So, 'salvation' is an empty word, a cruel hoax on mankind. There has never been such a state, the whole thing is a monstrous lie, foisted on mankind by unscrupulous institutions bent on exploitation. Correct?

As always, the Donald is immune to reason. He's besotted with 'strong man' Putin, that explains practically all there is to know. And he lacks the insight into his own emotions to acknowledge or understand it. He's like a goofy lovestruck teenager when it comes to Putin.

But on a more positive note, Ukraine has agreed to sign the minerals deal. Presumably, now that Trump (or anyway America) has a financial stake in Ukraine, this can be used to leverage military support - to protect their joint asset.

The deal will establish the “United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund,” which will allow the “two countries to work collaboratively and invest together to ensure that our mutual assets, talents, and capabilities can accelerate Ukraine’s economic recovery,” Bessent said in a statement. — WaPo

Smart move by Zelenskyy, I think.

‘Beware the Dark Side Luke’ :scream:

Maybe. I confess I only ever read one Lovecraft book, but the idea of entering other realms of being through dreams really struck me.

Poll results show that most Americans see Trump as a "dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy" (52%) compared with "44% who agree that President Trump is a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness.”

Most Democrats (87%) agree with the first statement, while most Republicans (81%) agree with the second statement.

Among Americans who voted for Trump and regret their decision, 55% agree that Trump is a dangerous dictator; agreement that Trump is a dangerous dictator is even higher among non-voters who regret their decision not to vote (68%).

Nearly eight in ten Americans (78%) disagree with the statement “When decisions by Congress or the Supreme Court hold our country back, the president should be able to ignore them,” compared with only 18% who agree; Republicans are more than three times as likely as Democrats to agree (28% vs. 9%).

Musk’s work (or 'frolic') with the Department of Government Efficiency is very unpopular, as most Americans are concerned about his access to citizens’ private data and a majority think his efforts at combatting waste and fraud are harmful.

Just 38% of Americans approve of the job Musk is doing within the federal government — though his work is most approved by Republicans (78%) and Americans who watch Fox News (83%) or far-right TV news sources (90%).

Most Americans oppose allowing Musk to access private data about American citizens at federal government agencies such as the IRS or the Social Security Administration (68% vs. 28%).

Atheists complaining about the God they don't believe in doing things they don't believe God ought to do. :roll:

You assert that no alien intelligence is capable of coming up with that theorem? — noAxioms

Not at all, but there is no evidence of such. I mean ‘rational intelligence’. And there’s also no grounds to entertain the idea of a universe with ‘different physical rules’. This is where your relativism/nihilism shows through. It underwrites the idea that there are no necessary truths.

But actually, it makes a difference whether "the knowing mind" is limited to a human mind. Let's go with your other term, "a rational intellect," instead. What might this include? Other intelligent ET species, certainly. But also the sort of cosmic mind that is often posited in religion. Is there an argument you'd want to make that such a mind is impossible, or hopelessly unlikely? If not, and positing such a mind, then the existence of all intellectual objects of knowledge doesn't require human minds at all. Isn't that exactly the sort of independence we're looking for? — J

As I said above, I meant ‘rational intelligence’. To all intents and purposes, that refers to our minds, although I'm open to the possibility of other intelligent species in the Universe. But the point is, that while Einstein says that the Pythagorean theorem is true independently of man I think he overlooks the fact that, at least in our world, it is something only knowable to a rational intelligence that is capable of abstract thought and symbolic representation. So in one sense it is independent of us - does not depend on our assent for it to be true - but in another sense it is mind-dependent, in only being perceptible to the rational intellect (nous.)

As to whether there is 'one mind' or 'cosmic intelligence' or 'divine intellect' - the way I put it is that mind is 'some mind' or 'mind, generally.' While individual minds have their own idiosyncracies and proclivities, the mind also possesses universal characteristics and attributes, which are what is described by logical principles (Frege's 'laws of thought'), among other things. I think that's what Bernardo Kastrup means (or should mean!) by 'mind at large'.

The quote you gave seems to be pretty old, referencing the Bohr model of orbiting electrons like little satellites, deprecated a century ago for the more modern orbital model which still uses those integers, but doesn't suggest electrons going around in cute orbits with nice clean angular momentum like that. — noAxioms

But the point about integers remains. I'm sure a better-educated Platonist physicist than myself could make something profound out of it.

