A Couple of Festive Arguments For the Festive Season
Happy Xmas everyone! In that spirit:
The Problem Of Evil
The problem of evil is a real show stopper for theologians, they wrap themselves in terrible logical knots trying to circumvent it. My solution can be summed up as ‘tough love’. In more detail, here are two possible models:
1. Earth is perfect and Heaven is perfect
2. Earth contains evil and Heaven is perfect
If we score each model in terms of ‘net happiness’ (=total happiness - total sadness), then:
1. Someone who has never experienced sadness, does not, as a result, fully appreciate happiness. So having lived a perfect, evil-free life, they get to heaven and think that it is ‘sort of OK’.
2. Someone who has had a life that includes suffering/evil will, when they get to heaven, think that it is ‘really cool!’.
Now obviously, our time in heaven is longer than our time on earth, so model [2] - an earth including evil, is the optimal solution - it leads to the maximum amount of net happiness. The general rule here is that 'in order to appreciate a maximum, one has to experience a minimum'.
Jesus Was Telling the Truth
He said he was the son of God. He did not say he was the only son of God.
Now if you buy the general deist/theist arguments for the existence of God, then that leads to the conclusion, that we are all, figuratively speaking, the sons and daughters of God.
So at worst, Jesus was being ‘economical with the truth'.
The Problem Of Evil
The problem of evil is a real show stopper for theologians, they wrap themselves in terrible logical knots trying to circumvent it. My solution can be summed up as ‘tough love’. In more detail, here are two possible models:
1. Earth is perfect and Heaven is perfect
2. Earth contains evil and Heaven is perfect
If we score each model in terms of ‘net happiness’ (=total happiness - total sadness), then:
1. Someone who has never experienced sadness, does not, as a result, fully appreciate happiness. So having lived a perfect, evil-free life, they get to heaven and think that it is ‘sort of OK’.
2. Someone who has had a life that includes suffering/evil will, when they get to heaven, think that it is ‘really cool!’.
Now obviously, our time in heaven is longer than our time on earth, so model [2] - an earth including evil, is the optimal solution - it leads to the maximum amount of net happiness. The general rule here is that 'in order to appreciate a maximum, one has to experience a minimum'.
Jesus Was Telling the Truth
He said he was the son of God. He did not say he was the only son of God.
Now if you buy the general deist/theist arguments for the existence of God, then that leads to the conclusion, that we are all, figuratively speaking, the sons and daughters of God.
So at worst, Jesus was being ‘economical with the truth'.
Comments (12)
I am a great-grandson of God.
I lied! God is my third cousin, twice removed.
I lied! God is my brother-in-law's uncle's pet canary who was sold to him by Minglende, the Danish butcher during the great typewriter-revolution.
Marry Christmas, and happy birthday, Jesus!
To elaborate, consider the common objection that heaven sounds boring, and being bored is a kind of suffering — indeed, ennui, the milder form of existential dread, is the French word for boredom — so a perfectly blissful heaven is impossible. Also consider that here on Earth people tend back toward a base level of happiness regardless of their circumstances, and some people can go back to being happy even after a horrible tragedy that they still nominally suffer from, while others can go back to being miserable even after they hit the jackpot and solved all of their nominal problems. The solution to both of those is to make human minds work differently, make people more inclined to be happy with and interested in whatever they currently have indefinitely and not get bored or tired of it and sink into bad feelings for no good reason. If God could do that, which he should be able to do, then he could also make humans in such a way that they would fully appreciate heaven even without having suffered, and so an Earth full of suffering would be unnecessarily.
Thanks for the reply! As you no doubt realise I am sort of playing devil's advocate here...
Quoting Pfhorrest
But a mind - an information processing machine with a memory - may only be able to take on a singular, fundamental form. For example: all our computers are similar in nature and mimic the human mind. It maybe that creating an intelligent entity that is fundamentally different from ourselves is impossible even for an omnipotent God? 'Great minds think alike' is the saying - I would modify that to: 'All minds think alike'.
The basic law of 'in order to appreciate a maximum, one has to experience a minimum' may hold for all possible intelligent life forms and it maybe beyond the powers of an omnipotent God to change this basic reality.
Quoting Pfhorrest
So people may need a 'refresher course' in evil in order to continue to fully appreciate heaven? I would have thought that the forward thinking dread that would instil in people would be sufficient to nullify any beneficial effects on total net happiness? I think instead it maybe best physiologically to get the worst bit over with first - the experience of evil on earth - followed by the good bit (heaven).
Quoting Pfhorrest
If that was possible, God would only do it for a mind in heaven: suffering is required to define a baseline for happiness and in order to value happiness.
I was happy as a child, without a baseline of suffering. I can conceive of a system where people are happy, and they consciously realize that, without having had to suffer, or even without having a concept of suffering.
Why couldn't God create that? He is not omnipotent?
Quoting Devans99
Why not go from extremely good to superbly good, to ecstatically good? Why start at a level below acceptable?
That lowers the bar of "omnipotent" below the acceptable level of the definition.
But people would be happier still if they have had that initial exposure to evil (so that they have a way of measuring/quantifying good). My point is that, yes, there are many 'good' answers to the question, but the only optimal answer is that happiness is maximised in those who have already experienced evil.
Quoting god must be atheist
The lower you start, the more effective the regime is at maximising happiness over the long term (in a purely mathematical sense). Of course that is an argument for starting everyone of in hell, but I think that this would not be acceptable, based on a human decency argument. It also might lead to long term trauma in individuals. So some evil but not an excessive amount of evil seems right.
Quoting god must be atheist
But if any mind is a logic processor plus memory then even an omnipotent God can only create minds of a similar nature. Your point is similar to 'why can't God create square circles?' - an omnipotent God can only perform things that are logically possible. A mind without memory is not a mind as we know it and its the memory of evil that make the good times good.
PTSD. People who have experienced pure evil suffer to the end of their lives. They never again experience joy in their lives, especially because of their suffering.
Is this what you meant by "optimum"?
No. A mind without memory is not a mind, but a life without ANY suffering due to evil is a LIFE, and no memory of evil is needed to experience joy and life.
What you are trying to say is that suffering is necessary to experience joy, and that is a logical necessity, and you are trying to convince others that it is a logical necessity to the tune of 1 plus 1 equals two, not five.
Well, it is not. Suffering is an empirical event, and it is not an a priori truth that you need to suffer to experience joy and happiness and rapture.
Not really. You say if you go from -4, you can get a difference more than if you start at +4. That is not true. If the difference is 16, then you get to 12 form minus four, but you get to plus twenty from plus four with the same difference of 16. Your argument breaks down both on the psychological and on the mathematical argument fields.
There is no way I can convince you to abandon your principles. So there is really no reason to continue this discourse for me.
I get the feeling you play your god's advocate here, not your devil's... but never mind.