Solving the problem of evil
I have a lot of sympathy with much of what those who think the problem of evil refutes God say. I agree with them that it is highly unreasonable to believe an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent person would create a world like this one and then dump innocent ignorant people in it, knowing full well the risks of harm this would generate.
And when theists respond by trying to show how certain goods might plausibly require exposing us to such risks, I am wholly unimpressed. For this is an omnipotent being we are talking about, and so the idea that an omnipotent being 'had' to expose innocents to this or that risk of harm in order that some good could accrue to them seems, well, confused - for an omnipotent being can do anything and thus didn't 'have' to do that at all. That they did, when there was no need, once more seems incompatible with their goodness.
So I am with the proponents of the problem of evil in agreeing that this premise is highly plausible - indeed, I can see no reasonable way of resisting that wouldn't simply trade on a misunderstanding of omnipotence:
1. If God (an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent person) exists, then he would not suffer innocents to live in ignorance in a dangerous world
But the proponent of the problem then adds the following premise to get to their desired conclusion:
2. We are innocents living in ignorance in a dangerous world
From which it follows:
3. Therefore, God does not exist
But it seems to me that premise 2 of that argument is not self-evident to reason. Our reason does not directly tell us that we are guilty or innocent - it is silent on the matter. As it is often said, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So, that our reason does not directly attest to our guilt or innocence is not evidence that we are positively innocent. It makes it a reasonable default assumption - granted - but that's not the same as thinking we have positive evidence of innocence. It's the presumption: there's a presumption of innocent. But a presumption of innocent is not evidence of innocence.
I think, then, that premise 2 is not self-evidently true. We just 'assume' we are innocent. We do not have positive evidence of it. This is of the first importance.
Anyway, I reason like this:
1. If God exists, then he would not suffer innocents to live in ignorance in a dangerous world
2. God exists
3. Therefore, God has not suffered innocents to live in ignorance in a dangerous world
As with the previous argument, this one is valid. And it shares the same first premise - a premise I think is beyond reasonable doubt.
The difference is in the second premise. But it seems to me that my second premise is supported by reason. That is, its truth is implied by some self-evident truths of reason. One might think otherwise, but 'if' it is, that is 'if' there is good positive epistemic reason to think God exists (not merely an absence of any reason to think he does not), then my second premise is more reasonably believed to be true than the second premise of the earlier argument. Again, this is very important as it means there's no 'problem' of evil at all.
For an analogy: imagine you have no recollection whatsoever of what you did yesterday. Do you have any reason to think you committed a crime yesterday? Well, given you remember precisely nothing, you have no reason to think you did. However, you do not have positive reason to think you didn't.
Now, other things being equal, if you have no reason to think you committed a crime, then it would be reasonable to conclude that you did not. That's the default.
But what if someone now shows that there is some apparent evidence that you did commit a crime: your dna is at a crime scene or something?
Well, now, surely, it does become reasonable - as reasonable as that evidence makes it - to think that you committed a crime yesterday? The fact that, absent that evidence, you had no reason to think you committed a crime and were thus default justified in thinking you didn't, doesn't mean that you still have reason to think you didn't commit a crime. The evidence that you committed a crime now makes it reasonable to think you did.
That, I think, is how things stand with the problem of evil. If there is no positive evidence that God exists, then we are default justified in believing ourselves to be born innocent. And thus premise 2 of the first argument is default justified and the conclusion is one it would be reasonable to draw.
But if there is some positive evidence that God exists, then the default does not apply. You just simply have some reason to think you are guilty of something - how strong a reason would depend on how strong the evidence is that God exists.
If this is correct, then there isn't really a problem of evil at all. There's just the question of whether God exists or not. The fact we are living in ignorance in a dangerous world is not positive evidence that God does not exist if, that is, there is a scintilla of evidence that he does exist. Again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; and so thinking there is a problem of evil is a akin to thinking that the presumption of innocence provides positive evidence of innocence. So, we do not need to worry about the problem of evil: if there's evidence that God exists - any evidence at all - then the 'problem' instantly vanishes.
To put it another way, it is not a 'problem', but just the upshot of assuming that we have no independent evidence of God's existence. For yes, if we have no independent evidence of God's existence, then it's reasonable to assume we're innocent and thus that we are living in a world God would not have created and dumped us in. But if we do have some - any - evidence of God's existence, then it just ceases to be reasonable to assume we're innocent. That evidence 'just is' evidence of our guilt. The 'problem of evil' does not, then, generate any countervailing evidence. It is not a hurdle to be overcome. One ounce of evidence for God, becomes one ounce of evidence of our guilt. Problem dissolved.
And when theists respond by trying to show how certain goods might plausibly require exposing us to such risks, I am wholly unimpressed. For this is an omnipotent being we are talking about, and so the idea that an omnipotent being 'had' to expose innocents to this or that risk of harm in order that some good could accrue to them seems, well, confused - for an omnipotent being can do anything and thus didn't 'have' to do that at all. That they did, when there was no need, once more seems incompatible with their goodness.
So I am with the proponents of the problem of evil in agreeing that this premise is highly plausible - indeed, I can see no reasonable way of resisting that wouldn't simply trade on a misunderstanding of omnipotence:
1. If God (an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent person) exists, then he would not suffer innocents to live in ignorance in a dangerous world
But the proponent of the problem then adds the following premise to get to their desired conclusion:
2. We are innocents living in ignorance in a dangerous world
From which it follows:
3. Therefore, God does not exist
But it seems to me that premise 2 of that argument is not self-evident to reason. Our reason does not directly tell us that we are guilty or innocent - it is silent on the matter. As it is often said, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So, that our reason does not directly attest to our guilt or innocence is not evidence that we are positively innocent. It makes it a reasonable default assumption - granted - but that's not the same as thinking we have positive evidence of innocence. It's the presumption: there's a presumption of innocent. But a presumption of innocent is not evidence of innocence.
I think, then, that premise 2 is not self-evidently true. We just 'assume' we are innocent. We do not have positive evidence of it. This is of the first importance.
Anyway, I reason like this:
1. If God exists, then he would not suffer innocents to live in ignorance in a dangerous world
2. God exists
3. Therefore, God has not suffered innocents to live in ignorance in a dangerous world
As with the previous argument, this one is valid. And it shares the same first premise - a premise I think is beyond reasonable doubt.
The difference is in the second premise. But it seems to me that my second premise is supported by reason. That is, its truth is implied by some self-evident truths of reason. One might think otherwise, but 'if' it is, that is 'if' there is good positive epistemic reason to think God exists (not merely an absence of any reason to think he does not), then my second premise is more reasonably believed to be true than the second premise of the earlier argument. Again, this is very important as it means there's no 'problem' of evil at all.
For an analogy: imagine you have no recollection whatsoever of what you did yesterday. Do you have any reason to think you committed a crime yesterday? Well, given you remember precisely nothing, you have no reason to think you did. However, you do not have positive reason to think you didn't.
Now, other things being equal, if you have no reason to think you committed a crime, then it would be reasonable to conclude that you did not. That's the default.
But what if someone now shows that there is some apparent evidence that you did commit a crime: your dna is at a crime scene or something?
Well, now, surely, it does become reasonable - as reasonable as that evidence makes it - to think that you committed a crime yesterday? The fact that, absent that evidence, you had no reason to think you committed a crime and were thus default justified in thinking you didn't, doesn't mean that you still have reason to think you didn't commit a crime. The evidence that you committed a crime now makes it reasonable to think you did.
That, I think, is how things stand with the problem of evil. If there is no positive evidence that God exists, then we are default justified in believing ourselves to be born innocent. And thus premise 2 of the first argument is default justified and the conclusion is one it would be reasonable to draw.
But if there is some positive evidence that God exists, then the default does not apply. You just simply have some reason to think you are guilty of something - how strong a reason would depend on how strong the evidence is that God exists.
If this is correct, then there isn't really a problem of evil at all. There's just the question of whether God exists or not. The fact we are living in ignorance in a dangerous world is not positive evidence that God does not exist if, that is, there is a scintilla of evidence that he does exist. Again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; and so thinking there is a problem of evil is a akin to thinking that the presumption of innocence provides positive evidence of innocence. So, we do not need to worry about the problem of evil: if there's evidence that God exists - any evidence at all - then the 'problem' instantly vanishes.
To put it another way, it is not a 'problem', but just the upshot of assuming that we have no independent evidence of God's existence. For yes, if we have no independent evidence of God's existence, then it's reasonable to assume we're innocent and thus that we are living in a world God would not have created and dumped us in. But if we do have some - any - evidence of God's existence, then it just ceases to be reasonable to assume we're innocent. That evidence 'just is' evidence of our guilt. The 'problem of evil' does not, then, generate any countervailing evidence. It is not a hurdle to be overcome. One ounce of evidence for God, becomes one ounce of evidence of our guilt. Problem dissolved.
Comments (150)
Thus, Onan self-flagellates ...
Quoting 180 Proof
Here it is for your convenience:
1. If God exists, then he would not suffer innocents to live in ignorance in a dangerous world
2. God exists
3. Therefore, God has not suffered innocents to live in ignorance in a dangerous world
:up: Keep it coming, keep it coming!
