Ayn Rand and the Intellectuals

HATING WHAT THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND Liberal intellectuals (almost a redundancy, that) hate author Ayn Rand.

They don't just dislike her, they hate her with a passion. The reason? Because she has single-handedly come up with a logical and reasonable philosophy that strips them bare and reveals all their scams and schemes so that people who know her philosophy (Objectivism) automatically spot one of their scams from a long ways away.

They don't subject her to the usual mild criticism or "shunning" to which they subject liberals who say something "slightly different" from "the norm." Their treatment of Rand and her works is visceral and vicious. There are many who merely dismiss her philosophy with the wave of a hand. But they cannot explain why they feel the way they do. If asked for a reason for their opposition to Objectivism, they can't answer and launch into a personal attack on her that amounts to a "fact-free opinion."

If you point out the fact that Objectivism is a "philosophy of reason," they deny the existence of reason. If you point to the logic of Objectivism, they say there is no logic. Then they go on to tell you that "there are no absolutes." Of course, they don't even notice the fact that their very statement is a "statement of an absolute," and negates not only their entire philosophy, but the very statement they have made as well. I love being a proponent of a philosophy that allows me to "shut down" those who disagree with it so easily and completely, and with their own words.

I hasten to say that I do not accept all of Rand's opinions and that I am not an Objectivist. I am a "student of Objectivist philosophy" and am still learning all its facets. That could change later, although I don't think I'll ever agree that abortion is a good thing and that there is no "higher power" although I may not see that "higher power" the same way other people do.

One professor said Rand was a "phony libertarian" who wanted to strip communists of their citizenship. She did not. In fact, she was one of the few people not on the Left who opposed the violation of the rights of communists and said so, in print. She said that stripping them of their rights "is an invalid means of opposing communism and that the proper way to oppose bad ideas was with good ideas."

To show you just how visceral and violent their hate is, there is a story told by Ronald Merril, in his book, The Ideas of Ayn Rand, where a woman's boyfriend was horrified when he saw her reading Atlas Shrugged and grabbed it, throwing it out the window. She watched as the gardener, upon seeing the title, threw it down and ran over it repeatedly. This is an excellent example of the violent reaction that her ideas often get from people who have never really investigated them, but have listened to what their liberal friends have said about her and her works. But again, if you ask them precisely what they don't like about her and her work, they can't answer and usually sneer some personal attack upon her.

That's one of the criticisms that is most often hurled at Objectivism and its creator, that it is a "cult" that does not allow any dissention. That people have been, in effect, "excommunicated" for disagreeing with it in the slightest way. There is a certain amount of truth to that charge, but it only applies to the personal "circle of friends" she laughingly called her "collective." Rand wasn't perfect, although her mistakes are tiny when put alongside her ideas, which are destined to change the world, and already are. She did insist on complete agreement among those people and shunned those who disagreed with her. But that does not apply to those who believe in, and use her ideas to guide their lives, as I do. That's not a "cult, nor is it a "religion."

Objectivism today has two major factions, about even in strength. One faction is run by her "philosophical and financial heir, Dr.Leonard Peikoff. Peikoff was a member of her "collective" and, in my opinion, is an "opportunist," who took advantage of Rand's fall out with her original protégé, Nathaniel Branden and took over her fortune as well as the "mantle" as "The Voice of Objectivism." This faction, running the Ayn Rand Institute, and claims to be the only source for Objectivist information and ideas. But it is this group that operates somewhat as a cult in that Peikoff's contention that Objectivism, as Ayn Rand proposed it, was, and is, complete and not subject to any changes. To be an Objectivist to him, is to accept everything Rand said, as "gospel" and not deviate from it in any way. It is this which gives rise to the "cult" accusation.

But there is a second faction, run by Objectivist philosopher David Kelley, who started and runs the Objectivist Institute, a competing organization whose view of Objectivism is that it is not complete, and can be improved. It is this group who are not, and never will be, "cult-like." If you wish to associate with this group, you will never get any static whichever way you believe.

It is this division in "the ranks" that caused a severe setback in the acceptance of Objectivism for years. This division was worse than that created when Nathaniel Branden left. But the Objectivist Center has had a strong influence and the acceptance of Objectivism as an excellent guide for your life is rising again, as it must, because it is the only logical philosophy there is.

