bluegenes:
Whereas other animals, plants and anything else around us, are still fully part of reality.
It's a good question... your mind seems to work in a rather logical fashion to me.
Actually, even the rest of reality suffers as a result of our part missing the mark.
Romans 8:19 The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
bluegenes:
I'm not a Deist, but at least, in their view, I'm entirely real. And for them, presumably, knowledge is perfectly O.K., even a good thing.
But the deist has a problem. What do they make of
the bad if everything is real and therefore true?
Is all knowledge good?
I don't know how to seduce a 2 year old girl... Am I missing out by not exploring that knowledge?
It may be a crude example, but where do we draw the line?
Let's look at something closer to home... the destruction of the environment. Is it just a fact, or is it wrong?
Many a deist would denounce it. But if everything is everything and all is real, then can we denounce
anything as wrong?
It's almost pantheistic in it's duplicity.
Consider the words of Chesterton:
"But the new rebel is a Skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be a real revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything, really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind, and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but also the doctrine by which he denounces it.
Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity and then curses Mrs. Grundy when they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is a waste of time. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland and Ireland because they take away that bauble.
The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts.
In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything."
(Orthodoxy, Chapter title - The Suicide of Thought / 1908)
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