I just want to bounce something off of you. Have you ever noticed how justice and evil seem indistinguishable? They employ the same method - inflicting pain and causing suffering, That means, it isn't necessarily the case that the suffering extant in the world is evil, it could be justice.
It seems a fundemental issue here is that it isn't possible to talk about us existing outside of existence, and the existence we have, the one in which we come in to being, is filled with all sorts of evils.
Perhaps it makes sense if we assume we existed outside this world before, sinned, and have been thrown into this one for our transgressions- with our memories wiped obviously. Then a guilt sperate from a reality awash in evil makes sense.
This, of course, is largely what Abrhamic faiths accept. We existed in the Garden, and were thrown into the fallen world for our sin. Our blame is grounded in a world without hurricanes, cancer, or 9 minute long Meatloaf ballads. Only in that case, our guilt is a shared one as the descendants of rebellious ancestors.
Plenty of conceivable divinities are consistent with this world. The only one that isn't is an omnibenevolent, anthropomorphic God who operates doing whatever people assume a really smart, really powerful God would do to induce maximum "good."
An evil God, an incompetent God, an incompetent or evil demiurge, an unknowable God, etc. are all compatible with this world. I don't know of any faiths that propose a God that extends maximum joy and pleasure to creation, perhaps because it is rather unbelievable.
God as the Absolute, being positing that-which-it-is-not in order to define itself, is certainly compatible with suffering and pain.
---
Anyhow, back to the idea of guilt. I think the idea of sin and guilt were a major historical progression. In ancient philosophy, you really don't see the concept of the will. You see prohairesis in Aristotle, but that is too narrowly defined to be our "will." You have some degree of subdivision in the Stoics, with the distinction of desires of the mind and appetites of the body, but still, this does not include the element of intentionality key to the will.
The will, as that part of the mind which desires, decides, chooses, and acts, comes far more into focus with Saint Paul and particularly Saint Augustine. With the coming of Christ, you have the need to differentiate actions based on the autonomy and choice of the actor. After all, it only makes sense for one to be condemned for one's choices if they are truly choices. At the same time, the concept of redemption only works if one chooses to turn from sin and to Christ. You have to be damned to be redeemed, and redemption through forgiveness requires a will to contrition.
In the Old Testament, choice is less of a focal point. God "hardens the hearts" of sinners and stays their course in sin. When God becomes man, the burden of control shifts, and man becomes responsible for his own redemption. He must choose redemption precisely because he is damned; if he was free from sin, the concept makes no sense.
To my mind, this marks a progression in the religious understanding. From fearing God, "wisdom is the fear of the LORD," to choosing God, even to the point of self-negation, "to die in Christ I count as gain." And obviously here, self negation also means the negation of the will, "not my will but your," which has to exist to be negated.
So I've come around on the OP, if maybe not in the sense it was intended: guilt is essential.
If God exists, then the 'evils' of the world - the risk of harm our ignorance exposes us to - are our just desert goods. That just follows as a matter of logic from these two premises:
1. If God exists, then he would not suffer innocents to live in ignorance in a dangerous world
2. God exists
If there is no evidence that God exists, then we are default justified in believing that God does not exist, because we're default justified in believing ourselves to be innocent (which implies God's non-existence).
But if there is any evidence at all of God's existence, then that evidence is evidence that we deserve to face the risks of harm that our ignorance is exposing us to here.
... therefore a corollary of my argument: only an "omnibenevolent" deity is worthy of worship (any other kind is indistinguishable from a capricious / malevolent "demon" or "extraterrestrial").
Quoting TheMadFool
I don't think so. When just (justified via legitimate authority), punishment – enforcing punitive justice – inflicts suffering. Evil, however, inflicts suffering usually indiscriminately and always without justification, or legitimacy. Justice is not "indistinguishable" from injustice, Fool.
Quoting 180 Proof
A sentence no doubt but also more than just a sentence. :up:
... therefore, the argument in OP is unsound at minimum. The "default", btw, is undecided, not "justified" (re: 3-value logic). :yawn:
"Evidence"? – faith is no longer good enough? Anyway, pro-tip: Theism is demonstrably not true. Amen! (I mean: you're welcome, B.)
Quoting TheMadFool
Quoting TheMadFool
Your premise assumes God has full control over people and doing so in line with his omnibenevolent nature, you omit free will of people, it's completely absent and nowhere mentioned.
This leads to conclusion that God-people relationship is master-slave rather than master-freeservant which obviously we all know is not true.
Secondly, we have evidence that free will in human live is not lacking, it is obviously present, therefore expecting God to control us is contradictory to fact.
What? No, I assume we do have free will. How else did we come to deserve to be here?
Quoting SpaceDweller
Eh?
Quoting SpaceDweller
I know we have free will. I don't see what your point is. We have free will, and due to how we have exercised it at some earlier time, in some other place, we came to deserve to be here. Hence we're here.
Therefore if God exists:
1. He can not be the source of evil because it's contradictory to it's omnibenevolent nature.
2. He is not required to prevent evil because this would be contradictory to our free will.
God's not an arsehole, right? By definition, he's morally perfect. And he's also all powerful. So he can do anything and he's nice. He's not, then, going to create a dangerous world and put ignorant innocent people in it, is he?
So, if he exists, he hasn't. Not has. Hasn't.
But here we are, living in ignorance in a dangerous world.
He wouldn't have put innocent people in that predicament.
So......we're not innocent, then. We must 'deserve' to be here.
There are two main ways you can come to deserve something. Something really bad happens to you and so you come to deserve good things as compensation. Well, that clearly doesn't apply here.
The other way is you exercise your free will and attempt to do wrong to another. That's what we must have done.
So, if God exists, this world is not 'evil'. It's a prison in which everyone is getting their just deserts: that is, everyone is being left to languish in ignorance in a world in which that ignorance exposes us to arbitrary risks.
Thus, any evidence that God exists is evidence of that - evidence of our guilt. And in that way, the problem of evil is dissolved.
Since God is omnibenevolent and since we have free will, then it's logical to conclude "dangerous world" is not dangerous because of God but rather because of us.
The rest of your post is thus not in line with this logic as well.
No problemo. Here's something funny :point: 'Missing' man joins search party looking for himself!
No, it is 'logical' to conclude that God made us ignorant and placed us here because we jolly well deserve to be here facing the risks of harm that our ignorance creates for us.
Look, this argument is valid and apparently sound:
Quoting Bartricks
So I do not know why you keep talking about what is logical, given that there's no question the above is. Logically, evidence that God exists is evidence of our guilt.
"ignorance" is relative word, it may mean many different things including those which have nothing to do with God or our suffering.
ignorance is subjective.
The only knowledge that matters is knowledge of good and evil, which is what free will encompasses.
Quoting Bartricks
You see, it's not clear what is meant by "ignorance", what kind of knowledge do you think would set us free of suffering?
Hidden premises.
Unwarranted assertion. (This again.)
Invalid inference (1, 2)
It is certainly more self evident to reason that a newborn is innocent than that God exists.
It appears that: God exists (at least to you), if God exists he wouldn’t let innocents suffer here, infants are innocent.
These aren’t consistent so which do we doubt? You doubt the third, that infants are innocent in this argument:
Quoting Bartricks
You use the first 2 as fact. But one can easily use different combinations:
1- If God exists, he can prevent innocents from going into a dangerous world.
2- God exists and doesn’t prevent innocents from going into a dangerous world
3- Therefore, God doesn’t mind innocents suffering here
Or:
1- If God exists innocents would not be allowed into a dangerous world
2- Innocents are allowed into a dangerous world
3- Therefore God doesn’t exist
It really is a matter of which appearances you take as premises and which you don’t. Which is why (as I said) these questions keep popping up:
1- How do you deal with a conflict between your own appearances? Why did you choose the first argument instead of the later two? Does it not seem to you that infants are innocent? If so:
2- How do you deal with a conflict between what appears to you and what appears to others? It appears to virtually everyone that infants are innocent but you don’t trust it, but on other matters you’re happy to quote the opinion of experts as indicative of “proper” appearances, so when do you trust what appears to others and when do you not?
You think that everyone is incapable of understanding your arguments when, by your own words, fish sticks can understand them. Everyone understands your ramblings Bart, they’re doubting your “self evident” premises.
I get the logic. What I am rejecting is the premise that humans could somehow be guilty outside of their relationship to being in the world.
The problem is one of causality. The world can't be bad because man is bad, if man doesn't exist before the world does. For the justification of evil by guilt to work God must:
A. Make the world bad prior to man's existence, because he knows man will be bad. In which case the guilt proceeds the crime and can't be the cause of it.
B. The world was originally good, but was changed because man was bad. This only makes sense though is human guilt is collective and hereditary.
