Both Mung and KeithS have asked me to weigh in on the question of whether the existence of evil counts as a good argument against Christianity, as KeithS has maintained in a recent post, so I shall oblige.
It is important to understand that the problem of evil is not an argument against the existence of God or gods, but against what KeithS calls the Christian God (actually, the God of classical theism), Who is supposed to be omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. KeithS succinctly formulates the problem as follows:
Let’s say I claim that an omniGod named Frank exists — omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Suppose I also claim that Frank regards seahorses as the absolute height of evil. The world contains a lot of seahorses, and Frank, being omnipotent, has the power to wipe them off the face of the earth. Why doesn’t he? Why does he countenance a world full of seahorses?
KeithS emphasizes that it is not enough for the Christian to show that God is on balance benevolent. Rather, the Christian needs to defend the claim that God is omnibenevolent:
The Christian claim is that God is omnibenevolent — as benevolent as it is logically possible to be. Finding that the items on the “good” side of the ledger outweigh those on the “bad” side — if that were the case — would not establish God’s omnibenevolence at all.
Finally, KeithS provides his own take on the problem of evil:
The problem of evil remains as much of a problem as ever for Christians. Yet there are obvious solutions to the problem that fit the evidence and are perfectly reasonable: a) accept that God doesn’t exist, or b) accept that God isn’t omnipotent, or c) accept that God isn’t perfectly benevolent. Despite the availability of these obvious solutions, most Christians will choose to cling to a view of God that has long since been falsified.
He even suggests how he would resolve the problem if he were a theist (emphasis mine – VJT):
Suppose God hates evil and suffering but is too weak to defeat them, at least at the moment. Then any such instances can be explained by God’s weakness.
It addresses the problem of evil without sacrificing theism. I’m amazed that more theists don’t seize on this sort of resolution. They’re too greedy in their theology, too reluctant to give up the omnis.
I think KeithS is onto something here. In fact, I’d like to ditch the conventional Christian views of God’s omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence. It’s time for an overhaul.
Why a God Who constantly watches His creatures cannot be omniscient
First, the conventional notion of God’s omniscience needs to be jettisoned. As I argued in an earlier post on the problem of evil, the problem of evil depends on the assumption that God’s knowledge of our choices (and of Adam and Eve’s choices) is logically prior to those choices. In that post, I upheld the contrary view (defended in our own time by C.S. Lewis), that God is like a watcher on a high hill: He timelessly knows everything that we choose to do, but His knowledge is logically subsequent to the choices we make, which means that He doesn’t know what we will do “before” He decides to make us. I have to acknowledge, however, that this is very much a minority view among the Christian Fathers and/or Doctors of the Church, and I can only think of two who argued for this view: namely, the somewhat heterodox theologian Origen (185-254 A.D.) and possibly, the Christian philosopher Boethius (c. 480- c. 524 A.D. – although his own personal views on the subject remain in dispute, as he elsewhere seems to reject the “watcher on the hill” analogy which he develops in Book V, Prose 6 of his Consolation of Philosophy, in which he declares that God “sees all things in an eternal present just as humans see things in a non-eternal present.”) Whether they be predestinationists or Molinists, the vast majority of Christian theologians who are orthodox – and I’m not counting “open theists” here – maintain that God’s knowledge of our choices is logically prior to those choices. I haven’t taken a straw poll of lay Christian believers, but judging from Christians I’m acquainted with, the “watcher on the hill” view of God remains a popular way of reconciling His foreknowledge with human free will, to this day. I believe the common folk are wiser than the theologians here.
Why are theologians so reluctant to accept the Boethian solution? In a nutshell, because they see it as detracting from God’s sovereignty, as it makes Him dependent on His creatures for information about what is going on in the world. God has to (timelessly) observe us in order to know what we are getting up to. I have to say I don’t see the problem here, provided that God freely and timelessly chooses to rely on His creatures for His knowledge of what they do. If He wants to impose that limitation on Himself, who are we to stop Him?
But if God’s knowledge of our choices is (timelessly) obtained from observing those choices, then we can no longer say that God knows exactly what I would do in every possible situation. On the Boethian account, God does not possess counterfactual knowledge: He knows everything I do, but not everything I would do, in all possible situations. Why not? For one thing, in many situations, there simply is no fact of the matter as to what I would do. What would I do if I won $10,000,000? I don’t know, and neither does God. Nor is this a bad thing: after all, if God knows exactly what I would do in every possible situation, then it makes no sense to say that in a given situation, I could have acted otherwise. (That, by the way, is why I find Molinism utterly nonsensical.)