Re nihilism, I meant 'soft nihilism'. Not the bitter 'everything is meaningless' type, but the 'shrug, whatever' type. Bart Simpson rather than Friedrich Neitszche. (Not that it really matters ;-) )

I've not discussed it much, but morals seem to be a social contract, valid only within the society where the contract is valid. — noAxioms

Which is moral relativism, generally contrasted with moral realism. Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus 6.41:

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.

If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.

It must lie outside the world.

Whatever he means by that, it emphatically could not be a matter of 'social contract'.

I care about a model of what is that doesn't depend on mind — noAxioms

But models are clearly mind-dependent in some fundamental sense. Einstein said once, in dialogue with Tagore, 'I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man.' But this overlooks the point that it is something only man can know. It's not a sense object, but an intelligible relationship that can only be discerned by a rational intellect. Like all of physics. The problem with today's understanding is, that it generally forgets to take into account the mind that knows it.

Anyone who pays attention to Sky is a lost cause already. They don’t have the clout here that Fox does in the US anyway,

There's what looks like a significant story broken today in the ABC, Dutton failing to declare financial interest in a profitable family trust involved with childcare industry, some hint of connection to that crook Eddy Groves who was busted a few years ago. I bet Mutton's 'hate speech' jibe was because he'd gotten wind of the story breaking.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-28/peter-dutton-failed-to-disclose-interest-in-family-trust/105217880

The number 17 doesn't seem to be a matter of cause & effect. It's just a member of the set of integers — noAxioms

It's true that that particular integer has no special significance, but the role of integers is significant in the overall scheme of quantum mechanics:

An object moving in a straight line has momentum. It is nothing more than the object’s mass times its velocity. An object moving in a circle possesses a property called ‘angular momentum’. An electron moving in a circular orbit has an angular momentum, labelled L, that is just the mass of the electron multiplied by its velocity multiplied by the radius of its orbit, or simply L=mvr. There were no limits in classical physics on the angular momentum of an electron or any other object moving in a circle.

When Bohr read Nicholson’s paper, he found his former Cambridge colleague arguing that the angular momentum of a ring of electrons could change only by multiples of h/2π, where h is Planck’s constant and π (pi) is the well-known numerical constant from mathematics, 3.14…. . Nicholson showed that the angular momentum of a rotating electron ring could only be h/2π or 2(h/2π) or 3(h/2π) or 4(h/2π) … all the way to n(h/2π) where n is an integer, a whole number. For Bohr it was the missing clue that underpinned his stationary states. Only those orbits were permitted in which the angular momentum of the electron was an integer n multiplied by h and then divided by 2π. Letting n=1, 2, 3 and so on generated the stationary states of the atom in which an electron did not emit radiation and could therefore orbit the nucleus indefinitely. All other orbits, the non-stationary states, were forbidden. Inside an atom, angular momentum was quantised. It could only have the values L=nh/2π and no others. — Kumar, Manjit. Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality (pp. 98-99).

So, while it is true that integers lack causal powers, they nevertheless constrain the space of possible causal relations in quantum systems by defining the allowed states of the system. In this way, mathematics — and whole numbers specifically — shape the possibilities of physical reality. Don't overlook the fact that the quanta in quantum physics refers to the fact that physical properties are constrained to discrete, numerical (often integer-based) values. Even if integers aren’t causal forces, they govern the structure of what’s physically possible ('other values were forbidden')

As Deacon says in Incomplete Nature, causal powers in nature are not exhausted by interactions of forces; constraints are also formative. Mathematical structures like quantized angular momentum states do not act on physical systems, but they fundamentally determine the organization of possibilities, and thus are indispensable to explaining physical outcomes.

Spent quite some time looking at it. There must be a more formal paper somewhere since this seems to be more a pop article written for the likes of me. Has a scientific paper been submitted and peer reviewed? — noAxioms

You're welcome. Note the link to the author profile. He has many published scientific papers in his speciality, rheumatology. I don't know if he published a peer-reviewed article on persistence theory. I would view this more as a philosophical framework for understanding the phenomenon of entanglement rather than physics as such. I am drawn to it, because it converges in many ways with the kind of informational dynamics approach that I've learned about from Apokrisis and others on this forum (which is after all a philosophy forum).