The view that the evils that befall man are due to man's transgressions is taken up and rejected in the Hebrew Bible in an interesting way. Job's friends are found guilty by God for claiming that evil only comes against those who are evil, and for claiming to speak for God vis-a-vis condemnation. The problem of evil is addressed and the response isn't an argument about greater goods or guilt, it is given after several books of disputation between Job and his friends, when God suddenly appears and joins the conversation:
That's the answer Job gets. Also worth noting that some sort of Dr. Pangloss's best of all possible world's never shows up in the Tanak:
[quote] Ecclesiastes 4
Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun:
I saw the tears of the oppressed—
and they have no comforter;
power was on the side of their oppressors—
and they have no comforter.
And I declared that the dead,
who had already died,
are happier than the living,
who are still alive.
But better than both
is the one who has never been born,
who has not seen the evil
that is done under the sun.
And I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person’s envy of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
Fools fold their hands
and ruin themselves.
Better one handful with tranquillity
than two handfuls with toil
and chasing after the wind.
Again I saw something meaningless under the sun:
There was a man all alone;
he had neither son nor brother.
There was no end to his toil,
yet his eyes were not content(J) with his wealth.
“For whom am I toiling,” he asked,
“and why am I depriving myself of enjoyment?”
This too is meaningless—
a miserable business
[/Quote]
This logic holds if one assumes the unit of analysis for guilt is the individual, not the people. However, in the doctrine of Original Sin, mankind as a whole is condemned for the actions of their progenitors, Adam and Eve.
We use the collective as a unit for assigning guilt fairly often. Corporations are punished as a whole for bad acts. The German people were to pay reparations to the Jews as a whole for their collective, not individual actions. Arguments in favor of reparations for American slavery often also invoke a similar idea of collective and inherited guilt.
The other interpretation that resolves the issue of infants' innocence is that God knew man would be sinful before It made man. Or, on the individual level, God knows the infant will become sinful in the future. So the guilt precedes the action of the guilty.
We can question if this is fair, but we have to bear in mind that time is perhaps a meaningless concept to apply to a transcendent God. Perfect memory means that the past is perfectly accessible to God, able to be experienced as fully as the present. Perfect knowledge means the future, or perhaps knowledge of infinite possible futures, is also as accessible to It as the present. Thus, God exists outside the conventional boundaries of time, in which case temporal cause and effect can't be understood the way we understand it conventionally.
Or, if you posit the God of the pietist tradition, God is coming to evolve and understand Itself through the coming into being of the world. Thus being, or more accurately, "becoming," is the process of God attaining the Absolute; reality is being coming to know Itself through itself. Thus, being is necissarily out of balance since difference is a prerequisite of definition and meaning. If you posit a Heraclitian semiotics of the tension of opposites, you shouldn't expect a balanced world, but one out of harmony so that meaning can be constructed. Hence pain, darkness, and evil- these must exist to define their antipode.
The same logic holds true for demiurgic cosmologies (one shouldn't expect a balanced world because the material realm is not within the Pleroma), or for cosmologies where an evil god of equal, or almost equal power to a good one, struggles for control of reality (Manichean cosmology, Zoroastrian, etc.).
The problem of evil is not really about God, its a lesson about defining terms without thinking through them fully. If you define any of the omni terms as "Being able to do anything without limits, even the impossible", then an omniscient, omnipowerful, and omnibenevolent being would be able to do anything, even contradictions.
So let us run with this logic. If God can do anything, is infinitely good, and we consider good experiences to be being able to live healthy, and happy lives while learning and becoming good ourselves, then we run into contradictions.
If God can basically do anything, then we can learn and experience all good without experiencing any suffering. You see, if we "needed" to experience suffering to learn, that would be a limitation on Gods power. But a God who can do anything, even contradictions, doesn't "need" to do anything.
If we look at the present situation of humanity, there is obviously suffering, crippling experiences, horrifying genetic abnormalities, and senseless and wasteful death.
Therefore we cannot conclude that God can do literally anything, and be perfectly good. It just doesn't work. There are two conclusions we can make from this.
1. God does not exist.
2. Our definition of "omni's" being "Can do literally anything, even contradictions" are poor, and we need to revise what they mean.
In my opinion, the first conclusion is a lazy way of dismissing the conversation, which only causes people to try to "solve" the problem of evil instead of concluding the more logical conclusion of point two. If you can conclude omni as being, "The greatest possible X that can be", then you have:
omnipotent: "The most powerful a being can be."
omniscient: "The most knowledgeable and aware a being can be."
omnibenevolent: "The most good a being can be."
Basically, God might be the best in what is possible, but God is limited by what is possible. If you think about this for a while, this should be satisfactory to you. If God is possible, then God must exist in the realm of possibility, not impossibility.
This also solves the problem of evil. We can merely conclude that if there is evil in the world, it is because of God's limitations. This also fits in with the idea that God wants humans to make certain choices, improve themselves, learn, and cause actions which further good in the world. This also seems to fit in with your OP in a certain sense. The existence of evil does not necessitate God is unjust or punishing the innocent.
Of course, this does not prove that God is actually omni-anything, that we're innocent OR guilty, or that God even exists. These are further puzzles to think about. But if you understand that the problem of evil is merely a lesson in not defining words in such a way that they cause contradictions, you can solve the problem of evil and move onto other ideas.
Yes, that is I think the only reasonable way to understand what omnipotence involves. Here is an argument for that: to be all powerful is to be more powerful than anyone else. A being who can do anything is more powerful than one who can do some things and not others. Thus, an omnipotent being can do anything.
If you try and place some restriction on 'anything' (anything logically possible, or some such) then the argument I have just made will come and get you.
So God can do absolutely anything. And so this:
Quoting Wirius
is quite right. There is no benefit that God was constrained to give you at the expense of some harm.
You are on the rails up to this point. But then it all goes wrong and you stop following reason.
Quoting Wirius
You have just begged the whole question by assuming that we are innocent! It's absurd. Look, if God exists, you're in a prison. That's the point I was making. It follows logically. Here:
Quoting Bartricks
Do you think that is invalid or unsound? Which? Don't just blithely ignore it, as you have done. It shows - demonstrates - that if God exists, then we're in prison. And the evils that befall us are deserved. We are coming to harm here because God - quite rightly - hates us.
And note the much more subtle general point: any evidence that 2 is true is evident for 3 and thus the problem of evil instantly dissolves.
Thus, there is no problem of evil.
You’ve stated the refutation I wanted to state. If God is being unjust he’s not worthy of worship.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes they can. Because an omnipotent God could make it so that he can tell past present and future. He didn’t do so, and is now punishing people for things they haven’t done. Not very benevolent.
And if God really does know the entirety of the future, why doesn’t he ensure no suffering occurs?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Which is idiotic.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
We do this because we need these reparations. The corporation or country hurt someone, and now they need that money to rebuild but there is no set group of individuals to blame. And always the problem is resolved after said reparations are provided (ideally).
God doesn’t gain anything from this punishment, it’s senseless. And it’s never ending. He chooses when it ends arbitrarily.
It’s akin to owning a chocolate factory, then telling 2 kids not to eat any chocolate, and when they eat a single chocolate bar (one you can reproduce effortlessly), you imprison them and all their children, with no chance of actually ever repenting for the “terrible evil” they committed. All the while you don’t specify when the imprisonment ends and choose to end it when you get bored.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
But that’s very unlike what we’re talking about.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Again, not what Bart is saying.
There are ways to make God (not Abrahamic) work, Bart’s isn’t one of them.
"There is no such thing as right or wrong, but only thinking makes them so." Shakespeare."
All meaning is a biological readout of one's experience of ultimate reality, providing us with, an apparent reality. Apparent reality is then biological re-action, as consciousness itself is biological re-action.
Quoting Bartricks
Just because God is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent, this doesn't mean he is inferior to superior God, contradictory to itself or that his omnipotence is limited only to doing good.
Such thinking is a fallacy already in the start, any conclusions based on such premise can be refuted.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You quoted Job from bible, and based on that found logic that an individual is to be blamed rather than whole society (people).
While this is true, it's false to say that either only an individual or only people are to be blamed.
The truth is however that both apply, an individual and people, this are 2 separate and necessary guilts (or judgements)
Quoting boagie
Therefore if child molesters which are currently in prison think they did right we should let them go out?
Or maybe we should just keep them imprisoned and claim they are right but also dangerous?
Imagine a judge having such criteria of what's right and what's wrong.
God could fulfill all three. Imagine a sadist who takes pleasure in torturing others. God does not prevent it, because free will. Nevertheless, God could simply play him a world in which all others are only avatars.
What about hell? I've been a regular on the forum for the past 6 or so years and the problem of hell is a rare topic. I suppose people, deep down, realize that hell is simply bad people getting their just deserts.
A little thought experiment for you to consider:
Say it's in the 1800s. You're riding from your small town to another settlement and along the way you come across a man dangling from a tree with a noose around his neck - he's dead of course. Can you tell just from what you see - a man hanged to death - whether it's murder (evi) or it's a judicial execution (justice)?
If it’s an infant and not a man, I know it’s evil.
There have been infants tortured to death before.
Ergo problem of evil (among many other sources of evil)
Also God would never need to enforce this justice. Justice is a punishment you inflict on someone for hurting you or someone else. You can’t hurt God, so he’s not the grieving party. And God could’ve removed every instance of someone hurting someone else, and chose not to do so. So in both cases, (whether the punishment is justified by you supposedly hurting God or someone else), God is being evil.
