Yep, truth can be ugly as it wants. Exceptionally so.

ugliness is revealed in the light....that's why so many prefer to stay in the dark. They're afraid of what might be uncovered....  

Yep. And there are some that cling to their own aberrations of truths instead of taking the initiative to turn on a light and instead gaze upon their "truth" with a lazy candle flicker.

~Zoo

This may be the shallowest discussion of theodicy I've ever seen--or is it anti-evolution? I'm a bit confused at this point.

Is it really so easy to dismiss the problem of evil by saying that a) free will exists and God does not "micromanage" and "works in mysterious ways"? Really?! So far most of this discussion has revolved around moral evil; okay, what about natural evil, which I believe TexasWahine has brought up before? What about the thousands of tsunami victims, people struck by lightning, drowned, et cetera? Did they offend God in some way? Will they spend time in your Purgatory like the unbaptized babies?

Also, let's get serious about the "mysterious ways" business: that's a double-edged sword. How can you love someone or something that you can't have any possible hope of even remotely understanding? God is transcendant, so He is above rebuke, because, what, we don't know what it was like growing up when the universe didn't exist? Okay, how do you even know that God wants your love if you don't understand his ways? Because your version of the Christian Bible tells you so? Why can't the one true god be Allah or Vishnu? Is your truth really the only truth?

Here's the problem I have with this entire conversation; it's called the two-model fallacy. If A then not B or if B then not A. What objective proof can you offer that if a natural explanation of the history of the universe is somehow inadequate that your enhanced, Christian-flavored version is the correct one? If your "proof" is something from that book or your faith or your love, then we're having two different conversations. In science, naturalism is not philosophical, it's methodological. We can't answer questions about the natural world by saying "because God said so." This is a statement devoid of any real information content. This, not the kind of systematic exclusion by a clique of elitists that paranoiacs like Ben Stein claim, is what keeps ID proponents from publishing in legitimate scholarly journals: because no ID author has ever shown that the "theory" of intelligent design has any explanatory power as regards the natural world. The only explanatory power it has is to provide insight into the mindset of its proponents, who are, like some of the posters here, almost exclusively conservative Christians who honestly believe that if we can somehow incorporate their idea of God into all aspects of our life and culture that our lives will all be better or at the very least they won't have to tolerate ideas that are different from their own anymore.

 

That's easy.

Intelligent Design tells us that the "creator" is a rather inept engineer. (My own G-d is very powerful but the god of the ID people is not.)

He designed the human eye, which is incredibly flawed.

http://denbeste.nu/essays/humaneye.shtml

He also designed people with built-in death traps, like Diabetes. He is either really nasty or incompetent.

It makes sense to me that a designer who is responsible for the human eye and Diabetes would design a world where tsunamis kill people.

Now, I believe in G-d. But I don't believe in whatever god they believe in, a god who is either nasty or incompetent.

I'm afraid, I don't know why (my) G-d allows tsunamis to happen. I also don't know how He created the world or created individual animal species. But I am curious and if you can find out, please tell me. Physicists found out a lot about the beginning of the universe and biologists can tell me how animals evolved. Perhaps a metereologist can help me with the tsunami issue.

But will I blame G-d for it? I don't think I am allowed to do that.

Hindu theology is quite complicated and it isn't quite clear whether the Hindu gods are really individual gods or just different aspects of one god.

"Allah", on the other hand, is simply a contraction of "al ilah", which means "the god". The Semitic root for "god" is Alef Lamed, and another word for "god" is Alef Lamed He. "ilah" is the Arabic for Hebrew "eloh" (which is usually used in the Plural "elohim").

The Allah of Islam is the same god that Abraham believed in. Ishmael's descendants believed in the same god as Isaac's descendants. Muhammed claimed he was a prophet of that god, and you can believe it or not. But the god is the same. (There is no other, I think.)

 

Leauki,

 

Great comment. Your discussion of the etymological roots of these god concepts was particularly enlightening. And you're right, Allah is the same entity as the Judeo-Christian God. I'm not sure whether conservative Christians have an easy time reconciling this fact with their beliefs but that is what the Qu'ran says.

The last paragraph of the first section of your remarks highlights the whole "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter" aspect of this discussion. Yes, biology can tell you about the history of life on Earth. It can't tell you what god or gods to believe in or give you instruction in morality or how you should live your life. Those are the proper realms of religion and/or ethics.

 

I am a strong proponent of the theory that the Bible can only be properly understood in its own historic and linguistics context.

For example, clinging to specific words or statements in an English translation is not useful; not only because Hebrew is a different language but also because Semitic culture sees everything in a different context.

For example, in Hebrew the concepts "word" and "thing" are the same ("davar"). And the verbs "read" and "happen" are also the same ("qore'"). They are not the same in a mere interchangeable word sense (like in English) but in a deeper sense. The middle-eastern idiom "it is written" actually does refer to something which is fact (English "written in stone" comes from a European view of that concept).

"El" was but one of the Semitic gods. "Baal" was another one (root for Baal is Beth Ayin Lamed, Ayin is difficult to pronounce for Europeans).

