GENIUS FORUMS

DQ writes:

A distant galaxy is only able to continue existing to the degree that other objects in the Universe, including myself, are prevented from transforming into a force capable of destroying it. It does not really matter that I will probably never change into such a force. All this means is that the causal circumstances will probably never be ripe for me to undergo such a transformation

That it could happen and doesn't is because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that the entropy or disorder of the Universe is always increasing.

Physicists use the concept of phase space to make probablistic arguments. Every particle in the Universe at any given time has three position coordinates and three momentum coordinates, given an arbitrary choice of a coordinate system (where the "0's" are in the six dimensional space we construct.) Physicists believe that at the beginning of the Universe, all particles were in an extremely ordered state, densely packed together, and that if even one of the particles had been in a diffrent state, the Universe as we know it would be entirely different. This accords with David's assertion that everything is somehow connected.

In fact, following an argument I borrowed from Roger Penrose, physicists are able to estimate just how unlikely this highly ordered state of the early Universe would be if it occurred purely at random. (Of course, by this reasoning, any initial state would be equally as unlikely). The chances that the original state happened purely randomly are one in 10 x exp [10 x exp (123)]. You could not write this number out in regular notation, since if you could write down a "1" and attached a zero to every particle in the Universe, you wouldn't have enough particles for all the zeros that would have to follow the "1".

My point here is that the initial state of the Universe was extremely ordered, but not perfectly so, or else it would be uniform - homogenous - today, and it clearly is not. This is assuming - and just about all physicists do assume this - the Universe proceeds in a direction of increasing entropy from any given moment to the next. By this I mean the Universe as a whole. To envision this more clearly, phase-space diagrams are helpful. Here is a link to The Large, the Small and the Human Mind by Roger Penrose at Amazon.com if you are interested. This book covers these ideas very succinctly with clear diagrams, if anyone is interested.

Where I have trouble agreeing with David is here:

The dust-particle in a different position would have an entirely different causal web in support of it, which means that the effects of this web would be entirely different. It is very possible that the none of us would be here, that the human race would never have evolved, that the stars and planets would have evolved very differently, and so on. It is indeed very much like a stack of cards.

It is very possible, but there is nothing to argue that it is even remotely likely. In that respect, it is nothing like a house of cards, because if you chose a card at random to remove from any such house of cards, the chances are the house will crumble. Let me rephrase that slightly: the chances are much greater the house would fall than the chances of our dust speck's having been somewhere else would mean the entire Universe would somehow be unrecognizable.

Given the topic of our thread, I submit the hypothesized highly ordered state of the very early Universe as evidence that a Creator or Designer is or was involved, and again, I know this is not proof but I'm still going for that preponderance that Kevin challenged me to produce.

brokenhead wrote:DQ writes:

A distant galaxy is only able to continue existing to the degree that other objects in the Universe, including myself, are prevented from transforming into a force capable of destroying it. It does not really matter that I will probably never change into such a force. All this means is that the causal circumstances will probably never be ripe for me to undergo such a transformation

That it could happen and doesn't is because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that the entropy or disorder of the Universe is always increasing.

Physicists use the concept of phase space to make probablistic arguments. Every particle in the Universe at any given time has three position coordinates and three momentum coordinates, given an arbitrary choice of a coordinate system (where the "0's" are in the six dimensional space we construct.) Physicists believe that at the beginning of the Universe, all particles were in an extremely ordered state, densely packed together, and that if even one of the particles had been in a diffrent state, the Universe as we know it would be entirely different. This accords with David's assertion that everything is somehow connected.

In fact, following an argument I borrowed from Roger Penrose, physicists are able to estimate just how unlikely this highly ordered state of the early Universe would be if it occurred purely at random. (Of course, by this reasoning, any initial state would be equally as unlikely). The chances that the original state happened purely randomly are one in 10 x exp [10 x exp (123)]. You could not write this number out in regular notation, since if you could write down a "1" and attached a zero to every particle in the Universe, you wouldn't have enough particles for all the zeros that would have to follow the "1".

My point here is that the initial state of the Universe was extremely ordered, but not perfectly so, or else it would be uniform - homogenous - today, and it clearly is not.

I don't understand these terms "early Universe" and "initial state of the Universe". In a Universe that stretches back forever, these terms have no meaning.

In fact, Penrose's arguments only have substance when it is assumed that the Universe had a beginning. In a beginningless Universe, the kinds of probabilities he talks about lose all significance.

