> In your last paragraph, you have challenged my entertainment theory: "...after a few million years of watching the cycle of life go round and round, I think it will most likely have lost all its entertainment value, like watching one too many movies." First of all, no-one would expect an entertainment to last for ever, but a few million years of fun is surely preferable to a few million years of boredom ... just as an hour of pleasure is preferable to an hour of pain. Secondly the human show is full of variations, which I think would make it infinitely more interesting than the dinosaur story, for instance, and remember, that went on for 160 million years. Who knows what God might think up when he's finished with us? 
> -A few million years in the billions of years our universe has been around? That would be like paying the $9 to go to the movies and only watching the first preview.-
> Like you, I loved David's "Dayanu" post, and echo all its sentiments. And it reminds me of something we certainly haven't mentioned before. Since I find it hard to believe that a god could create anything of which it had no knowledge, I find it comforting to think that ours ... if he exists ... must have a great sense of humour.
> -A sense of humor is definitely something to find comforting :P

life is an experiment devised for God's entertainment, and the random distribution of pain and pleasure offers no evidence to indicate that he has any personal interest in us as individuals. If so, he has no relevance to our lives. This should not be seen as an attempt to pass judgement (I'm not that presumptuous!), but only as an attempt to make sense of the world as we know it.
> 
> In Judaism at the Passover Sedar there is a prayer often sung called "Dayanu",meaning: it is enough. Whatever God has done for us is enough. HE has given us life. We are here to battle with it and enjoy it. I'm not ready to leave life. I have enjoyed most of it. I have been privileged to be alive. It is enough, Dayanu! And that is Judaisms' answer to your question.-I find that sentiment to be quite beautiful. Thank you for sharing it. It does not answer the why, but it is something resonates with me deeply. There is something else that falls into the category of this conversation DHW, that I don't think I have spoken about(I could be mistaken). Without pain, without heartache, death, sickness, and other negatives, would you have any reference at all to appreciate all the good in your life? Generally, when we see someone who has never experienced pain, they are spoiled brats, insulated from the world and from reality, ungrateful for all they have, not compassionate for others, and have no natural affection for anything because they have no reference to appreciate it. Pain to me is as absolutely necessary as the disasters that I have discussed. Yin & Yang, Good & Evil, Right & Wrong, Light & Darkness, Life & Death, Pain & Pleasure, Love & Hate, Have & Have Not, Matter & Anti-matter, Positive & Negative, Rational & Emotional. Without one, you can not truly appreciate the other. In everything there is a balancing act that must be maintained, that is absolutely necessary, and that is the true meaning behind my pseudonym. It is a rule that permeates the universe, it is a fundamental concept in mathematics, science, and nature. All people intuitively grasp the concept, though not many ever consciously and completely accept it, much less understand it. -The people living six months in darkness find the light of the first sunrise on their face a experience that borders on spiritual, while the man trudging through the murderous heat of the Sahara finds nightfall and darkness a tremendous blessing. In these cases, both the light and the darkness are a source of life. Too much light will ultimately kill you as just as certainly as too much darkness.-Perhaps the UI created this realm of experience so that we could more fully appreciate the gift of simple existence. Personally, after a few million years of watching the cycle of life go round and round, I think it will most likely have lost all its entertainment value, like watching one too many movies. The sequence of events and characters may change, but the plot never really does, which makes the movie boring. What fun is it if you know that the hero is always going to die eventually?

life is an experiment devised for God's entertainment, and the random distribution of pain and pleasure offers no evidence to indicate that he has any personal interest in us as individuals. If so, he has no relevance to our lives. This should not be seen as an attempt to pass judgement (I'm not that presumptuous!), but only as an attempt to make sense of the world as we know it.-In Judaism at the Passover Sedar there is a prayer often sung called "Dayanu",meaning: it is enough. Whatever God has done for us is enough. HE has given us life. We are here to battle with it and enjoy it. I'm not ready to leave life. I have enjoyed most of it. I have been privileged to be alive. It is enough, Dayanu! And that is Judaisms' answer to your question.