Realism can be relational. You can talk about it either way. 2+2=4 seems like an 'ultimate truth', but who can say for sure? — noAxioms

One thing I've picked up reading your posts over the years, is that you're basically nihilist - kind of a 'soft nihilism', not harsh or cynical. 'Nobody knows for sure that anything is real.' It provides a kind of ultimate get-out-of-jail card for any argument or model, which can be nullified with a shrug, and 'who knows'?

there are things that exist and things that do not exist. If those things do not exist, it might subsists [sic]. If it subsists, it is real. If it does not subsists [sic], it is not real. — Richard B

I’m differentiating the sense in which particulars exist from the sense in which universals are real. Particulars exist in a phenomenal sense, but universals are real in a different sense. I think Russell uses ‘subsist’ to try and articulate this distinction, and while I don’t think that term provides a very elegant way of expressing it, at least it recognises there is a distinction to be made.

An archetypal example of a universal can be found in the argument from equals in the Phaedo. You will recall that in it, Socrates discusses the nature of 'equals' with Simmias, saying that unless we grasped the idea of 'equals' then we wouldn't recognise that two things of different kinds were of equal lengths. (Of course in the context Socrates argues that this must be because of knowledge the soul has before birth, but that is not relevant for my purposes.) So one might feasibly imagine an addendum to that dialogue:

Socrates: “This 'Equal' that you agree is essential to our judgments — can you show it to me? Can you point to it as you would point to a piece of wood or a stone?”

Simmias: “No, Socrates. 'The Equal' is not something we perceive with our senses. It is something that only reason (nous) can grasp.”

Thus, Socrates draws Simmias to recognize that the Equal — and by analogy, all such intelligible Forms — does not exist as a physical thing, but subsists as an intelligible reality, knowable only to a rational soul (psuché).

A fuller elaboration of this point is provided by Eric D. Perl in "Thinking Being: An Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition":

Forms...are radically distinct, and in that sense ‘apart,’ in that they are not themselves sensible things. With our eyes we can see large things, but not largeness itself; healthy things, but not health itself. The latter, in each case, is an idea, an intelligible content, something to be apprehended by thought rather than sense, a ‘look’ not for the eyes but for the mind. This is precisely the point Plato is making when he characterizes forms as the reality of all things. “Have you ever seen any of these with your eyes?—In no way … Or by any other sense, through the body, have you grasped them? I am speaking about all things such as largeness, health, strength, and, in one word, the reality [οὐσίας, ouisia] of all other things, what each thing is” (Phd. 65d4–e1). Is there such a thing as health? Of course there is. Can you see it? Of course not. This does not mean that the forms are occult entities floating ‘somewhere else’ in ‘another world,’ a ‘Platonic heaven.’ It simply says that the intelligible identities which are the reality, the whatness, of things are not themselves physical things to be perceived by the senses, but must be grasped by reason. If, taking any of these examples—say, justice, health, or strength—we ask, “How big is it? What color is it? How much does it weigh?” we are obviously asking the wrong kind of question. Forms are ideas, not in the sense of concepts or abstractions, but in that they are realities apprehended by thought rather than by sense. They are thus‘separate’in that they are not additional members of the world of sensible things, but are known by a different mode of awareness. But this does not mean that they are ‘located elsewhere'... — Eric D Perl, Thinking Being, p28

Thus, when we distinguish between particulars that exist phenomenally and universals that are real intelligibly, we are making precisely the kind of distinction Plato articulates, and which later philosophy (including thinkers like Russell, despite his awkward terminology) recognizes as crucial to any coherent account of universals (not that he elsewhere defends scholastic realism).

As for Quine, that is a vulgar caricature.

Trump is notorious for echoing what the last person who impressed him has said. Obviously, Zelenskyy impressed something on him in that impromptu meeting at the Vatican (a portentious setting if ever there was one.) If only Trump could grasp the fact - obvious to everyone except him, it seems - that Putin doesn't want 'peace', he wants to conquer Ukraine, or at least come away with enough for him to claim he has to his country.

But overall, a better outcome than Trump walking away muttering about 'that dictator Zelenskyy'. Let's hope it sticks.

