15 - “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.” This is the problem of pain, in its simple form.
Logical fallacy: If A then B. Not B therefore not A.
If study hard, then you will get good result. You did not good result therefore you did not study hard.
15 – Absolute vs relative possibilities/impossibilities.
The absolutely possible may also be called the intrinsically impossible because it carries its impossibility within itself, instead of borrowing it from other impossibilities which in their turn depend on others. It has no unless clause attached to it.
Can the God who has unlimited power create very heavy stone even He Himself cannot lift it?
16 – His omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say “God can give a creature free-will and at the same time withhold free-will from it,” you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other works “God can”. It remains true that all things are possible with God: The intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even we talk it about God.
20 – If fire comforts that body which at a certain distance, it will destroy it when the distance is reduces. Hence, even in a perfect world, the necessity for those danger signals which the pain-fibres in our nerves are apparently designed to transmit.
20 – If the fixed nature of matter prevents it from being always, and in all its dispositions, equally agreeable even to a single sour, much less is it possible for the matter of the universe at any moment to be distributed so that it is equally convenient and pleasurable to each member of a society. If a man travelling in one direction is having a journey down hill, a man going in the opposite direction must be going up the hill.
21 – The permanent nature of wood which enables us to use it as a beam also enables us to use it for hitting our neighbour on the head.
21 - We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free-will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies of insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to gram them.
22 – Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.
59 – It would, no doubt, have been possible for God to remove by miracle the results of the first sin ever committed by a human being; but this would not have been much good unless He was prepared to remove the results of the second sin, and of the third, and so on forever. If the miracle ceased, then sooner or later we might have reached our present lamentable situation: if they did not, then a world, thus continually underpropped and corrected by Divine interference, would have been a world in which nothing important ever depended on human choice, and in which choice itself would soon cease from the certainty that one of the apparent alternatives before you would lead to no results and was therefore not really an alternative. As we saw, the chess player’s freedom to play chess depends on the rigidity of the squares and the moves.
90 – To say that God “need not have tried the experiment” is to say that because God knows, the thing known by God need not exist.
92 – From our present point of view it ought to be clear that the real problem is not why some humble, pious, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
103 – We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the “unimaginable sum of human misery”. Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that not one is suffering 2x.
104 – There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.
Source: The problem of pain (1940) - CS Lewis
Logical fallacy: If A then B. Not B therefore not A.
If study hard, then you will get good result. You did not good result therefore you did not study hard.
15 – Absolute vs relative possibilities/impossibilities.
The absolutely possible may also be called the intrinsically impossible because it carries its impossibility within itself, instead of borrowing it from other impossibilities which in their turn depend on others. It has no unless clause attached to it.
Can the God who has unlimited power create very heavy stone even He Himself cannot lift it?
16 – His omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say “God can give a creature free-will and at the same time withhold free-will from it,” you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other works “God can”. It remains true that all things are possible with God: The intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even we talk it about God.
20 – If fire comforts that body which at a certain distance, it will destroy it when the distance is reduces. Hence, even in a perfect world, the necessity for those danger signals which the pain-fibres in our nerves are apparently designed to transmit.
20 – If the fixed nature of matter prevents it from being always, and in all its dispositions, equally agreeable even to a single sour, much less is it possible for the matter of the universe at any moment to be distributed so that it is equally convenient and pleasurable to each member of a society. If a man travelling in one direction is having a journey down hill, a man going in the opposite direction must be going up the hill.
21 – The permanent nature of wood which enables us to use it as a beam also enables us to use it for hitting our neighbour on the head.
21 - We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free-will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies of insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to gram them.
22 – Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.
59 – It would, no doubt, have been possible for God to remove by miracle the results of the first sin ever committed by a human being; but this would not have been much good unless He was prepared to remove the results of the second sin, and of the third, and so on forever. If the miracle ceased, then sooner or later we might have reached our present lamentable situation: if they did not, then a world, thus continually underpropped and corrected by Divine interference, would have been a world in which nothing important ever depended on human choice, and in which choice itself would soon cease from the certainty that one of the apparent alternatives before you would lead to no results and was therefore not really an alternative. As we saw, the chess player’s freedom to play chess depends on the rigidity of the squares and the moves.
90 – To say that God “need not have tried the experiment” is to say that because God knows, the thing known by God need not exist.
92 – From our present point of view it ought to be clear that the real problem is not why some humble, pious, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
103 – We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the “unimaginable sum of human misery”. Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that not one is suffering 2x.
104 – There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.
Source: The problem of pain (1940) - CS Lewis
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