I think you're missing an important piece in the puzzle - free will.
What exactly do you mean. Free will fits into this a 100 different ways.
:rofl: I always fail to convince you!
How? God can't be evil if the evil is our doing.
He already decides what we can and can’t do arbitrarily (can’t fly, but can reason, but not very strong, but very persistent in a chase, etc) and we don’t think these qualities or lacks are infringements on free will. Why didn’t he make it physically impossible for us to do evil?
Quoting khaled
:100: :fire: ... Man might be to blame for his evil acts, but "God" is responsible for making it possible to commit evil acts; ergo, "God" is not omnibenevolent, or worthy of worship.
Free will requires evil, ergo pain & suffering, to be possible. You can't talk about free will without conceding pain, suffering should be part of the overall scheme. So, when you assert that God could've taken suffering out of the equation, what you actually mean is we shouldn't have free will. Evil is a key component of free will, morally speaking. Choice is central to the free will question.
Choice!
As a Pyrrhonist, I should suspend judgment on whether the man hanging from the tree indicates evil/justice. Skepticism is, at the end of the day, awareness of possibilities.
God wanted to give us our freedom and that it seems has unfortunate consequences viz. evil.
But only so that we're truly free. That's the whole point.
Think of evil as maximizing options. Sure, God made it impossible to walk through brick walls but at the very least, making us capable of evil, He expanded our choices.
Interesting point though! Would being able to walk through walls be a good thing or a bad thing, morally that is? :chin:
Substantiate this claim. And besides, I didn't say anything about suffering. I said "Why did God make it so that we can commit evil acts" not "Why did God make it so that we experience pain", those are very different.
This sounds exactly like "Free will requires the ability to levitate at will". No it doesn't.
Free will doesn't require that you possess certain abilities. There are disease where the individual cannot feel pain. Does that individual thereby possess no free will (assuming the rest of us do)? Psychopaths cannot empathize nor have a sense of morality, do they thereby not have free will?
Quoting TheMadFool
We aren't "truly free" given we can't levitate at will either by this logic. But we have free will. Ergo, not having certain abilities does not limit free will. Ergo, God could could have made it so that we cannot commit evil acts without infringing on our free will. Just like he made it so we can't fly without technology without infringing on our free will.
Quoting TheMadFool
Agreed. But God clearly has no problem limiting our choices. So instead of limiting us from levitating at will, and allowing us to commit evil, why didn't he do the opposite?
Quoting TheMadFool
But that's arbitrary. Why did he give us the option to commit evil, but not the option to levitate at will. Giving us the option to levitate at will would also expand our choices. Why does he choose to expand our choices by making evil possible specifically? He could also have expanded them by allowing us to change shape, or to fly through space, or walk through walls. He chose to limit us in certain ways and to allow us to do certain things. Why is one of the things he allowed to do committing evil evil instead of, say, flying but with no ability to commit evil?
[quote=Neil deGrasse Tyson]The more i look at the universe, just the less convinced i am that something benevolent is going on[/quote]
Quoting khaled
Sans pain, evil is meaningless.
Quoting khaled
Good point but explain to us how levitation can be moral/immoral? God, remember, is only concerned with moral responsibility. Perhaps there's nothing good/bad about being able to levitate or walk through walls.
Sure. But pain =/= evil. That's the distinction I was pointing out.
Quoting TheMadFool
What does "God is only concerned by moral responsibility" mean?
There are plenty of things that are neither good nor bad that we can do and others we can't do. Lifting my arm is not good or bad. Neither is walking through walls. So why don't we have both abilities? Or why do we not lack both abilities? Why one and not the other?
If you're implying that we can't fly because there is nothing good/bad about flying, that makes no sense. There is nothing good/bad about raising my arm either but I can do that.
What are you getting at and how does this address anything I've said?
Quoting khaled
The distinction is as pointless as trying to talk to Abby in private. :point: Abby & Britanny.
I'm beginning to doubt this claim.
Is running good or bad?
I dunno!
:chin:
I took this to mean that everything we can do, is either good or bad. So running has a moral value, either good or bad. You just don't know which. Is that what you mean?
This question depends on context.
It's good to run away from a wild animal if you have any chance to escape.
Otherwise it's better not to run and just stay calm and hope the animal won't recognize your fear.
good and bad therefore depends on context.
Example 2:
You are forced to choose between 2 evils, one grater than the other, which one do you choose?
The lesser evil here becomes good, but that evil is not good by definition in every context.
I have a feeling you're confusing epistemology with ontology. Try not to confuse knowledge with fact. :joke:
Great OP.
What about revelation? According to the holy texts supplied by the Christian god, for example, one could indeed be demonstrated to be totally innocent in the presence of a supposedly omnibenevolent god. And if one is innocent why would they potentially suffer more than someone who isn't innocent? This disjunction seems to indicate very little thought on the part of an omniscient, omnipotent person. And surely determining one's guilt against a set of interpretable but still infallible laws is a function of reason?
Furthermore, I don't see why guilt would necessarily require punishment in the mind of an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent being. You must have received a specific piece of revelation supplied by god to come to the conclusion that guilt => punishment. And if you have that my other post applies - people who are innocent according to god might be being punished or punished more than those who are more guilty.
And even if you have that specific piece of revelation, what makes it okay for god to mete out the punishments and not humans (or a chimp for that matter)? Guilt is guilt, and your comeuppance could reasonably come from anyone it seems to me - unless god stipulates that it is only he who can punish certain acts in certain ways. And if god doesn't make that stipulation, then, according to his own laws, he might be rendered not so omnibenevolent, and thus not exist. Or be evil. .
If God exists why he should be "good"?
And I think you built your case based on that false premise. Imo, existence or not of God says nothing about good or evil. Good and evil are just what religions added to " God's concept".
As someone who woke up in the middle of the one surgery I've had, and definetly remember it as extremely, extremely unpleasant, I'm open to the possibility that it might not be putting people out as much as making memory formation difficult. After all, it takes a pretty deep sleep to not experience someone burning a wound in your throat closed (what I woke up to). I'm also a bit weird in that I tend to remember deep sleep dreams, which is less common, but not totally unheard of, as a sort of disjointed conciousness. This makes sense from my understanding of neuroscience. The systems that make up conciousness don't shut down during unconsciousness, else we would die, they just desynchronize and act at different levels (frequencies of brain waves).
Whole point of this tangent being, suffering in this form of life might be akin to anesthesia. Yes, you experience it in the moment, but the memory will fade. And as with surgery, the process might be to help one.
Why do we need suffering? Perhaps it has something to do with a sort of ontological semiotics. No pleasure without pain. In Dostoevsky, suffering is a part of the process through which the soul can come to know God. It's the sort of question it isn't easy to answer. However, I'm not sure if "imagine being, that is being and contains the things we think are good, without anything negative coming into being," makes sense as a supposition. How do I know something without the negativity (in the definitional sense of negativity, not the good/bad sense). Meaning is essentially differentiation, and the power of differentiation is the negative.
The whole doctrinal elements of salvation are, in my opinion, a red herring because sects vary quite a bit in how they define it. For Christians at least, it is worth noting that Jesus didn't come to Earth to write a theology book, but spoke in parables open to interpretation on many levels.
I always find myself a bit lost in the doctrine debated vis-a-vis salvation because Revelations specifically has the revival of the dead before their judgement. So the focus on actions before the "hard deadline" of death in many doctrines never made sense to me. For that matter, Hell as it appears in the Bible, is a lot different from Hell as generally understood in culture, which takes more from Dante's fan fiction (admittedly one of my favorite works of fiction) than anything else.
Valid but unsound I reckon. At least #1 is false, to my mind. Omnibenevolence only entails that from God's POV everything is good. That's perfectly consistent with human suffering. I'm a meta-ethical relativist. So you always have to specify a POV from which something is good or evil to avoid gibbering.
Quoting ToothyMaw
Please enlighten me and tell what is the difference between an evil God and a God that is good if neither of them punish in any way?
My apologies Bartricks, I had logged in this forum a couple of days ago under the wrong email, and did not realize I had an old account I had forgotten about until I saw the name on my post. My original post was on the first page from Wirius. I did not receive your reply notice on this account of course, and I just realized you had responded to the other account.
We seemed to be in agreement until here:
Quoting Bartricks
While you understood omnipotence, I think omnibenevolence was neglected. An omnibenevolent being would do that which is perfectly good. Now if that being is already omnipotent, it can even do things that are contradictions, why would it need to jail anyone?
Guilty beings could simply be reformed, or even changed on God's whim. Lessons could be imparted without any suffering or punishment. If God requires that the guilty must be punished, then God simply wants to watch guilty beings suffer for its own sake. There is no lesson that could not be learned without suffering, and yet this God inflicts suffering on its guilty victims. You have assumed an omnibenevolent, omnipotent being would only avoid inflicting suffering on the innocent. But that's not the case. They would also avoid inflicting suffering on the guilty.