Even if the current space-time bubble that we inhabit (i.e. what scientists currently call the "universe" or "cosmos") was produced against the odds, the endlessness of time dictates that these kinds of fluke events are bound to happen sooner or later.

brokenhead wrote:Where I have trouble agreeing with David is here:

The dust-particle in a different position would have an entirely different causal web in support of it, which means that the effects of this web would be entirely different. It is very possible that the none of us would be here, that the human race would never have evolved, that the stars and planets would have evolved very differently, and so on. It is indeed very much like a stack of cards.

It is very possible, but there is nothing to argue that it is even remotely likely. In that respect, it is nothing like a house of cards, because if you chose a card at random to remove from any such house of cards, the chances are the house will crumble. Let me rephrase that slightly: the chances are much greater the house would fall than the chances of our dust speck's having been somewhere else would mean the entire Universe would somehow be unrecognizable.

The point I'm making is obvious once you see it. But if you are looking for scientific reasons to accept it, then you need look no further than Chaos Theory. There, it talks about the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in China causing a hurricane to emerge in America. Small events leading to massive outcomes. Everything that happens has consequences, which means that if the events are different then the consequences will be different. And these differences can only grow bigger and bigger with time.

The same reasoning applies in reverse, to the past unfolding of causality.

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David Quinn wrote:

I don't understand these terms "early Universe" and "initial state of the Universe". In a Universe that stretches back forever, these terms have no meaning.

In fact, Penrose's arguments only have substance when it is assumed that the Universe had a beginning. In a beginningless Universe, the kinds of probabilities he talks about lose all significance.

In a Universe that agrees with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity - and ours seems to - space and time form a curved hypersurface in 4 dimensions; both time and the three spatial dimensions began at the same point in space-time.

No physicist or cosmologist questions the validity of Einstein's equations. In fact, General relativity is the most accurately verified physical theory we have, due to fairly recent measurements on distant quasars. It holds to 1 part in 10 exp (14).

What physicists do not agree on is the future of the Universe, whether it at some point begins to collapse upon itself or continues to expand in one of two main ways.

That space and time have a common point of origin (i.e., that Einstein's General Relativity is correct) has been more or less accepted since I was studying physics at Cornell and BU. Granted you may disagree with it, or "not understand" it, as you put it, but studying it and scientifically veryifying or ruling out theories is what cosmologists do. The general agreement seems to hold down to the time when the Universe was one one-thousandth of a second old. From that point on, the accepted model is the expanding Universe. But at times close to what is known as the Planck time, 10 exp (-43) sec, physicists believe that quantum effects had to have been significant because of the extremely tiny volume all the Universe's matter occupied. They have no theory (as yet) that combines General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. This is not the same as Relativistic Quantum Mechanics, which deals with the special theory of Relativity and subatomic distances, which is very well understood and verified.

DQ writes:

The point I'm making is obvious once you see it. But if you are looking for scientific reasons to accept it, then you need look no further than Chaos Theory. There, it talks about the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in China causing a hurricane to emerge in America. Small events leading to massive outcomes. Everything that happens has consequences, which means that if the events are different then the consequences will be different. And these differences can only grow bigger and bigger with time.

It is from Edward Lorenz's talk at meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972, which he called Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?

I don't claim to be any kind of expert on Chaos Theory, but I did do a paper on it once as an undergraduate. I think you have to be careful about generalizing on the concept of the butterfly (or seagull, as Lorenz originally had it.) Yes, every change in initial conditions of a deterministic system results in a change in the way the system evolves. To see this difference in practice, you can take a system and measure the way it evolves, then repeat the trial, this time slightly changing the initial conditions and observing how the system evolves differently from the way it did the first time. Historically, chaos was discovered by using computer simulations and altering input parameters of trial runs of the model being studied.

Taking the Universe as a system, you obviously cannot go back to the initial phase space state of all its particles, make your small change, and see what happens. What you can do is construct physical systems whose initial state can be modified and run repeated trials to view the ensuing chaotic behavior - if any.

Here you encounter the notion of a time-frame. The butterfly in Brazil might cause a tornado in Texas, given time. In fact, in a Universe with an infinite future (one that does not conform to the so-called "Big Crunch" scenario), the thinking goes, that tornado must happen. However, by then many tornados will have happened in Texas. There would be no way to know which one was "caused" in the distant past by the butterfly's wings, unless you could go back in time and kill the butterfly before it got a chance to flap its wings. David, you make this point about paradoxes encountered by the notion tof time-travel in science fiction.

