> I'm trying to remember -- I think Luther solved the problem of
> theodicy by arguing that since God's goodness is unknowable, obviously
> our puny human understanding of the term what it means when we say
> that God is "good." I can imagine a race of highly evolved cows would
> refer to the existence of hamburgers as evidence against God's
> goodness.
Not just Luther; that's basically the standard "solution." The standard reply to it is: OK, Martin, tell that to a mother whose two-year-old is presently lying crushed under a mud hut in Bam.
> I am not a theist by the way and am neither defending not attacking
> any of these theological positions.
I realize that!
He also wrote:
> Me: I don't see this: Clearly existence has different modes.
> Betelgeuse, the number "three," consciouness, the law of universal
> gravitation, "justice" and ancient Rome do not all exist in the same
> sense.
Oh, boy -- now we're into ontology. I wanted to tiptoe and whistle past that graveyard.
Of the examples you gave, I would say that Betelgeuse and consciousness exist, ancient Rome used to exist, and the others don't.
You can make their names subjects of the word "is": "Three is the sum of one and two," "The law of universal gravitation is one of the most important physical laws," and "Justice is blind." But that doesn't mean that they exist. "Leopold Bloom is one of the most interesting characters in literature" is a perfectly good, understandable English sentence (and might even be true), but that doesn't mean that Bloom exists, or ever did exist, in any sense. If you go down the road of attributing some "kind" of existence to every subject of "is" in an understandable sentence, then you end up with all sorts of "worlds" in which various sorts of entities exist. That is just unnecessary obscurantism, as far as I can see.
Bertrand Russell analyzed all this sort of stuff early in the twentieth century; I think his approach was probably the best part of his philosophical work.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ After the Buddha died, people still kept pointing to his shadow in a cave for centuries—an enormous, dreadful shadow. God is dead: but the way people are, there may be, for millennia, caves in which his shadow is still pointed to. — And we — we must still overcome his shadow! —Friedrich Nietzsche