Is God Judgemental? - Page 2

Aaron · #11 (**permalink**) 14th May 2008, 12:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Travis Clementsmith

My concept of God does not possess humanly attributes such as judgement, or that God does anything. I think those are just ways humans use their highest ideals as a means of relation to something that is un-relatable by such quantifications and qualifications. Judgement is our tool, not God's.

-TC

Ditto. God only judges to the degree that we judge IMHO.

metis · #12 (**permalink**) 14th May 2008, 03:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Harvey1

I don't think this was Spinoza's view.

Here's what I had written:

Quote:

Einstein and Spinoza would completely agree with you. Matter of fact, they felt that the concept of a moral God who will reward us for being good and punishing us for being bad is just more anthropomorphizing of God, and Einstein referred to such a belief as being "childish".

Here's your follow up:

Quote:

So, although Spinoza didn't see God as rewarding saints and punishing sinners, he did believe that goodness was self-rewarding by being eternal, and wickedness was self-punishing by being bodily and stuck in a duration of time. Wickedness is being apart from God and focused on negative emotions.

Everything's fine until your last sentence. What I'm going to do is to quote from Wikipedia, even though it's not my favorite source by any means (but it saves time):

Quote:

He contended that everything that exists in Nature/Universe is one Reality (substance) and there is only one set of rules governing the whole of the reality which surrounds us and of which we are part. Spinoza viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality, namely the single substance (meaning "to stand beneath" rather than "matter") that is the basis of the universe and of which all lesser "entities" are actually modes or modifications, that all things are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and that the complex chain of cause and effect is only understood in part. That humans presume themselves to have free will, he argues, is a result of their awareness of appetites while being unable to understand the reasons why they want and act as they do....

The consequences of Spinoza's system also envisage a God that does not rule over the universe by providence, but a God which itself is the deterministic system of which everything in nature is a part. Thus, God is the natural world and He has no personality...

For him, even human behaviour is fully determined, with freedom being our capacity to know we are determined and to understand why we act as we do. So freedom is not the possibility to say "no" to what happens to us but the possibility to say "yes" and fully understand why things should necessarily happen that way. By forming more "adequate" ideas about what we do and our emotions or affections, we become the adequate cause of our effects (internal or external), which entails an increase in activity (versus passivity). This means that we become both more free and more like God, as Spinoza argues in the Scholium to Prop. 49, Part II. However, Spinoza also held that everything must necessarily happen the way that it does. Therefore, there is no free will...

Some of Spinoza's philosophical positions are:

The natural world is infinite.
Good and evil are related to human pleasure and pain.
Everything done by humans and other animals is excellent and divine.
All rights are derived from the State.
Animals can be used in any way by people for the benefit of the human race, according to a rational consideration of the benefit as well as the animal's status in nature.

metis · #13 (**permalink**) 14th May 2008, 03:22 PM

By coincidence, this showed up in the Jerusalem Post yesterday:

Quote:

Albert Einstein: arch rationalist or scientist with a spiritual core?

A letter being auctioned in London this week adds more fuel to the long-simmering debate about the Nobel prize-winning physicist's religious views. In the note, written the year before his death, Einstein dismissed the idea of God as the product of human weakness and the Bible as "pretty childish."

The letter, handwritten in German, is being sold by Bloomsbury Auctions on Thursday and is expected to fetch from 6,000 to 8,000 pounds (US$12,000 to US$16,000; €7,500 to €10,000).

Einstein, who helped unravel the mysteries of the universe with his theory of relativity, expressed complex and arguably contradictory views on faith, perceiving a universe suffused with spirituality while rejecting organized religion.

The letter up for sale, written to philosopher Eric Gutkind in January 1954, suggests his views on religion did not mellow with age.

In it, Einstein said that "the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."

"For me," he added, "the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions."

Addressing the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people, Einstein wrote that "the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

Bloomsbury spokesman Richard Caton said the auction house was "100 percent certain" of the letter's authenticity. It is being offered at auction for the first time, by a private vendor.

John Brooke, emeritus professor of science and religion at Oxford University, said the letter lends weight to the notion that "Einstein was not a conventional theist" - although he was not an atheist, either.

"Like many great scientists of the past, he is rather quirky about religion, and not always consistent from one period to another," Brooke said.