And what about mathematics? Does God know the answer to every possible mathematical problem? I would argue that He doesn’t, as there are many branches of mathematics where the “rules of the game” are determined by the mathematicians theorizing in that area. In a different world, we would have had different mathematicians, and different branches of mathematics, with different rules. I see no reason to suppose that God knows all possible choices that could be made by all possible (as well as actual) persons.
The upshot of all this is that while God knows everything there is to know about His creatures, He is not omniscient. There are many counterfactuals that He doesn’t know, and there are many possibilities that He never contemplates, either. All we can say is that God knows everything about what we do (past, present and future), and that we can keep no secrets from Him.
Why God is a lot less powerful than many Christians think
Second, the traditional notion of God’s omnipotence needs to be discarded. On the classical view defended by St. Thomas Aquinas, God can do anything which it is logically possible for Him to do, as God. In recent years, however, the classical view has come under fire, from the Reformed theologian Alvin Plantinga, who refuted it using the humorous counter-example of a being whose nature allows him to do nothing but scratch his ear (which he does, making him omnipotent) in his book, God and other minds (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), and also from the Catholic philosopher Peter Geach, who sharply criticized the traditional view in an influential article titled “Omnipotence” (Philosophy 48 (1973): 7-20 – see here for a discussion). In his article, Geach argued that God is not omnipotent but almighty: since He maintains the world in existence, He has power over all things, but He does not have the power to do all things.
What relevance does this have to the problem of evil? On the traditional view of God’s omnipotence, God could have preserved each of us from sin throughout our earthly lives, without violating our free will, as he did with Jesus and (according to Catholics and Orthodox) the Virgin Mary: we would still have possessed full libertarian freedom when choosing between alternative goods, but not when choosing between good and evil. And there are many Protestants who believe that individuals who are “born again” are infallibly elected by God, so that even if they sin, their final salvation is Divinely guaranteed. Why, one might ask, didn’t God make us all like that? The Catechism of the Catholic Church attempts to resolve the problem by appealing to the “greater good” of the Incarnation and Redemption – a response which I find unsatisfactory, since (as Blessed John Duns Scotus argued) there was nothing to stop God from becoming incarnate even if Adam had never sinned.
For normal human beings, their personal identity is determined by their parentage, and by the gametes from which their bodies were created. (I would not be “me” if I had had a different mother or father, or if I had been conceived from a different sperm or egg.) But what if God’s act of specially electing a saint to glory also determines that individual’s personal identity? In that case, there is no way that God could have refrained from electing that saint without making him or her a different person. And if I am not elected in this fashion, but possess the power to choose between being saved and being damned, then I cannot coherently wish to have been predestined for eternal life without wishing myself to be a different person. It follows from this that while God could have made a world of human beings who were all preserved from sin, or who were all infallibly elected, not even God could make a world in which each of us is preserved from sin or infallibly elected. In that case, God is significantly less powerful than Christian theologians like to imagine.
In recent years, New Atheists have argued that the designs we find in living things are inept, and that if a Creator existed, He could have done a much better job of making these creatures. Creationists and Intelligent Design advocates reply that living things are subject to numerous design constraints, and that just because we can imagine a more elegant design does not mean that it is possible to create such a design. Picturability does not imply possibility. Recent scientific discoveries regarding the vertebrate eye (see here and here) have done much to vindicate this line of argument. (The same goes for the laryngeal nerve in the neck of the giraffe.) We are a long way here from the traditional view that God can make anything, as long as no logical contradiction is involved. Physical and nomological constraints (relating to the structure of matter, and the laws of Nature which obtain in our cosmos) also need to be taken into account.
An additional reason for rejecting the traditional notion of omnipotence is that it commits one to maintaining that God can bring about states of affairs which are not properly described. When someone claims, for instance, that God could make a horse capable of flying, like the mythical Pegasus, what, exactly, are we supposed to conceive of God doing here? And how would Pegasus fly, anyway? Are we supposed to imagine God working a miracle, by raising a horse in the air? But in that case, shouldn’t we really say that the horse is not flying (by its own natural power), but rather that God is holding it up? Or are we meant to imagine an alternative world, where the laws of Nature are changed so as to allow horses to fly – in which case, should we call the creature in this alternate world a horse, or should we rather call it a shmorse? Or are we to suppose that God could come up with a physical design for a horse that would enable it to fly, even with the laws of Nature that hold in this world? But in that case, how do we know that such a design exists? There is not the slightest evidence for such a design, and aerodynamic considerations suggest that the enterprise of attaching natural wings that would allow an animal with the dimensions of a horse to fly, would be altogether unworkable.