To inflict suffering on the guilty, when you could reform them with your omnipotence is not omnibenevolent. That's a being with a less than perfect morality. So you haven't solved the problem of evil, you've only confirmed it.
I don't know. An evil god might allow innocents to suffer in ignorance, as the premise goes. Whether or not it qualifies as punishment requires motive. And if god breaks his own laws, even not via punishing people, then he could be considered evil. The point of my post is that while Bartricks' argument is sound academically, it requires some very specific revelation to make sense.
You might not have noticed, but Bartricks' argument gels a little too well with the idea of original sin; we are each given a static "guilty" value, equally weighed so that whatever suffering comes our way is well-deserved. He might keep his arguments vague, but they are almost always in service of Christianity.
Makes me wonder if he knows something we don't. Or, then again, maybe not.
Reason trumps revelation, for either you have a reason to believe you have experienced a revelation, or you do not. And in the latter case you have no reason to think in the truth of the supposed revelation. And in the former case, Reason is acknowledged to have the greater authority.
And it is by following Reason that we can come to understand that if there is any evidence for God, that evidence is evidence of our guilt, and thus there is no problem of evil.
The problem of evil is actually better described as a 'presumption' of evil that follows from a 'presumption' of innocence. We 'presume' we are innocent creatures facing risks of harm in a dangerous world.
That presumption is justified, other things being equal. But a presumption is not evidence. And so if evidence of God comes alone, then the presumption of innocence does not constitute countervailing evidence. That's my point.
If one freely does wrong, one thereby comes to deserve harm. That does not, of course, entail that others are obliged to give one the harm in question. It does, however, mean that it is not unjust for you to receive it. And though an omnipotent and morally good person may not give a wrongdoer all that they deserve, I think it is reasonable enough to suppose that they would not go out of their way to prevent a wrongdoer receiving, by other means, their just deserts.
And that is what this world does.
If a criminal I know to be guilty of horrendous deeds comes to my house seeking sanctuary, I am not a bad person if I turn him away and let the authorities catch him, am I?
God is not a bad person for letting those who have freely attempted to do horrendous things to innocent people languish in one another's company for a while. And God is not a bad person for denying those people the knowledge that would otherwise make this world a safe place for them, is he? To think he is, is a bit like thinking I am a bad person for denying the criminal sanctuary.
Where have I said anything to imply otherwise? We are living in ignorance in a dangerous world. We deserve that. And what form to those dangers take? Well, there are the natural ones, due to our ignorance of when earthquakes will occur and ignorance of how to prevent ourselves catching this or that disease. And then there are those that we pose to one another. And there is no injustice in what happens to them. They made someone else run the gauntlet; they deserve to run it themselves another time (for this time it is for some other crime, of course).
What we deserve, it seems to me, is to run the gauntlet. God made us run the gauntlet, and from there on in it's down to luck precisely what happens to us.
It's what parents do, though with an important difference. Parents have a god-like power to subject others to life here. And parents know enough about the world to know that it is a place that is full of dangers to the ignorant, and know that we are born ignorant and remain largely so for the rest of our lives here. Yet they voluntarily decide to subject someone to it. And thereby they come to deserve, well - what? They deserve to be running the gauntlet themselves. They are being done to as they have done to others.
So if you want an example of how someone can come to deserve to run the gauntlet, look to human parents. They make what they take to be innocent others run the gauntlet.
And if you want confirmation that we are living in a prison, just look around you at others, or look inside yourself. Notice that pretty much everyone you meet has some vice or other. And notice that you do too.
You're putting the cart before the horse. An omnipotent being determines what is right and good, for otherwise they would not be omnipotent. So it is not that there is 'what's good' and an omnipotent being then has to obey. That is to make morality into a god, a god who bosses God about! No, an omnipotent being makes a good thing good and a right thing right.
That is by the by, really. Because our source of insight into what is good and right is our reason and it is from that information that we can glean something about God's character. My point is just that if you think you understand omnipotence, then you do not if you think morality binds an omnipotent being: morality, no less than anything else, is under God's control.
Quoting Philosophim
He does not 'need' to. He 'wants' to. A good person wants to keep evil people from innocent people. A good person doesn't care unduly about what evil people do to one another; doesn't give them the same attention they give to the innocent, and so on.
Quoting Philosophim
Indeed. If you want an evil person to be happy, are you good or bad? Bad, right? A good person does not indiscriminately want others to be happy - not if you consult your reason. Think of Dr Mengele, the Nazi doctor who tortured thousands with his horrific experiments. He lived out the rest of his days as a wealthy and happy farmer in Argentina or some such place. Now, does a good person think of that as a silver lining to an otherwise awful story? No, it makes a bad story worse. Good people do not want anyone and everyone to be happy.
Our own reason tells us about moral desert. It tells us that if you do wrong freely, then you deserve to come to harm. Not because it will reform you - that would be an added bonus if it occurred, but it is not 'why' you deserve to come to harm, for clearly you deserve to come to harm even if harming you would not reform you - but for its own sake. That is precisely what 'deservingness' expresses. It is no more than God communicating to us that He wants some to come to harm for harm's sake. And that does not imply God is bad, for the people in question are gits.
But an omnibenevolent being would never choose to do wrong, even if they could. That's part of the contradiction of the problem of evil. if God chooses to do evil, then they aren't omnibenevolent, period. Omnibenevolent is not talking humanity level good. We're talking about perfection level good.
Quoting Bartricks
Are we omnibenevolent? No. We are imperfect beings that do a lot of immorality for our personal self satisfaction. Revenge for example.
Quoting Bartricks
No, you're wrong here. Sometimes evil people need special attention from good people. Sometimes good people can help a person who is being selfish, or angry at the world for nothing, come around to understanding they don't have to be that way.
Quoting Bartricks
No. I don't want them being happy off of doing the wrong thing. I don't want them profiting off of doing the wrong thing. What I want is for them to turn their life around, and do the right thing. If you have any knowledge of Christianity, God essentially dies for all of humanities sins. Not for all the good people, but for the bad people too. So we have examples of Gods doing great things for bad men. There are also examples of people helping to reform people with an evil streak in their heart in life. I'm sure an omnibenevolent God would want the same.
Quoting Bartricks
No, that is revenge for personal satisfaction. Why would an all powerful omnibenevolent being want revenge. More to the point, far more important than this conversation, is your desire that hurting people for revenge is somehow right. Before you think I don't understand, I do. A part of me absolutely despises my own mother. She betrayed me when I was younger for nothing more than spite. Every so often, I think about what she did to me, and the long term ramifications of that stupid spite, and I can't help but feel hate and wish ill on her. And no, its not some teenage angst. I have permanent scars on my body that I will never be rid of.
She's an alcoholic. I had the desire to never see her again. But I decided to reach out anyway. We talk every few weeks, and I see her every few months. We've talked about the past. I help her with little things. She's learned, and grown a little. In some ways she may never, as long as she stays on that bottle. There is still a part of me that will always hate her. But I choose not to. And am I a better person for it? Yes. And is she a better person for it? Yes. Surely an omnibenevolent God would do greater than both of us.
Well, that's a bit confused. Premise 1 is not necessarily true - I don't think any proposition is necessarily true, precisely because God exists and so can make any proposition false if He so wishes - but it is true beyond a reasonable doubt.
Your doubt, for instance, is not at all reasonable. God is all powerful - so he can do anything. God is also all good. Our reason - which is our source of insight into reality - tells us that being all good means not being a sadist. It means not exposing innocents to suffering if one does not have to. And God, being all powerful, did not have to expose innocents to any suffering. Hence the prima facie plausiblity of 1. Denying 1 involves, in one way or another, showing either ignorance of what goodness plausibly involves, or ignorance of what omnipotence involves.
I never said otherwise. My point is that an omnipotent being determines what's right and good. My point wasn't that they will sometimes do what is wrong and bad.
Quoting Philosophim
I don't understand your point. At no point have I assumed we're omnibenevolent. Indeed, I have and am arguing that we're quite bad people!
Tell me, was it a silver lining that Dr Mengele lived out the rest of his life happily in Argentina?
Quoting Philosophim
So you understand why an omnibenevolent being doesn't want that either?
Look, prisons don't serve one purpose. They serve three. First, to protect others from the wrongdoers - prevention. That's primarily why we are here. Not for our sakes, but for the sake of others.
Second, retribution. It is good when bad people get their just deserts.
Third, reform. That's why we have a moral sense.
There is hatred that is just. Lots of it. And it is far from always bad. Consider: if your mother hates herself for what she did, that would be good, not bad, would it not?
If you are claiming that what is good is what a powerful being decides, then you are not using the word omnibenevolent to describe that being. At that point, you are removing the idea of good and evil entirely, and simply stating that a being's judgement of what is just goes because they have the power to do so. This does not solve the problem of evil. The problem of evil assumes God is also omnibenevolent, meaning while God could change what is good and evil, God does not.
If you're not including the 3 omni's, you're not talking about the problem of evil. At that point you're simply proposing another type of God. In your case, its simply a powerful God that decides what is right and wrong through its might. I find there are other problems with this, but again, its not the problem of evil. To confront the problem of evil, you need to explain why all 3 omnis, which are defined as having zero limits, can coexist in a God of creation while there still being evil in the world they created.
