It might be helpful to turn the theodicy question upside down. Assume that the natural world, rather than being the theophany of a supremely good God, is instead the creation of supremely wicked Devil. The question then is not why does God permit evil & suffering, but why does the Devil tolerate any ember of compassion or integrity to exist in his world? Monsters like Jeffery Dahmer or Genghis Khan might make us tremble in terror, but there is nothing really inexplicable about them; they are simply avatars of Nature. But men like Gandhi or Albert Schweitzer ought to astonish us & fill us with wonder.
It could be flipped in that way since good and evil are mixed in the world, but both scenarios seem arbitrary to me, because conventional morality is anthropocentric.
There's no chance a personal First Cause would be good or evil in a sense that would be immediately recognized by any of us. A supreme being would be beyond both good and evil, which is to say this being would be insane, amoral, neither benevolent nor benevolent. This being would be weird: sometimes helpful and at other times disastrous, a tyrant lost in its powers and delusions.
It might be helpful to turn the theodicy question upside down. Assume that the natural world, rather than being the theophany of a supremely good God, is instead the creation of supremely wicked Devil. The question then is not why does God permit evil & suffering, but why does the Devil tolerate any ember of compassion or integrity to exist in his world? Monsters like Jeffery Dahmer or Genghis Khan might make us tremble in terror, but there is nothing really inexplicable about them; they are simply avatars of Nature. But men like Gandhi or Albert Schweitzer ought to astonish us & fill us with wonder.
ReplyDeleteIt could be flipped in that way since good and evil are mixed in the world, but both scenarios seem arbitrary to me, because conventional morality is anthropocentric.
DeleteThere's no chance a personal First Cause would be good or evil in a sense that would be immediately recognized by any of us. A supreme being would be beyond both good and evil, which is to say this being would be insane, amoral, neither benevolent nor benevolent. This being would be weird: sometimes helpful and at other times disastrous, a tyrant lost in its powers and delusions.