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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
I’m not expert on quantum mechanics, but your understanding is way off. First, gravitons are still quite theoretical and not at all accepted or even understood as existing.
I think you’re a bit muddled on the photon issue, Max Planck began the theory, Einstein expanded it. There’s also a misconception by many that light is both a wave and a particle. This is not true. Light behaves like a wave and it behaves like a particle. It is a photon, it is not a wave, nor a particle, but it behaves like each at times.
Just because we have theories of quantum mechanics and a method of predicting quantum behavior does not mean we understand it well yet. There is also the fact that behavior at the quantum level, using our current tools, is not at all consistent with larger bodies.
So, you can’t say that because quantum behavior is modeled to only attain a state after observation and therefore the same model applies to other things, such as concepts like mathematics. That’s just pure nonsense brought on by popular misunderstandings of science.
Ah, here we are. The internet is working, and this is what I had in mind.
Actually, the number is one in ten to the 1000th power when I make up numbers.
It doesn’t matter what the odds are, this is the reality we have. It is conceivable that everything could have had upside down spins compared to what we now have, but that’s not what happened.
If you throw an infinitely thin dart at the dart board and it sticks in place, the chances that it landed at that point are infinitely small. But that is where it landed. That is, to predict it would land there would require those odds, but after it lands, those odds are meaningless. So even if Leonard Susskind’s numbers weren’t completely and necessarily arbitrary, it still means nothing to the state we have already arrived at.
Certainly. Our models show that this is our understanding. But our models are just models. They are useful but limited. We shall likely find in the next few centuries that this model, although useful, is seriously lacking in some respects.
Ok, so what you’re saying is that it really is time for a logic fight over anthropic teleological arguments?
I have very little to say about this, and have (as I recall) the same very little to say since I hit on parallel illustrations myself in the year 2002. However, I have since switched from dart guns to lightning.
Yes, the odds that lightning strikes a particular place are incredibly low, and it still means nothing whatsoever when it happens.
But the odds that lightning strikes the same particular place several times are indeed evidence that the lightning strikes were no coincidence.
An argument that G-d must have designed the universe because otherwise we’d have basically no chance of ONE THING being the way it is . . . is a lousy argument. If the earth is just the right distance from the sun to support life as we know it, so what?
An argument that G-d must have designed the universe because otherwise we’d have basically no chance of SEVERAL THINGS all being the way they are . . . is a good argument. If the earth is just the right distance from the sun to support life as we know it AND half a dozen other factors are all Goldilocks-just-right for life as we know it, that’s a clue that it’s not a coincidence.
Kuhn!
How many things are your limit?
I don’t have an upper limit. (Maybe I don’t understand your question.)
But as for lower limits–how many times does lightning have to hit exactly the same spot before it’s not a coincidence?
If it’s hitting a lightning rod . . .
And my point is that if you don’t know there’s a lightning rod there, then you would think it is supernatural. We don’t know enough about how universes are created to know if there is a galactic equivalent of a lightning rod to cause things to happen how they did.
You know I always thought that “lightning doesn’t strike twice” was a crock. But cosmologically speaking lightning rods are intelligently created just for that purpose.
No, the evidence only establishes that there is some explanation. I would only conclude–as the argument establishes–that the location of the lightning strikes is not a coincidence. It remains to be established by what reason they struck in the same place, and while a supernatural explanation is plausible a natural explanation has the Ockham’s Razor advantage in the absence of more evidence.
But when the order of nature itself is the phenomenon to be explained, plainly it itself is not available as the explanation for itself. That can only leave some explanation outside of it.
This assumes that the universe is rational. If it is, this in itself is reason for a rational creator.
In other words, you don’t know why so you’ll just make things up, or accept things made up by people who came before you. What makes them wiser than you?
Um, no. That’s not at all what I said.
I think we do know.
What, you think this is a G-d of the gaps argument? It’s nothing of the sort.
Intellect allows for that. It’s different from matter and energy. And it’s not subject to conformity with the latest scientific theory or validation by the voting majority in such and such a year. Then again, the universality of the laws of physics throughout time and space is allowed for, but is utterly unprovable.
It’s all just a human presumption.
I’ll say again, the laws of physics themselves are unjustifiable. Something exploded out of nothing, creating time and space, matter and energy, and yet were directed by preexisting laws or processes, or ways of being and acting and recurring patterns of interacting, that were full-blown and functional at the earliest picoseconds, when there was nothing at all for laws to act upon. Law or order really directed the first milliseconds of the creative explosion of nothing into something? Or they just made themselves up as they went along? As opposed to easy chaos, uniform spread of energy, and so-called heat death?
This preexistence of laws leans toward the idea of a preexisting spirit or mind that directed the processes within the creation of the universe. Why did the universe congeal into order, stars, and solar systems and galaxies, with arms and spirals, and life and reproduction and mind and intellect?
The immaterial, intellectual, powerful force that created all this marvelous stuff, that included the order and the laws, is Life itself.
And to be honest, all of that is speculation as well, but at least it is based on math.
Exactly. (And crucial bits of rational presumption.)
:)