> You write: "there is no reason not to be indifferent to a UI, if one exists, other than simple gratitude for every breath you draw etc." This ties in nicely with David's observation: "Even if God doesn't care, He has given us life to experience and enjoy. To my mind that is a great gift all by itself." As one of the (so far) lucky ones to have been given a winning ticket in the lottery, I can only agree with both of you, and am extremely happy that chance or a UI has given me such an opportunity. But I can't go along with the sentiment that those who have not been so fortunate as me are always to blame for their own suffering. It is the apparent randomness of the latter, and the apparent impersonality of the whole system, that makes me question a possible God's concern for individuals and hence his relevance to our lives.
> -**got to love nap time, it gives me a chance to sneak in a post while everyone else is sleeping :P88-At the risk of again seeming callous, I would ask you to try to 'zoom out' your perspective a bit. Step back from the ultra personal perception of every death that you feel represents a lack of interest or concern on the part of a UI and look at a bigger picture. Every fleshly creature that is born must eventually die. This law of nature is so pervasive that we have, as of yet, failed to find a single exception to this rule. Why? Why allow the death of something you created? The simple answer, because it must be so. If nothing ever died in the billions of years we think the earth has been around, we would not be able to take a single step because of the over abundance of life. We could not eat because all that we eat requires the death of something, either plant or animal. We could not grow crops because plants require nutrients that are donated to the soil by the decomposition of dead matter, whether through the actual rotting of a corpse or from the defecation of plant or animal matter that must have died in order to be digested. So, in that regard, ask yourself, is death a absolute, if tragic, necessity? To push the point further, isn't it beautiful how even death brings forth life? On a personal level I do, in fact, feel intense remorse over any life that ends, because I find every individual life a beautiful and awe inspiring miracle that is beyond our ability to explain why it happens at all. I feel sympathy for those that die, whether by their own action/inaction, or through no fault of their own. But, on the other side of the scale, I recognize that it is in fact a necessity. This world could not function without this cycle. I would not be alive without this cycle. And therefore, I am forced to acknowledge its necessity, and admire the beautiful tragic simplicity of it. I have personally experienced more death than any one person should ever have to witness, particular during my time serving in Iraq. Friends, some I considered as close as brothers, dying unnecessarily, and often under seemingly random circumstances. I will never see them again, their families can never replace them. That is something I carry with me every day of my life. So please, do not confuse my statements with callousness or a lack of compassion, but that experience has helped me to understand the importance of death, and has helped me to cope with it, often to a point that others do not understand and mistake for a lack of care or concern.-As far as your statement: "In general, I find that conventionally religious people like to give credit to God for all the good in life, and to hold humans responsible for the bad." Much like you, I hold people responsible for much of the good and bad in their life, and I also recognize that much is beyond their control. The UI, in my personal perspective, is ultimately what we consider neutral, though I find that word extremely lacking. I can already sense that someone is going to misunderstand that statement and respond with something to the effect of "If the UI is neutral than that would mean that he is indifferent..etc etc." This is not the case at all, from my perspective. Perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be to say that I believe the UI has an "ultimate grasp of necessity that trancends our limited understanding of good, evil, and everything in between. I do not personally hold him responsible for every death, though, in an abstract way I could grudgingly concede the point as it was him who implemented the system that allowed for death by creating a realm in which life was even a possibility, for without life, there could be no death, no pain, no suffering. How many times have you heard the phrase a "necessary evil", or something that is temporarily a negative that must occur in order to bring about a long term positive? If we can understand that concept in our own actions, why are we so blind to perceiving the concept in regards to a UI?

Even if I were to accept (though I don't) that the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami which killed over 230,000 people and devastated communities and towns over a vast area was actually necessary for the survival of the human race, and that the ghosts (I speak figuratively) of the once flourishing Pompeii should be comforted by the fact that "a volcano creates earth and soil that will eventually provide habitable land", the point of my terrorist analogy was to focus on the mind of the perpetrator.-As an aside here, Tsunamis, as we all know are the result of earthquakes. Earthquakes produce tremendously violent shock waves, again, as we all know. Water, as a medium, is terribly efficient at absorbing the energy of those shock-waves, which are then transformed into motion and form the waves that become Tsunami's. We all know all this. My questions that I would ask you to ponder are, what would happen to this world we call home if there were no medium to absorb all the tremendous energy released in an earthquake? How long do you think our home would survive under the constant onslaught of these earthquakes? Do you think that plate tectonics, and thus earthquakes, are not an integral part of life on this planet, a geologic necessity for the survival and development of life? -The volcano at Pompeii, is another fine example. Do you think that life on this planet, regardless of whether you believe in a UI or evolution, could exist without volcanoes? Does the fact that volcanoes serve as a natural pressure relief system for the Earth's molten core (Which provides our EM field, and a host of other benefits) not strike you as a necessity for the stability of the planet, aside from the many other numerous benefits they provide? Do you think our planet, and thus our species or any other that calls this planet home could could survive without volcanoes?-I will end this particular aside here, as my other response to your post covers my view on the humanitarian side of things.


