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by gambiting 1769 days ago
A lot of religious people I know would just say that god had his reasons and that's good enough. You don't need to understand why, the very core of religion is to believe that god "acts in misterious ways" and if something happened then it's because god wanted it to happen. Maybe those people have sinned. Maybe that's god's way to teach people a lesson. Or maybe it's something entirely else and we just don't know yet - you just need to trust that god knows what they are doing.

Really, it's as deep/shallow as this, not much else to it.
1 comments
mr_toad 1769 days ago
For most of history this was how people viewed life and death.

If you tried telling them it was just nature, bad luck, and an uncaring universe they would have viewed you as a naive simpleton.

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perl4ever 1769 days ago
> uncaring universe

What "caring universe" do you measure things against to see it's not caring?

How can you have yin without yang, in other words?

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jasonwatkinspdx 1769 days ago
This is a classic philosophical argument that was dispensed with in the middle ages. The usual form of it is "how can you know what infinity is if infinity doesn't exist?" The answer is as simple as "I take the word finite and put the word not in front of it." We are perfectly capable of synthesizing concepts that do not exist in our experience of reality.
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perl4ever 1769 days ago
>We are perfectly capable of synthesizing concepts that do not exist in our experience of reality.

I am not sure exactly what this means, but I don't think I asserted anything to the contrary.

An automaton or a parrot can place words next to each other without "synthesizing concepts". Can an intelligent being not do that too?

As another application of my original point, "synthesizing concepts" would not mean anything unless it was possible (and I think it is) to not synthesize a concept when a string of symbols is put together.

It's not that we have to have a caring universe to imagine one, it's that we have to at least imagine one in order to say the universe is not caring.

One way to look at the universe we live in is that it seems to be faithful. Every atom follows physical law perfectly, at least we assume. Maybe that's not exactly proven, but it's the conventional faith today, and we certainly can imagine the world otherwise, with lots of miracles.

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