If you take the view that in an infinite-futured Universe, the butterfly's wings must be an ancestral cause to a tornado in Texas at some future time, then you are forced to conclude two other things: 1) The butterfly must also eventually likewise "cause" a tornado every where else, and 2) every other butterfly must also "cause" a tornado in Texas, given enough time.

So in some sense the Butterfly Effect is simply cause and effect. The term is used in cases where a small change in initial conditions results in dramatic changes in resulting behavior of a system within an observable time-frame, and where the process is entirely deterministic.

Okay, I threw too much science into this thread.
I agree you can't prove God exists.
I am trying to demonstrate it, or point to things that are much more difficult to explain, discuss, or understand if one assumes God does not exist.

The results have been underwhelming.

Let me try a different approach. If you cannot prove a Creator does not exist, and you cannot prove a Creator does exist, do you just throw up your hands? Wouldn't you want to err on the safe side, you know, not piss off the Big Kahuna? Look, if he's promising a better world after this one, why would you not want to jump on the boat?

brokenhead wrote:If you cannot prove a Creator does not exist

What's the difference between your "Creator" and any normal creator, like ourselves, or also like an alien creator being who might have created our universe?

Why are you giving it a capital "C"? Are you implying that there is such an intelligent alien creator being who themselves were not created and are without any cause whatsoever? Such a thing is impossible.

Wouldn't you want to err on the safe side

The safe side is the logical side. The side of reason.

, you know, not piss off the Big Kahuna?

If there is such an alien being, you might piss him off by being illogical.

Look, if he's promising a better world after this one, why would you not want to jump on the boat?

If he's an evil creator, then you will be on the boat to hell.

If he's an evil creator, then you will be on the boat to hell.

The creator (small "c" - better?) gets to decide what's good and evil. Parent and child. A child may have his definite ideas, but he cannot, nor would he be permitted, to run the household.

brokenhead wrote:

If he's an evil creator, then you will be on the boat to hell.

The creator (small "c" - better?) gets to decide what's good and evil. Parent and child. A child may have his definite ideas, but he cannot, nor would he be permitted, to run the household.

In your opinion, is the creator, as a parent, doing a good job running this world?

brokenhead wrote:Let me try a different approach. If you cannot prove a Creator does not exist, and you cannot prove a Creator does exist, do you just throw up your hands? Wouldn't you want to err on the safe side, you know, not piss off the Big Kahuna? Look, if he's promising a better world after this one, why would you not want to jump on the boat?

I understand your point and I did think over that as a youngster, but I couldn’t however bring myself to jump on the boat since my humanity wouldn’t allow it; I cannot be that selfish you see, and turn a blind eye to the miseries of humankind as a whole. You know what…. I wouldn’t mind being roasted for eternity, but not before the creator justified his non-interference in the miseries of the world that I came from; knowing just that would be worth aaaaany trouble.

What do you think of this approach?

brokenhead wrote:

If he's an evil creator, then you will be on the boat to hell.

The creator (small "c" - better?) gets to decide what's good and evil.

So if an alien being created our universe, are you saying that they can decide what is good or evil, but that we can't?

But what if that creator was evil but dictated that their evil is in fact "good"?

brokenhead wrote:
Let me try a different approach. If you cannot prove a Creator does not exist, and you cannot prove a Creator does exist, do you just throw up your hands? Wouldn't you want to err on the safe side, you know, not piss off the Big Kahuna? Look, if he's promising a better world after this one, why would you not want to jump on the boat?

Pascal's Wager would have to be the weakest argument for believing in God ever devised.

Wouldn't 'he' know if one was hedging bets?

I understand your point and I did think over that as a youngster, but I couldn’t however bring myself to jump on the boat since my humanity wouldn’t allow it; I cannot be that selfish you see, and turn a blind eye to the miseries of humankind as a whole. You know what…. I wouldn’t mind being roasted for eternity, but not before the creator justified his non-interference in the miseries of the world that I came from; knowing just that would be worth aaaaany trouble.

What do you think of this approach?

I think it's juvenile and lazy. Since you asked.

When I was a youngster was about the last time I resorted to that approach, myself. But nothing else seems to be working here.

