Right. I used the qualifier "so called" when speaking of natural evil earlier. I'm not a fan of this phrase, as I don't think natural disasters and the like are instances of evil. As you correctly point out, there are no moral agents involved. That being said, it's the standard term used among philosophers of religion, so that's why I use it.

Anyway, despite having said that, there may actually be moral agents in involved. An idea I have found intriguing is that Satan and his fallen angels are behind what is labeled natural evil. See here: http://reknew.org/2008/01/satan-and-the-corruption-of-nature-seven-arguments/

Regardless, there is still a problem here. I would refer you to the DBH quote once again.

But you seem to have a very rationalistic/Kantian position with regards to morality. — Agustino

I might as well add that this ultra-rationalism with regards to morality is quite a "modern" invention — Agustino

I quite honestly don't understand what you're talking about here. Natural evil has been a problem for the theist for thousands of years and has become ever more problematic with the advent of modern biology and evolutionary theory.

Is God beyond good and evil? — Agustino

I can see this being answered both affirmatively and negatively. I don't know.

Well, we can then ask why there is the privation of the good, as opposed to just the good. Evil cannot be absolutely nothing, since it has meaning with respect to what it is a privation of. In other words, it presupposes the good. But, again, must the good presuppose evil? Why could there not simply be the good, without any privation of it? I quite like the idea as far as it goes, but it still fails as a theodicy.

Also, so called natural evil is not to be ignored. As David Bentley Hart says,

[O]ur modern narrative of nature is of an order shaped by immense ages of monstrous violence: mass extinctions, the cruel profligacy of an algorithmic logic that squanders ten thousand lives to fashion a single durable type, an evolutionary process that advances not despite, but because of, disease, warfare, predation, famine, and so on. And the majestic order thus forged? One of elemental caprice, natural calamity, the mercilessness of chance—injustice thrives, disaster befalls the innocent, and children suffer.

This perhaps more than anything else forms the greatest barrier to my possible conversion.

Actually I want to clarify that I wasn't agreeing that you are justified in treating as a propositional claim, only that you could not even be justified in daring to mistakenly think it is, unless you believed you had some understanding of the concept. — John

Yes, this is what I got from your last post. Having now clarified, I don't disagree with you. Terms must be defined and mutually understood before being debated and used in arguments.

I don't see that there had to have been for me to bring it up.

Huh? No. You quoted a couple verses from Isaiah as if we could interpret them solely on their own, apart from any other considerations (like the rest of the book of Isaiah, the rest of the Bible, the Church Fathers, the Magisterium, etc). Here's a connection with the other thread: that's a very Protestant and Islamic thing to do. Eastern Orthodoxy is closest to Catholicism. It's Protestantism that's closest to Islam, given their views on scripture.

I should add that the Bible is not the Quran. The Quran is considered to be dictated line by line by God, meaning that Muhammad didn't write a word of it. Muhammad couldn't have anyway, according to his biography, since he was illiterate. He was simply the means of transmitting God's message. Muslims therefore consider the Quran to be eternal, in that God has written it from eternity. The revelation of the Bible, by contrast, is considered progressive, in that the OT is an opaque expression and anticipation of the NT, and is to be found in its patterns, themes, and trajectories. So you can't isolate a couple verses and say, "look here, this is what God revealed." God's revelation in the Bible, especially the OT, consists in whatever overarching pattern or theme those verses are embedded in. The Holy Ghost is said to have inspired the authors of the Bible, but it is still the work of human authors. Islam couldn't exist and is unthinkable without the Quran, but Christianity could and did exist without the Bible (e.g. there was no NT during and immediately after Jesus' life, but there were obviously still Christians).

You started out by saying that the "permanent unchanging self" either exists or doesn't; isn't your treating it as a propositional claim based on your understanding of the "concept"? If you understand the concept then you can explain and critique it, no? If not then I don't see how you can justifiably treat it is a propositional claim in the first place. — John

Right.

