YJA Convention 1994 07 Chicago IL First

Author(s): Young Jains of America (YJA)
Publisher: Young Jains of America YJA USA

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want in the Deity, and a want is not consistent with the idea of perfection. Thus buy attributing creation to Deity the qualities of perfection and happiness are destroyed.
goodness, for what would one think of even an earthly father who seeing his son about to commit evil deed and being able to prevent him, took no action in the matter, but punished the son afterwards for his sin? The next thing to be considered is the belief that God is the only eternal existence and that he crated the world out of nothing or else out of himself.
Further, it is admitted that ordinary living beings suffer pain and misery, and that salvation from these pains and miseries can be obtained by obeying the precepts of God as given to the world. But creating souls and bringing them into the pains and miseries of the world and then afterwards giving them precepts, by acting upon which, they can release themselves from these pains and miseries, is not an act of wisdom; for an omniscient and almighty being, who should put a thing into an unsatisfactory condition and then give its rules for its betterment, could not be called wise an benevolent.
Again, an omniscient being has no need, of testing anybody or anything to see what it will do; and if it be said that God put souls into this world to see which of them would obtain salvation and which would not, then the omniscient quality of the Deity is destroyed.
With regard to the theory that God crated the world out of nothing, is there any proof or argument that can be found to support this belief? Apparently not; for nature does not show us that this world came into existence out of nothing; nature does not show us any single instance where something has come into existence out of nothing; everything that we see has had a previous state, and we never see anything that goes into absolutely nothing Physical science has proved that something does not come out of nothing and that a thing cannot be reduced to nothing. If God created the world out nothing, he could destroy it; and this implies that being can be converted into nobeing; so that those who worship the kind of God that we are now considering, worship a being who has the potentiality of becoming non-existent. But "being" and "non-being" are contradictory terms and cannot be converted into each other. Non-being cannot become being, nor vice versa, which is obvious to common-sense and to intuition. Thus the theory that God has created the world out nothing and can destroy it whenever he pleases, is contrary to common-sense, contrary to the intuitive faculty, and contrary to scientific evidence and to natural law.
Again, to attribute creation to Deity is not consistent with goodness, because with a perfectly good creator there would be no evil or impurity in his creation; no worldly ruler desires bad acts to be committed in his country, but worldly rulers are not omniscient and omnipotent, and they cannot therefore prevent such acts from being committed in their kingdoms; but Deity is to be considered as perfectly powerful and benevolent as well as omniscient, and therefore no evil deeds could be committed if Deity is the creator of the world, for he would not give his creatures the power of committing such deeds.
The same is the case in relation to sorrow, pain, disease, and poverty, if it be said that pain and disease are the result of the evil deeds of those who suffer these things, then, if Deity is regarded as the creator who gave people the power of doing evil deeds and afterwards punished them for exerting that power, such a Deity would lack the quality of
The next point is the theory that God is the only eternal existence and has created the world of himself; that is to say, he himself has take the shape of the world. If this theory be held, then the question arises, how God, who is a pure and perfect being, could convert himself into this impure and imperfect world. Either the work of creating the world cannot be attributed to him, or else the germ of the impurity found in the world must have been in him from eternity. That is one difficulty.
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