You may not agree totally with the basic tenets of Objectivism, but here you will not be met with a cold silence if you dare to suggest change. In the Objectivist Institute, you will be welcomed and your ideas debated respectfully. The concepts discovered by Objectivists are not subjective, but the final word on the details of Objectivism may not have yet been discovered. You might be the force by which we can improve the philosophy, no matter what Leonard Peikoff might say.

If you're still "drifting in a sea of opposing philosophies," and you don't know why what's happening in this world is happening, this philosophy will help you to understand. Things will become clear to you as never before, and you will be able to, as my older brother Bob said many years ago, "read between the lines" and be able to figure out why people do as they do. What brought me to Objectivism is my inability to understand why people like Nelson Rockefeller, who had more money than he could spend in three lifetimes, supported collectivism even though it was intent on taking his money away (If you want to know the answer to that, e-mail me).

But this philosophy answered most of my questions and therefore, I can follow it for the most part because it's a logical philosophy and its opponents can only stupidly deny the existence of logic to oppose it. They cannot give coherent answers as to why it is bad, so they make things up. If you want to know the truth, go to the source: The Objectivist Center.

u: Why would someone ask "If God is omnipotent, how can he be good?" or "If God is good, how can he be omnipotent?" I've tended to prefer to ask, "Since God is real and since he has revealed himself with integrity to me, how much can I understand about how he is both good and omnipotent?

gre: Do you still think that omnipotence and perfect goodness can be reconciled?
l44: Well, why not share, dude? You and God got some insider deal going on?

I'm going to try to give a very skeletal answer to my rationale.

This appears not to be a question of someone who is looking for God, but of someone who is looking toward God from an egocentric point of view (which is antithetical to the way we may communicate with God). God is prime. Because of this, sense is made about God, albeit to very alienated minds and hearts, by considering him from a Godcentric view. This may e done not by a kind of sycophantic sympathy, but by yielding to God and allowing ourselves the benefit of having empathy toward him. In so doing, one can ask, "If God were good and omnipotent, might he be good and powerful enough to reveal himself and his truth to humans, so we can see things his way?" This presumes (acknowledges) that a good/omnipotent God may also be omniscient and therefore know fully while we may know only in part;

If we look into the various ways that God is purported to reveal himself in history, we find quaint, culturally derived anthropomorphic pantheons, we find quasi moralistic but legalistic gods, we find unknowable, frustrating gods in hierarchical mazes, and we find one who purports to have created man so he can have people created in his image to "walk with," ones created to share in his nature and ones whose individual and corporate natures in return may be shared with him. If God were all good in every sense, including delightful, that certainly sounds best.

Examining this further, one finds that in order to walk with man as a being created in his image, he created him with the qualities of, yup, free will as yeah, yeah, eternality. I won't belabor this, since I presume it has been examined before by the reader and especially since it's been so often given as a rationale for God's prescient allowance of the choice by man to know evil as well as good.

This historical record indicates that God created us as relational beings, first and foremost, to be relational with him. However, disagreement with God became our nature instead of Godliness being our nature and consequently, God could neither find man a suitable vessel for sharing of his own nature, nor would it be conceivable to share in man's corrupt nature anymore (A = A) where A is God's nature (and maybe our Hank reads this - Hank if God wants to have a nature, he's allowed to and there's nothing you can do about it, bless your heart).

Who's asking this?: But God knew this would happen; why wouldn't he just create those people who would obey? Giving God the benefit of the doubt, some of the answers could be:

1. God doesn't cheat and that would be cheating.
2. That wouldn't really be a holistic relationship between God and creation, especially when creation is the entire means of God sharing his loving nature with free beings.
3. None of us would choose to be fully obedient (Shoot, bunches of angels even messed up.)

We are taught further in this historical record such things as:

1. God expressed his morality to us, but that didn't make us good.
2. But this did adequately demonstrate to posterity, certain basic facts of morality and the fact that God has it and we can't get nearly all the way to it, from here.
3. God is less impressed with our trying to be perfect morally, which of course cannot be done, than he is impressed with our yearning to know him relationally and thoroughly. The chief exemplar of this was David, at times a Clintonesque sinner, but one who sincerely turned to God, and by his will truly tried to empathize with God and was thus called by him, "a man after God's own heart."
4. God found a way (through someone of David's lineage as well as his own) to fulfill God's law and its consequences of disagreeing, disobeying man's alienation from him. It cost. It also demonstrated that God empathized with every bit of our suffering the consequences of our evil, and in ways that are just about as fathomless as he is, himself. God's very being of the fused natures of God and newly regenerated man became utterly separated from God, somehow, and somehow took up both our evil and its consequences and took up all who would sincerely empathize with God and his having done so
5. God is omnipotent to provide this new nature, of man with God, fused in a way which fulfilled the very bad consequences of having "the knowledge of good and evil" concluded in our nature. Omnipotently, he has shown himself good for us, good to go, if we're willing to "take part in the divine nature" with him instead of our corrupt egocentric nature, a new nature that knew evil and has been enabled to thoroughly know good.
6. That doesn't mean that partakers become perfect in effect on earth. It means that this new nature is encapsulated in the core of the regenerated beings in ways that can renew their/our earthly lives while not being corrupted by it. This new nature waits to be released so as to transform the regenerate's entire being, and revealed so as to be a part in the transformation of all of creation, at the time(s) God appoints.

I could go on and I'm sure there are gaps of communication left unfilled, but that's my sense of it, where I yield and submit to God and allow an empathetic understanding to develop, and feed what in me develops relationality with God. I'm sure there are inadequacies in my expressions here, but once again, don't blame God. And yes, to address something Mr. Mill pointed out about how we may be prone to look for a tidying up of the entire situation (and why not?) the historical record of God's revelation further indicates that we who accept this divine nature are the first fruits of all creation, along with the primary being of that eternally God-man fused nature, and we'll be good testifiers to future ages of the sufficiency of God, so as to spare other beings in the future from evil, presuming there will be other beings in the future/eternity, however that may work.

"Here I stand..." and sit and lie and "live and move and have my being," and have certainly taken up space lately in this thread, and here I would walk with God (instead of demanding him to submit to my means of measurement).

Okay. So I'm going to be pressed into service defending Mill. Well, like I said, I'll try ;)

Not necessarily. I think that Mill is trying to come to an understanding of the nature of God by examining His handiwork - essentially, he's looking at the creation, and trying to come to understand what sort of creator would create this thing. And I think he would probably find the answers you suggest to be wanting, but let's see...

Who's asking this?: But God knew this would happen; why wouldn't he just create those people who would obey? Giving God the benefit of the doubt, some of the answers could be:

1. God doesn't cheat and that would be cheating.
2. That wouldn't really be a holistic relationship between God and creation, especially when creation is the entire means of God sharing his loving nature with free beings.
3. None of us would choose to be fully obedient (Shoot, bunches of angels even messed up.)

This is perhaps the easiest to address, since Mill himself considered exactly this sort of response when he said "They have exhausted the resources of sophistry to make it appear that all the suffering in the world exists to prevent greater---that misery exists, for fear lest there should be misery: a thesis which if ever so well maintained, could only avail to explain and justify the works of limited beings, compelled to labour under conditions independent of their own will; but can have no application to a Creator assumed to be omnipotent, who, if he bends to a supposed necessity, himself makes the necessity which he bends to." (my emphasis).

What Mill is essentially saying is that it doesn't make sense to call the creation of inherently good and virtuous and obedient men "cheating", since it's only "cheating" because God Himself made it that way! In other words, a God who made such a rule must have had the ability to not make that rule if He were truly omnipotent - when you get to make all the rules, something is only "cheating" if you make it that way. And thus He, were He truly omnipotent, must have easily been able to make good and virtuous men, but for some reason chose not to. So saying that such a thing would be "cheating" doesn't rescue an omnipotent God from the responsibility for creating wickedness - it's only "cheating" because He wanted it that way.

And the same sort of rationale applies to the other two points as well. If such a relationship isn't really a "holistic" relationship with God, that can only be because an omnipotent God declined to make it a holistic relationship with Him - if He is omnipotent, He could have just as easily chosen to allow that sort of relationship to be holistic, and yet he chose not to. If none of us would choose to be fully obedient, then that's because an omnipotent God must have wanted us to choose disobedience, since an omnipotent God has the power to make us obedient, and yet chose not to. And of course He must have wanted all these things - there are no unintended consequences for an omniscient being, who knows in advance every single consequence of His every single act.

1. God expressed his morality to us, but that didn't make us good.

IOW, as Mill posits, He chose not to make us good - He, being omnipotent, must have had the power to do so, and being omniscient, knew that His expressions of morality would fail to make us good. What other conclusion can we reach but that things are the way they are because that's exactly how God wanted them, if he is truly omnipotent?

