Turning the problem of evil on its head (The problem of good)
I was speaking with a theist friend of mine the other day, and he found an interesting way to counter the problem of evil. His arguement went:
Since God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, onle he knows why things happen. Despite the fact that you, or me, as mortal humans might witness many seemingly evil things happen, we just see it that way because we do not have enough perspective towards the future, in reality those seemingly evil acts will turn out to have been good in the future, we just dont know it yet, only God knows it.
This line of argument seems logically coherent, but I knew there was something fishy about it. So I decided to turn the problem of evil on its head, with the following thought experiment:
Suppose Im parting from the premise that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-malevolent. With all the evil and suffering that we see in the world, it doesnt seem like such a crazy conclusion. I am, however, confronted with a certain amount of good things that go on in the world, which presents an obstacle to the existence of an all evil, all powerful, and all knowing God. I then proceed to say, that since God is omniscient, only he really knows what effect these "good" events will have in the future. In reality, all these seemingly good things that are happening just look good to us, because we dont have his perspective towards the future, in reality, these good deeds will further down the line, end up bringing the greatest amount of suffering possible.
It seems to be that if I can justify an all evil, all knowing, and all powerful God with the same line of argument my friend used, then there must be something wrong with it.
What is it?
Is there some flaw in my thought experiment?
Please enlighten me
Since God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, onle he knows why things happen. Despite the fact that you, or me, as mortal humans might witness many seemingly evil things happen, we just see it that way because we do not have enough perspective towards the future, in reality those seemingly evil acts will turn out to have been good in the future, we just dont know it yet, only God knows it.
This line of argument seems logically coherent, but I knew there was something fishy about it. So I decided to turn the problem of evil on its head, with the following thought experiment:
Suppose Im parting from the premise that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-malevolent. With all the evil and suffering that we see in the world, it doesnt seem like such a crazy conclusion. I am, however, confronted with a certain amount of good things that go on in the world, which presents an obstacle to the existence of an all evil, all powerful, and all knowing God. I then proceed to say, that since God is omniscient, only he really knows what effect these "good" events will have in the future. In reality, all these seemingly good things that are happening just look good to us, because we dont have his perspective towards the future, in reality, these good deeds will further down the line, end up bringing the greatest amount of suffering possible.
It seems to be that if I can justify an all evil, all knowing, and all powerful God with the same line of argument my friend used, then there must be something wrong with it.
What is it?
Is there some flaw in my thought experiment?
Please enlighten me
Comments (53)
Likewise, the existence of good is insufficient to disprove the reality of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnimalevolent God. Again, by itself, this does not justify the belief that there is such a God.
Anyway I think it is an interesting counter-argument, although I'm not entirely sure if it works:
If an omnibenevolent God exists, one wonders why he allows evil to exist. This might be defended by a number of means, like appeals to free will, appeals to divine compensation after death, etc. Theodicies.
If an omnimalevolent God exists, one wonders why he allows good to exist. How can this be defended?
The trouble is that I can imagine a universe that is better and worse than the universe I live in. Theodicies try to explain why the universe is not better than it could be. I see no method of doing so for an omnimalevolent God and explaining why the universe is not as bad as it possibly could be. Theodicies defend an omnibenevolent God against the problem of evil, while there doesn't seem to be any defense of an omnimalevolent God against evil. An omnimalevolent God would not care about free will, or divine compensation, or any of that. Why would he wait to inflict pain and suffering and evil? Why not do it now, and forever?
Now, of course, we could see God as a wrathful, vengeful, or manipulative trickster who takes pleasure in other people's pain but likes to watch the story unfold for dramatic affect. This is surely an evil God but not an omni-malevolent God, who would instead inflict evil upon the world for the sake of inflicting evil upon the world.
... is indeed a weak one, that works just as well backwards as forwards.
Try instead the argument from freedom.
Moral good (distinguished from aesthetic good, perhaps) only arises from moral freedom. One is not morally good if one cannot do otherwise. Therefore the possibility of evil is necessary to moral good.
As to God, an evil god must be endured if such is the case, but has no impact that I can see on morality or religion. If the Arsehole is in charge, one must do the best one can, which will be little enough. In this sense, faith in a good god is more of a declaration of allegiance than a declaration of fact. Similarly, to say "I believe in justice" is not to claim that justice invariably prevails but that I will that it should prevail.
