Sunday, March 2, 2008
God's Trustworthiness
I think Descartes is a little quick to decide that God has no reason to deceive him in Meditations. As our 'creator', I think it would be naive to think that we would be exposed to the whole truth of 'God'. Judging my our own meager attempts to become the 'creator' of various entities and life forms, we are especially concerned about fully revealing our imperfections to our creations with the fear that someday these creations might decide to cause us harm. One (of many) ways to prevent such a thing is to not tell our creations the whole truth of any situation but to have such a thing become distorted to our advantage. Something important to keep control of such situations as a creator would be to install rules to ensure you stay in control, Asimov's 3 Rules of Robotics, the 10 Commandments, etc...
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3 comments:
I agree. How can Descartes say with 100% assurance that God is benevolent. Where is the definitive proof? It is entirely plausible to me that God could actually be apathetic or even malevolent towards humanity.
Without commenting on whether or not God is benevolent or malevolent I think it is not the case that God withholds knowledge from humans because he is worried that they might rebel or overtake him. If God is all-powerful, then it is ridiculous to assume that God would be worried that humans could do anything to harm him. Humans can barely understand the immense largeness and smallness of parts of the universe, let alone control them. We can't even prohibit ourselves from dying. I would hardly say that God has reason to fear men who can't even fully control their own existence, let alone a being who is all-powerful over his creation. Secondly, sets of rules such as the ten commandments are probably not the best at keeping men in line. If God wanted to keep men in line then he would never have given them free will (or at least the possibility of doing wrong whether or not we have "free" will).
in an ever changing universe and with people who grow and mature and change biologically throughout a life, it is close to impossible to keep the same rules and consistent throughout all time. sometimes humans dont understand the whole picture and what seems to be a bad idea turns out to have been the best decision
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