4. God found a way (through someone of David's lineage as well as his own) to fulfill God's law and its consequences of disagreeing, disobeying man's alienation from him. It cost. It also demonstrated that God empathized with every bit of our suffering the consequences of our evil, and in ways that are just about as fathomless as he is, himself.

But Mill would object that you are positing a God that is merely "empathizing" with the consequences of evil that He is ultimately responsible for in the first place! I suspect Mill might become a bit exasperated at this point, and suggest that mere sympathy for the helpless victims of evils that you created and are responsible for is hardly adequate redress, and not the hallmark of a perfectly good being - why would a perfectly good being permit evil and suffering in the first place, especially if we are to believe that He is omnipotent, and thus has it easily within His power to eliminate it, or to not create it at all? Is that really what we mean when we think of "perfectly good" - a being who freely and willfully chooses to cause evil to occur? Or is it possible, Mill asks, that He really is perfectly good, but is of limited power, and so is thus not responsible for the existence of evil?

Consider an analogy for a moment, related to the doctrine of sins of omission. We can both, I think, agree that it would not be accurate to call a person who has the power to stop some evil from taking place, and yet does not, as being "good", especially if that evil can be stopped at little or no risk to oneself. If you're walking down the street some afternoon, and you see a toddler playing in the street, but you choose to walk on past despite the fact that you could easily have removed the child from such a dangerous position, then I think we would both agree that you bear some responsibility if that child should be struck and killed later on - by your conscious and willful failure to act, you have permitted a bad thing to occur. And we call this a sin, as per James 4:17 - "Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin," - and sins are posited to be objectively evil acts. So what are we to make of a being who consciously and willfully permits all the evils in the world to occur, especially when He could prevent them all with infinite ease? Does it make any sense at all to call such a being "perfectly good"?

He, being omnipotent, must have had the power to do so [make us good] and being omniscient, knew that His expressions of morality would fail to make us good

Looks like we're talking about a fairly simple dispute with God, so I've plucked this sentence out. I'll give my immediate answer, then there could be more to post later.

Goodness is merely an expression of what God is. That's all. It isn't "The Force," with which he could have made us. Remember? Everything that we call true life is only allowed to be called life bacause it exists in perfect relation to God, sharing his nature (A = A) but his nature continues to be his. (Hence, "treasures in earthen vessles" being "Christ in me, the hope of glory," and "share in his glory," but "I will not give my glory to another, or my praise to idols.") Othewise it is either destroyed, or "growns" in an existence of suffering. Further suffering is simply detachment from God. The great evil that man suffers and inflicts upon man is only a "momentary suffering" that is a part of the much greater suffering of existence being separated from God (spiritually dead).

Back toward the center of the problem, instead of making man subsets of himself (Godlets) he chose to make us distinct beings and to do so, he chose to make us free spirits. (The inadequacy of creating automatons has been touched upon recently.) To put it another way, Mills wants Pinochio and Pinochio is an oxymoron. There is no such thing. One is either God or distinct from God. The choice is either Godlets (God encapsulated), automotons (lifeless), or real live boys (and girls).

He chose to make us in his image though, and (BTW, Ayn Rand might have appreciated this) he made us free morally and to be so, the burden of responsibility for our obedience is upon us, not him.

(The more I consider this, the more I'm compelled to think that my #3 point of the list that I know irked Mr. Mills rings true. All not only have fallen short of the glory (the stuff) of God, but all would have, no matter who ate the fruit and who didn't.)

There is no sin of ommission here, because like a good father, God warned A&E of what would happened and let them grow up. There is not limiting of God's power, because it was a matter of God being God-with-integrity, who again, simply doesn't, won't cheat or lie (the creation of beings that aren't distinct, though he would call them distinct). I say that not allowing himself to be immoral doesn't make him 'unomnipotent.' But it does show him in fact, to be both all good and all powerful. It's only the concotion of a 'depraved' mind to say that God choosing to act with the integrity of goodness makes him less powerful. Come to think of it, that may have been one of Lucifer's points.

Since God is the master of what his nature is, of course, I could have said, "accept it in faith that God is both all good and all powerful," and of course that's how I conclude. I'm sure that elements of the further answer are in the aforementioned statement, "I will not give my glory to another," though and here is that point: That would be lessening himself. That woudld be ceasinng to be omnipotent (and I wouldn't be surprised if that would also be ceasing to have integrity and therefore ceasing to be good, which of course wouldn't happen because he is -very willfully- I AM THAT I AM).