Quoting Bartricks
No. I don't want her to hate herself. I want her to learn and be a person that would never do that again. Emotions themselves are not moral or immoral. It is the actions we do despite those emotions that make it moral or immoral.
When it comes to the problem of evil, I have shown that it involves a presumption of innocence. Presumptions, even when justified, are not evidence. And thus if evidence of God exists, that evidence is evidence of our guilt. And evidence trumps presumptions.
Now, our guilt solves the problem as there is no risk of harm that a person cannot in principle come to be deserving of. Your response is to just insist that being morally good involves indiscriminately preventing harms, regardless of what the person has done. Yet a cursory inspection of the nature of morality - which is our source of insight into God's nature - tells us that it is good when people get what they deserve, not bad. It is good to hate evil; good to want harm to befall an evil person. And when or if it does, we have justice, not injustice.
We ourselves build prisons and do not thereby show ourselves to be unjust. We build them to try and make the world more just. And we see them as morally justified by the three purposes they serve- to protect the innocent; to give the wrongdoer their just deserts; and to reform the wrongdoer. And that, then, is the purpose this world itself serves and it no more implies a lack of omnibenevolence on the part of its creator than our prisons do on the part of theirs.
An omnipotent being could, of course, just reform a wrongdoer at will. But that's the wrongdoer's job, not God's. So he clearly prefers to let wrongdoers fix themselves - ir not, as they choose - than to intervene and fix them himself. For that would be to impose himself on them. Whereas clearly God values free will and letting people make their own choices about the kinds of people they want to be.
The title of your topic is "Solving the problem of evil". The problem of evil is a very specific problem defined by the contradiction inherent in the three omni's in one being. If you remove omnibenevolence as a restraint, then all you have is an omniscient, omnipotent God. Boom, problem avoided.
But avoiding the problem is not solving the problem.
Quoting Bartricks
No. As stated earlier, if you know about Christianity, in it God sacrifices themselves to forgive the sins of humanity. He declares them all guilty, but forgives them. Are you saying this is evil?
If you are trying to redefine what good is, you're not going to make that case. Revenge is not considered the height of virtue. Forgiveness of the repentant is. Also, lets say that we are guilty of some crime we committed, but we do not remember it. In what world would that be considered just? At that point, you just want to hurt something for your own satisfaction of destroying something. That's pretty darn evil.
I think you're confusing the philosophical puzzle of the problem of evil, with your own desire to redefine what is good. Perhaps a better topic title would be called "Redefining evil". But at this point, I think we've strayed from solving the problem of evil.
I have not done that. God is omnibenevolent and there is no problem of evil. Clear? I am not denying that God has any of those properties.
A good, all powerful being would not suffer innocent people to live in ignorance in a dangerous world.
Why do you think I think that? It is because a 'good' person doesn't want innocent people to suffer. And if that good person has the power to prevent it, then they do - or at least, so it is reasonable to suppose. It's all there in the OP, so quite why you think I am denying that God is omnibenevolent is beyond me.
I have not mentioned Christianity. I am not a Christian. I don't know much about it or care. I am a philosopher, not a theologian.
I have made an argument. To be clear: if there is evidence of God's existence, then that evidence is evidence of our guilt.
Absent evidence for God, we have no evidence of our innocence or our guilt. What we have instead is a justified presumption of innocence. But a presumption is not evidence. And thus should there be any evidence for God, that evidence overcomes the presumption.
Quoting Philosophim
Then I do not think you understand what the 'problem' is. The 'problem' is that the bad things that happen to us seem to be of a sort that no good all powerful god would allow - and thus imply his non-existence. And that's quite right - of course, no good all powerful being would allow 'innocent' people to be exposed to the risks of such harms.
So the problem depends upon an assumption of innocence, as I keep saying. Yet we have no evidence of innocence or guilt, only an assumption - an assumption that, admittedly, it is reasonable to make. However, the reasonableness of the assumption is not grounded in evidence, but is rather morally justified. When it comes to evidence, should there be any that God exists, then it will be eo ipso evidence that we are not innocent at all, but deserve to be exposed to the risks living here exposes us to.
Now, if you think a good all powerful person would not expose guilty people to such risks, I want to see your argument for that. For I have now argued extensively for the opposite - that good people do not feel the same way about all harms, regardless of whether they're befalling the innocent or guilty. And that good people do not actively try and prevent justice from being done. I mean, does a good person release prisoners?
Yes, you are denying the property of omnibenevolent. Perhaps the part you do not understand is that what is good is independent from something with power. Might makes right means you presume there is no morality. If you presume no morality, you have an omnipotent, omniscient being. That could just as easily be a devil that enjoys torturing even the innocent for their own pleasure.
You seem to want to say Quoting Bartricks
And you are forgetting that an omnipotent being would also not have to cause suffering to create good. An omnipotent being doesn't have to punish evil. It can simply change evil without causing suffering.
You also seem to be assuming that only your perception of what is good is correct. The point of introducing Christianity was to show you there is a view point of a God that is good that is far better than your own. If you believe Christianity was invented by man, then that means there are people who have a view point of good that is far better than your own. The desire to inflict suffering upon others for its own sake, even upon people who have done wrong, is a human desire, and considered evil by many people.
You are describing what is omnibenevolent as something less than perfect. Which means its not omnibenevolent. Which means you have not solved the problem of evil.
Quoting Bartricks
Incorrect. That is evidence that if a God exists, it cannot be a combination of the 3 omni's. What you must show is that a God could be a combination of the 3 omni's, and not have it be a contradiction. But as I've demonstrated, a perfectly good being would not cause undue suffering on the wicked, especially if they did not remember or know what it was they did wrong. Your argument is not sufficient enough to fit omnibenevolence, so it does not solve the problem.
No. I. Am. Not.
Quoting Philosophim
I have no idea what that means. Here you are once more straying from the problem of evil and into the relationship between God and morality. I have already said that omnipotence requires that God have power over morality - that God's will and attitudes constitutively determine what is right and good. To think otherwise is, as I have already pointed out to you, to conceive of God as 'bound' by morality - as if morality is some curious force or straightjacket that even God is subject to!
God makes morality. Now that, in itself, does nothing whatever to overcome the problem of evil. For our source of insight into the content of morality - into what is in fact right and in fact good - is our reason. And our reason tells us that qualities such as sadism and so forth are vices. Thus, despite the fact that God can make anything good if he so wants, the fact remains that sadism is actually a vice and thus we can reasonably infer that God does not have it. He 'could' have it and still be omnibenevolent - for He could approve of sadism in himself despite disapproving of it in others. But that does not seem to be a reasonable default assumption to make. And so we are justified, well justified, in thinking that God himself instantiates the very character traits that he approves of us cultivating - so, we are justified in thinking that God is kind, generous, benevolent and so on.
And that is all it takes for the problem of evil to arise - or for an 'apparent' problem to arise, anyway (to insist it is a problem is to beg teh question after all).
And it is to that problem that I am addressing myself. For like most proponents of the problem, I accept entirely that a morally good person does not expose innocent people to the risks of harm that we are exposed to living here. It is just that I reason better than they do and conclude, as one should, that therefore He has not! Which is just what follows from the obviousness of that truth combined with the premise that God exists.
And from that it follows that we are not innocent. It's just logic.
Now once more, if you think that a good all powerful being would not expose guilty people to the risks of harm we face here, explain why.
You say that such a being could just change the evil into the good if he so wished. Yes. But that would be unjust, as I explained. It is not for me to change you into the person I want you to be, is it? If I did that - if I had an idea about how I'd like you to be, and had as well the power to make you answer to it and exercised it - I'd be doing wrong, yes? So why do you think it would be okay for God to do so? Or, to put it another way, given God clearly doesn't approve of us behaving in that manner, why do you think God approves of himself behaving in that manner?
God wants us to be certain sorts of people. But he's omnibenevolent so he's not going to just make us be those sorts of people, is he? What notion of omnibenevolence is that?
And that's the entire problem your argument runs into. Morality is a set of constraints on what we should or should not do, independent of our power. An omnipotent being could change it, or defy it, but then it wouldn't be perfectly good. That is the part you are missing.
Quoting Bartricks
Then God is not an Omnibenevolent being. Its a being that simply creates laws for others to live by. If God says, "It is good to torture your babies and eat them," then that's a law. It doesn't mean God is perfectly good. What is good is independent of God, that is why God is omnibenevolent. God follows what is good, despite being all powerful.
You are speaking in terms that are not omnibenevolent. You are saying morality is "might makes right". If you create an all powerful being that makes rules for humanity live by, and punishes them because that's what the God wants to do, that's not an omnibenevolent being. It would be just as disingenuous as if I started limiting God's omnipotence or omniscience. If you do that, you're not understanding that the God in the problem of evil is all powerful, all knowing, and all good.