@substantivalism @apokrisis

New theory of entanglement - Persistence Theory, Bill Gianokopoulos (Profile)

Spooky Action at a Distance, Reversed: Entanglement as Collapse of Mutual Information (via Medium).

// for anyone interested, an AI chat about this article and its implications - comparisons with Peirce's pan-semiosis and Wheeler's 'it from bit'.//

It seems possible that Trump will support a peace plan that heavily favours Russia; that Zelenskyy and the Europeans will reject it as unfair (Trump has already said that not invading the whole of Ukraine was 'a concession' on the part of Russia); Trump will then accuse Zelenskyy of 'scuttling the peace plan' and the US will wash its hands of the situation, leaving Ukraine and the European Union to fight on alone. We'll see, but I suspect we won't be waiting long to find out.

Make no mistake: Ms. Ozturk’s case (Tufts PhD student snatched off the street by ICE in March and incarcerated since) is not an isolated one. This administration has already overseen a wave of unconstitutional actions: raids without warrants, prolonged detentions without hearings and retaliatory deportations. Each case chips away at the rule of law. Each one makes it easier for the next to go unnoticed. And each one brings us closer to the authoritarianism we once believed could never take root on American soil. — NYTimes

This is mostly the handiwork of Stephen Miller, Trump’s Secretary for Xenophobia.

*

Why, if 'one identical' word is used, must there be 'one identical' object present which it denotes? Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things ?
Why should not words be by nature 'general' ? (Quoting Austin) — Banno

Words can only be general because they denote universals. But universals are not things that exist. They are not objects as such. Designating them as 'things' is precisely the reification that you and Austin are complaining about. But because of Austin's presumptive naturalism, he will say that only things can exist.

Note again from Russell:

the relation 'north of' does not seem to exist in the same sense in which Edinburgh and London exist. If we ask 'Where and when does this relation exist?' the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'. There is no place or time where we can find the relation 'north of'. ....it seems plain that the relation subsists

Universals are real, not as existing objects among objects, but as the indispensable constituents of the rational structure of reality - the 'ligatures of reason' - grasped by the mind, and necessary for intelligibility, yet not themselves located in space and time.

I'll pick this up later.

Alternatively, we might understand "triangularity" as a way of grouping some objects, as something we do, and without supposing the existence of a mystic form. — Banno

Why is the concept of a plane bounded by three sides 'mystic'? I say the problem is in trying to come to grips with the sense in which such concepts exist.

Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe. ...We may therefore now assume it to be true that nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London. But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create.

This conclusion, however, is met by the difficulty that the relation 'north of' does not seem to exist in the same sense in which Edinburgh and London exist. If we ask 'Where and when does this relation exist?' the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'. There is no place or time where we can find the relation 'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburgh any more than in London, for it relates the two and is neutral as between them. Nor can we say that it exists at any particular time. Now everything that can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection exists at some particular time. Hence the relation 'north of' is radically different from such things. It is neither in space nor in time, neither material nor mental; yet it is something.

It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We can think of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'. ...In the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time, also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts. — Bertrand Russell, The World of Universals

:100:

If the forms (ideas, eidos) are understood as principles rather than as ghostly templates in a mysterious realm then they continue to make sense.

Aristotle, in De Anima, argued that thinking in general (which includes knowledge as one kind of thinking) cannot be a property of a body; it cannot, as he put it, 'be blended with a body'. This is because in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible. Among other things, this means that you could not think if materialism is true… . Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally.

….the fact that in thinking, your mind is identical with the form that it thinks, means (for Aristotle and for all Platonists) that since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too. — Lloyd Gerson, Platonism vs Naturalism

Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once. — Edward Feser

The Buddhist is the quintessential phenomenologist. — Astrophel

Edmund Husserl, the founder of Phenomenology, wrote that "I could not tear myself away" while reading the Buddhist Sutta Pitaka in the German translation of Karl Eugen Neumann.[35][36] Husserl held that the Buddha's method as he understood it was very similar to his own. Eugen Fink, who was Husserl's chief assistant and whom Husserl considered to be his most trusted interpreter said that: "the various phases of Buddhistic self-discipline were essentially phases of phenomenological reduction." — Wikipedia

"God loves us like a parent loves their children" — J

Yes, the image of God as a loving parent is a recurring motif in Christian scripture. But it’s meant analogically, not literally. Divine love isn’t the same as human affection — it’s not sentimental or reactive, nor a description of a mortal parent with moral obligations. And it also depends on what we take “Father” to mean. Interpreted archetypally, Father is a symbol of creative origination — the generative, principle. Think of the Father as the seed or zygote, the initiator of form; the Mother as Earth, the bearer of substance. So the religions speak of “Father" it has many layers of meaning.