Stephen Law's 'Evil God' challenge
Quoting rickyk95
There is something fishy about all arguments concerning the existence or nature of God.
I do think you might have an interesting point. Your argument might work if it is further developed as a way to make some theists drop the type of counterargument you presented without further explanation on part of the theist.
However, two issues:
1) It appears, intuitively, easier to imagine how things could have been worse then better. It is very easy to create plans that involve the entire population of earth that make things horrible. It is much harder to create a plan that turns out good.
2) The skeptical theist can accept that both criticisms are valid. Remember that the problem of evil is a positive argument against the existence of God. One only needs to provide a defense against the argument. It needs to show the problem is evil argument, however formulated, is somehow invalid or unsound. The skeptical theist presenting the skeptical response probably has other reasons to believe God exists, so any potential explantion or way to get around the argument without creating problems for their beliefs are fine, including accepting the argument you presented.
Augustine and, Aquinas more specifically, thought that evil is a privation, not just the absence of good but the deprivation of good, G creation is good. They also thought along with the Bible that man's ability to see what G's plan is is not possible. G asks Job, where the hell were you when I put this all together, G sees all that is, was and will be, we don't know how evil events may fit into his plan.
If the essence of G is perfection, perfect power, perfect knowledge, perfect evil (?). I wonder if perfect evil is logically possible. Is perfect evil a coherent possibility, or does the idea fail. If the essence of evil is imperfection itself, then the notion of perfect evil fails itself. Aquinas quotes Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethic "Therefore, the Philosopher says (Ethic. iv, 5) that "if the wholly evil could be, it would destroy itself"
The problem of evil begins from the assumption that God is benevolent, omniscient and omnipotent: Assuming that God is so, how is it possible that evil exists? The task of solving that problem need not involve finding justifications for the assumption that God is so. It need only involve providing an account of what is called evil that is consistent with the assumption that God is so.
Likewise your problem of good. The problem of good begins from the assumption that God is malevolent, omniscient and omnipotent: Assuming that God is so, how is it possible that good exists? The task of solving that problem need not involve finding justifications for the assumption that God is so. It need only involve providing an account of what is called good that is consistent with the assumption that God is so.
Accordingly, your solution to the problem of good does not provide any justification for the claim that a malevolent God exists. It only provides (or aims to provide) an account of good that is consistent with the assumption of a malevolent God.
This is one I came up with myself too a while back. I presumed some philosopher had advanced it, which @andrewk has confirmed. Anyway, the idea that this is the worst possible world and ruled over by an omnimalevolent being is hardly less absurd than its contrary. At least advancing the argument seems a fair riposte to the old panglossian chestnut it subverts.
Assuming heaven and hell exist, an omnibenevolent god can create hell - for justice. But an omnimalevolent god cannot create heaven - a place of eternal bliss.
And since such a god can't create heaven he wouldn't be omnipotent. This implying he is lesser than the omnibenevolent, omnisicient, omnipotent god we're familiar with. We already have such an entity - Satan
Maybe not disprove, since the theist can always appeal to God's mysterious ways and divine perspective being different from ours, but it sure seems like a rationalization to me, not a good justification for evil existing.
Basically, if people want to believe in an omni-god, then they'll find ways to make the argument work. But it comes across as sophistry to someone who doesn't begin with the premise that such a God must exist.
An omnimalevolent being cannot create heaven - a place of eternal bliss. Therefore it cannot be omnipotent. Therefore it cannot be a GOD, who must be omnipotent.
The omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient god doesn't face this problem because this god can create everything, including hell - to dispense justice.
Perhaps my argument is not that good. However, I think it makes sense.
An omnipotent X has the ability to create any particular thing but isn't obliged to create any particular thing. Absolute malevolence and absolute benevolence weigh equally as logical constraints here.
God doesn't claim to be omniscient either : ""Do not lay a hand on the boy," he said. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son." - Genesis 22:12
If you actually read the Bible you'd see that God is a vengeful, judgmental jealous uncompassionate ass. Even in Jesus' head, he pleads with God to forgive everyone, because they don't really understand what they're doing. Moses pleads with God to not just kill all of his peeps for the golden calf thing. People have to be good, and actually ask God for things to happen, otherwise they're implied to just take an uninvolved natural course. Like when someone is going to die, they can pray to have their life extended. One needs to be a holy dude, doing the work of God. God just lets things happen pretty much otherwise, or worse, just would fucking extirpate everything that rubs him the wrong way, without the human prophets giving a case for moderation, and leniency.