> Even if I were to accept (though I don't) that the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami which killed over 230,000 people and devastated communities and towns over a vast area was actually necessary for the survival of the human race, and that the ghosts (I speak figuratively) of the once flourishing Pompeii should be comforted by the fact that "a volcano creates earth and soil that will eventually provide habitable land", the point of my terrorist analogy was to focus on the mind of the perpetrator. 
> -During the 2004 Tsunami, there was a group of people, whose name I do not recall, that survived the tsunami without the loss of a single life in their tribe because they heeded the warnings and acted accordingly. The same could almost certainly said of survivors of the Pompeii volcano, the residents of New Orleans, and the survivors of other natural disasters. You seem to have made the assumption that, and feel free to correct me if I am mistaken, that people are not responsible for their own lives, and that their failure to pay attention to the warnings represents a callous disregard for life on the part of a UI. Is the engineer that designs brakes for cars(which come standard with a warning system to tell you they are going bad) responsible for people who die because they fail to heed the warning and crash when their brakes fail? Did that engineer show a callous disregard, or even indifference to life? He knew the brakes would eventually fail, he built in a warning to notify the operators of the danger, and some might speculate that when people die because of his brakes, despite the fact that they ignored the warning, he might feel remorse or regret at their deaths. Yet, in this example, we generally do not blame the engineer, we blame the individual. Why do you not hold people to the same standard in other aspects of their lives, choosing to instead blame the UI for their deaths when they fail to heed the warnings?-Just like the engineer, there was no innate need for any form of UI to put any form of warning system in any of its creations. Had there been no warning signs, I could accept your reasoning that it is perhaps indifferent, or has a callous disregard for life. However, as things are, I do hold people responsible for their own actions and decisions, or lack thereof.-To answer your last question, there is no reason not to be indifferent to a UI, if one exists, other than simple gratitude for every breath you draw, every sunset you witness, and every twinge in your guts when you feel the love of someone you care about. In general, I find that people like to take credit for the good in their life, and avoid all responsibility for the bad.

David says that if God's purpose "was to create us, the plan is over." I would simply take it one step further, and ask why he created us ... and would suggest that if the plan is over, all that remains is the spectacle.
> 
> If we follow this line of reasoning, the important question then becomes, not whether God exists, but whether his existence actually matters. An impersonal God for whom individual lives are of no significance might just as well not be there, so why should we as individuals bother with him?-Theodicy is a tough area to think about. Whatever is God may certainly be impersonal. We don't know that the concerned God of religions is real. Adler left it at a 50/50 proposition that God cared for the individual. Changing the Earth from a big rock to what we have now, allows life, but it also requires all of the dangerous events that have occurred and are still ocurring. Even if God doesn't care, He has given us life to experience and enjoy. To my mind that is a great gift all by itself.