Something else is nagging me as well. Jesus, after all, was a pretty demanding teacher. 'He who saves his life will lose it, while he who loses his life for my sake will be saved.' There's a moral demand in that, isn't there? It isn't 'do what you like, it will turn OK'. And isn't the final end of suffering the 'salvation' or the 'life eternal' that the faithful are said to inherit? I'm not trying to preach (although I admit it sounds like it!) but to interpret.

Or we can agree that to imagine God as a loving parent is to imagine them more or less like our human idea of such a love...The problem is not with God, but with the consistency of human descriptions of God. — J

Right! Especially when abstracted and disconnected from the sacerdotal and liturgical context in which it was originally meaningful and interpolated into modern idioms.

A hand cannot grasp itself, but nevertheless, is proof of an external world, as Moore wrote in Proof of an External World — RussellA

Not the point at issue, if you read the post I responded to.

‘The hand that cannot grasp itself’

First, it's very confusing that the word "theodicy" is being used in this thread to mean "anti-theodicy" or "anti-theism." For that reason I will avoid the word altogether. — Leontiskos

Acknowledged. I had associated the word with general discussion of the problem of evil not realising that it was usually intended as a apologetic in the religious context. So it is misleading, and I have changed the thread title to reflect that.

Part of your argument is something like this:

4. If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent, then there would be no head colds
5. But there are head colds
6. Therefore, there is no existing God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent {modus tollens}
7. Therefore, head colds disprove the existence of God {reductio ad absurdum} — Leontiskos

That is not the argument at all. The argument is, if the existence of suffering is supposed to be an indictment against God, then where do you draw the line between what you would deem a reasonable and an unnacceptabe degree of suffering? That colds and influenza would be 'allowed' by a merciful God, but not cancer? That earthquakes would be reasonable, but mass casualties would not be?

The more general argument is that a world without suffering is inconceivable, (although I might add that this is actually what Heaven is supposed to mean.) So it's not as if suffering is inflicted on the world, either by design or intention, but that physical existence must be susceptible to suffering, pain and imperfections of many kinds. Hence the Thomist view of natural evils:

“God does not will evil to be done, but He permits it to be done; and thus He brings good out of evil.” — ST I, q.19, a.9

As facing and rising above evil is an essential aspect of existence.

Further, that the most conspicuous forms of intentional evil have been committed by man against man - even in the name of religion itself, which is particularly egregious, but again, not an indictment against God.

Again, the essay 'is not an attempt to justify suffering, nor to offer spiritual guidance. It aims only to point out the mistake of that common assumption in modern discourse — the idea that if God exists, He must operate like a benevolent manager of human well-being. It’s a superficial way of seeing it. Recovering some understanding of the metaphysical and theological contexts against which the problem of evil has traditionally been resolved, allows us to reframe the question in a larger context — one in which suffering still has to be reckoned with, but not on account of a malicious God.'

And I stand by that argument.

It (theodicy) does disappear if your version of god is less benevolent sky wizard and more ground of being. Mind you, the Bible deosn't help as it depicts a pretty nasty deity who has no issues with slavery and genocide and behaves like a mafia boss, demanding deference and worship to sooth his seemingly fragile ego, so there is that. — Tom Storm

Specifically, the Old Testament. And bearing in mind, the OT texts preserved in the Bible originated in the late Bronze age, amongst agrarian tribes, for whom the subtleties of the much later theologians would presumably mean nothing. Ergo the voice that is presented speaks in the terms appropriate to the society in which it was heard (although I don't know if genocide was part of the narrative. That doesn't enter the language until WWII, and not through any act of God.) But it raises the question of what is being debated.