It might be the cost of anything happening. Stuff usually occurs in pairs - up/down, north/south, day/night. And you can't have one without the other - you can't have ONLY mountains, because without valleys, it would be simply a vertical plane. and so on.
A lot of complaints about God are anticipated by Lewis' book title 'God in the Dock'. They act like the world is this hotel or set of managed apartments, and God is the manager. 'Hey the service is terrible here. The taps are leaking, carpet is mouldy, I WANT TO SEE THE MANAGER'. In other words, unless life is like a perfectly stage-managed spectacle full of happy endings and healthy people, then there must be something the matter with whoever is in charge.
And there it is, the horribly glib attitude of the bougeois religious in the face of evil. We ask how can an omnibenevolent God preside over, for example, the sexual torture of trafficked children? And cometh the answer: "Meh, day/night; now stop complaining, it's not a hotel around here."
If you think nothing people do is relevant to the problem of evil then that's a novel philosophical position to say the least.
Natural evils are things like epidemics, natural calamities, famines, and the like. And they don't seem 'evil' to me either, any more than a landslide is. It seems to me, you can't have a world where nobody dies, nobody gets sick, where there are no carnivous animals and no diseases.
So in short, I think most or all of the evil that is so freely attributed to deity nowadays, is more likely the work of man.
Either the omnimalevolent (let's call it x) being can or cannot create heaven.
If x can create heaven x can't be omnimalevolent because there is some good in it that allows x to contemplate such a thing as heaven.
If x can't create heaven then x isn't omnipotent
Doesn't work. Knowledge of good does not morality constitute. And further, consciousness of ability is not a necessary existential condition thereof.
There you make a distinction between ability (the power to create heaven) and obligation (loosely translated as intent) to create heaven.
You state that this omnimalevolent being (call it x) can create heaven but is not obliged to do so.
Well, in this case it seems x is obliged, by virtue of its omnimalevolence, NOT to create heaven. Since x is under obligation NOT to create heaven it loses its claim to omnipotence - x is under an obligation NOT to do something (create heaven).
By definition in that case (unless it serves a greater evil). Just as by definition an omnibenevolent God is obliged not to do evil (unless it serves a greater good). This is a logical constraint of the thought experiment.
An omnipotent and omniscient God could ensure that only the best things happen in every situation. But then we'd have no free choice. And free choice is essential to the human nature, so if God wanted to ensure that only the best things happen in every situation, there would be no human beings. If God is omnibenevolent as well, then it must be the case that creating human beings, and allowing human beings to exist, and have free choice to make mistakes and even create evil, is better than not creating human beings.
This is how God gives of Himself, in the act of creating. He has determined that it is better to create situations in which He will restrain His omnipotence because he has decided through His omniscience, that it is better to have such situations. Therefore He takes from His own omnipotence, to give to us the power of free choice by means of restraining His power to act. He has determined that allowing us the power of free choice is better than exercising His omnipotence. And so He has acted, through His omnibenevolence to suppress His omnipotence, to create us and allow us to exist with freedom of choice. This is why God's gift of creation is so special, because he actually takes from Himself, His omnipotence, by restraining Himself, to give to us the freedom of choice. It is the highest selfless act, which is to willfully take from yourself, to give existence to another.
You could of course dispute the compatibility of omnipotence with omnibenevolence/omnimalevolence, but that wasn't what our disagreement was about originally. It was your assumption of an asymmetry (which by its nature needed to take the principle of that compatibility for granted) which I argued against.
God created man in his own image and so on. But I'm less interested in the theology than the psychology here.
An omnimalevolent being can't create heaven - a place of eternal happiness. I don't see what obligation has to do with this.
Are you saying an omnimalevolent being can create heaven but it simply won't? Are you saying such a being is not obliged to create heaven?
However, it is obliged not to create heaven - out of its omnimalevolence and out goes its omnipotence.
The omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient god creates hell to punish sinners. There IS a relevant assymetry.
It's all in the above. If you still don't see why your cherry-picked example can't be generalised to render only one half of the dichotomy incoherent (and herein lies your claimed asymmetry) then all I can suggest is you consider a few more examples.
Perhaps some form of necessary moral transcendental is needed by man to make sense his existence, to be able to unequivocally say genocide is evil, whenever & wherever.