Born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1879, Einstein said he went through a devout phase as a child before beginning to question conventional religion at the age of 12.

In later life, he expressed a sense of wonder at the universe and its mysteries - what he called a "cosmic religious feeling" - and famously said: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

But, he also said: "I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking, but by immutable laws."

Brooke said Einstein believed that "there is some kind of intelligence working its way through nature. But it is certainly not a conventional Christian or Judaic religious view."

Einstein's most famous legacy is the special theory of relativity, which makes the point that a large amount of energy could be released from a tiny amount of matter, as expressed in the equation EMC2 (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared). The theory changed the face of physics, allowing scientists to make predictions about space and paving the way for nuclear power and the atomic bomb.

Einstein's musings on science, war, peace and God helped make him world famous, and his scientific legacy prompted Time magazine to name him its Person of the 20th Century.

Just a reminder that Einstein stated on many occasions that he believed in "Spinoza's God".

Harvey1 · #14 (**permalink**) 15th May 2008, 01:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by metis

Here's your follow up:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Harvey1

Wickedness is being apart from God and focused on negative emotions.

Everything's fine until your last sentence. What I'm going to do is to quote from Wikipedia, even though it's not my favorite source by any means (but it saves time

Quote:

Some of Spinoza's philosophical positions are. . . Everything done by humans and other animals is excellent and divine.

This last part seems to me to leave the door open toward confusing Spinoza's "attributes of extension" and "attributes of thought":

Quote:

The two attributes of God of which we have cognizance are extension and thought. This, in itself, involves what would have been an astounding thesis in the eyes of his contemporaries, one that was usually misunderstood and always vilified. When Spinoza claims in Proposition Two that "Extension is an attribute of God, or God is an extended thing", he was almost universally — but erroneously — interpreted as saying that God is literally corporeal. For just this reason, "Spinozism" became, for his critics, synonymous with atheistic materialism.

According to one interpretation, God is indeed material, even matter itself, but this does not imply that God has a body. Another interpretation, however, one which will be adopted here, is that what is in God is not matter per se, but extension as an essence. And extension and thought are two distinct essences that have absolutely nothing in common. The modes or expressions of extension are physical bodies; the modes of thought are ideas. Because extension and thought have nothing in common, the two realms of matter and mind are causally closed systems. Everything that is extended follows from the attribute of extension alone. Every bodily event is part of an infinite causal series of bodily events and is determined only by the nature of extension and its laws, in conjunction with its relations to other extended bodies. (Steven Nadler, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Baruch Spinoza, 2005)

So, it's important to ask the question is the action done by a human being (or animal) an attribute of extension (of God's essence), or is it a mode or attribute of thought (of God's essence)? Spinoza clearly did not think that all knowledge was equally a reflection of the divine nature since he defines three types of knowledge and equates the third type of knowledge as the highest endeavour:

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E5: PROP. 25. The highest endeavour of the mind, and the highest virtue is to understand things by the third kind of knowledge. (Spinoza, Ethics)

In the case of wickedness as an attribute of thought, Spinoza ranked it as the lowest endeavour of the mind and not an eternal mindset:

Quote:

E5: PROP. 40, Corollary.--Hence it follows that the part of the mind which endures, be it great or small, is more perfect than the rest. Ibid

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But the objects of our passions, being external to us, are completely beyond our control. Thus, the more we allow ourselves to be controlled by them, the more we are subject to passions and the less active and free we are. The upshot is a fairly pathetic picture of a life mired in the passions and pursuing and fleeing the changeable and fleeting objects that occasion them: "We are driven about in many ways by external causes, and … like waves on the sea, driven by contrary winds, we toss about, not knowing our outcome and fate" (IIIp59s). The title for Part Four of the Ethics reveals with perfect clarity Spinoza's evaluation of such a life for a human being: "On Human Bondage, or the Powers of the Affects". He explains that the human being's "lack of power to moderate and restrain the affects I call Bondage. For the man who is subject to affects is under the control, not of himself, but of fortune, in whose power he so greatly is that often, though he sees the better for himself, he is still forced to follow the worse". It is, he says, a kind of "sickness of the mind" to suffer too much love for a thing "that is liable to many variations and that we can never fully possess." (Steven Nadler, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Baruch Spinoza, 2005)

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