Er, no, it is not a problem. It is called 'divine command theory' - it's a metaethical theory about the fundamental nature of morality. According to this view - the view that is compatible with God's omnipotence - moral directives are directives of God. So there is no external constraint - God makes na act wrong by issuing a directive not to do it. That directive 'is' its wrongness. And moral values are God's values - that is, if God values something, then it is thereby made morally valuable, for the property of being morally good and the property of being valued by God are one and the same. (this is not 'might makes right' incidentally; it's 'Reason' makes right - and Reason is God....has to be, else God won't be omnipotent).
Thus, there is no external constraint on God. So you, I'm afraid, either do not understand the nature of omnipotence, or the nature of morality, or both.
But anyway, it is neither here nor there, for I am not solving the problem of evil by appealing to the fact God can make anything good if he wants, I am solving the problem consistent with morality having the content that it actually appears to have. God has the power to change that content - but there's what God can do, and what God has done. And morality has the content it has and according to that content an omnibenevolent being would not suffer innocent people to live in ignorance in a world like this one.
But at this point I think we've both made our cases. I've pointed out you're not really talking about a God that is omnibenevolent, and given several reasons pointing that out. You believe for your part, that might makes right, and that omnibenevolent is simply an all powerful being making rules for others to follow.
Now that we understand each other, there's really nothing else to be said. Hopefully you'll get some others to chime in and present their own views.
Again, you're not staying on point. This is about the problem of evil, not the credibility of divine command theory. I am assuming that morality has the content it appears to have. The tired old objection to divine command theory is that it seems to allow that morality's content could change. But given that I am assuming it has whatever content it actually appears to have, this is all beside the point, as I keep saying.
Quoting Philosophim
Yes, you're just confused. I am talking about an omnipotent, omnibenevolent being. Nothing I have said implies otherwise.
How on earth can one have reason to believe that they have received revelation other than some sort of subjective experience? Furthermore, how would reason have greater authority than the revelation received? It is quite literally the word of god, so it cannot be challenged. Maybe reason can aid in its application, however?
What our punishments must be for our guilt is already known by god, so he knows exactly what each of us is going to be exposed to and could arrange the world in such a way as to make the punishments make sense if he wanted. Yet he doesn't do this. He just allows it to be determined by luck, as you say. Which isn't actually luck, because he must have known all of it ahead of time and could change it. If you say he doesn't know what we are are going to do because free will, then he isn't omniscient.
Thus, god punishes unjustly, and therefore is unjust. I don't know how that ties into omnibenevolence, but an unjust god seems undesirable.
Quoting Bartricks
In line with your god-theory-of-everything and the aseity argument contained therein this makes sense. But some choices are demonstrably unfree. If you want I can supply an example.
Quoting Bartricks
I sincerely doubt that anyone who has actually "run the gauntlet" would believe that others deserve to "run the gauntlet", even in the presence of a compelling argument for such a thing.
Quoting Bartricks
True enough.
God can be omnibenevolent even if he determines arbitrarily what is good by adhering to the laws he creates, or by stipulating that he has his own set of laws to follow, according to your reasoning here; you just add the step of creating objective moral laws and, optionally, a set of rules only for god.
I mean, if god never breaks a moral law he must be omnibenevolent, right? Regardless of who makes the laws?
Thought about it some more: the whole omnibenevolence thing seems weaker with a god that can arbitrarily change what is good whenever he wants. Technically I think it can be retained, but it isn't as meaningful as it is with a god that commands what is good because it is good because god could potentially change morality at any time and commit any act and still be omnibenevolent. A truly omnibenevolent god would command that morality cannot be changed and relinquish his omnipotence in the process.
This is exactly it. Omnibenevolence is a restraint on what we do, because there is some greater purpose than our own personal whims. An omnipotent God could decide that we should torture and eat all of our babies, but an omnibenevolent God would not.
I disagree: if god commands us to eat and torture babies it could be moral, although it is so intuitively heinous that hardly anyone would do it. My point is more that omnibenevolence loses all meaning when god can arbitrarily decide what is moral and simultaneously create rules that only apply to himself or change what is moral to suit his own aims at any time.
Isn't it open to you here to say that god is wrong? Wouldn't this be a situation in which the moral thing to do would be to condemn god?
This by way of pointing out that there is a fundamental error in the logic of the approach to morality adopted in the argument here. God's commanding an act on our part does not make that act right.
What I meant is that if god deems such an act to be moral it is moral. My bad. Btw, I think Bartricks is taking the more repugnant horn of the dilemma.
Why?
What you suggest concerning babies is immoral, even if god commands it.
It might be disgusting and horrible and no one would actually do it, but you have to admit that if god is omnipotent he can make anything moral, no matter how ostensibly despicable.
You have linked Euthyphro's dilemma in other threads. You aren't ignorant. Why play dumb?
And I actually think that the people pretending to be Bartricks come up with some pretty brilliant arguments.
That's what I'm questioning. It's the naturalistic fallacy as much as the Euthyphro. Consider the open question: is it right to eat babies? You know that it isn't. If you claim that it is because god commands it, you are simply acquiescing to a tyrant.
:up:
Look, it is undeniable: if god is omnipotent then anything can be moral. Unless there is a law that god cannot change that says that it is wrong to eat and torture babies, god overrules our own intuitive moral faculties.
All of this being said, yes, fuck what any god has to say about morality. I would rather be wrong than acquiesce to a tyrant too. We are better off exploring these questions on our own, especially considering there is no way of knowing if we have actually encountered the revelation of an actual god or some sort of super-powerful being that just seems omnipotent and omniscient.
What a pity? What is a pity? That I'm trying to be honest here?
But that's wrong. Morality is not found by looking to the scriptures, but in deciding what you will do next.
Even if the scriptures are the word of god, you are the moral agent, you are the one who decides what you will do. And it is open to you to decide that the word of god is evil.
Right and wrong is not like the laws of physics, sitting around in the world waiting to be found. Right and wrong are attitudes you adopt towards the universe.
You can't get an "ought" from an "is". That it is the case that god commands it does not make it what you ought do.
One ought to do what is good, right?
If god determines with his power that an act is good one ought to do it then - which is different from having a disembodied command to do something. If he issued a mere command to do something your argument would make sense: one could justifiably refuse to follow his commands and remain moral; our own faculties and agency would indeed be paramount.
This isn't deriving an ought from an is but rather following an infallible command, the very content of which instructs an ought.
But we would need to know the commands are definitely infallible, and I see no way of confirming that. So DCT still sucks.
Quoting ToothyMaw
There's a gap between what god commands and what we do, a point at which we make a decision to do as commanded or not.
At that point, the one making the decision decides what is right and what is wrong.
Even in deciding to follow god's command, one decides that following that command is right.
Hence:
Quoting ToothyMaw
We each have no choice but to choose.
I think I see what you are getting at, and I definitely like it. But how does one's decision determine anything? If god commands something is right, isn't it right independent of what we do or think?
I mean I appreciate the weight you are giving us as choice-makers, but how does that mean anything in the face of omnipotence?
And I'm sure some, including myself, will always be rebels, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be honest about what we're rebelling against.
Exactly that: it is your decision that determines what you choose. If you decide eating babies is wrong, but you do it because god commands it, then you are doing evil.
This takes us away from the topic. My point was that there's no higher authority than reason - so, if, for example, you think there is no reason to take what you thought was a revelation to be a revelation, then you'd just consider it a dream; whereas if you thought it really was a revelation, it'd be because you thought there was reason to think it was. Pointing out that there is no higher authority than God misses the point, for all it does is show that God and Reason are the same person.
Quoting ToothyMaw
Yes, he could - that's one option, one possibility. But it seems more efficient and consistent with being good to expose people to a risk of harm, rather than actually to mete the harm out oneself. I also think God would be ignorant of much of what goes on here, for why would God trouble himself to find out what people he hates are getting up to?
Quoting ToothyMaw
That's just question begging. As I keep pointing out, being good doesn't involve indiscriminately preventing harms - it matters who is coming to harm. Good people among us do not campaign to release prisoners from jails, do we? We're not less good for that. They deserve to be there and releasing them would pose a great danger to others.
And again, our moral intuitions about moral desert, which undoubtedly exist, tell us that God wants those who do wrong to come to harm.
So you accept that this is a world full of wrongdoers - full of people who deserve to come to harm of one sort or another. And it is a world in which they do!
If one is in any doubt about the justice of the world, just consider parents. They have a god-like power to subject what they take to be an innocent person to a lifetime here. They know what the world is like - they know that it is a place full of risks of harm of every conceivable kind. And yet they decide to go ahead and subject an 'innocent' (so, not actually an innocent, but someone they take to be one) to a life here. Well, surely that person now deserves to be exposed to the risks that living here involves? If you subject someone else to a lifetime of risk, you deserve to be exposed to a lifetime of risk yourself.
So, the fact that most people voluntarily procreate shows that most people are of a sort that deserve to be exposed to the risks that living here poses. Of course, they already deserved to be living here, else they wouldn't be here (God does not punish the innocent). So they've just earnt themselves another life stretch. The point, though, is that most people demonstrate well enough by their behaviour why they deserve to be here.
Is god aware of what is going to happen to people or not? If so he is unjust if the harm incurred by different people is disproportionate to their guilt. If not he is not omniscient*.
