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What you could do better than god

Roger Ramjets said:
You are assuming God can do anything. This is not correct.

Again, you assume God could just 'design' a fish and have it turn out 'perfect'. But such a God wouldn't even create that fish in the first place. I mean, if He could do anything then He could design fish with no nerves at all, and that don't need to eat other fish, or live in water, or any of the other things about fish that aren't as 'good' as you imagine they could be. A 'perfect' fish would be an incredible fantasy very different to a real fish - so fantastic that we might not even recognize it as a fish.

You say that if you were God you could just wave your magic wand and do anything you imagine, but how do you know that? We know the real world doesn't work that way. If God exists then He is constrained by reality. If He created the Universe then He made it in a way that uses evolution - not magic - to produce fish and humans. And having done that it might not be possible for Him to change the course of evolution without breaking it in ways we can't even imagine.

The things you think are so important that He should meddle with evolution may not be. Are humans the end goal? That's highly unlikely. More likely we are just another small step along the way, no more important than fish or microbes. Just look at what has evolved so far, and consider the amount 'discomfort' that has caused to the creatures it produced. Clearly avoiding discomfort was not part of the plan. And why should it be? You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.
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If god is unable to do everything, then it is not omnipotent. If this is the case none of the monotheistic gods, and quite a few of the polytheistic gods can exist.
 
GDon said:
Quite the opposite. If a universe that has God plus one good human being is better than a universe with God alone, which universe would God make? I think making a better universe is a good reason for God to do something.
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So god isn't perfect then. He's simply another slob like the rest of us.
 
We've mentioned much on the hardware side but there are big improvements we could do on the software side. Tackle the root of cognitive dissonance, a bit more robust logic handling could clear that up.
 
GDon said:
Well, no it's not. Your conclusion doesn't follow. If it is possible to say that one universe is better than another, then why would God make an inferior one? He would make the best one. Can you explain why God would make an inferior universe?
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It's not obvious to me that a God would necessarily choose to make the best universe. But let's go with that. If you expect the best, then perhaps we need to consider best for whom? Perhaps the universe we have is one that God finds more interesting than one with no suffering. Maybe God likes a bit of drama and tension, so this is "better" than a bland, boring version where everyone is just happy all the time.

If it bothers you that this suggests a God who isn't infinitely good, kind, caring, loving, protective etc etc then maybe we need to check the small print to see if that's guaranteed.

If humans imagine a God loaded down with the baggage of our expectations and then find the concept somehow seems to contradict observed reality, it's not a given that the initial assumptions were all correct and we're just overlooking some key to the explanation.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
It's not obvious to me that a God would necessarily choose to make the best universe. But let's go with that. If you expect the best, then perhaps we need to consider best for whom? Perhaps the universe we have is one that God finds more interesting than one with no suffering. Maybe God likes a bit of drama and tension, so this is "better" than a bland, boring version where everyone is just happy all the time.
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That's actually my exact point in this thread. The thread title is: "What you could do better than god". But what does "better" mean in this context? More convenient? More peaceful? Is making a world where one doesn't need to do anything doing "better" than god?

Imagine a 10 year old Billy Mummy with god-like powers: what might he do that he would consider as being better than god?

Jack by the hedge said:
If it bothers you that this suggests a God who isn't infinitely good, kind, caring, loving, protective etc etc then maybe we need to check the small print to see if that's guaranteed.
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For me the definition of God includes the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence. There may be a Creator of the universe, a Gnostic Demiurge, that doesn't have those attributes, but I wouldn't consider such a being "God".
 
Well, omnibenevolence would seem to put Him in an awkward position when it comes to pointless suffering.

Perhaps the fact that we cannot see His justice in the world is necessary since evidence of His existence would obviate faith in it. And maybe faith is more important than not randomly giving children cancer, because something something.

Maybe running the universe as a contest with one all or nothing prize awarded for believing in something for which there is intentionally no objective evidence is something else we could improve on.
 
Darat said:
We've mentioned much on the hardware side but there are big improvements we could do on the software side. Tackle the root of cognitive dissonance, a bit more robust logic handling could clear that up.
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Cognitive dissonance IS the hardware mechanism for cleaning up inconsistent world models, though. When things conflict too much to be a consistent world model, the dissonance mechanism kicks in. The only real problem in humans basically the ability to solve it by drinking one's own kool-aid.

And I'm not even sure it's bad software or hardware per se. That ability is also why we can choose to believe what's in a medicine book even if it conflicts all previous life experience. But I'm at a loss as to how I would design it so I can't equally choose to believe a homeopathy book.
 
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psionl0 said:
He might think that he is being imaginative but this displays poor imagination.

For all we know, it could have been God Himself who introduced carnivores into the world after the fall as part of the deparadisation of the planet.
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Along with sex. For the depravation of all.

Desparadation? Making desperate people do desperate things?
 
Budding instead of horrific childbirth. A sack on the back that painlessly detaches when the fetus is ready.

A male who isn't wasted by ejaculation, then to turn over and fall asleep.
 
Here's one that most people (outside of biologists) probably never even heard about: palindrome genes (i.e., same sequence of nucleotides back to front or front to back.) They're at a significantly higher chance of being repaired wrong if broken (which happens more often than most of us think) and some of them are the most usual to cause a cancer.

Seems to me like if there is an intelligent designer, who actually lovingly hand-coded that DNA, it should be a pretty clear hint that, you know, maybe either code them differently or code the DNA repair mechanism differently, so it doesn't have this vulnerability.

I'm hard pressed as to why a higher chance of cancer is making it a better universe or making people better. I mean, we're not even talking something sexually transmitted or anything.
 
Apathia said:
Budding instead of horrific childbirth. A sack on the back that painlessly detaches when the fetus is ready.

A male who isn't wasted by ejaculation, then to turn over and fall asleep.
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Good point, but I'd add that it's not even just the pain. Especially in the ancient times when God was, well, playing God, it was a MAJOR source of mortality in women. I mean, to give a sense of proportion, in Old Kingdom ancient Egypt the difference in life expectancy once you're past the infant mortality spike, was 35 for men and 30 for humans. That 5 years difference is almost all childbirth deaths (including deaths by infection soon afterwards and the like.) That's huge.
 
I have many thoughts about how the lower back of the larger primates could be redesigned. Disks that don't herniate would be a great start.
 
"Thou shalt wash thy hands before cleaning a wound" is a simple directive that requires no future knowledge to understand, but would have saved million of lives. If a little germ theory would be acceptable in the commandments of a supposedly omniscient and omnibenevolent deity, "boil your water" would also have had an impact. Funny how they're both missing though.
 
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