Nothing about having faith requires you to turn a blind eye to the pain in the world. Nothing. In fact, just the opposite is true. Which you would know if you let yourself know it. It was Christ's claim that "Whatsover you do to the least of my brothers, that you also do unto me." The very message of Christianity is to be part of the force the creator uses to help root out the broods of vipers which we all know are around us.

You question why this world is permitted to be the way it is. The truth is, the way it is is not being tolerated. If you keep asking the question, you will one day know the true answer. I'd give it to you as I understand it, but my own comprehension is wanting, as I'm sure you can tell. I am, however, doing the best I can.

The notion of not having faith because you don't like what you see around you is self-defeating. It's static. If you have that attitude now, you're likely to have it tomorrow and the day after. It will block your progress. The adage is to "seek, knock, and ask" in order to get answers, not fold your arms across your chest and refuse to play. Not having faith has enabled you better to do something positive about humanity's sufferings? How is it such advanced thinkers can't seem to comprehend the fallacy of this line of "reasoning"?

You take it upon yourself to judge your creator.

What religon ever promised an end to suffering in this world?

This world is designed to be a crucible. It is to be a field of wheat and chaffe.

Sapius - how's it working for you? Expecting the suffering of mankind to be justified to you? If I were a god, I'd put you in the last group of people who get the "justification," along with all the others who believe they deserve it.

I believe it makes you feel better to have others know you feel this way than it does to actually feel this way. If I felt that way, I'd be too embarrassed to admit it! It would mean there is something fundamental about existence that I was not grasping.

There's no such thing as being roasted for eternity, so while it's very brave to state that, you are in no danger of risking it.

Once you get the idea of God - and his Creators like Jesus - being loving Fathers, you will understand what I'm trying to get across.

And Kevin, my point is that the alien creator cannot be evil, or more precisely, that we cannot be good in relation to him. You say what if he turns out to be evil - I am asking, who would be telling us that? We decide it for ourselves? The child does not make the rules. The created cannot make the standard up to which the creator must live.

This frees man to use all his powers to actually improve his world. That there are many good people who have never even considered whether or not humanity was created is the best argument I can think of for a loving creation. This world improves slowly, and once we do our bit in it, we are offered a better one. Only a fool would not try to discern what this promise implies and then take the issuer up on it.

Ataraxia wrote:

brokenhead wrote:
Let me try a different approach. If you cannot prove a Creator does not exist, and you cannot prove a Creator does exist, do you just throw up your hands? Wouldn't you want to err on the safe side, you know, not piss off the Big Kahuna? Look, if he's promising a better world after this one, why would you not want to jump on the boat?

Pascal's Wager would have to be the weakest argument for believing in God ever devised.

Wouldn't 'he' know if one was hedging bets?

Your point being...?

All right, Ataraxia. I won't disagree, since I don't get your point. What are the better ones?

Brokenhead;

Sapius - how's it working for you? Expecting the suffering of mankind to be justified to you? If I were a god, I'd put you in the last group of people who get the "justification," along with all the others who believe they deserve it.

Frankly, all is working quite fine, and I am not necessarily expecting any justification really; for obvious reasons of course. However, I did mention I am willing to go through any trouble to know, so being last in the line is no big deal. Or may be you could tell me now if you know, as to what is God’s justification? Or you think could possibly be. For example; death of an innocent child through natural disasters, or an act of a tyrant.

Please don’t go beyond that; I do not deny that any religion does not have good moral values incorporated within, and I respect them. For example; don’t do unto others that you would not like done unto you, or even wish ill of someone may be. This alone covers a great deal of good moral values if followed whole-heartedly.

Or may be you could tell me now if you know, as to what is God’s justification? Or you think could possibly be. For example; death of an innocent child through natural disasters, or an act of a tyrant.

When you are a child, you ascribe powers and motivations to your temporal, imperfect parents.

When you are a spiritual child, you do the same to God. I don't know how else to put it.

The closest explanation of God's mysterious ways I have found is in the Urantia Book. It's not for the faint of heart or the person who gives up easily, not is it for people who cannot learn. You are asking me a question; I'm telling you where to get a better reply than I think I could give. It's that simple. Although it has taken me years to read it and understand it to the extent that I do. I expect further reading to make it clearer.

In brief, the Universal Source divests himself of everything he can except his authority. He divests to something, namely his creations. His immediate creations are the other two members of the triune Godhead, on the other side of what Kabbalists refer to as a "ring-pass-not."