So, maybe the Pinocchio that Mills wanted I suppose would have been a being living on God's glory sustaining his goodness, but it still wouldn't make him a real live boy. He wouldn't be a distinct spirit so it wouldn't be a fully formed being (maybe it would be a little like an animal, but I think that is different). But I digress. It's an idea that wouldn't get off the drawing board.

Feel free to tell me that it still doesn't satisfy the former Mr. Mills or whomever else. Also, I'll look to see if there are other issues that don't just boil down to this. I's guess that Mills might still complain about something.... maybe that God shouldn't have had the right to make beings of free will in the first place. I guess you mentioned that. Too bad. Though he knew what would happen, it's not his fault, it is only the sustained fault of the willful beings that don't accept God by their acts (the fallen angels made that choice in the first place, humans make that choice by whether or not they choose regeneration). To say that sin is God's fault is simply a denial of moral responsibility. And again, the sin of ommission doesn't charge to God either because all are warned. Now I have to avoid the sin of omitting the mowing of my lawn. Dangerous as it is, I won't even proof read so I'm sure there are redundancies, etc.

Checkpointing my thoughts about Mills' Paradox v. God's Integrity... pardon the repetitions....

"They have exhausted the resources of sophistry to make it appear that all the suffering in the world exists to prevent greater---that misery exists, for fear lest there should be misery: a thesis which if ever so well maintained, could only avail to explain and justify the works of limited beings, compelled to labour under conditions independent of their own will; but can have no application to a Creator assumed to be omnipotent, who, if he bends to a supposed necessity, himself makes the necessity which he bends to."

...why would a perfectly good being permit evil and suffering in the first place, especially if we are to believe that He is omnipotent, and thus has it easily within His power to eliminate it, or to not create it at all?

At least as an aside, I think Mr. Mills undersells the treasure of being a distinct being -- a free spirit, despite suffering. Who would trade it in? I don't think he would. I sure wouldn't. What's more (much... much... more): God being all good will see to it that each has the opportunity to be reconciled with God. Again, the 'better question' (the utilitarian question, surely) that I mentioned is, "God being all good, how is (was) evil reconciled with (by) his power?" Wow, what a wonder to be a distinct, self-directed person adopted to be God's son in Christ and to know surpassing love.

Looking at this again in a less hurried time and with a newly mown lawn (and lawn mowing being wonderful for meditation) I think I found answers to this paradox that satisfy me, at least, even if they were less than well expressed.

God's goodness is merely a reflection of who He is and of course all he creates.... God will not give his glory (nature, substance) to another, which would leave him less than omnipotent and less than complete (completely satisfactory, with complete integrity, i.e., completely good) and which perhaps would risk evil greater than Lucifer's (perhaps this would be a valid injustice for Mr. Mill).... But, God shares his glory with those who are in full relationship with him.... Real life as a person is relation to God as a distinct being.... Fully formed and fully informed beings inevitably are morally responsible for themselves (apt to include "light, momentary" discipline by an intently caring authority).... Knowing our failing, God provided us reconciliation as a new, inextricably God-fused spirit by our agreement to relinquish our separation and receive this relationship (by covenant)* -- the Father and the Father's Word knowing what they'd have to do as he created us and expressed as early as Genesis 3:15... Being the testifying first fruits, having known sin/evil and now knowing God... I think it's kind of like Hank's air flight phenomenon. It really happened.

The real necessity is for us to be in relation to God, and of course by the way he really has happened to provide.

_________________________________________________
*If we hadn't sinned and suffered with the knowledge of good and evil, could we have had the opportunity for such an agreement for this so deeply and essentially communing relationship with God? And would we have really known what it meant?

Sigh. At this point, I am confronted with the rather unpleasant task of setting aside the next year or so of my life in order to teach you enough logic to get you a college degree in philosophy - holding your hand and walking you through Hume and Mill and Whewell and so forth. That way, you might fully understand the truth of what I say by being able to derive the truth of it for yourself, and avoid having to take my word for it.

As tempted as I am to simply ask you "cash or charge?", I think I'll save the time and just give you a short snippet from a typical introductory text in logic, the kind you might encounter as a freshman in college, on the understanding that you'll simply dismiss it if it proves inconvenient to you. Or perhaps you'll take it as a starting point for your own voyage of discovery - your choice.