So if God can't do any better than create a world with genocide, sexual trafficking, famine and predation, why create a world in the first place? And the hotel manager is a terrible metaphor, as if the inconvenience of a poorly run hotel is somehow equivalent to the holocaust, or people starving to death.
David Benatar's argument really comes into force with a being like God.
Because maybe, just maybe, us humans can do our bit to make sure it happens. Instead of whining about it like a Benatar.
Why not? I can imagine a world in which that particular rabbit wasn't hit by a car last night. I can imagine a world in which that fish wasn't sucked into the motor of a maritime vessel. If I can imagine these particular cases as non-existent, why can't I imagine the entire set of particular cases as non-existent?
I mean, sure in this day and age we can be naturalists and believe there is nothing "objectively" evil to natural disasters. But back in the age of the Pre-Socratics and before that we were animistic and believed evil gods and demons were the source of these calamities.
The naturalistic turn, in this particular case, happened when we stopped seeing the world as divided by good and evil forces and saw it as simply indifferent. We went from seeing something that made no sense and making it meaningful to making sense of the world by realizing it makes no sense. It makes no sense for any of this to happen.
There is plainly an element in religion which is concerned with soliciting for benefits, safety and favour, going right back to ancient 'rights of propitiation'. Buddhism, in principle, is supposed never to be concerned with such things, but on the village level, it is frequently combined with animism, intercessory prayer and veneration of ancestors. Here in Australia every year, there is a 'blessing of the fleet' (i.e. fishing boats), a ritual that is apparently conducted by Catholic priests. Such practices seem endemic to human cultures and despite the wishes of the Enlightenment don't seem likely to be going away. But whether they're essential to the real meaning of religion is another question.
As for the 'naturalistic turn', I read that in terms of Max Weber's 'disenchantment of the world' which describes the attributes of modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society, where scientific understanding is prized over belief, and where processes are oriented toward rational goals, as opposed to traditional society where 'the world remains a great enchanted garden'. That sense of disenchantment is what gives rise to the feeling (and that is what it is) expressed so memorably by Stephen Weinberg, that 'the more the universe seems intelligible, the more it seems meaningless'.
Even if it were impossible to be different, why should this change the ultimate worthiness of such a universe? Just because it's the best-possible-universe doesn't mean it's actually a good universe.
It would be immensely sad and concerning if this really was as good as it got. I mean, this probably is why people believe in heaven after all.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah.
I think critters behave like it's a good universe. They have a natural exuberance. Humans loose touch with that - that is part of the predicament of 'the human condition' - but we have to recover that sense of wonder and mystery. That is the problem, the absence of that sense.
See the problem with moderns is that they've attached their religious identity, such as it is, to the sensory domain. So they tremendously value youth, sex, hedonism, but then of course we all know all of that will age, curdle, wither away in time. That is what gives rise to the sense of bitterness and dissappointment so often expressed in these threads.
Yes, time-consciousness is a key, if not fundamental, aspect of existentialist and pessimistic philosophies. The reason these animals are "exuberant" as you say is taken to be because they aren't as conscious of themselves as we are. The more conscious you are, the more you aware you are about things. The key is to get right in that goldylocks zone, which humans are unfortunately out of.
This, of course, is more of a symbolic story than an accurate biological history, especially in terms of animal happiness, because on average animals live fairly short lives filled with stress. Pain may even be worse for animals because they can only endure or escape, they can't fix like we can. Although the idea of a "surplus consciousness" is something from Freud and Zapffe and is a key part of things like depressive realism. Colin Feltham has a good book(s) on this.
I see the myth of the fall as being a parable about self-consciousness. It symbolises the origin of language and identity. I read the synopsis of a book by Georges Battaille about this idea - he sounds like a rather unsavoury character otherwise, but his theory of the meaning of 'primal intimacy' and the advent of self-consciousness rings true. It revolves around language and tool use - at that point, the idea of possession becomes possible, and also the idea of loss, and the realisation that other subjects exist, who don't conform to my wishes. This represents a profound loss of innocence, the realisation of our aloneness and the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of death. Sacrifice is seen as a returning to the God or gods of the tools or powers which we have been given, which gives them something beyond utility - almost like returning a gift to its rightful owner, so as to relieve oneself of the responsibility of owning it. Sacrifice is a way of symbolically returning to the womb of nature, the 'time before time'.
