Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
SilentDawning wrote:
Those are all interesting thoughts. I believe it was the greeks who believed the world revolves around humans. Leibniz seems to be refuting that premise.
It was actually Christianity that Leibniz was reacting against here. It was a pretty major teaching of the Catholic church that the object of all God’s creation, including the earth, was for humankind, and therefore the earth was the center of the universe. There were complicated theories devised to explain the movement of the planets and starts to support the idea. But around the time of Leibniz, the invention of the telescope started to provide evidence against the heliocentric (earth as center of the universe) model, and that conflict was a huge part of what Leibniz was dealing with.SilentDawning wrote:In the last quote above, the idea that “maybe, if this bad thing didn’t happen, something worse would have happened” is pure speculation. It’s possible that God allowed the holocaust to happen so the world would be motivated to get into the war before Hitler perfected the atomic bomb — which he surely would have used, creating even greater destruction. We know that it wasn’t American technology that spawned the A-Bomb — it was German technology that Americans scavenged after WWII.
But somehow, that argument isn’t satisfying. Doesn’t God have the power to also stop the A-Bomb, and wouldn’t it have been easier to knock off a few scientists rather than millions of innocent jews, poles, and other races (both men, women and children)? It’s not as if God has to allow lesser evil to happen to prevent greater evil from occurring…why not simply nip the greater evil before it happens?
Yeah, that’s actually part of Leibniz’s point, I think. That’s what the example of thirst is getting at. Sure, God could just stop the bad stuff from happening in the first place. He could stop people from being thirsty. He could stop ALL bad things from happening. But that wouldn’t necessarily produce the best possible world. It would be like Satan’s plan, where everyone is forced to do good, but nobody gets to experience real joy because there is no pain. That’s what I found so compelling about Leibniz’s ideas. He touches very closely on the whole “opposition in all things” argument from the Book of Mormon.And yes, it’s all speculation. But by explicitly pointing out that as mere humans, we can’t necessarily see the whole picture as God can, Leibniz forces the assumptions we tend to make into the open—the assumption that we can ever know as well as God can what’s actually best for God’s creation, and furthermore, the egocentric assumption that WE are most important. So speculate away. Just be aware of what assumptions you are making. If you want to speculate that we are in fact most important, and that God should be stopping genocide and mass disasters, fine—but you have to justify that.
SilentDawning wrote:These are questions that make me agnostic about so many things. We really don’t know. At one time, when I was younger, it was interesting to discuss all these items because I believed it may lead to enlightenment. I suppose these philosophies have a certain amount of persuasive value when people need to adopt new paradigms that direct behavior, or to restore hope. But in my view, I will never know the truth of these things.
I totally get this, and I’m with you. I was a philosophy major in college (well, it was my second major, and I didn’t quite finish it), and after a few years of reading philosophy intensely, I started to get jaded. It seemed to me that for any possible idea you could espouse, someone else had an argument that would refute it. It all started to feel like an exercise in futility to me. Science wasn’t much better—sure, it has made a lot of things possible, but we can never rely 100% on anything since new discoveries can happen at any time that reveal our previous ignorance. And religion/revelation didn’t seem reliable either, since everything seemed based on the Spirit, which I didn’t (and still don’t) understand or have any level of confidence in. I’m still a pretty entrenched skeptic.But I thought Leibniz’s ideas had some really interesting things in common with Mormon theology and thought others might enjoy reading about them.
This doesn’t really go along with the main idea of your post, but Korihor’s story actually contributed to my faith crisis. I was in the middle of trying to figure out which of my beliefs, if any, were my own rather than inherited uncritically from my culture, and whether I had ever felt the Spirit, when I read the Korihor story. He talks about the people’s beliefs being the product of a “frenzied mind” (I think that’s the term), and I thought YES—not that believers are necessarily psychotic or delusional, but when you consider confirmation bias and how often we act mindlessly (not like zombies, but with a lack of mindfulness), it often seems to me that belief in God, the supernatural, and unprovable things are constructed purely inside our minds rather than received as direct knowledge from God through the Spirit. There are some things that don’t fit with that view, and I’m not really convinced either way, but I really sympathized with some of Korihor’s ideas. My family and friends would be horrified! Heber13 wrote:I wonder if today’s world devalues imagination as a child’s thing, and by doing so, as we adults try to reason ourselves to feel more advanced, if we go through mid-life crises or other crises in search for what imaginations we gave up as kids.