Perhaps it's this confusion about the nature of the 'supreme identity' that is behind the belief that He operates as a kind of supreme agent — a being with immense power, knowledge, and will, who chooses outcomes in the world much like we do, only on a grander scale. It’s from this anthropomorphic projection that the impulse to assign blame arises: if God could have prevented this or that disaster, and didn’t, then He must be responsible, perhaps even malicious.

But this view mistakes what kind of causality is at issue. In the classical world — particularly in Aquinas and the Neoplatonic tradition — God is not a proximate cause operating within the causal order. He is not a being in the world, but the ground of all being, the cause of causes. His causality is not like ours — it is ontological, not mechanical or voluntaristic.

The “Hotel Manager” model of theodicy arises precisely from this misplaced attribution of agency: it treats God as if He were running the world like a human administrator, and then judges Him by those standards. But this picture, intuitive though it may be to us, is metaphysically confused. It domesticates divinity into a kind of super-personality — and then is shocked when the universe doesn’t live up to the standards we come to expect.

Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe – even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their scientific hypothesis was unsound. — Lunging, Flailing, Mispunchiing, Terry Eagleton (review of The God Delusion)

I gave too much credit to what DOGE could do as Musk didn't last even until the summer and the cuts have basically been meaningless as the Trump administration is spending a bit more than the Biden administration now. — ssu

Weren't all of these measures simply Trump lashing out at a Government that he hates, using 'waste and fraud' as a pretext? Similar to how he is having people deported on the pretext of them being 'violent criminals' even without any convictions having been recorded purely to appease the xenophobia of his base.

It seems the wind has been taken out of Musk's sails. He's said to have been having screaming matches with Scott Bessent in the West Wing and to have considerably annoyed many other cabinet members. Tesla is clearly wounded and may not ever recover (and it doesn't help that the Cybertruck is on the way to being an historic dud.) I think Musk was literally power-drunk when it all kicked of. Now for the hangover. Even so, the consequences of the DOGE chainsaw will be felt for years to come.

I'm trying to stay true to the classic framing of a theodicy in the West, which conceives of God as omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent. — J

But regardless, one being amongst others - apparently with extraordinary powers and longevity but a being nonetheless. This is why Paul Tillich says that to conceive of God as a being is to deny Him. (And I'm not saying this from the viewpoint having it all worked out, either - more like a historical forensic pathologist, trying to reconstruct what happened on the basis of scattered remains. It ties into the loss of the heirarchical understanding of Being, and its replacement with univocity, 'all being(s) are of the same kind'. That, in turn, leads to the loss of a 'dimension of value' - values are subjective, or intersubjective, or social, there being no value in so-called objective reality (ref)).

God set up the whole thing — J

I'm sorry, I still don't think that is a fair assessment. It's a very Dawkins style depiction, God as a kind of cosmic film director, staging all of the action. I think it betrays a misunderstanding of the God that Dawkins doesn't believe in. A straw God, so to speak.

I could've done that! — J

Which is key to the whole thing.

Not sure that would necessarily amount to nihilism—perversity and cruelty are value-laden terms, and many people actually find them galvanizing, even a kind of raison d’être. — Tom Storm

Ah. They like them.

Far more damning is the design and creation of a world that uses death and pain as the engine of survival. That’s pretty twisted. A god might have engineered creation any way he wanted; creatures could have survived on water or light alone. — Tom Storm

The Buddhist creation myth has it that sentient beings were originally composed entirely of light. At the beginning of each kalpa (a cosmic age), beings are reborn as luminous entities, often described as shining or radiant beings. These beings, called Abhassara, are said to be reborn from the Ābhāsvara Brahma-realm and initially lack physical form, moving through the aether like pure energy. They are also said to not require sustenance and possess great longevity. Over long periods of time, they become attracted to a sweet substance on the physical plane, and as they consume it, their bodies become heavier and more physical, eventually losing their luminous qualities and differentiating into two genders.