That is also a theme which is explored by religious studies scholar Mercea Eliade, in his seminal works like the Myth of the Eternal Return. Ancient man divided the world into the profane realm, and the sacred domain of the ancestors/gods/spirits, which were invoked through ritual and sacrifice.
The predicament of modernity is that this sense of the sacred has been lost or displaced. Where I think it has shown up again, is the quest for interstellar travel - now we literally, physically want to 'go to the heavens', via machines that for now (and possibly for ever) only exist in fantasy realms, which can travel 'faster than light' thereby literally dissappearing into the super-luminal realms. 'Warp drive, Scottie!'
We could be made of something more resilient than meat. Even as meat, we're not optimally designed to last and avoid injury. We just have enough resilience to reproduce and raise children, on average.
You can't really tell me that God couldn't think of a better design. Our bones could be made of carbon nanotubes. Or immune systems could be much more resistant. But for that matter, why do we inhabit a world where we need immune systems? Why should the environment be chalk full of things that would like to hijack our cells or feed on us? That's just horrific.
Why oh why does life exist at the expense of other life? Why can't the entire biosphere be massively symbiotic? Are you telling me that God is incapable of that?
And aging is unnecessary. Our germ line is ageless, going back all the way to the first life. Cells don't necessarily have to age. There are several organisms who don't show any aging.
And what is up with cancer? Are you telling me that God couldn't make our cell reproduction mechanism robust enough to avoid uncontrolled growth? Is God that bad of a designer? Are you telling me that cancer is unavoidable. That no possible design could have eliminated the possibility?
We can make machines faster, strong, and of more durable material than our bodies. Can God not even do that much?
I don't think most human beings actually consider this sort of free will to be a good thing, but I'll create another thread about it.
Until they're being chased by a lion, or fail to find water during a drought, or have parasites infesting their brain.
Science fantasy.
We're talking about God, who didn't find it too hard to create an entire universe with the laws of physics as they are, and you're telling me that making animals with carbon nanotubes instead of calcium is too difficult? Gimme a break.
We're talking about 'conceptions of God', mainly entertained by those who believe there is no such being, and therefore no real understanding of the term, so therefore interprets 'omniscience' to mean 'anything I think is possible'. The break you're looking for is to actually be God.
Omniscience means to know everything. What exactly is meant by knowing all things is debateable, but non-believers did not' invent the term.
Quoting Wayfarer
Wouldn't this apply to believers as well?
That is one easy argument to dismiss.
The existence of 'good' (or fleeting moments of non-pain and no suffering) don't necessarily undermine an evil/oppressive world where the individual is merely meat for the machine and nothing more.
In the movie 1984, a character by the name Winston Smith can for brief moments seem to be able to outmaneuver the totalitarian state by both knowing the truth from the many of the lies he is told and by the fact he is willing to take risks when undertaking many actions which he knows could get him into trouble. One could imagine the fact that an individual such as Winston doing such things could be a threat to 'Big Brother' (the evil all powerful state), but Big Brother often just sits back to when it suits them to arrest someone instead of 'swooping in' merely at their first thought crime. As the movie seems to put it, 'Big Brother' prefers for some it's victims to have a fantasy that they have managed to safely fooled him before getting caught, brainwashed, and made a scapegoat like all of it's other political prisoners.
Another way to put it, in a Machiavellian world the ability of people to sometimes be good and or have pleasure doesn't mean it is any less Machiavellian. I guess someone might believe that an all-powerful Machiavellian God might want to increase suffering as much as possible, but there is nothing that I know of that says that such a God would do so, As far as I know an all-powerful Machiavellian God could merely be an apex predator choosing to consume and destroy (and possibly sometimes creating something to later consume and destroy) as it pleases them, and things not immediately being harmed by it would very unlikely threaten it omnipotence, and any other omni whatever powers it might have. All it would mean is that it is still just meat for the machine.
The only reason there does not exist a school of thought examining this is simply because its just so uncomfortable for people to even entertain the idea.
I see no reason why God can't achieve these future goods without putting innocent and good people through such gratuitous suffering in the process. He's not bound by any such reason, he can have it both ways if he wants to.
Both of the arguments used are examples of self-sealing or fallacious arguments, i.e., any counter-evidence in terms of evil or good is justified by saying it's not evil or good. It's like saying "All cars are blue," and someone's response is, as they point to a car, "But this car is yellow," then they respond, but that's not a car. Thus it's self-sealing because they will not admit to any counter-evidence, they simply deny it.