I’ve never understood why god would create beings that are so primed to want things that we end up describing as evil.
We’re not really just here as neutral choosers with free will. Take drugs for example, we’re literally designed at a neurological level to become hopelessly addicted to heroin if we touch the stuff.
That seems quite cruel to do to a being as its designer. We could easily be designed such that there aren’t a bunch of substances lying around that induce extraordinary pleasure and then horrific dependence.
Similarly, a lot of evil that people do is a result of how their brains are wired. Pedophiles for example, to a large extent seem to be wired in such a way that they derive pleasure from that, with the best outcome that they just never act on this desire that’s to an extent built into their neurobiology. Why would you make someone like that, and if you cared for the beings you designed, however it is that the mistake entered into them, wouldn’t it be so much kinder to just remove the mistake that somehow got into their brains on your watch? Both for the sufferers and for anyone they may end up harming or abusing?
Instead religion seems to treat it like a willpower problem. One with eternal consequences. Yet reality seems to repeatedly indicate that it’s not really a willpower thing, more often it’s some form of brain problem that leads to a large fraction of evil. Like the guy who developed a brain tumor and started having constant violent urges until he shot up a bunch of people at a university, and left a note saying please study my brain I just know something wrong happened to it. Or the guy who took the metal stake though his brain and lost all self control and self inhibition.
Materialist models seem to explain a lot of this quite well. Someone has some form of perversion, or is even just gay, well it looks like the function of the brain that generates objects of sexual desire just happened to develop on the wrong object in this case. Or this guy suddenly started having violent urges all the time, oh look, there’s a tumor pressing on the part of his brain relating to aggression.
But if we’re in a Christian worldview… how horrific is it that the stakes of this guys eternal soul were decided by a tumor and that god tested him like that, or that the pedophile or addict is burdened with constantly needing to resist what seems to be a fault in the architecture of their brains, as if in many cases the evil was designed into them from the start or came about in their very biology in some cases through no fault of their own.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that both sides might consider the other more of a threat for matters that concern them than some Iranian mullah is
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I’ve never understood why god would create beings that are so primed to want things that we end up describing as evil.
We’re not really just here as neutral choosers with free will. Take drugs for example, we’re literally designed at a neurological level to become hopelessly addicted to heroin if we touch the stuff.
That seems quite cruel to do to a being as its designer. We could easily be designed such that there aren’t a bunch of substances lying around that induce extraordinary pleasure and then horrific dependence.
Similarly, a lot of evil that people do is a result of how their brains are wired. Pedophiles for example, to a large extent seem to be wired in such a way that they derive pleasure from that, with the best outcome that they just never act on this desire that’s to an extent built into their neurobiology. Why would you make someone like that, and if you cared for the beings you designed, however it is that the mistake entered into them, wouldn’t it be so much kinder to just remove the mistake that somehow got into their brains on your watch? Both for the sufferers and for anyone they may end up harming or abusing?
Instead religion seems to treat it like a willpower problem. One with eternal consequences. Yet reality seems to repeatedly indicate that it’s not really a willpower thing, more often it’s some form of brain problem that leads to a large fraction of evil. Like the guy who developed a brain tumor and started having constant violent urges until he shot up a bunch of people at a university, and left a note saying please study my brain I just know something wrong happened to it. Or the guy who took the metal stake though his brain and lost all self control and self inhibition.
Materialist models seem to explain a lot of this quite well. Someone has some form of perversion, or is even just gay, well it looks like the function of the brain that generates objects of sexual desire just happened to develop on the wrong object in this case. Or this guy suddenly started having violent urges all the time, oh look, there’s a tumor pressing on the part of his brain relating to aggression.
But if we’re in a Christian worldview… how horrific is it that the stakes of this guys eternal soul were decided by a tumor and that god tested him like that, or that the pedophile or addict is burdened with constantly needing to resist what seems to be a fault in the architecture of their brains, as if in many cases the evil was designed into them from the start or came about in their very biology in some cases through no fault of their own.
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