What's So Great About Ushas

b sharp · 12 Jul 2008, 04:30 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

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From: bsharporflat at hotmail.com (b sharp)
Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:30:36 -0400
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas
Message-ID: <BAY103-W325E04E1CCEA7D93DA5FD7D7930 at phx.gbl>

Paul B, I still think you are missing the crucial factor and thus missing some of the
best of what science fiction and religious philosophy has to offer in regard to the 
superhuman (and sorry if my last post sounded testy, it wasn't meant to). Your 
example of a surgeon harvesting organs from a "worthless" bum to save "great"
men demonstrates my position quite well, so I'll use it.  

Despite your assertion that the surgeon has foresight in this situation you are wrong. 
The surgeon is only guessing, making a judgement that the bum is worthless and that
the men he saves are great and more worthy of life. The surgeon has no way to know
with certainty whether the bum would become a world-saving saint if he had lived 
another year. Or if one of the great men he saves will become a genocidal monster 
within a year.  He is gambling with people's lives and dealing out death based on his
own limited value judgements. That is why utilitarianism is a bankrupt basis for morality;
 it involves gambling.  Gambling with other people's lives but relying on less than perfect
 knowledge and judgement. Yep, the surgeon here is "playing God".

But God (or a god-like omniscient being) is not gambling or making individual value 
judgements in his/her/its actions.  God knows exactly what the bum and the great men
will become within a year and beyond.  He not only knows that, he knows what the exact
impact of a death or a life or even the flap of a butterfly's wing will have on every single 
other living creature on earth, yea the effect it will have on every quark and every galaxy
in the universe through eternity. No gambling involved at all.

This sort of certainty of consequences places God in a moral postion impossible to compare
to your surgeon or Gandhi or any other human being.  We cannot judge such a God or 
understand it because it is so far from human comprehension.  But I will go out on a limb 
to suggest that God's omniscience in understanding of consequences is so complete as to 
offer no choices of action. All that is done must be done to provide the best possible outcome.
In other words, God has no free will. And thus God has a moral position equal to a rock and 
the equivalence to a rock in being subject to moral judgement by humans.

-bsharp

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