Hi Vg,
A late response to your post:
I have read the article you linked to and, apart from probably emphasising the importance of the natural emotions more than the article does I find no strong points of disagreement. For my own part, as I have mentioned in other threads on morality in the past, I see the idea of morality having a strong evolutionary basis. I accept that there is a 'potential' for morality, if it aids survival. For me, this is probably driven by such traits as empathy, sympathy, and natural feelings of co-operation and responsibility towards others. Culture, environment, experience, upbringing, and a rational approach, for me, superimpose upon those feelings. You might be right about not being able to care about the bad things if one is not exposed to them in some way but there again humans have very creative imaginations which could easily invent bad scenarios and empathetically respond to them.
Hi Enki
I'm just expressing my thoughts rather than making a definite argument. Human offspring need care for a relatively long period until they mature sufficiently to look after themselves. So developing the ability to care for others seems to have been selected for. If there were no problems in the world would we really need the large brains we have? And if we didn't have large brains, we wouldn't need the level of care we currently need and we also we wouldn't be able to articulate abstract concepts including the supernatural.
You could certainly argue that a god could have created a world where we did not require care because there was nothing bad in that world to harm us. In theory we could have only feelings of love for other people. Not really sure how choosing family units, spouses, preferences for any individuals works in such a world where everyone is equally amenable and pleasant? My feeling is that in order to have the ability to appreciate the good stuff in life you have to have the bad - such a world makes sense to me. Whereas a world where bad things don't happen because no one has the freedom to do anything bad or there are no natural disasters to care about seems a bit like agreeing to becoming a post-lobotomy McMurphy (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) before he is euthanised by Chief Bromden, as an act of what Bromden believes is benevolence for the good of McMurphy. Yes such a world is a form of living and many people might choose it but many people might not. And the dynamics, interaction and outcomes of such a world would be different from a world where bad things are allowed to happen.
I am not sure that any god I believe in includes the promise of no individual pain as part of benevolence. My understanding was that the benevolence was in relation to human benefit collectively, rather than to individuals not feeling any pain.
So, it seems valid to me to believe/ worship a god that allows the moral complexity of bad things happening, but given the moral complexity of such a world it also seems valid to not believe such a god exists, leaving you with just moral complexity.
I was originally taking a particular Christian viewpoint(God of the omnis) and trying to show some of the problems which result from that. Didn't God make Eden as a good place without such things as earthquakes, cancer or poverty? And was it not Aquinas who said, "Good can exist without evil, whereas evil cannot exist without good"? Hence, from such a Christian viewpoint, it was supposed to be human beings who let loose the bad things in the world, whereas I would put the responsibility squarely upon the shoulders of this God.
My view in such a story is that a God of the omnis can make a place like Eden, but having decided that the point of humans is to give them the freedom to choose from right and wrong, I'm not really seeing it as going against the logic of such a story or against omnibenevolence if humans choose bad sometimes and therefore occupy a habitat that reflects that same complexity of good and bad as their freedom of choice gives them.