This does happen a lot, but I think the geek revolution is changing that to some degree. It’s now cool to wear your heart on your sleeve when it comes to your favorite comic book hero, movie, TV show, book, graphic novel, or what have you. I think we are beginning to embrace fantasy more fully in mainstream society. People like Stephen Colbert have done a lot to legitimize the worship of things like Middle Earth and Star Wars. But even before the geek revolution, many people loved reading fiction and watching movies, all of which is a product of someone’s imagination. And even many of the most dedicated secularists still love themselves some good sci-fi.Despite the high-profile examples of people like JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, I still see a lot of imagination-hate in religious conservatives. For decades, some Christians have seen Dungeons and Dragons as evil devil-worship. I had a good friend in high school who was not allowed to play those harmless games with the rest of my friends because of that (he also wasn’t allowed to play with face cards).
Interestingly, Mormons tend to embrace imagination and fantasy much more readily than other conservative-leaning religions. A disproportionate number of fantasy and sci-fi authors are Mormon—Orson Scott Card, Stephanie Meyer, Brandon Sanderson, James Dashner, David Farland (Wolverton), Tracy Hickman, Anne Perry (yes, she wrote two fantasy novels), Brandon Mull, Aprilynne Pike, and the list goes on and on. This article talks more about it:
http://mormonartist.net/articles/is-it-something-in-the-water/ I would appreciate a brief description of what the video is. I never click on links that aren’t described. Ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat! SunbeltRed wrote:I personally have never had and I don’t know anyone personally who has had an experience like that, but I can’t completely discount other people’s experiences either. Thus the wondering continues…
🙂
Ditto. There are a lot of unexplained things in the world. Enough to keep me wondering.Thanks for the review. I’m an occasional Card fan and always wondered what this book was about. I was never really interested in historical fiction, but I would be curious to read it now that I’ve learned more about church history. My wife recently read Sarah by Card and liked it a lot—it was very similar in portraying the characters as flawed and very human, yet somehow inspiring in their humanity.
Has anyone read Card’s Memory of Earth series? It’s a science fiction novel based on the plot and characters of 1 Nephi.
Roadrunner wrote:Good thread with lots of helpful quotes. Thank you all.
it does seem like a paradox – perhaps the more holy we are the less we worry about god’s existence and the more we live a good life.
:thumbup: I saw this question elsewhere on the Interwebs and was surprised. I’m kind of mad at John Dehlin for saying that. I defended our little community, but I couldn’t tell if the guy who was asking the question bought my response or not. I hope he did—maybe he’s here now! This is the core of my own faith crisis. I had a very similar experience to you, except I didn’t just feel nothing—I actually felt lonely. Looking back over my life, I can only remember one time feeling an emotional response in a church setting. It was in a seminary class in response to a gospel-oriented music video. I didn’t really analyze it at the time. But since then I’ve grown to believe it was the same kind of emotional response I often get when listening to inspiring music or reading beautiful prose. I have come to the conclusion that reality must be one of two things. The first is this idea:
West wrote:In recent times, I have imagined God more and more like a really great, wise parent. He knows how you learn. He gives us the best information we need according to our learning style. And then He trusts us to make an informed decision.
So it might be possible that either you aren’t wired to feel or believe in the kind of spiritual experience you were expecting, or that God knows that type of experience isn’t best for you, but God is giving you experiences and interacting with you in other ways that you need to learn to recognize or just trust that God knows what he’s doing.The other idea is that maybe it doesn’t actually matter whether you got an answer or not, or what an answer actually feels like. What really matters to God is seeing what you do with what you have. He’s not watching you like a helicopter parent, waiting for just the right moment to give you answers or bless you. He’s watching to see what happens to you and how you make use of your agency—what kind of moral choices you make—in response to the experiences you have, whatever they are. In this model, experiences that some people interpret as spiritual might have nothing to do with God or the Spirit, or they might, and it wouldn’t actually matter either way to God. What would matter to God is whether people act with as much goodness and integrity as they can given their life’s circumstances.
Recent comments on another thread reminded me of this hilarious and slightly off-color faux pas from a youth pastor:
