Sense and Reference

If God transcends the world and everything in it, then claims that God exists cannot be shown to be false. We need an inquiry into whether verificationism underestimates the variety of language games that occur and/or overlooks the possibility that there is more than one conceivable paradigm in terms of which the world might be understood.

It would be improper to suggest that the notion of divine "transcendence"  was invented solely to get God off the evidential hook.  A claim that cannot be shown to be false (because its subject matter transcends one) equally cannot be shown to be true (because its subject matter still transcends one). This historically has led to the assertion that such a claim is nonsensical.

Traditionally, the meaning of a proposition is understood in terms of the sense and the reference of its terms and phrases.  

A word or descriptive phrase might fail to have a sense for any number of reasons.  Some such as, "the square root of 11 sleeps late except on Tuesdays" and "she entered the room in a flood of tears and a sedan chair," are fairly trivial.  Others such as, "human beings are made of two kinds of stuff - body and mind" are not trivial at all.  But all are nonsensical.

When crucial terms and phrases in putative assertions either happen to have no sense or can have no sense, for whatever reason, the potential truth or falsehood of the sentence-like strings in which they occur vanishes and with it, all possibility of knowledge, pro or con.  Absent the possibility of testing, the utterance is "sophistry and illusion" according to Hume and "strict nonsense" according to the logical empiricists but with the consolation, according to A.J. Ayer, that "while they cannot be true, they cannot be false, either"

This analysis originally targeted philosophy's "metaphysics," but it splashes over onto ethical discourse, too.  Exactly the same thing holds for religious talk.  Literalists' religious talk passes muster as meaningful, though often false.  Transcendentalists' religious' talk, however does not pass.

Reference & sense

Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we should be silent

The most radical disconnect between divine existence and the canons of ordinary cognition is voiced in the claim that God, in one way or another, transcends the world and everything in it.  One sort of transcendentalism perfectly defends against skeptical rebuttals to the various arguments for divine existence, as well as against atheistic arguments to the opposite effect, based on evil.

Questions of relevance will become even more vexed when we examine the notion that ethical monotheism constitutes a paradigm (a way of taking experience, a particular way of spinning the world).   

Although it is often said that God transcends this world and all that is in it, it is not always clear exactly what is meant by that claim, given that "transcendence" can be interpreted in three distinctly different ways.

Transcendence is the "transcendence of heft."  This sets God up as a superhero whose powers cannot be matched. He is the strongest, the smartest, and the superlative of all human characteristics.

Transcendence is the "transcendence of distance or remoteness."  This tries to show that since we are not in the Kingdom of Heaven with God, we cannot fully know Him.

Transcendence is the "transcendence of otherness."  This expresses how God is non-knowable. As humans we are only able to distinguish what He is not, but we are not able to pinpoint exactly what He is.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

There is no good without freedom and no freedom without evil

Many who attempt to justify natural evil claim that it is a result of human evil.  Others say there is a parallel theodicy that says that natural evil is the result of the corruption of the natural order by demonic beings whose freedom is as important as our own.

The free will theodicy, as applied to human beings and their conduct, is very simple.  If this is the best of all possible worlds, it must be the one in which people freely choose to do good, rather than one in which they function as amoral automata.

• Simple free will solution. We are not blind automata, but free agents. As a consequence of God having given us free will, we sometimes choose to do wrong. Suffering results. However, free will allows for certain important goods, such as the possibility of morally virtuous action. God could have created a universe populated with puppet beings that always did as God wants. But the behaviour of such puppet beings lacks the dimension of moral responsibility that makes our actions morally virtuous. By cutting our strings and setting us free, God inevitably allowed some evil. But this evil is more than outweighed by the important goods that free will allows. 
• "If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul."-Isaac Asimov
• God could have made us like robots who do nothing more than say, “I love you. I love you. I love you.” But we’d be forced to do that and that wouldn’t be real love. Love is a choice. And if you have a choice you have to be able to choose not to love and that in itself is the nature of evil. Evil is choosing not to love. So when God gave us the freedom to choose, he gave us not only our greatest blessing, but he also gave us our greatest curse because we can choose to do right or choose to do wrong.
• Alvin Plantinga does not challenge (and thus implicitly concedes) the soundness of Paul Draper's argument for the conclusion that certain facts about good and evil are strong evidence against theism. Plantinga does, however, challenge Draper's view that naturalism is more plausible than theism, which Draper needs to reach the further conclusion that, other evidence held equal, theism is very probably false. In addition, Plantinga challenges the significance of this final conclusion. In this chapter, Draper defends his views on plausibility and then argues that Plantinga's challenge to the significance of his final conclusion fails for two reasons. First, Plantinga fails to show that this further conclusion does not threaten the rationality or warrant of most theistic belief. Second, he mistakenly assumes that, in order to be significant, this conclusion must threaten the rationality or warrant of most theistic belief.

This however is still not enough to prove there is a God for some people.  This also does not work for anyone who does not think that people have a free will in the first place.

This free will theodicy raises a number of difficult questions --

• While true freedom may be bound up with glory now and to the eschaton, does there not fall over this formal freedom the shadow of this dual possibility of choice and thus also the threatening possibility of evil?
• It is possible that God is simply allowing evil and suffering in the world to prove that rebellion against Him brings pain and suffering. God may be allowing sin to take its natural course in the world, so that on the day of judgement God can say "Do you see what rebellion against my words brings?" This may seem overly simplistic, but it may prove to be one of the reasons that God allows pain and suffering. After all, did He not make us in His image and give us the freedom to choose? And in our freedom have we not rebelled? Yes, we have. Should God then make us robots or restrict our freedom so much that we have no choices at all?  
• Why should the joy and the blessedness of those who would freely accept God's salvation be precluded because of those who would stubbornly and freely reject it?  

A free will theodicy, exactly parallel to the one above, can be applied to Lucifer and his minions rather than to people to cover the balance.  The target of the theodicy in this case are evils, flaws, and dysfunctions that cannot easily be attributed to human actions or dispositions.

• The Devil's most feared role was as the Tempter, the great seducer of humanity, who had the great capacity to plant suggestions in minds and to lure mankind to sin. This was because he had a preternatural talent to discern inner weakness and fashion his temptations accordingly and by aligning his temptations with the internal temptations of the individual thereby inducing the individual to follow the flesh and the world.
• In movies, novels and TV shows we see this same theme emerge time and time again. The truly evil character defeats the scientific experts. These experts often, then, turn to religious figures. They might wander into a church looking for answers or consult a priest. The character might start to pray. The experience of evil--the residual--draws the characters, as a last resort, to the religious vocabulary. Why? Because the person they are chasing is beyond criminal, beyond human categories. And, just as often, we see the truly evil antagonist defeat these religious shock troops. Hollywood knows it needs the language of the residual, the vocabulary of religion, to make movies which speak to human experience. Screenwriters are artists, not scientists. So they get what I'm talking about. But that doesn't mean that Hollywood is going to embrace organized religion! So priests in the movies are often killed by the evil figure (usually because the priest is a hypocrite). Regardless, the defeat of evil is going to rely on some sort of self-sacrificing goodness. The main plot of the movie is figuring out where that goodness is going to come from.
• it may have been a huge step to finally admit that God exists. While it may be a relief to finally make such an admission, it is just the first step, not the last. The Bible teaches that even demons believe in God - and tremble. (James 2 vs. 19)

Some recognition of the dark side - whether defensive or proactive - seems inevitable for anyone who sees the way the world is and takes it seriously and thinks it is proper to infer the nature of the world's source by means of an argument from design.

The free will theodicy, then, is strong enough to defeat the claim that divine existence is incompatible with the existence of evil, given appropriate auxiliary hypotheses about the nature and importance of autonomy and freedom.

Braveheart Freedom Speech

Freedom and the Ability to Choose Evil

Is death one of the greatest evils

One way to rebut the atheistic argument from evil is to claim that the world's evils are justified and, consequently, not incompatible with ethical monotheism's concept of God.  

One could attempt to rebut the atheists' argument from evil by denying that the world is less than perfect in any way - insisting that this is "the best of all possible worlds" and that its apparent flaws are simply our own misconstruals of what is really the case.

One could attempt to rebut the atheists' argument from evil by insisting that evils are logically necessary and, hence, not anyone's fault.

One could attempt to rebut the atheists' argument from evil by insisting that any imperfections that occur n the world are not God's doing - evils may be real (and even be unjustified), but insofar as they are not from God, God is excused.

Each of us will have to make up his or her own mind about whether any of these moves are even remotely plausible.

• Some (or all) evils may amount to humans' misdeeds and their results 
• We humans cause it by misusing our free will. Although evil is not necessary for free will to exist, the possibility of it is. Humanity has chosen (numerous times) to misuse its free will, and when we do, we suffer the consequences. But if we chose to live as morally perfect people, none of the murders, wars, and tortures would have taken place. When these evil things do happen, we are to blame. God is not obligated to prevent humanity from accepting the responsibilities and consequences of our actions. 
• What would it look like for God to have a morally sufficient reason for allowing evil? Let’s first consider a down-to-earth example of a morally sufficient reason a human being might have before moving on to the case of God. Suppose a gossipy neighbour were to tell you that Mrs. Jones just allowed someone to inflict unwanted pain upon her child. Your first reaction to this news might be one of horror. But once you find out that the pain was caused by a shot that immunised Mrs. Jones’ infant daughter against polio, you would no longer view Mrs. Jones as a danger to society 
• Some (or all) evils may amount to fallen angels' misdeeds and their results 
• Fallen angels (who are also commonly known as demons) work for evil purposes that lead to destruction in the world, in contrast to the good purposes of the missions that faithful angels fulfil. 
• Some (or all) evils may amount to the working to the dark side itself 
• The Dark Side is when the temptation to fall has an added oomph. It's more than just the cumulative result of ones actions; there's a corrupting force that speeds things along. This is often the Phlebotinum-powered justification of Jumping Off the Slippery Slope, which results in the Fallen forgetting why they fell in the first place. The Dark Side often promises pleasure with power and respect.
• We have closed our collective eyes to evil for so long, we can hardly recognise it, let alone make sense of it. Dazed, frightened, and confused, some of us--for want of a more psychologically accurate, integrating, and meaningful myth--seize blindly upon the timeworn symbol of the devil, in order to somehow express this disturbing encounter with the dark, destructive side of the daemonic.

Note: If evils are not God's fault because of logical necessity, then they are not our fault, either, for the same reason.  So much, then, for moral responsibility - divine or human.

Letter to Menoeceus
Quotes About Fear Of Death

Is Death Evil?

Can unlimited power and wisdom be limited by stubbornness?

Knowing what ethical monotheists mean by "God" is a necessary condition for asking why they say that The One exists and whether anyone is in a position to know whether they are right or wrong.

Theism - belief in the existence of a god or gods, especially belief in one god as creator of the universe, intervening in it and sustaining a personal relation to his creatures.

• Polytheism - the belief in or worship of more than one god.
• Monotheism - the doctrine or belief that there is only one God.

Monotheism has been an arena of high theological development with the result that many of the dimensions of this view of God have been very precisely articulated, parsed and re-parsed. There is nothing that can limit what a completely non-contingent being can do and/or know.

Ethical monotheism incorporates all the dimensions of general monotheism and adds one important further characteristic, namely, that the divine is "without moral flaw." How could the sole source of all that is be simultaneously omnipotent omniscient, without moral flaw, and interested in us and the world be the way it is -- beset by host of all too familiar "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune"?

It is generally held that no more than one being can be "all powerful, all knowing and all good" -- thus, ethical monotheists tend to believe that all other worshippers are following after "false gods," at best, or are "idolaters," at worst. Even if there an be no more than one such being, however, it is not clear to everyone that there is one at all.

The word "God" - used 85% of the time non-seriously

Many (but not all) religions and the people who subscribe to them, affirm the existence of one or more "gods."  The belief in the supernatural may, however, include very specific beliefs about the existence or occurrence of one or more particular supernatural beings that are in some sense, "supreme" beings (that is, not just "superior" to nature, animals or humans).

In the contexts in which it seriously occurs, "god" generally designates some force, entity, being or process that is affirmed as a proper object of human worship. To "worship" some X is to venerate it, address prayers and praise to it, be obedient to it, hold it in awe and as a target for ritual practice, and so on.

Although those who worship some X would seem, by their practice, to imply that it deserves their veneration and so on, there remains an important question to the outsider -- "Does the target of their worship actually deserve it?"  All would agree, however, that anyone who worships something that does not deserve it worships a "false" god.

The affirmation that some X or other is a proper object of worship ( and is, hence, to be called "god") has been articulated in many ways --

• Animism - All the objects and phenomena have a soul. Worship of the ancestors , superstitions, magic 
• Polytheism - Believes in several gods who act on the world 
• Pantheism - Aims its worship at any and all things (either distributively or collectively), seeing them all as inhabited by spirits or beings of the sort that animism singles out. 
• Henotheism - Belief in or worship of one deity without denying the existence of other deities. 
• Dualism/bitheism - is the belief that two separate, complementary forces or deities exist (light/dark, wet/dry and so on). 
• Deism - Believes in a creative God, first cause, who does not intervene in human business

If you don't believe in God, can you say, "Oh my God?"