To be fair, it’s hard to be a Christian or someone who presumes a benign creator when looking at children’s wards or the overrepresentation of children and youth in disaster, plague and famine mortality.
As a player and occasional programmer of sims and models, the degree of suffering in the universe is compatible with a creator when the well being of the individual units (or even species) are not a goal.
If the objective is drama and entertainment, creation as Reality TV, where Anyone Can Die™ then mountains of dead babies is all part of the show.
No, what makes it hard to be a theist is how everything is procedural. None of the life around us looks like a pocket-watch made by an artisan. It looks like a pocket-watch made by generative AI, itself programmed by generative AI, itself programmed by generative AI. We aren’t the Sims, we’re the dead drunken cats in taverns who got alcohol poisoning from spillage on the floors ingested when cleaning ourselves.
This doesn’t entirely disprove intelligence creating the universe, of course. The simulation hypothesis is still valid, but we can expect God to be more like Azathoth ( Long may be slumber ) than Adonai. And we are microbes in the tree bark of a single Sequoia Redwood in central California, rather that God’s chosen. Heck, if there is a divine purpose to the universe ( ꜰᴏʀᴛy ᴛᴡᴏ ) then we are just as likely incidental to its function, or even an emergent antagonistic side effect thanks to the chaos of complexity, than we are a critical element of its function.
But then, You are a redundant functionary in God’s great machine to prepare Its morning breakfast does not sell people into your organized money-driven religious ministry.
To be fair, it’s hard to be a Christian or someone who presumes a benign creator when looking at children’s wards or the overrepresentation of children and youth in disaster, plague and famine mortality.
As a player and occasional programmer of sims and models, the degree of suffering in the universe is compatible with a creator when the well being of the individual units (or even species) are not a goal.
If the objective is drama and entertainment, creation as Reality TV, where Anyone Can Die™ then mountains of dead babies is all part of the show.
No, what makes it hard to be a theist is how everything is procedural. None of the life around us looks like a pocket-watch made by an artisan. It looks like a pocket-watch made by generative AI, itself programmed by generative AI, itself programmed by generative AI. We aren’t the Sims, we’re the dead drunken cats in taverns who got alcohol poisoning from spillage on the floors ingested when cleaning ourselves.
This doesn’t entirely disprove intelligence creating the universe, of course. The simulation hypothesis is still valid, but we can expect God to be more like Azathoth ( Long may be slumber ) than Adonai. And we are microbes in the tree bark of a single Sequoia Redwood in central California, rather that God’s chosen. Heck, if there is a divine purpose to the universe ( ꜰᴏʀᴛy ᴛᴡᴏ ) then we are just as likely incidental to its function, or even an emergent antagonistic side effect thanks to the chaos of complexity, than we are a critical element of its function.
But then, You are a redundant functionary in God’s great machine to prepare Its morning breakfast does not sell people into your organized money-driven religious ministry.
Alan Watts basically argued reality was a play one put on for themselves.