And if not from God, then where does evil come from? — Agustino

I would say that God can be and is responsible for evil, since he is responsible for his creation which contains evil. But that's different from saying that he commits evil, which is the word I used in the sentence you originally quoted of me.

As such, God must be beyond logic and illogic - neither logical, nor illogical. — Agustino

In his innermost essence, sure. But he reveals himself as a God of love.

So does he want to determine if a path is better than another without walking it? What did Jesus do, did He say "Let me convince you that I am the Truth and the Way and the Life"? Or did He invite people to see for themselves that He is the Way?

Your foundational assumptions are problematic. You presuppose that it is a priori possible to determine which is the best path without taking it, and that's false - it's also something that can be borne out of a fear of taking the wrong path (although you have to balance that with the fear of not taking any path, which is definitely the wrong path to take — Agustino

The problem is that one can't walk all the paths at once. It's impossible. So there must be some way to whittle down one's live options to those that would be the most worthy of testing. I don't see how to do that except by reason.

You may both be interested to read this. — Agustino

Thanks, I'll see if I can take a look at it.

So what do you think about the following? — Agustino

I think you're using a somewhat inaccurate translation. "Evil" is translated as "calamity" and "woe" in other translations. I take it to refer to God's judgment that appears in a poetic portion of the book of Isaiah.

By my own judgment, I'd like to think it's truth. By others' judgment, it would probably be integrity.

It's true, if salvation is impossible, I see no reason to live. But that doesn't mean that if I deem it impossible I will commit suicide. It might mean I live on as a bitter, irrational hypocrite until I die of natural causes. Fortunately, I do think salvation is possible. I will add that it's paradoxically hard to write about the things you've spent the most time reading and thinking about, so in that post's case, you got a slightly discombobulated but highly distilled expression of the kind of pessimism to which I subscribe.

?

What is "an unchanging permanent self"? Surely you need to know what something is, before you can deny it? — John

Now you're critiquing the concept, but I'm not a Buddhist, so you'd have to ask them. But speaking on behalf of them, I would say that a permanent, unchanging self is a concept that has no referent in reality. It would likely fall under the category of "wrong views." All that exists is an impermanent, changing self.

Matters of interpretation are properly hermeneutic, not epistemic. — John

Any attempt to distinguish the true from the false is an epistemic endeavor.

But I speculate that he would have chosen Christianity because it was his 'native' tradition; the one within which he experienced his spiritual epiphany and was converted. Then he went back to study Buddhism and Advaitism because he is half-Indian, and he saw those as part of his cultural 'roots'. I speculate that he remained a Christian because he did see it as the highest, and philosophically richest, expression of the truth. I say this because Christianity includes notions of radical freedom, personality and a personal relationship with the Divine, that the other traditions (at least the non-Abrahamic) do not. — John

Your first speculation was an original concern. I can only hope your second one is more accurate.

Pannikar was a Jesuit. They are in a class of their own. — Wayfarer

Which may also be the Devil's. ;)

I would say it is not a propositional claim at all, because such claims are proper only in the empirical sphere. Reading it propositionally; what would you say that it is actually claiming? — John

That there is no permanent, unchanging self.

I don't believe it is an "epistemic" matter at all. — John

We're speaking of the truth of one interpretation over and against others, are we not? How is it not epistemic?

I would say that Pannikar examines every way that he can think of of thinking about the divine, and that he avows that ultimately, none of them can possibly be adequate.This is speaking from the point of view of pure rationality, though. If the ways of thinking about the divine are understood as being metaphorical, or even more profoundly as examples of mythoi, moments or movements that shape the spirituality of entire cultures; then there can be no question of comparing them in terms of right and wrong; of 'either/or". — John

And yet he's a Catholic priest. Does he explain why he chose and continued to be one?

for me the fatal shortcoming of your "style of popular perennialism" is that it glosses over the intrinsic and irreconcilable differences between religions, and tendentiously interprets sacred scriptures in ways that are alien to their meaning and which seek, ironically, to undermine the very idea of their being one true authority, or any "genuine higher truth". — John

John said this? Then why the hell is he disagreeing with me?! Lol.

Btw, it looks like Pannikar was educated at a Jesuit college, so things are not looking well for him. I had a hunch!

The problem is that you are thinking of 'anatman' as a propositional claim — John

Yes, because, at minimum, it is exactly that. That's not all it is, though, clearly.

It is a matter of interpretation, though. — John

Mhmm, but one interpretation must be right and the others wrong, unless I'm talking to an epistemic relativist, which I don't think I am.

So, how would you describe Pannikar's book? Is he more of a universalist or does he acknowledge that religions have mutually exclusive truth claims? He would make for a very odd Catholic priest if he suggested that it didn't much matter whether one was Catholic, Buddhist, or Hindu. Maybe he's a Jesuit, though.

they do not — John

A bold claim and one that is surely false. Let's test it, shall we? The doctrine of anatman, or not-self. Is this claim exclusive to Buddhism or is it accepted by all the other world religions?

I notice you haven't answered my question.

(Y) It's a deal, then, my friend.

You say, without having read it. I can assure you, his book is by no means the output of a lazy person. I didn't finish it, but only because I don't have that much interest in the subject, really. I only have so much to unscramble why Western thinking has culminated in nihilism. As for you, every single source I recommend on this forum, you seem to take pleasure in scorning. Beats me why. — Wayfarer

You're right. I haven't read it. But you haven't read the Scotus book or the reviews on The Smithy, have you? Will you? If you promise me you will, then I'll add Gregory/Gillespie to my list.

You are thinking of this in unhelpful 'black and white' terms; it's either "universalism" or "mutually exclusive truth claims". This kind of 'propositional' approach to religions will never open them up for you, and nor will it open you up for them. — John

Okay, so give me the "shade of grey" position. Regardless of its existence, religions still either make mutually exclusive truth claims or they do not.

Also, what makes you think Beebert needs your advice about whether he or she should read the book? — John

Because I value my own advice, just as you do yours, or else you wouldn't have advised that he read the book. :-}

The reason I referred to the Gillespie book, is that it analyses the significance of nominalism in the overthrow of scholastic metaphysics, and the many implications of that. The crucial point was that the nominalist vision of God was such that God was not even constrained by logic - He could completely subvert logic if he so choose. God is utterly omnipotent, omniscient, and completely unknowable.
Whereas, in the Scholastic philosophy, God was in some sense rational, even if also beyond rationality. (I might not be putting that well, but it's an argument that Gillespie takes an entire book to develop and it is a very complex issue.) — Wayfarer

Yeah, but does he actually present arguments against voluntarism and nominalism or does he just bemoan their purported societal effects? It could be that they have produced a lot of bad effects, but that doesn't mean they're false. Scotus and Ockham are philosophers. Good philosophers. They present extremely sophisticated arguments for the positions they hold. It's intellectually dishonest to ignore them but still dismiss these thinkers on the grounds that some bad things seemingly happened as a result of their ideas.

Another book I have partially completed about a similar topic is Brad S Gregory's 'The Unintended Reformation' — Wayfarer

I'm still on the fence about whether I should add it to my list. Consider this book:

http://www.fortresspress.com/product/postmodernity-and-univocity-critical-account-radical-orthodoxy-and-john-duns-scotus

The author mentions Gregory as someone who buys into the "Scotus story," which tries to pin on Scotus's shoulders all the bad stuff of modernity. There's also the posts about Gregory on the following blog that are pretty damning, to me: http://lyfaber.blogspot.com/search/label/Brad%20Gregory

I'm no fan of Protestantism or its results, but I also don't like lazy scholarship of the kind Gregory seems to have engaged in. If he gets Scotus so wrong, who's to say the rest of the book is not riddled with misrepresentations? Gregory and Gillespie blame voluntarism and nominalism but then guys like Jonathan Israel have their own just-so story about modernity, in which he doesn't identify an -ism so as to condemn modernity but to praise it, that -ism being Spinozism. These accounts seem to be rather easy to compose. Find a vague idea, use it to explain modernity in a celebratory or condemnatory way, and surround it with a deluge of names, dates, etc.

Does he advocate a kind of universalism or does he acknowledge that said traditions, similarities between them not withstanding, actually make mutually exclusive truth claims? If "balanced" just means warmed over universalism, then I have little interest in it and would suggest Beebert avoid it as well.

If the truth isn't communicable, then what is Christ's message? If the truth can't be communicated, even by God, then...? — Heister Eggcart

In the case of the truth about why God allows suffering, I'm saying that that might not be communicable, not that all truths about God are incommunicable.

I don't think capital T Truth is capable of being exhaustively expressed as a certainty through the use of language. I also don't think it can be expressed in any other way, either. — Heister Eggcart

A strange position to hold. Why can't the truth be expressed in any way? Remember, my position is that, if God exists, then the truth can be expressed in a way known only to God and only after we die (for most of us).

If you take away verbal communication, do you really think that the complexities of, let's say in this case Christian theology, could be expressed in an accessible, understandable, and intelligible way? — Heister Eggcart

I do, if it's God who's expressing them to the individual, rather than other humans. That's the context of our conversation: God may reveal certain things to certain people in certain ways not amenable to communication with other humans.

I don't think God would even think so, seeing as he sent a man in Jesus to the world in order to speak the good news, with every Christian afterward also speaking that very same good news. — Heister Eggcart

Jesus came to bring salvation, but how salvation works and in what it consists is ultimately a mystery this side of the grave.

My point is that if it's logically impossible for there to exist some agent before that agent's existence, then it is equally illogical to suggest that some agent exists after said agent's existence already ceases to be. If you retort with, "one has no knowledge of whether or not one's agent ceases to exist after death!" Well, neither do you have knowledge of whether "you" had agency, or being, before you existed, either, as such can't be verified either. Yet, it would seem that agency after, but not before, is somehow more plausible, why? — Heister Eggcart

I would make the argument that I did not exist prior to conception but that I might continue to exist after death, and there would be nothing contradictory in that.

Faith is dependent on will & personal experience & revelation — Agustino

So, it is independent of reason, thus making you a fideist in this sense.

If so, then I'm baffled as to how you think you can "invite" people to become Christians if their becoming so doesn't depend on rational argument, but rather on will, personal experience, and revelation. What have we been doing this whole time? Why are you talking to @Beebert as well, in that case?

If you invite people without argument, then you're on equal footing with the Buddhist apologist, who, much like your metaphor of the lamp posts, has his own simile of the raft to describe the goal of Buddhism. You've given the prospective believer no means to determine why one path is any better than another.

How about you answer your own questions there? I'd be interested to know your answers to each of them.

A simple question: are you a fideist?

I'm not sure I would affirm such a cataphatic statement about God — Agustino

A complete apophaticism would be indistinguishable from atheism. There must be some positive statements one can make about God or else you're just engaged in farce. I agree that we are incapable of comprehending God fully, but we must have some small degree of knowledge about God or else we speak of him in vain.

that presupposes for example that God has a nature, just like created things do — Agustino

No, it implies that God has a nature different from created things, analogous but not identical to created natures. We are said to be made in God's image, after all. Moreover, there is a difference between an "atheistic non-existence of God" and a "hyper-thingness of God," (a point made here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0025.2005.00285.x/abstract). God is not absolutely nothing but not a thing either. To assert the former is to assert atheism and to assert the latter is to assert theistic personalism over and against classical theism, which directly leads to atheism, given the paucity of empirical evidence for such an entity that such a view demands.

The categories of thought that apply to the phenomenon don't apply to the noumenon... — Agustino

They don't apply univocally, but analogically. If you reject both univocity and analogy but still want to engage in God-talk, then you're really just an atheist or someone engaged in equivocal gibberish. The alternative, of course, is Wittgenstein's approach: cease talking about God altogether.

Sure but that's because God is the standard of good itself. — Agustino

But he can't change his nature, which is goodness itself, which means neither that which is right nor that which is wrong can change their status. If it is wrong to violate someone's will, then, because that which is wrong cannot cease being wrong, it cannot be the case that God "could have" violated someone's will without having done wrong.

Vastly more progress has been made since then than the rest of history. — daldai

So you think. New scientific theories that purport to explain the same phenomena could arise that repudiate or replace the current ones. Whence progress then? I admit the appearance of progress and the utility of science, but I won't give it absolute explanatory privileges and neither should you.

Your notions of right and wrong are first of all corrupted by original sin, so you do not see very clearly. — Agustino

I see clearly enough to know that God cannot commit evil. Period. And I've given an argument as to why.

Let me ask you - is God free? — Agustino

Not absolutely. He's not free to commit evil, make square circles, cause himself to not exist, etc. His freedom is limited by his nature.

No as in God wouldn't do wrong. What is wrong for you to do isn't necessarily wrong for God to do — Agustino

That doesn't get out of the contradiction! If God can do right by doing wrong from our perspective, then he's still doing wrong. But God can't do wrong. What is wrong for us must, at minimum, be wrong for God, in addition to whatever else may be wrong from God's perspective that we don't know about. This is once again because God, if he exists and is goodness itself, is the author of our notions of right and wrong. So he can't violate them without violating his own nature.

Nope. — Agustino

Clarify this negative. Nope as in, "no, God wouldn't do what we deem wrong," or nope as in, "you're wrong, Thorongil."

The more truth you know, the less meaning your life has. — daldai

Could it be that the more of certain facts you know, the less meaning your life has? Knowing facts and knowing the truth might not be the same thing.

Well, that might have been true 2,400 years ago but with all the knowledge science has given us I now claim to know everything - in the wide sense of course. What I mean is that I can now close my eyes and see, generally, how everything fits together from a tiny fraction of a second after the big bang right up to now and, even in this age of specialization, I know I can't be the only one - that really would be absurd. — daldai

You seem here to have fallen for the scientistic hubris of our age. You need to realize that one scientific paradigm has always led to another. There were physicists in the 19th century arrogantly bloviating about how there was nothing left to discover about the universe and then along came Einstein. Don't take the bait of those preaching a similar sermon today. This doesn't mean you have to reject truth, mind you, only its transparency and ability to be found in a way that matters existentially in the sciences.

Nope. Creator has different rights than creatures. — Agustino

Sure, but they wouldn't include doing that which is wrong among creatures, for then you're faced with a contradiction: God can do right by himself by doing wrong to us, so he can do both right and wrong simultaneously, which is impossible.

So God violating someone's will becomes right by virtue of God simply doing so, even though it would otherwise be wrong? That produces a rather nasty conception of God I would refuse to believe in. You appear to accept the horn of Euthyphro's dilemma that says something is right because God commands it, as opposed to the horn I would argue for, which is that God commands things because they are right. I believe there is an objective standard of morality. If God exists and he is both immutable and goodness itself, then God is the objective standard of morality and he cannot change that which is good.

In order for you to maintain your position, you would have to deny that God is immutable or that God is goodness itself, either of which would be to reject classical theism, which obviously includes Aquinas. It seems to me, if you do so, that Scotus of Ockham ought to be your favorite philosopher.

That doesn't refute my claim. God can create someone and yet it still be wrong for him to violate that person's will. "I created you, therefore, I can commit wrongdoing against you" sounds like Descartes's evil demon, not God.

I would say it's because he can't. Violating the will of his creatures would be wrong, and God cannot commit wrongdoing.