Goodbye to omnibenevolence
Finally, the concept of God’s omnibenevolence needs to be tossed out, lock, stock and barrel. Theologians have always maintained, of course, that God could have made a world that was better than the one He did, simply by adding a few extra bells and whistles. There is no “best possible world,” as the philosopher Leibniz falsely imagined. But that does not prevent God from making a world which is free from all natural and moral evil – which raises the obvious question of why an omnibenevolent Deity would create such a world as ours. One traditional answer, given by St. Augustine in his Enchiridion, Chapter III, is that God allows evil for the sake of a “greater good”: “For the Omnipotent God, whom even the heathen acknowledge as the Supreme Power over all, would not allow any evil in his works, unless in his omnipotence and goodness, as the Supreme Good, he is able to bring forth good out of evil.” I think its time to candidly acknowledge, as Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has already done, that this kind of talk simply won’t wash:
Being infinitely sufficient in Himself, God had no need of a passage through sin and death to manifest His glory in His creatures or to join them perfectly to Himself. This is why it is misleading (however soothing it may be) to say that the drama of fall and redemption will make the final state of things more glorious than it might otherwise have been. No less metaphysically incoherent – though immeasurably more vile – is the suggestion that God requires suffering and death to reveal certain of his attributes (capricious cruelty, perhaps? morbid indifference? a twisted sense of humor?). It is precisely sin, suffering, and death that blind us to God’s true nature…
I do not believe we Christians are obliged – or even allowed – to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery.
But as KeithS has pointed out, there are problems with Hart’s own resolution of the problem of evil:
So in Hart’s bizarre world, we have a God who supposedly hates evil and suffering, yet chooses to permit them — and somehow this is all okay because it’s only temporary. Good will triumph in the end.
KeithS suggested that the problem of evil would be soluble if Christians simply acknowledged that God isn’t omnipotent or perfectly benevolent, but noted that Christians continue to “cling to a view of God that has long since been falsified.”
So I’d like to make a proposal of my own. In the first place, I’d like to propose that God is benevolent only in relation to the persons whom He decides to create. “Prior to” His act of creation, God is not benevolent at all. Thus when deciding what kind of world to create, God makes no attempt to choose the best one, or even a perfect one (i.e. one free from evil). Only after having chosen a particular world (for reasons best known to Himself) can we speak of God as being benevolent to His creatures.
In the second place, I’d like to propose that God’s benevolence to His sentient and sapient creatures is not unrestricted. After all, He allows His own creatures to be tortured to death, on occasion. Nevertheless, God is perfectly capable of setting limits to the amount of pain we have to put up with (thankfully, none of us has to suffer one million years of torture), of healing whatever wounds (physical and psychic) His tortured creatures have endured, and of bestowing the gift of immortality upon His sentient and sapient creatures (provided that they do not spurn it). Thus according to the picture I am sketching, God is ultimately benevolent, but not omnibenevolent. On this side of eternity, God’s benevolence is quite modest – but we can at least console ourselves with the thought that life could be much, much more painful than it is.
Finally, I’d like to point out that Christians have never referred to God in their prayers as omnibenevolent, but rather as all-loving. God loves each and every one of us with a steadfast, unshakable love which is greater than any of us can possibly imagine. The only kind of love we can compare to God’s love, in its steadfastness, is parental love. And most importantly, what God loves is we ourselves, and not our feelings. Thus God has no interest in maximizing the level of euphoria in the world – whether it be the aggregate level or the average level – because God’s parental commitment is to us, and not our states of mind. Being a loving Father, God naturally wants what is ultimately best for us, but He does not necessarily want us to enjoy a pain-free journey to our ultimate destination.
These proposals of mine have significant implications for the problem of evil. On the Judeo-Christian view, each and every human person is a being of infinite and irreplaceable value, loved by God. Two infinities cannot be meaningfully added to yield a greater infinity; hence a world with more people would not be a “better” world. What’s more, even wicked people are beings of infinite and irreplaceable value; hence a world with kinder people would not be a “better” world, but merely a world where people existed in a better state. