Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

Post 32. 04/24/2018

Deistic Theodicy

Is G*D Good, or Evil, or Both?

Medieval Theologians were faced with a paradox : how could an all-good & all-loving God allow bad things to happen to good people? Their rationalization concluded that a perfect world was logically impossible, even for an omnipotent deity. But, in that case, how could God create an all-good heaven for good people to escape to? This was like the old conundrum : “could an all-powerful creator create a rock so heavy that even the omnipotent Prime Mover couldn't pick it up?” It sounds like a joke, but such paradoxes arise from mistaken assumptions. In this case, about the nature of Deity, and of Omnipotential.

Deists though, are not bound to scriptural benedictions of “Allah the merciful, the beneficent”1 or even of Jehovah the just. Instead, they are limited by Logic, which leads to the conclusion that, since the Creation is experienced by humans as some good, some bad, and some neutral, then the Creator must have the potential for all of those qualities. So was the "all-wise" world-maker suffering from schizophrenia while building a world in seven days? On the sixth day, God looked upon everything he had made, “and indeed it was very good”. So, what went wrong? The Bible blames the subsequent evils & imperfections of the creation upon the creatures. But that is another paradox : can the "all-powerful" Creator create creatures that can undo his good work?

A Theodicy is an attempt to justify Injustice in a divine creation2. Yet for Deists, good vs evil is not a paradox, but a logical necessity drawn from the mathematical division of enfernal unity into space-time duality. Eternity & Infinity are all-encompassing monistic concepts. But space-time is polarized by definition3. Space and Time are pre-requisites for change to occur. If you can move from one place to another, then there must be two or more places in the real world. If you can change from young to old, then there must be more than one point in time. But, while Enfernity4 is the opposite of space-time, it is not nothingness, as some assume. Instead, it is every-thingness; it encompasses all possibilities. Consequently, it is omni-potential. Which is why we can attribute omni-science to the deity who created our world out of infinite options.

So, if you can imagine the eternity before space-time was born in the Big Bang, it was by definition perfect, complete, and unitary. But as soon as the Creator decided to split Infinity into Space, and to change Eternity into Time, you are left with a dichotomy. On one hand you have a finite world, and on the other you have all other possibilities. But G*D remains as the unitary Whole, which includes both the Real world of Things, and the Ideal realm of potential Forms. This BothAnd concept is difficult for our finite minds to grasp.

Nevertheless, if G*D is omnipotential, and omnipresent in the real world, then s/he can be logically characterized as both Good and Evil. From the perspective of space-time reality, G*D’s providence is experienced as sometimes Good, and sometimes Evil. But from the vantage of Enfernity, deity encompasses all possible qualities from Best to Worst. The positives & negatives are in balance, and cancel-out. So the overall holistic quality of G*D is neutral, neither Good nor Evil, but BothAnd. And that's how I justify the inscrutable monistic Mind of G*D to the scrutinizing dualistic minds of men.  

End of Post 32

Whose side
was God on?
The infidels inside
or
the faithful servants
in the plane?

1. Attributes of Allah :
   He is Allah, besides whom there is no god. He has know­ledge of everything, whether perceptible or imperceptible. He is the Beneficent, the Merciful. He is Allah, besides whom there is no god, the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One, the Giver of peace, the Keeper of faith, the Supreme, the Mighty one, the All powerful and the Majestic. Exalted be He above what they associate with Him. He is Allah, the Creator, the Originator, the Fashioner. His are the most beautiful names. All that is in the heavens and the earth gives glory to Him. He is the Mighty, the Wise". (Surah al-Hashr, 59:22 - 24).
https://www.al-islam.org/philosophy-islam-sayyid-muhammad-husayni-beheshti-muhammad-jawad-bahonar/names-and-attributes-allah

2. Rationale for The Fall :
   Some possible reasons for the emergence of Evil in a Good creation :
a> God intended for his creatures to be tested by his loyal prosecutor, Satan, to weed-out any unfaithful or disloyal creatures;
b> God was foiled by his equally powerful adversary, Satan, in an eternal struggle between Good & Evil;
c> God had no logical alternative to avoid the good/evil dichotomy in a world designed to evolve. Physical change requires space for movement, and time for development. And Moral Freedom requires a range of choices;
d> There is no god, and every event in the natural world is a random accident. So humans must learn to make the best of an imperfect situation.  
   In option c> God’s justice lies not in the absence of evil, but in the statistical fairness of the average between positive & negative. events. CLICK HERE

Theodicy :
God’s Justice

3. Duality of Reality:
   Eternity & Infinity are conceptually a single unitary state that I call Enfernity. But as soon as you divide that seamless whole into space & time, the holistic One becomes Two.    Following that bisection, all things in reality have their binary opposite, such as matter & antimatter, positive & negative.
   Philosophers call that complementary union “Yin-Yang”. Scientists call it “symmetry”. And the physical world is a broken symmetry, that allows movement in space and change in time. 

4. Enfernal, Enfernity :
Contraction of Eternal/Infinite and Eternity/Infinity as a holistic state. It is the category of all categories, hence it encompasses all possibilities.