Post by THawk on Mar 19, 2018 18:26:59 GMT
Mar 19, 2018 11:34:16 GMT @miccee said:
and you had the ability to create a universe of your own, which would be fairly similar to the universe that we are inhabiting with the same amount of suffering, joy, torture, death, pain etc...would you do it? Let's say that once you had started the universe, you would be powerless to step in to intervene against evil, or to prevent suffering. But you did know from the outset that you would not be able to produce a universe with significantly less conscious suffering than the one that you live in yourself.
Would you jump straight into it, believing that you were bestowing a gift upon the inhabitants of your universe and there was effectively no downside to your experiment? Or do you think that the project would be too ethically problematic due to the suffering that would be experienced by many of the inhabitants? Do you think that if we were capable of simulating such a universe with powerful computers capable of producing conscious simulated characters, that such an experiment could pass a university ethics committee?
Sorry bro, but the premises of this argument is one of the main flaws of atheistic thinking.
First of all, how in the world do you know that there weren't "worse" versions of the universe under consideration? We can talk about cancer, war etc now - but what if the original plan had 1000s times worse things, but were removed in order to balance out what we can stand, and what we couldn't?
Also, the perception of human suffering is just that, perception. You remove the very worst thing about this universe from existence - and guess what - the thing second on your list becomes the worst thing, with just as much power. Because your mind adapts to what is the new limit.
If you created a universe where you removed nearly all ills, and the worst thing about it was people getting paper-cuts - the inhabitants of that world would still ask you why you are a monster for creating so much pain and suffering. They wouldn't be able to conceptualize that you've spared them from much worse things, as those worse things do not exist st all in their version of the universe. Without context, they will still call you a sadistic bastard.
Then it all spirals down into "well why have a world at all with any challenges of any sort, why not just have heaven from the beginning to end" - and that becomes a different topic to explore.
But the notion that God is cruel because of our perception of how horrible the world is, (or God doesn't exist because if He did he wouldn't have created such a world) absolutely does not hold up.