But instead, he designed hunting, maiming, killing, and predation as the lingua franca of survival. None of this involves human sin or any other spurious theological cop-out. — Tom Storm

I found this essay, in a book of essays by a US Zen teacher, provides quite a compelling account of the source of religious consciousness:

The animal world is a world of pure being, a world of immediacy and immanence. The animal soul is like “water in water,” seamlessly connected to all that surrounds it, so that there is no sense of self or other, of time, of space, of being or not being. This utopian (to human sensibility, which has such alienating notions) Shangri-La or Eden actually isn’t that because it is characterized at all points by what we’d call violence. Animals, that is, eat and are eaten. For them killing and being killed is the norm; and there isn’t any meaning to such a thing, or anything that we would call fear; there’s no concept of killing or being killed. There’s only being, immediacy, “isness.” Animals don’t have any need for religion; they already are that, already transcend life and death, being and nonbeing, self and other, in their very living, which is utterly pure.

(In his book, A Theory of Religion, George) Bataille sees human consciousness beginning with the making of the first tool, the first “thing” that isn’t a pure being, intrinsic in its value and inseparable from all of being. A tool is a separable, useful, intentionally made thing; it can be possessed, and it serves a purpose. It can be altered to suit that purpose. It is instrumental, defined by its use. The tool is the first instance of the “not-I,” and with its advent there is now the beginning of a world of objects, a “thing” world. Little by little out of this comes a way of thinking and acting within thingness (language), and then once this plane of thingness is established, more and more gets placed upon it—other objects , plants, animals, other people, one’s self, a world. Now there is self and other—and then, paradoxically, self becomes other to itself, alienated not only from the rest of the projected world of things, but from itself, which it must perceive as a thing, a possession. This constellation of an alienated self is a double-edged sword: seeing the self as a thing, the self can for the first time know itself and so find a closeness to itself; prior to this, there isn’t any self so there is nothing to be known or not known. But the creation of my me, though it gives me for the first time myself as a friend, also rips me out of the world and puts me out on a limb on my own.

Interestingly, and quite logically, this development of human consciousness coincides with a deepening of the human relationship to the animal world, which opens up to the human mind now as a depth, a mystery. Humans are that depth, because humans are animals, know this and feel it to be so, and yet also not so; humans long for union with the animal world of immediacy, yet know they are separate from it. Also they are terrified of it, for to reenter that world would be a loss of the self; it would literally be the end of me as I know me.

In the midst of this essential human loneliness and perplexity, which is almost unbearable, religion appears. It intuits and imagines the ancient world of oneness, of which there is still a powerful primordial memory, and calls it 'the sacred'. This is the invisible world, world of spirit, world of the gods, or of God. It is inexorably opposed to, defined as the opposite of, the world of things, the profane world of the body, of instrumentality, a world of separation, the fallen world. Religion’s purpose then is to bring us back to the lost world of intimacy, and all its rites, rituals, and activities are created to this end. We want this, and need it, as sure as we need food and shelter; and yet it is also terrifying. All religions have known and been based squarely on this sense of terrible necessity. ... — The Violence of Oneness, Norman Fischer (On the Motivation for the 9/11 Terror Attacks

And yes, the non-human world is full of suffering too, but God isn't supposed to be the loving parent of ants, on the Abrahamic account of things. — J

But it's already been said that

Nature isn’t merely amoral; it’s grotesquely cruel and perverse by design — Tom Storm

Which to me suggests the question, does the perversity and cruelty of existence negate its worth altogether. Which again suggest nihilism.

And it also should be acknowledged that the most grotesque and needless forms of suffering to have been suffered by humans in recent history, has also been inflicted by them, in the form of world wars and military and political repression and conflict. Indeed, great suffering has been inflicted in the name of religions, but again whether that constitutes an indictment of a Creator is a different matter.

As to the suffering that is due to natural causes - the 2004 tsunami comes to mind as an example - how is that attributable to divine act? I'm sure there are those who would intepret it as such, and indeed they are sometimes referred to as 'acts of God', but whether they actually signify malign intent is the question at hand. I'm inclined to think not - the Thomist understanding, that they are an inevitable aspect of a contingent and imperfect world, still seems reasonable to me.

What would it take to falsify this statement? — J

The emergence of trends showing less mental illness, decreases in depression and anxiety, and a commitment to veracity in the political sphere.

Don't hold your breath!

Again - how could existence be free from suffering? Predation is fundamental to organic life, disease inevitable, even before intelligent life develops, which still relies on predation and is subject to disease and accidents. So you're basically just repeating the same line: an expectation that if a Creator was truly benevolent, then suffering would not exist. And I think it's a false expectation.