The Biblical account of Abraham is historically true in the sense that there was indeed a common ancestor, at least philosophically, of those Semitic peoples and tribes that stopped believing in all the other gods. The name "Abraham" is as much a title or description as a name. "Av" (spelt Aleph Beth) means "father". It's a proper title for the father of two nations. (Note that Arab legend says that Ishmael was the father of "arabised Arabs", not all Arabs. That matches linguistic evidence.)

The Bible has to be understood in that context. It's a collection of Semitic legends, some of which are rooted in polytheistic culture.

The Bible is also not a static document completely different from other religious texts. For example the Mandaean religion shares the early concepts of the Bible (Adam, Noah, Abraham and their stories) but doesn't believe in Moses and the entire speifically Jewish history described in the people. And Arab tribes have believed in all sorts of things before and after Jesus' birth. Muhammed, for example, believed in one G-d (Hebrew "eloh" or Arabic "ilah", note that in Semitic languages vowels are quite redundant and interchangeable) plus the Adam, Noah, Abraham AND Moses legends. He knew about Jesus, but didn't believe he was anything but just another Jewish prophet. (Most Jews did not acknowledge Jesus even as a prophet.) I'm not sure if he believed Jesus was a prophet before he believed that he himself was also a prophet.

Then there are the Samaritans, who share a lot of Jewish history and legends. But they have a different temple location, apparently, and didn't enjoy the Babylonian exile. They, like Christians, do not believe in the oral Tora (later the Talmud), but like Jews acknowledge Moses and the others as prophets (but not Jesus as a prophet or anything but a man who might have lived).

It's all very complicated and I find that many Christians start their quest on the wrong side of the journey. They look at the "New Testamant" and go back, rather than start with some Semitic legends and follow them to the future.

(I also read Luther's original translation of the Bible and that text is already a bit different from modern English translations. It's ultimately not a very useful enterprise when looking for the truth in it all.)

 

I do not rely on the Qur'an. (The apostrophe comes after the "r", it's important, more later.)

The story of Isaac and Ishmael is in the Bible and was retold countless times. With or without the Quran, Arabs would believe (in at least one god) named "Ilah" (or "Allah" with the definite article). Christian Arabs use the word "Allah" to describe G-d too, as do and did other religions (i.e. Arabic-speaking Mandaeans).

Here we go with the etymology.

As I said before, the root QR' (Quf Resh Aleph) means "to read" or "to happen" in Semitic languages (at least in Hebrew and Arabic). Aleph is usually transliterated either as nothing or as an apostrophe. The Hebrew (and original Arabic) pronounciation of Aleph is as a glottal stop before a vowel and as zero (nothing) after a vowel. (This is similar to the French "h" in "honour".) Quf is "q", Resh is "r" (sounds like a German "r").

"liqro'" means "to read" in Hebrew. "Ani qore'" means "I (male) read". And "qur'an" means "recitation" in Arabic, and that's recitation in the sense of "what happened". It's not a story, it's the truth, because there is no difference between the two. (But that doesn't mean that one has to believe it. The Quran quite clearly says that any faith that knows the important truth (about the one G-d) is valid.

So it's not just the Quran that says that Allah is the same guy the Jews believe in, it's the entire framework including the Bible that makes that clear.

(The other gods, like Baal, vanished over time. You still find Baal in the Punic Wars against Rome, when the Carthaginian military leader, Hanniball, was named with a referene to Baal. His name means literally "grace of Baal". In Hebrew "hannah" means "grace" and "baal" means "lord, master, husband".)

 

Exactly.

And, incidentally, looking for answers to ethnical questions in biology is wrong; just as wrong as looking for answers to biological questions in the legends of a middle-eastern desert people.

 

Illuminating. Clearly you have a much greater scholarly background in this matter than I or many of the other respondents here do.

And my apologies for the misspelling--maybe I should stick to the Anglicized "Koran"

Are you kidding? I am a college dropout.

 

I hope you realise that I corrected your spelling because I was making a point about the word's root. The apostrophe represents a Semitic consonant.

I don't spell things right all the time; but in this case my point relied on the precise order of the characters in the word.

In Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran) the Arabic seems to read Alef Lamed ("al") Quf (that's the little circle with the two dots) Resh (the little downwards hook, no idea how the "u" vowel is represented) Alef with Hamza (represents the glottal stop before an "a" vowel) and Nun ("n", I use the Hebrew names of the letters).

The Hebrew entry (http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%94%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%9F) spells it He (for the article "ha") Quf Vav Resh Alef Nun, where the Vav is a "u" vowel and the Alef is part of the root (and pronounced as a glottal stop since it comes before the vowel). Note that Alef is not originally a vowel and part of the root. In Arabic Alef is often used to represent a long "a" these days. It's terrible.

 

 

Warreni posts:

Catholics believe that the world was made for the glory of God...God is not only the Creator, but also the Conserver of all things. Without His sustaining hand, everything would lapse into its original nothingness; "In Him, we move live and are."

His providence is all embracing for not even a sparrow falls to the ground without Him; it is infallible in all its workings and no secondary cause is able to thwart His divine plan. ONce we believe in God's Infinite Wisdom and Goodness, the problem of evil need not disturg us, for we know God's ruling "reaches from end to end mightily, and orders all things sweetly."

The God we worship is the One, True and Living God, the Creator and Lord of Heaven and earth, Almighty, Eternal, Incomprehensible, Infinite in Intelligence and Will, and in All Perfection, really and essentially distinct from the world. We believe He watches over and governs us by His Providence all things that He has made.



There is no way possible that we even dream of comprehending Almighty God or His divine plan, but He has given us His own Revelation both written and through Christ and His Apostles. We know that "to them that love God, all things work together for good."


God cannot be the cause of evil, for evil, being something privative, cannot be the term of a postivie creative act. For example, just as the sun gives light, while the shadow on the ground, the absense of light, is caused by the intervention of some obstacle such as a tree blocking out the rays of light, so the Infinitely Good God is the cause only of goodness, the absence of goodness whereever it occurs is caused by the intervention of some of some object and most often by the misuse of free will on the part of man.


You ask what about natural evil....well there is no such thing as natural evil..God created nature and everything in it and He declared it very good.

These physical events occur according to the natural laws established by God, with the operations He is not obliged to interfere becasue of the finite minds of men surprised by them. Driving on the freeway is more deadly than being in an area where volcanoes erupt. We never know when our ticket to physical life on earth will be up...and so we must always be ready to meet our Judge and Maker. Nor does the death of people in these circumstances terminate their real existence. The transition from earthly life to our future state is an normal as the transition from infancy to adulthood. Death for all of us is the result of Adam's original sin and God permits it to come to us in various ways to various people.

Your god is perfect, and vengeful.

In fact your god seems to have many of the qualities I would regard as negative. He is an inept (to an irresponsible degree) designer and an arbitrary judge. He holds grudges and abuses his power.

I think you took a convenient shortcut to understanding G-d there.

It bypasses all the big questions, but it doesn't allow you to see how great G-d really is. You are not closer to the answers by using the shortcut and you are limited to seeing of G-d only the imperfect versions of His attributes.

You are either not seeing G-d as clearly as you could or you have found a different god and are happy with him.

 

 

Your diatribe of doctrinal teachings says that you has defined non-moral evil out of existence. This is simply sophistry or verbal sleight-of-hand. There is no natural evil because nature cannot be evil because it was made by an omnipotent, benevolent God. The people who have suffered in natural disasters would undoubtedly offer a somewhat different viewpoint. What does it even mean to say that God has no responsibility to change things "because our finite minds cannot understand his plan"? Maybe that's true, but we sure can understand suffering, grief, hardship, and loss. If God created everything and knows everything and is the cause of everything as the "providence in the fall of a sparrow" idea asserts, then why does God punish us with floods, earthquakes, droughts, famine, and pestilence? Is this your notion of a benevolent entity? Are we not praying hard enough for Him to intervene or change the world so that these things do not occur?

God is not as benevolent as some would paint him to be. He actually cares about us, but he will not help us because we choose to leave him.

Evil is very, very true. Man is evil.

True. Very true.



The why questions are very hard to answer. How can we know all of the reasons why something occurs?

God does answer prayer. Sometimes it's not about punishing us so much as lifiting his hand of protection.

Most of the time we want God for what he can give us. We want the pie and eat it too.

We go our own way disregarding our creator and when he lifts his hand of protection, we yell and scream at him. Maybe instead of asking God why.....we need to ask ourselves....why?

Why do we do things we do?

There is but one true God. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. God created all mankind in His image and likeness so that they may know, love and serve Him and be with Him in eternity.  God revealed His holy religion to us first through biblical Judaism which was fulfilled in Christianity.

Christ died on the Cross to redeem all mankind. "All" mankind includes Muslims.

Muhammad sprang from paganism and rejected and denied the Incarnation of Christ as the  Savior of all mankind. Muhammedanism began as a heresy, not as a new religion even though its vitality and endurance gave it the appearance of a new religion. Those who were contemperory with its rise saw it for what it is---an adaption and misuse of the Judeo-Christian religion.

Muhammad was a heretic.  The followers of Muhammad's Qur'anic Islam read his words and imitate his actions which leads to an expression of faith (violence and bloodshed) quite different from Christianity's expression of faith. Islam is a mixture of truth and error. Muslims in their belief of Islam submit to God as far as believing He is the ONe God; He is the Creator; He is most forgiving and merciful, etc. This part is truth. All the rest, having to do with their leader Muhammad and his false Qur'anic teachings is error and false doctrine.

Muslims worship the one God (they call Allah) according to the Qur'anic teachings of Islam, a religion developed by self-named Muhammed in 610. Jehovah Witnesses worship the one God (they call Jehovah) according to the teachings and doctrines of Charles Taze Russell, Judge Rutherford, etc. Mormons worship God the Father according to the tenets of Joseph SMith and the Book of Mormon. Unitarians worship the one God according to the teachings of Theophilus Lindley in 1774. The Muslims, the JW, the Mormons, and the Unitarians are all a revived form of Arianism at least by their denial of the Doctrine of the Blessed Trinity and the Deity of Christ, although they acknowledge His existence.