The preceding chapters have dealt with deductive arguments, which are valid if their premisses establish their conclusions demonstratively, but invalid otherwise. There are very many good and important arguments, however, whose conclusions cannot be proved with certainty. Many causal connections in which we rightly place confidence can be established only with probability - though the degree of probability may be very high. Thus we can say without reservation that smoking causes cancer, but we cannot ascribe to that knowledge the kind of certainty that we ascribe to our knowledge that the conclusion of a valid deductive argument is entailed by its premisses. On that deductive standard, one distinguished medical investigator observes, "No one will ever be able to prove that smoking causes cancer, or that anything causes anything. Theoretically, you can never prove anything. " Deductive certainty is, indeed, too high a standard to impose when evaluating our knowledge of facts about the world.
In this and the following chapters we turn to the analysis of arguments that are not claimed to demonstrate the truth of their conclusions as following necessarily from their premisses, but are intended merely to support their conclusions as probable, or probably true. Arguments of this latter kind are generally called inductive, and they are radically different from the deductive variety. The fundamental distinction between deduction and induction was discussed at some length in our opening chapter. Part Three of this book has been devoted to deduction; Part Four will be devoted to induction. Of all inductive arguments there is one type that is most commonly used: argument by analogy. Two examples of analogical arguments are these:

Some people look on preemployment testing of teachers as unfair - a kind of double jeopardy. "Teachers are already college graduates," they say. "Why should they be tested?" That's easy. Lawyers are college graduates and graduates of professional school, too, but they have to take a bar exam. And a number of other professions ask prospective members to prove that they know their stuff by taking and passing examinations: accountants, actuaries, doctors, architects. There is no reason why teachers shouldn't be required to do this too.
We may observe a very great similitude between this earth which we inhabit, and the other planets, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury. They all revolve round the sun, as the earth does, although at different distances and in different periods. They borrow all their light from the sun, as the earth does. Several of them are known to revolve around their axis like the earth, and by that means, must have a like succession of day and night. Some of them have moons, that serve to give them light in the absence of the sun, as our moon does to us. They are all, in their motions, subject to the same law of gravitation, as the earth is. From all this similitude, it is not unreasonable to think that those planets may, like our earth, be the habitation of various orders of living creatures. There is some probability in this conclusion from analogy.

Most of our own everyday inferences are by analogy. Thus I infer that a new computer will serve me well on the grounds that I got very good service from a computer earlier purchased from the same manufacturer. If a new book by a certain author is called to my attention, I infer that I will enjoy reading it on the basis of having read and enjoyed other books by that author. Analogy is at the basis of most of our ordinary reasonings from past experience to what the future will hold. Not an explicitly formulated argument, of course, but something very much like analogical inference is presumably involved in the conduct of the burned child who shuns the fire.
None of these arguments is certain or demonstratively valid. None of their conclusions follows with logical necessity from their premisses. It is logically possible that what is appropriate for judging the employability of lawyers and doctors is not appropriate for judging the employability of teachers. It is logically possible that earth may be the only inhabited planet, that the new computer may not work well at all, and that I may find my favorite author's latest book to be intolerably dull. It is even logically possible that one fire may burn and not another. But no argument by analogy is intended to be mathematically certain. Analogical arguments are not to be classified as either valid or invalid. Probability is all that is claimed for them.

If I may, those are not the only possible sources. There have been several threads on offered on Free Republic discussing the concept of Intelligent Design as an alternative to evolution, or primordial ooze, if you prefer. As far as I can discern, they do not posit that God must be that intelligence. So, we have the possibility of another intelligence as a source of humanity. Might that other intelligence have absolutes? I'll say, yes, it might.

Who is the intelligent designer if not God? What source of intelligence would that be other than God? Aliens? (LOL) In fact, most IDers are Christians (Dembski, e.g.). Arguing from intelligent design is just a crafty way of arguing backwards from the observable particulars.

I've already given you my moral absolute: Liberty. Its source is the process that created us. In other words, we were created in such a way that liberty is a moral absolute. It is moral because we have the choice of denying liberty. But, if we deny liberty, dire consequences will ensue. Dire consequences always have and always will result from enslavements.

What is its source? I keep asking and asking and you just keep repeating the same ole inadequate mantra. WHO created us?

That is what I believe. Don't bother asking me to prove it, it a belief, just as you believe in God but cannot prove His existence.