> 1) All life was geared to the production of humans, and we just don't know why dodos and dinosaurs etc. were essential prerequisites.
> 2) Natural disasters and diseases are essential factors in the production and survival of humans.
> 3) If humans don't heed the warnings or take the necessary precautions, it's their own fault when they are struck down by natural disasters and diseases.
> 4) God has an ultimate plan for humans, but we don't know what that plan is.
> 
> Tony, please forgive me if any of this is inaccurate. I'm trying to understand your approach, and these are the arguments I've extrapolated from your posts as a "defence" of God's apparent indifference to the suffering not just of humans but of all his creatures (though we mustn't ignore the beauty and happiness that are also on offer to us).
> 
> Your last post on the subject offered excellent examples of 3), but the image that came very forcibly into my mind was that of the terrorist issuing a warning that a bomb is about to explode in the middle of a crowded market. Whether everyone really will have time to escape is not the issue here: my concern is the attitude of the terrorist who plants the bomb in the first place. If he has no feeling of responsibility or guilt at the death or maiming of even a single victim, then is this the sort of being I want to have power over me? (I realize that what I want is not relevant, but I'm actually probing into what I think YOU want!) The image of God that you have drawn is of one who is capable of creating a universe, but not capable of creating living beings without the imposition of appalling suffering. We don't know why all the dead creatures were essential for the production of humans, we don't know why all the disasters and diseases were/are also essential (though you have given some illuminating explanations of selected cases), the victims are apparently to blame for not getting out of the way, and we don't know what God is actually aiming at. This to me is a theory full of don't-knows and unsubstantiated presuppositions. Of course it doesn't matter two hoots whether or not I find it convincing, but what we're all doing on this forum is offering one another ideas to be tested and thought through, and I wonder to what extent you yourself actually find your theory convincing. To go one step further, I wonder why you might prefer it to simpler theories that at least have the merit of not requiring any further explanation: (a) that the apparent randomness indicates that there is no God at all, or (b) that God's interest lies purely in creating life, with all its apparently random contingencies, and watching how the spectacle develops.-
(a) that the apparent randomness indicates that there is no God at all:-Actually it is because despite the seeming chaos and randomness I see patterns, and so do most physicist, whether they realize it or not, or else their precious physics simply would not work.-(b) that God's interest lies purely in creating life, with all its apparently random contingencies, and watching how the spectacle develops.-I have not completely discarded this hypothesis, despite my objections to it, I still admit the possibility. It seems so absolutely counter intuitive to everything though that it is very difficult from me to swallow, all anthropological deities aside.-
I would like to address your terrorist analogy for a moment, though. There is a fundamental difference between the two scenarios, that of a creating God and that of a terrorist. The most important distinguishing characteristic, without attributing any personality beyond this present analogy, is that the natural disasters and diseases and such often promote life as well as take it, where as the terrorists only goal is to take life and instill fear. A volcano creates earth and soil that will eventually provide habitable land. Hurricanes cool the planet and help maintain homeostasis. Tsunami's act as geological shock absorbers and help prevent earth quakes from causing even more devastation. The core of the planet is heated by the breakdown of radioactive materials which are also deadly to us. Even the sun, which is responsible for the survival of all life on planet earth could end said life in a heartbeat, and over exposure to it is deadly. -These things play a necessary role. We even KNOW the necessity of them in many cases. How strange is it, though, that all of them give warning signs? To use your analogy, how many terrorist call the FAA and say what day they are going to put the bomb on the plane.


> 1) All life was geared to the production of humans, and we just don't know why dodos and dinosaurs etc. were essential prerequisites.
> 2) Natural disasters and diseases are essential factors in the production and survival of humans.
> 3) If humans don't heed the warnings or take the necessary precautions, it's their own fault when they are struck down by natural disasters and diseases.
> 4) God has an ultimate plan for humans, but we don't know what that plan is.-
> To go one step further, I wonder why you might prefer it to simpler theories that at least have the merit of not requiring any further explanation: (a) that the apparent randomness indicates that there is no God at all, or (b) that God's interest lies purely in creating life, with all its apparently random contingencies, and watching how the spectacle develops.-Jumping in, Tony's first 3 points fit my reasoning exactly. To create this 'goldylocks' planet required an evolultionary plan with all the disasters, thereby taking the third rock from the sun and making it habitable. We have giant brains to give ourselves warnings so we can avoid most of the disasters. The biological evolutionary plan is programmed for increasingly complex organisms, dashing off in all possible directions, until ideal forms appear. There are essays in recent years suggestiong that evolution is over with our arrival. As for point four,what God's plan should do next is beside the point. If his purpose was to create us, the plan is over.-As for simpler theories, your plan (b) is fine, but not watching the spectacle, perhaps guiding it, with planned codes in DNA set up beforehand.

The challenge is still out there for someone to prove that life came from inert soup, and then continue on backwards to prove that quantum fluctuations spontaneously existed where nothing had before and triggered a big bang(no real explanation was given for where all that mass or matter came from either in that lecture, but they were certain that our universe came from nothing). 
BM
No, it's only a challenge for those that claim it's the truth. It is also a challenge for those who claim it is false. For the wise we can sit on the side lines ->Proof is the ultimate squash to all of us who are either theist or fence straddlers. But, as no one has yet been able to prove any of it, atheist, theist, and agnostic alike, the debate goes on. And, in all honesty, it probably will until the end of time.-Proof is the gnostic's illusion my friend.