As for the meaning crisis, it's an undeniable fact of modern existence. John Vervaeke expresses it in the foreword to his lecture series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, like this:

We are in the midst of a mental health crisis. There are increases in anxiety disorders, depression, despair, suicide rates are going up in North America, parts of Europe, other parts of the world. And that mental health crisis is itself due to and engaged with crises in the environment and the political system. And those in turn are immeshed within a deeper cultural historical crisis I call the meaning crisis. So the meaning crisis expresses itself and many people are giving voice to this in many different ways, is this increasing sense of bullshit. Bullshit is on the increase. It's more and more pervasive throughout our lives and there's this sense of drowning in this old ocean of bullshit. And we have to understand why is this the case and what can we do about it? So today there is an increase of people feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, from a viable and foreseeable future. — John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

Which part of that isn't true?

//that said, I can't really fathom Christian teaching about 'God's love', other than to think it must be a pretty tough love.//

It has been intrinsic historically, but would you agree it isn’t so much anymore? — Mww

Well, sure, nowadays physics has metaphysics which has not much to do with divinity, although that is rather an old-fashioned word. And yes, that is an excepctionally good book.

I don't understand why you're entitled to your "God-child" who plays hide-and-seek and goes on adventures, but others can't have their divine hotel manager. — goremand

I recommend a read of The Supreme Identity, Alan Watts. He spells it out in considerably more detail than I am able to reproduce in a forum thread.

One of the formative books in my quest was Alan Watts' The Supreme Identity (although I don't know how well it has aged). But something I took from this book, is that the cause of suffering is a consequence of our mis-identification with who or what we really are. Because of this mis-identification - this is what 'ignorance' means - we fall into states of suffering, which can extend over lifetimes (or 'aeons of kalpas' in Indian mythology). Realising the 'supreme identity' is the seeing through of that illusory sense of identity, and the awakening to our true nature, which is somehow beyond death and decay. Of course, this is a motif that is found in many cultures (think Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey). You can find analogies for it in philosophies East and West. And I think seeing it in those terms (rather than just through the prism of inherited religious lore) gives it credibility, at least for me. So again, in analytic terms, the aim of the paths of liberation or enlightenment, is to come to know directly a higher intelligence - not theoretically, not dogmatically, but through insight, always hard won. And that awakening, or 'return to the source', is what is being alluded to through the various religious lores that have been handed down. That on that return, the being realises it's original identity as one with that source and beyond suffering (although each cultural tradition may have very different understandings of what that means.)

The point is really just that it is impossible to improve upon a perfect and complete being, and therefore God can't possibly derive any benefit from creating the world. He can do if he wants to, it doesn't affect him either way, but it's still completely arbitrary. — goremand

In some senses, it's an adventure. According to the Alan Watts book I mentioned, and without wanting to sound flippant about a serious topic, God plays hide-and-seek with himself.

While the term 'theodicy' usually refers to attempts to justify God’s goodness in the face of evil, my use of the phrase Hotel Manager Theodicy was deliberately ironic: it criticizes a particular framing in which God is seen as a kind of cosmic service provider which I think misrepresents the metaphysical depth of classical theism and the spiritual traditions it emerges from.

Would the irrational number, π, also constitute some understanding of The Forms? — Shawn

According to legend, the Pythagoreans—followers of the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras—believed that all things could be explained through whole numbers and their ratios. This harmonious view of the cosmos was shattered when it was discovered that some quantities, like the square root of 2, could not be expressed as a ratio of whole numbers. These “irrational numbers” deeply troubled the Pythagoreans, as they threatened the foundation of their mathematical and philosophical beliefs. The story goes that the man who revealed this unsettling truth—often said to be Hippasus—was drowned at sea, possibly by his fellow Pythagoreans, as punishment for exposing a truth they considered too dangerous or sacrilegious to be known.

There were similar controversies over the discovery of zero, which was likewise opposed on dogmatic grounds, holding back progress in arithmetic for centuries, until at last it was imported from Indian mathematicians, via Islamic scholars, who had no such qualms.

I think a case can be made that the forms are nearer to what we would call principles. Have a read of the chapter on Plato in this .pdf book, it will set you straight