Your belief is a non-rational pie-in-the-sky leap of faith.

Oh? How attached to the notion of omnipotence are you? ;)

Pretty attached to it, general_re. For creation out of nothing would seem to demand it.

I am aware that J.S. Mill feels that the divine attributes of goodness and omnipotence are apparently irreconcilable. For how can a good God, if he is omnipotent, permit evil in the world? If a good God doesn't "stop it," then he must not be omnipotent.

Mill can only reason from the human side -- he is a committed empiricist. There is a way to answer the apparent conflict between divine goodness and omnipotence; but it is not one that can be directly viewed or "tested" by man. Yet the test of the truth about something is not necessarily that it can be directly observed by man.

God can be good and omnipotent -- yet freely choose to "limit" Himself -- by virtue of the logic of His having vested man with free will. If He were to intervene directly to elmininate the evil of this world, then that would be to violate His own grant of free will to men. To put it crudely, one might say that God made a "deal with man," and He keeps His promises.

Arguably, God did not put the evil in the world. Evil is always a possibility where man is free to choose. To "correct" man in this life for his choices -- which would be the effect of God intervening to overrule and eliminate evil -- would effectively make God an "indian-giver." (So to speak.)

Mill in these passages is only saying what man can know (and thus conclude) on the basis of observation. He does not say that observation is necessarily the ultimate test of what is the truth of reality, just that it's the best tool man has. Mill is aware of the limits of human knowledge. He does not say that man -- or more precisely, what man can know via empirical means -- is necessarily "the measure" of all things. But he does in effect say he chooses to remain "agnostic" about things that are not knowable on the basis of observation and experience.

He is not so agnostic, however, as to fail to note that the universe is "designed." Or to note that ideas of God can draw man to his own great benefit and to the benefit of society. He has noticed that human nature quite often resonates to ideas of God. This is something an empiricist can respect. Unlike his father, J.S. Mill was not an outright atheist.

I am reluctant to give much credit to JS Mill, as misunderstood as he may be. One aspect of utilitarianism that he, Bentham, and all other utilitarians fail to see is that it fails to predict the "long run". There is no way to predict the outcome of utilitarian theory simply because humans cannot see into the future. If the outcome is negative, all a utilitarian can do is change is game plan for next time, sort of a sophisticated "trial and error" philosophy.

There are very very few philosophers taught in university classrooms that are even worth reading. The few that are worth reading are mostly ignored (big surprise!). Hume, Kant, Descartes, Mill, Bentham, Marx, Nietszche, Berkeley, Sartre, Hegel, Rousseau, Hobbes, Voltaire, Foucault, Aristotle, etc. are all false philosophies, and only serve to poison the minds of their readers. There are some true elements in the philosophies of these men, but overall, they stink, and all have been debunked. T. Jefferson said after reading Hume that it took him years of reflection and reading to rid his mind of the poison of Hume's philosophy. John Adams ridiculed Hume, and rightly so. There is very little TRUE philosophy taught in public universities. There is so much false philosophy that it only serves to confuse the minds of the unenlightened (by God). They present the cases of these false teachers, then more or less leave you to "pick your poison" as to which one you will believe. Arsenic or strichnine... Before I was saved, I was totally confused by philosophy, but then, after being reborn, I could suddenly see the errors in the thinking of these ungodly men. There is only one true philosophy -the rest are simply lies from the darkened hearts of men.

Hi, bb! I won't be here long, since there is much to do 'round here, nor will I answer directly any of the questions you and all the other worthies have raised here toward the end of this thread.

Rather, I will try to give you all a different way of looking at God as "all of the omni's"...

First of all, try reading the Bible from Genesis thru the Gospels as a history of sorts of a people's journey of faith and relationship with their Creator. When reading Deuteronomy 6, and especially Deuteronomy 6:4-9, read it as not only a way of life but, in the shorter passage, a prescription for a method of what might be called generational learning. (Here, think of the stories about the Australian Aborigines and their ability to "remember" things that their ancestors did, observed, sensed before they were born.)

If you do this (and yes, it might take some time for those who have never read all this material before, or in this way), I think the picture that will begin to emerge is of a God who will not reveal Himself until his children are ready to understand what is next to be revealed.

Or, to put it a bit more succinctly, God is omnipotent but because we are finite, He is forced to wait for us to catch up.

And, as always, if this doesn't help, pitch it into the nearest circular file. :)

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