves to avoid them. People starve—but the supermarkets are full of food. Starvation is an economic problem, not a biological one, and the economy is created by, used and ruled by humanity. There’s disease, yes, but there are also doctors. (Incidentally, I have heard the question asked—wouldn’t the world be a better place if some of the hard corners are rounded off, if, in effect, it were a padded room instead of a hard, steel floor, so that it would hurt less when we fell. The trouble with that is that, for all I know, we are in the padded room, and what we call steel is simply a slight stiffness in the padding… if we’ve never seen real steel, how would we know the difference?)
Of course, we might well be entertainment—that’s a possibility. I guess we might be an experiment as well, though the trouble with that is that an omniscient being would know the result of the experiment before running it (which puts us back into being entertainment again).
Even if you are correct that starvation and disease are both solvable now, so what? Are the thousands of years of human history before now irrelevant? More people have died than are alive today.
The world doesn’t just hurt when we “fall”, it hurts many people all the time, for no reason. People are born without limbs, people are struck by lightning, people are born depressed and suicidal. Our minds are built to suffer, evolved to use the pain of existence to encourage us to reproduce. If god could subject us to worse, how does that let you call what we have now good?
You do raise a very good point here. Even if people in the past had all acted in the most perfect possible way, millions would have died of old age in any case during that time. If God (unpack: omnipotent, omniscient being) exists, therefore, then this must have been a design feature of the universe; or at least, one that He is unwilling to stop.
It’s at this point that the question of whether an afterlife exists enters the debate. What death means, for the person who dies, changes pretty dramatically between the universe where an afterlife exists and the universe where an afterlife doesn’t exist; and an omniscient being has access to this datum, and can plan according to it.
It is always possible, of course, that an omniscient, omnipotent being might not be good. I doubt the extreme of evil (life is too pleasant for me to believe that that is true), but there is certainly the possibility of indifference to consider.
Yes, God gave us glands and hormones. And then God allowed us to override them. He gave us faulty brains, but allowed us to see the faults and train ourselves to avoid them. People starve—but the supermarkets are full of food. Starvation is an economic problem, not a biological one, and the economy is created by, used and ruled by humanity. There’s disease, yes, but there are also doctors. (Incidentally, I have heard the question asked—wouldn’t the world be a better place if some of the hard corners are rounded off, if, in effect, it were a padded room instead of a hard, steel floor, so that it would hurt less when we fell. The trouble with that is that, for all I know, we are in the padded room, and what we call steel is simply a slight stiffness in the padding… if we’ve never seen real steel, how would we know the difference?)
Of course, we might well be entertainment—that’s a possibility. I guess we might be an experiment as well, though the trouble with that is that an omniscient being would know the result of the experiment before running it (which puts us back into being entertainment again).
Even if you are correct that starvation and disease are both solvable now, so what? Are the thousands of years of human history before now irrelevant? More people have died than are alive today.
The world doesn’t just hurt when we “fall”, it hurts many people all the time, for no reason. People are born without limbs, people are struck by lightning, people are born depressed and suicidal. Our minds are built to suffer, evolved to use the pain of existence to encourage us to reproduce. If god could subject us to worse, how does that let you call what we have now good?
You do raise a very good point here. Even if people in the past had all acted in the most perfect possible way, millions would have died of old age in any case during that time. If God (unpack: omnipotent, omniscient being) exists, therefore, then this must have been a design feature of the universe; or at least, one that He is unwilling to stop.
It’s at this point that the question of whether an afterlife exists enters the debate. What death means, for the person who dies, changes pretty dramatically between the universe where an afterlife exists and the universe where an afterlife doesn’t exist; and an omniscient being has access to this datum, and can plan according to it.
It is always possible, of course, that an omniscient, omnipotent being might not be good. I doubt the extreme of evil (life is too pleasant for me to believe that that is true), but there is certainly the possibility of indifference to consider.