On this side, his immediate creations are his Creator Sons, through whom the millions of universes are created. All of his will, all of his actions, are through beings, most of whom are sentient and eternal.

Christ is one of millions of such Creator Sons and is our creator as other beings in other universes have theirs.

The gift given to God's children is will. Even a tyrant gets that. It is a mistake to blame the creator for the actions of his will-creatures, just as it is mistaken to ignore the fact that such tyrants are in the end judged and cast down. To permit only the good is to ignore the "free" part of "free will," and to ignore the plain fact that we are in an evolutionary world, one that could contain no good if it were not permitted to harbor evil as well. The end result of exercising one's will in contradiction the the divine will is not an eternity burning in a mythical hell. This concept originated with the Zoroastrians, who often incorporated fire into their scarificial rites. The end result is rather creature extinction. Death of the physical body is an end we all share; death of the spirit is something which in the end has been chosen by a creature endowed with personhood, endowed with will.

Gainsaying what is, is pointless. Concluding there is no creator nor deeper meaning to life because the world is not perfect is something any child can do. And most children probably do just that. What benefit is there to cease developing past your childhood concepts and certainties? I'll bet there is no other area in which you ceased to grow. You have to be open to further mathematical thought, for example, even after all the effort you put in to memorizing the times tables up to 12 x 12.

Just a word of brotherly advice, Sapius. I don't know what if any established religion you were brought up in, but appealing to the clergy of any denomination for answers is like asking the IRS to prepare your taxes.

BK, can I get back tomorrow. It's rather late for me.

brokenhead wrote:my point is that the alien creator cannot be evil, or more precisely, that we cannot be good in relation to him.

Why not?

You say what if he turns out to be evil - I am asking, who would be telling us that? We decide it for ourselves?

Certainly.

The child does not make the rules.

The child must decide for themselves what is right and wrong if they are to be a moral being. If they just go along with what their parents say, then they don't really exist as a human being. They will be without a soul.

If the parents are evil and the child just goes along with what the parents say, then the child will share the same evil fate as the parents.

The created cannot make the standard up to which the creator must live.

Why not? If my parents break the laws of the land then they will be judged and found guilty. The same goes for any creator.

Kevin Solway wrote:

The child must decide for themselves what is right and wrong if they are to be a moral being. If they just go along with what their parents say, then they don't really exist as a human being. They will be without a soul.

If the parents are evil and the child just goes along with what the parents say, then the child will share the same evil fate as the parents.

It is heartening to hear you write in these terms. You are assuming an evil parent will suffer an evil fate.

The analogy of Creator/Man with Parent/Child traditionally presupposes a nicely functioning household. I'm not speaking of some kind of Supreme Grifter here, Kevin.

To what, then, does the child of evil parents appeal as he correctly decides for himself what is right and wrong? It was Christ that said a man must be prepared to hate his mother and father in order to follow him. More: if your eye offends you, pluck it out.

That there is right and wrong independent of the genetic chain is evidence of a creator being.

If in fact this creator being, good or evil, exists, what was his motivation to create? I posit that Love is sufficient motivation, and that no parent who begets with Love will neglect its offspring.

brokenhead wrote:To what, then, does the child of evil parents appeal as he correctly decides for himself what is right and wrong?

Reason and truth.

That there is right and wrong independent of the genetic chain is evidence of a creator being.

No. There is truth and untruth, but the fact the fact that there is truth and untruth is not evidence of any intelligent alien creator being. Why do you think it is?

If in fact this creator being, good or evil, exists, what was his motivation to create? I posit that Love is sufficient motivation

Hatred would also be sufficent motivation.

Hatred as a motivation to beget offspring? Where do you see this happening?

brokenhead wrote:Hatred as a motivation to beget offspring? Where do you see this happening?

I'm saying that hatred could be a motivation for creating something. It doesn't take much imagination to work out why.

No. There is truth and untruth, but the fact the fact that there is truth and untruth is not evidence of any intelligent alien creator being. Why do you think it is?

