Darren New wrote:
> You're saying "maybe the world would be more evil without the holocaust, 
> you just can't tell."  That's *exactly* the argument he's talking about.
> 
> ...
> 
> "the evil things in it are perfectly justified and necessary, and 
> everything is for the best"
> 
> What mysterious ways are you talking about? That maybe God's idea of 
> good doesn't match ours? Then he'd do evil by our definitions. That's 
> saying that polio is actually good, and we just don't realize it

NOTE: just saw your other response, but I'd already gone and typed this 
all out so I may as well post it.  If what you'd groked from my posts 
contradicts what I've written below I'd certainly be interested in 
hearing the argument that you thought I was making (maybe it's a better 
argument!)

---

I think this is what he doesn't address properly.  What he musters is this:

"Of course, one of the consequences of this is then that we are also too 
cognitively limited to understand what’s right and wrong"

This, unfortunately, doesn't follow from the point I'm making.  What 
would follow is that we're too cognitively limited to understand what's 
right and wrong for *God*, but it's perfectly consistent to believe that 
doesn't at all preclude us from understand what's right and wrong for 
humans.

Now, I realize that this may come across as "well maybe God wanted us to 
get polio", but that's not the view I'm talking about.  Rather it's the 
view that God's decisions would be made at a scale so much larger than 
ours that there might well be reasons (possibly beyond our 
comprehension) which make a universe which allows such things a "good" 
thing.  One might even say this would be expected considering the 
immeasurably vast scale on which God would be making decisions.

What this particular line of reasoning *would* entail, however, is that 
the concept of good as it applies to God sure doesn't seem to involve 
minimizing our earthly suffering as it's primary factor -- but I don't 
see how this is inconsistent or how it diminishes/undermines moral 
choice as we typically understand it on our human level (the latter of 
which seems to be his overall point).


> Otherwise, I'm not seeing what you're trying to say. Maybe I'm 
> just dense today.

I suppose I'd say that my point is that one could take the view that our 
earthly suffering simply isn't the primary factor in the decisions made 
by God, and that this doesn't preclude that there may be many ways in 
which such a God could be "good".

His argument, on the other hand, seems to be implicitly using the 
assumption that God is chose how to make the universe with the reduction 
of earthly human suffering as the primary moral factor.  This makes 
perfect sense in rebutting certain religious arguments, but he phrases 
his initial problem more generally than that, and I don't his reasoning 
carries over to the viewpoint I mention.

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