Quoting Bartricks
But he is omniscient. How could he be ignorant of anything? And what is the difference between meting out the punishment and allowing a horrible fate to befall one that could be easily prevented? And even if everyone is merely exposed to the same risk of harm then that too is disproportionate to people's guilt, because we are not all equally guilty (presumably).
And why the everlasting fuck would god be concerned with efficiency? He can do anything he wants whenever he wants and can exist for as long as he wants. Do you think he conjures up computers and simulates different eventualities? Oh, that's right, he wouldn't - because he's god.
Never said I think people deserve to come to harm; even despicable people need to be loved and rehabilitated. If harm befalls them during this process then so be it, but other than that I don't think anyone deserves harm.
I would campaign to release all non-violent drug offenders, like any other good person would. And no, I'm not committing your favorite fallacy. I'm saying if god allows people to come to disproportionate harm then he is unjust - not unjust for not preventing all harm.
And where do I say otherwise? You don't seem to understand my position. If God exists, he does not allow injustices to occur. He's good and omnipotent, for goodness sake! So, we can conclude that we either deserve every single bad - or apparently bad - thing that happens to us, or we can conclude - and this, I think, is the more reasonable conclusion for reasons already given - that we deserved to be exposed to the risk of harm.
Note, if I buy a lottery ticket and win the lottery, I did not 'deserve' to win the lottery. I deserved the chance of winning it. Nevertheless, my winning it is not an injustice.
Well, that's a controversial and counter-intuitive moral view. My view is respects our moral intuitions about what goodness actually involves; you're just ignoring some of them.
Again, why do you keep just insisting that people are being punished disproportionate to their guilt?
If that's not something a good person would allow, then God doesn't allow it and no one is being punished disproportionately! You just keep blithely ignoring the very argument I am giving.
God does not disproportionately punish! Thus, if God exists, no one is being disproportionately punished. Logic!
That does not mean that everyone deserves every bad thing that happens to them - though that would be consistent with the thesis - for it could be that what we deserve is to face the 'risk' of harm.
The point remains, however, that God is not going to punish unjustly: he's good and omnipotent.
Thus, if He exists, nothing unjust is happening here.
Wrongdoing yes. But no injustice.
As to whether God is aware - no, I suspect not. As I have already said, I don't see why a good omnipotent person would bother trying to find out what is happening to us here.
If you think that's incompatible with being omniscient, then you're wrong, as omnisicence involves being in possession of all knowledge, not all truths. It is up to God what he is or is not ignorant of.
According to what criterion can we determine if God is unjust? What set of rules do we have that give us an idea of whether or not we are each being punished justly? Is it not counter-intuitive to believe that god would allow a child-murderer to live in better health than a pious, god-fearing preacher that develops Huntington's?
We use our reason. Our faculty of reason is our source of insight into what is right and good. And from such intuitions we can infer something about God's character. So, God hates it when people are unkind. I infer that from the fact that we all seem bid - and bid in no uncertain terms - be kind. God is clearly pro kindness, then. And God seems to hate unkindness so much that he wants those who are unkind to come to harm. I infer that from the fact my reason tells me that if someone is unkind, they deserve to come to harm.
I don't believe justice is necessarily a permutation of omnibenevolence unless god makes justice an objective, moral necessity.
Like I say, you're just ignoring all those representations of reason that tell us about moral desert. Ironically, if you genuinely do not believe in there being a difference between deserving a harm and not, then there's nothing especially bad about harms befalling innocent people is there!!
If a child comes to some great harm, doesn't the badness of that reside in the fact the child is innocent?
You are assuming that god created us in his image, a decidedly Theistic thing to believe. How can we know that? What about evolutionary biology? Does that not do a better job of explaining human nature than a sermon (no matter how good of a sermon it is)?
I would think that it is worse for a harm to befall a child because they are developing and trauma could cause them to become maladjusted. Or so I think, at least - I'm no psychologist.
I don't know what you're talking about. You're assuming I'm an off the peg religious person, yes? Don't. I'm not. Just address my arguments and resist the temptation to attribute to me views I do not hold. (I do not believe God created us - I think it's wrong to create people and so I don't think God did so; and he tells us as much in a variety of ways; we have free will, but wouldn't if He'd created us, and so on....but let's not get distracted by these issues).
You quite literally said that we can infer god's characteristics from our own. How is that not believing that we are created in god's image?
So you don't think their innocence is the issue? What is especially terrible about harms befalling the innocent is that they are innocent. Now, perhaps you do not have that intuition - okay, some people are colour blind and some people have blindspots in their faculties of reason. But it is widely shared - about as widely shared as the visual impression that the sky is blue.
Because, er, that's not what I said. I "quite literally" didn't. Sheesh. I said we can infer something about God's character from the content of our moral intuitions.
If I am told to be kind, generous, and so on, I can infer - fairly safely, though not infallibly - that the person issuing such instructions really likes kindness and generosity. And from that I can infer - again, not entirely reliably - that this person is therefore probably kind and generous themselves.
That is not remotely the same as saying "we are created in God's image", is it? That you could confuse the two shows that you are making assumptions about me - you're assuming you're talking to a regular religio. You ain't.
Who is telling us and how?
Quoting Bartricks
I mean, psychopaths can come off as charming and relatable - even compassionate - if they are more competent at deception than the average person. Someone who is making that much effort to come off as benevolent might not actually be so benevolent.
God, via our faculty of reason.
But note, all philosophers will appeal to the representations of our faculties of reason as the source of insight into what is right and good and just. Most will deny that the faculty is the means by which God is communicating with us. But that's beside the point - for my case to go through, it is sufficient that we have excellent reason to think that a good, omnipotent person does not suffer innocents to live in ignorance in a dangerous world.
So, my case does not presuppose the truth of a divine command metaethics and an associated epistemological theory. It just assumes that being good involves not wanting innocents to live in ignorance in a dangerous world and that when accompanied by the power to prevent that from happening, a good person exercises that power and prevents it.
I still think that your view is the counterintuitive one. What about the preacher who develops Huntington's and the child-murderer that walks free and healthy? What about the injured veterans who fought in wars ostensibly out of a selfless desire to protect their country that get little more than a percentage? How are these people getting their just deserts?
You're not following this. This is just silly now.
God doesn't allow injustices. So, if God exists, there are no injustices. Wrongs, yes. But no injustices.
Do you follow that?
I then explained how one can deserve to be exposed to a 'risk' of harm.
Did you follow that bit?
If I buy a lottery ticket, I don't deserve to win, do I?
But if I win, is that unjust?
No.
Clearly i need to join the dots here, though I thought the example was obvious.
If you do wrong, you deserve to be exposed to a risk of harm.
That's analogous to buying the lottery ticket - you don't deserve to win, you deserve the chance of winning.
If you get lucky and win, you did not 'deserve' to win, though there is no injustice in you receiving all the money.
Again then, if you get unlucky and get some ghastly disease or are treated atrociously by some other wrongdoer here, then you did not 'deserve' that, though no injustice occurred through you getting it.
So, again, we deserve - I suspect - to be exposed to the risk of harm our ignorance exposes us to.
That includes the risk of getting horrible diseases and so on.
Some of us will get horrible diseases, others won't.
Some people who buy lottery tickets lose, some win.
There's no injustice, though, as we all deserved to face the risk. Or did if God exists. Or, alternatively (but I think less reasonably) we all deserve every particular thing that happens to us.
The important point is that if God exists, that's the only reasonable conclusion to draw. And thus evidence that God exists 'is' evidence that we deserve either to face the risks we face, or the specific things that happen to us.
So not only is god omnibenevolent, he doesn't allow injustices. So you actually think these people deserved what they got. Good on you, Batricks, you fucking psycho. I'll be sure to tell someone who got their legs blown off by an IED that god just exposed them to equal risk of harm as the child-murderer and that he computed the outcome with a god-computer but still allowed him to get his legs blown off and the child-murderer to walk free.
That's not additional - it's part of what being omnibenevolent involves.
Quoting ToothyMaw
No, as I explained above. Learn to follow an argument. And it is you, incidentally, who thinks innocence doesn't matter, which makes you the psycho, or at least morally flat footed to say the least!
The rest was just bog standard virtue signaling. Seems you're quick to temper - is that a virtue?
Honestly, it seems to me you have no understanding of what compels people to believe what they believe, or any connection to humanity at all. It's a little sad, whoever you are right now, Bartricks.
However, please continue to provide motivations for God's actions, or in actions, as it is entirely entertaining.
I present my theory, based on a variety of theological and philosophical readings (no, don't ask for references, I am at work and don't have that memorized):
During our time on earth we are to accomplish a predetermined goal, or learning plan. This plan has been decided upon, by us, the individual energy spark, prior to becoming a corporeal form in which to learn/accomplish this goal (whatever it might be). Good and evil have no part in this, and your fellow man, or beast, becomes nothing more than a player in our individualized goals of learning. In this current incarnation we are unable to access the background information detailing what, and why, the learning goal is of value, because that would negate the actual learning experience. No God, except the individual. No Good, No evil. Only learning and forward evolution from a spiritual view point.
Enjoy.