You had used the terms good and evil. I will accept your switching truth and untruth for them. We do not manufacture truth. Yet it exists and is recognized. Every truth requires at least three things: itself, its negation, and the thing experiencing or proclaiming it. In our case, the third thing is Man. I can conceive of a world containing life that does not also contain Man. As such, Man is unnecessary to life. So in this world, we have life and Man. That truth exists and is perceived by Man, indicates another Will as antecedent to both.

brokenhead, I understand that you are not a typical Christian, but you seem to nevertheless identify as a Christian of some form. I have significant problems with the typical Christian model so I'm sympathetic that you are looking for better answers. I on the other hand do not identify as a Christian although I keep an open mind. Several months ago on the now-closed Future Philosophy board, in a thread where a Christian (Wazeer) began proselytising, I spelt out one of my difficulties with traditional Christianity and I proposed a modified and, IMO, more plausible, model. It was a wordy post so I'll try to summarise it here in case you couldn't be bothered reading through it. Basically I elaborated on what Sapius wrote a few posts ago in this thread:

I wouldn’t mind being roasted for eternity, but not before the creator justified his non-interference in the miseries of the world that I came from; knowing just that would be worth aaaaany trouble.

Now I suspect that Sapius was exaggerating for poetic effect because I can't imagine anyone who "wouldn't mind being roasted for eternity", but his point (or at least my interpretation of it) is a solid one: there is an inconsistency between the Christian conception of God and what we observe His (in)actions to be. The traditional Christian God is all-powerful. As an all-powerful being He surely could have created and maintained a world of perfect bliss where free will still existed but where evil and suffering did not. In other words: an all-powerful God could have created a heaven on Earth where suffering was unknown and impossible, or at least where it was wiped out when it came to be. Furthermore, the traditional Christian God is perfectly benevolent, meaning that He wants His sentient creations to live in a world of bliss without suffering. Therefore not only could He have created such a world, but He should have. The fact that in reality, we find a world where there is rampant suffering, is strong evidence that the traditional Christian conception of God is seriously flawed.

My proposed solution to this is to drop the notion that God is all-powerful. If we are to consider a Christian-like conception of reality then I propose that a more likely model is a manichaeanistic world, where good and evil forces battle according to pre-existing rules, and where God as the ultimate protagonist of good, and Satan as the ultimate protagonist of evil, are relatively equally powerful. This at least would provide an explanation for suffering: God would detest it yet would not have the power to completely prevent it. This basic scenario could be expanded upon but I won't speculate further unless you're interested.

brokenhead wrote:In brief, the Universal Source divests himself of everything he can except his authority.

As the ultimate authority though, He nevertheless retains the ultimate responsibility, so...

brokenhead wrote:It is a mistake to blame the creator for the actions of his will-creatures

...it is not a mistake to blame the Creator for the actions of those over whom He exercises authority. He is free to constrain and direct their actions, is He not? He is no less responsible for choosing not to.

brokenhead wrote:To permit only the good is to ignore the "free" part of "free will,"

I disagree. Our choices are always a "limited"[*] set. We are still free when our (limited) set of choices is wholly good as when our (limited) set of choices also contains evil choices.

brokenhead wrote:and to ignore the plain fact that we are in an evolutionary world, one that could contain no good if it were not permitted to harbor evil as well.

I don't understand this reasoning. Why can a good world not exist with a total absence of evil? Isn't that the traditional conception of heaven?

brokenhead wrote:Concluding there is no creator nor deeper meaning to life because the world is not perfect is something any child can do.

Agreed, and I will continue to consider the plausibility of alternatives, as it seems you are doing.

[*] I placed "limited" in inverted commas because I suppose that the set could be infinite but there are nevertheless things that it does not contain.

I'm saying that hatred could be a motivation for creating something. It doesn't take much imagination to work out why.

Oh, I have a dark enough imagination to work that out. But that's not what I'm talking about, I'm not talking about merely "creating something," but rather creating a sentient being. I'd like to believe people do not procreate in order to have someone upon whom they vent their hatred. Although I am sure that happens. In nature, you see creatures minding their young. I don't presume to call that love; it certainly does not resemble hatred. In humans, I gladly use the term love. And for that alien being who may have created both nature and humans, it seems fitting also to call the being's motivation "love," as we may assume the being is superior to ourselves.

brokenhead wrote:I'd like to believe people do not procreate in order to have someone upon whom they vent their hatred.

Firstly, that's just what you'd like to believe, and secondly, a creator alien might not view the creation of a universe as "procreation".

we may assume the being is superior to ourselves.

Why? Just because they are more powerful than ourselves?

Laird writes:

I don't understand this reasoning. Why can a good world not exist with a total absence of evil? Isn't that the traditional conception of heaven?

I think such worlds do exist, and that is the direction our own world is headed.