bluejay writes:
I concluded that conflict is an unavoidable side effect of free will. And, any attempt to control the "bad" effects of conflict would be plagued with more conflict over what constitutes "bad," and would only be resolved by the loss of free will.
And so where does that leave us, with respect to having any sort of reliable, coherent understanding or expectation about what God might be doing for us, or what His purpose(s) might be, or what considerations should hold sway as we try to decide on our various individual courses of action?
Things happen that we perceive to be bad, often as a direct and unavoidable consequence of conflict, which is an intrinsic property of our existence. And God, in whom we believe and to whom we pray, lets (makes?) these things happen for reasons beyond our ken -- and so we must accept these things because God's judgment is in fact inscrutable to us.
Please try to explain where I've gone wrong in trying to follow your logic, because when I put that line of reasoning up against general assertions like "God is good" and "God's purpose is made clear to us in the Bible" and "the Bible is the foundation of moral judgment" and so on, I detect a colossal self-contradiction, or at least, a substantial tendency to be misleading, misguided, and fairly meaningless.
I think I can follow that line of thought further to conclude that, since God does not inhibit free will, He is not really in a position to answer a significant proportion of prayers. Is that consistent with your point of view?
Ultimately, I would pursue this perspective on God to arrive at something quite similar to what Dawkins says about deism/theism in general: that this is an unnecessary and superfluous concept -- it really contributes nothing to our overall understanding of ourselves, our situation, or reality as a whole. Everything can be understood much more clearly and coherently on the basis of natural (as opposed to supernatural) explanations and practical evidence, or practical inference where evidence is lacking, or sensible analogy/metaphor wherever practicality might somehow be "inapplicable". No deities with special powers are required.
Any sense of purpose that we might detect is purely of our own invention. This fact in itself does not devalue the sense of purpose that we instinctively assign to existence as we perceive it, but like everything else in our perception, our current understanding of purpose leaves room for improvement. Fortunately, there seems to be a built-in tendency for "improvement" (in some inter-subjective sense that is shared by many of us) to be a predominant vector as we continue to evolve.
Obviously, there are ample opportunities for interruption, reversal or even outright annihilation of that vector, but in a non-deistic culture, we would at least have the wherewithal to improve our understanding of it while it continues, and to do what we can to try to keep it going, without struggling over vain attempts to attribute everything to some inscrutable entity that requires our devotion.
Edited by Otto Tellick, : minor edit in 5th paragraph
autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.
™ Version 4.2