If "most" of the natural catastrophes that have indiscriminately killed or maimed millions of people through the ages are necessary for life, then a God powerful enough to create a universe must have been incapable of creating life without indiscriminate slaughter. If that comforts and satisfies you, so be it. What about the catastrophes that are not necessary?
> 
> I ended my post by asking: "Why did God create a world in which helpless humans could be destroyed at a moment's notice by forces beyond their control? But to avoid the conventional theological digressions, please focus your attention on natural catastrophes and diseases, and on the time before humans even knew the causes of those diseases." 
> 
> You have answered with: 
> 
> As for blaming humans for not escaping, perhaps you think our ancient ancestors should have jumped into their luxury cruisers when God sent down the Great Flood. (I'm using that as a symbol for all such natural disasters and for the helplessness of their victims).
> 
> I respect your faith, and I acknowledge that my attempts to solve the problem of God's apparent indifference to human suffering are hampered by the limitations of my powers of reason. However, I'm afraid I just can't go along with your exclusive focus on those modern diseases that may have been the fault of humans, and your belief that throughout human history the billions of human deaths caused by "most" of God's floods, earthquakes etc. were necessary for the survival of humans. This sounds to me rather like a lawyer defending his client against the charge of burgling House No. 1 on the grounds that someone else burgled House No. 2, and in any case crime is necessary for the survival of the police force, so who cares about the victims?
> -Ok, so lets back up a couple of thousand years or so, and ask some necessary questions.-1)Did God(s), or some other higher being force people to live in an Earthquake riddled part of the Mediterranean? -2)Did God(s), or some other higher being force people to live within the kill zone of an active volcano? (And for the sake of brevity, let us just apply this question to all areas prone to natural disasters, i.e. flood planes, Hurricane and tornado alleys, etc)-3)Do all such natural disasters provide some form of warning before they strike, that under most circumstances would allow people to evacuate the area, on foot if need be? -Bear in mind that natural disasters have a very limited range, normally of less than 100 miles, which from experience I can testify can be crossed, on foot, with at least 80lbs of goods on your back, in a matter of about 4 days. The effective killing range of most natural disasters is actually MUCH less than that(A mile can clear you from a tornado, 5 miles from a hurricane and less for most other natural disasters. A fleeing human carrying nothing with them can exceed the 25 mile per day mark quite easily. -4)Are there simple and effective ways to survive?-Many natural disasters only require a bit of brains to survive, i.e. cover your mouth and nose if you are in the ash cloud radius of a volcano, try to be outside and away from buildings for major earthquakes. Don't put your house at the bottom of the hill next to the river if you don't want to get flooded, and if you do live next to the river, have a boat, canoe, log raft, reed bundle, or some other floaty thing nearby for emergencies. And our ancient ancestors were clever, they knew the dangers, in fact they worshiped most of these events because they were dangerous. (Egyptian's and the Nile flooding for example)-
As for ancient viruses, the most effective countermeasures we have today, was known by at least 900 BCE. We know this because several of those counter measures were written about in the Torah,(See the list of directions for setting up the Israelites camp as they wandered the desert for 40 years) and included things like proper sanitation and bathing(also huge in the Roman and Egyptian civilizations), latrines being away from your eating and living spaces(Reference ). The major sources of plague could be avoided in a couple of easy steps. First, by not congregating in major cities, and second again with cleanliness(this time avoiding rats and flies, the carriers for two types of plague). It is hard to argue about the possible viruses that were around then, because many have mutated, but truth be told, you don't hear about many viral outbreaks in ancient history. You hear about Plague which is transmitted from rats or flies depending on the type, and then spread from person to person.

dhw maintains: "One of the most powerful arguments for a UI is that life is too complex to have fashioned itself by accident."-And for me this is an ultimate god of the gaps type of argument. Ooohh this is far to complex for me to understand, therefore a UI, a god or a whatever must be responsible. -And for me, pasting examples and links of complex biochemicals as evidence and saying "too complex" does not cut it for me as a method of discussion.-rom