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Was Evil Possible Before Adam and Eve?
It sure seems that way to me.
The text says that G-d created the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen. 2:9). Which means the possibility of evil existed before Adam and Eve ate the fruit.
I was thinking about this after a recent kerfuffle on Ricochet about whether G-d is capable of doing or being evil, and it occurred to me that the common religious belief that G-d can ONLY be good seems to be clearly contradicted by the text itself. He made the world. Some He calls “Good.” Some, He does not.
I might qualify the above by pointing out that in the Torah both “Good” and “Evil” are not really things in themselves: they are judgements, created by and subject to the perceptions of the viewer. And if this is the case, then the assessment of both good and evil come down to our own mental breadth and faculties. An animal knows nothing of either. But thanks to eating the fruit, both G-d and Man are able to make judgements accordingly.
In sum: the concept of evil did not rely on sin.
Published in General
That has been a long standing silly way to express the science. It’s very popular, though.
That’s crazy. Almost as crazy as my assertion that words spoken privately have power to affect things thousands of miles away.
Sapions?
(My high school latin cam e in handy)
I have no training or education in philosophy, so I guess I’d have to better understand what is meant by “natural law.” As someone who believes in God as Creator, I would answer: Something outside of God? no. Something God created/arranged? yes
An imperfect analogy:
Computer chips have an instruction set that governs how they will work, in addition to the instruction sets that programmers use to make program. Programs run on computers by using other instructions made available by the chips, w/o needing to know how. Some programs may not let you do some things. Some programs may be badly written and won’t work. But the chips will work the way they were created to do in order to process the electrons, and in a perfect world, would do it consistently. However, if the chip itself tries violate those instructions, there will be problems. If someone else tries to make the chip operate outside those parameters, trouble will ensue.
Where did those instruction sets come from: the creator of the chip.
Beyond that I don’t know how much I can contribute. Discussions like this are interesting to me, but I tend to concentrate on base principles. I’ll leave it to some of the finer minds to discuss if all the angels on the head of pin (whatever the number is) can determine what will happen if an irresistible force meets an immovable object.
And even before modern physics, a man could alter the position of his teacup by using his mind to direct his hand.
I don’t understand the last sentence. (Perhaps at least in part because I don’t know something you know about photons.)
Proper function. The fundamental concept in Aristotelian ethics.
Yes.
You’re presuming the existence of a creator in your analogy.
The creator was in the beginning of his comment. In context, the whole point was to consider the possibility of integrating an ethics based on G-d’s commands with an ethics based on the way the world is constructed. Proper functions as a source of moral rules plus a theistic design is a step in that direction.
Not really. The modern thinking is that the fundamental character of the chip, the laws or instructions to be followed, arose spontaneously from nothing.
Of all possible permutations of what could arise spontaneously from the Big Bang, how did any consistent and universal physical properties come into being at all?
Had to have done. Completely random. Just a fluke.
And they make fun of religious people for being credulous.
The laws of physics pre-exist all else. There are perhaps other results that could have resulted in however the universe took its current form, and this is the result we have. But the correct answer to your queston is “we don’t know.” And neither do you, and making up a creator as a source is presumptuous and assumes you can know that which is currently unknowable.
Time for a big logic fight over anthropic teleological arguments, is it?
But laws are just intellectual constructs. Three dimensionality and time began with the Big Bang. How could laws of physics predate the existence of any energy or matter?
Inherited from the universe where our black hole exists. . .which inherited it from the universe where its black hole was. It’s turtles all the way down.
Physical laws are not intellectual constructs. They are. Our expressions are intellectual constructs to attempt to explain those laws, just as our laws are legal constructs of right and wrong which also exist before all else. Ideas are their own existence and do not require us to understand them or perceive them, they are always there.
Yes.
So you’re saying there really wasn’t any creation ex nihilo. It always was. It just changes very 30 billion years or so?
A law is a construct. If the universe exists and acts in a certain way, it is not because of any law(s), there is no reason for it. What you’re saying is that the way the universe exists and acts is dependent on causes that existed before there was anything.
No, I’m saying this:
https://ricochet.com/980875/was-evil-possible-before-adam-and-eve/comment-page-3/#comment-5541073
Cognitons?
In Quantum mechanics, or Quantum field theory, a field always has a particle that manifests it. For and electromagnetic field (light), there is the photon. For the Gravitational field, there is the Graviton. etc. Einstein demonstrated that light comes in packets, particles actually, with his demonstration of the photoelectric effect. Prior to that, light was considered an electromagnetic wave only, described by Maxwell’s elegant electromagnetic equations. It was, in part, through recognition of the existence of photons (along with recognition of the wave behavior of electrons, that were particles) that the concept of wave-particle duality became central to Quantum mechanics.
Precisely
Again, the likelihood that our universe exists as it is, according to Leonard Susskind, one of the originators of string theory, is one chance in 10 to the 500th power: One chance in 10 with 500 zeros behind it. Assuming a creator is highly rational. Much more rational than assuming pure chance. Dr. Susskind repeatedly claims that he “…has no need of that hypothesis (God).” But methinks the physicist doth protest too much.
It’s not silly. Just because physicists don’t like it, doesn’t mean that it is silly. Physicists, in fact, have sought to gloss it over, just as you are doing, and belittle anyone who tries to hold their feet to the fire of their own formulations. Shrodinger did not consider it to be silly. In fact, it discombobulated him so much that he lapsed into a vedantic pan-psychism. You sleep the Newtonian sleep. To the extent that it has been tested, it holds. That’s why Feynman said no one understands Quantum Mechanics. Physicists prefer a default, unthinking atheism. For most physicists, that is a given, because it’s the premise they start with,adn that they like. Self-contradictory thinking. Ridiculing something that you reject from the outset because you reject it from the outset because you don’t like it, doesn’t mean that that thing is invalid. Yes, it is, and was, popular with such as Roger Penrose, John Bell, Alain Aspect, Eugene Wigner, etc.
In fact, there actually is no question that conscious observation directly affects the behavior of quantum systems. It’s been demonstrated over and over. One of the objections of Einstein to Quantum physics was that it allowed instantaneous transfer of information based on conscious observation of one of a pair of entangled photons (see Einstein Podolsky Rosen conundrum). To the extent that has been tested, it has held.
Anthropic teleologic arguments are saying that, to paraphrase, the Universe was made for Man, not Man for the Universe.
Sure. And Cogitons sounds good. And don’t forget Ruminitivity fields.
Don’t forget tachyons and chronotons. I understand they have been discovered about 250 years from now.
Added: By the way, I joke, but I do think there is a spiritual substrate to the universe, similar to the physical nature hypothesized by string theorists.
The Bartender says: We don’t serve your kind in here. A faster-than-light neutrino walks into a bar…
I believe there is a question. Maybe I can get back to you later on this from the office compy.
If it’s working. Had an internet problem last time.