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Tuesday, August 30, 2016

God and Gratuitous Evil.



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  Rashomon, 1950 Kurosawa's great classic film
reflecting upon the Human condition (see my 
Review)


Keith Parsons enters the discussion about God and evil on Secular Outpost [1] with a look at gratuitous evil. That means evil that God doesn't allow for any rational reason,In other words the kind thing about which one says "there's no excuse for that, God could just no reason to allow that." An example of gratuitous evil might be  what happened to the woman gunned down in Chicago while pushing her child in the stroller. She was shit by a stray bullet. One might be tempted to think  --I can see why God would allow the gunman to waste his life or even why he would allow the other member he was shooting at to be shot but why did God have to allow this woman to be hit by the stray bullet? In this piece I'm not going to deal with F inductive issues but to disagree with the approach to understanding gratuitous evil.
Parsons states, "perhaps even the grossest moral evils are not gratuitous. I would add that, since we cannot know the counterfactuals of freedom, then neither can we know that moral evils are not gratuitous. Perhaps God could have created a better world after all." That does not seem to follow. Either way we can still know that there is a justifiable purpose in allowing consequential evil. Such evil is not gratuitous because it has to be allowed to achieve certain ends. But he doesn't stop there. He goes on to takes his position to absurdity. He is speaking of unwanted undeserved suffering he says "note that if if even one...instance...of suffering is gratuitous , that is if even one is such that God would have no morally sufficient reason for permitting it then God does not exist." It is odd that tyey are willing to take it down to that level

Would the atheists be willing to say that if one miracles happens there has to be a God? I doubt that they would but one thing I know they would never admit there was a miracle, But I don't necessarily object to the idea since it would be against God's nature to allow gratuitous evil. But I think I have just demonstrated that there is no such thing, All forms of evil that occur must be allowed weather they lead to direct and specific good or not They all are the result of necessities. That is not to say that the individual evils must be excused or or tolerated and in all those cases where they wrought by humans we could choose to prevent the. There may be instances in which God intervenes but we don't know the parameters. That doesn't mean there aren't any. It means that the causes of evil must be allowed and in those cases where God does act to prevent there are certain reasons we don't understand. We can understand the reasons for allowing evil generally. Overall I've explained that by the use of internalizing work of the search and the idea of keeping the search inviolable.[4]

The variables are too complex by far to tabulate probabilities. We can't know enough any given to say if there is or is not a rational reason for some kind of pain. The consequential pain is what we have in place of gratuitous pain; that is pain that has to be of necessity given the objectives of creation but has no direct positive outcome,or we may not know enough about the outcomes to say.



Sources


[1] Keith Parsons, "Gratuitous Evils: What are the Chances?" Secular Outpost, April 26,2016, BLOG url: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2016/08/26/gratuitous-evils-what-are-the-chances/#disqus_thread (Accessed 8/30/16)


[2] Ibid

[3] Reinold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man vol.I Nisbet &co. 1943
Niebuhr doesn't actually speak of internalization values of the good but he does compare the selfish resplne to comprehending justice. There is clearly an internalizing of values innovated,


[4] Joseph Hinman Soteriologocal Drama, The Religious a propri. website URL











6 comments:

  1. this was the best one comments om it

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  2. Just saw this movie recently. Absolutely love it. My favorite Kurosawa film would still be Ran, which, granted, is a lot more pessimistic.

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  3. Probably my second favorite Kurosawa film.

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  4. I think several of his other are better than ?Ran, don't underrate seven samurai. and some of his modern stuff,

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  5. I think Ikiru is one of his best

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