There's a difference between designing a meaningful study to understand something, and thinking that it has to comply with rules we set out in advance.
We can design studies to understand how lightening works. But we don't ask why lightening strikes good people as well as bad people. We don't try to attribute to it motives that match our motives. For all we know, electricity may have immense intelligence of a kind and a nature totally different from ours. But that doesn't prevent our ability to study and understand WHAT it does and HOW it does it. It just affects the WHY it does it.
Similarly, with our presumed deity, you're focusing on the why would it do this, or more exactly, why would it do it in ways not consistent with our human ethics. I'm suggesting that we can try to understand what it does, and how it does it, without feeling a need to get into the why. We can also study the why, but should do so with open minds, realizing that its reasons may be--indeed almost certainly are--based on concepts of good and evil, right and wrong (if it is even based on those) totally alien to our ideas of right and wrong. And heck, we maybe the playthings of a child God, who worries no more about why he/she/it does what he/she/it does than a baby thinks about why it sucks its thumb. |
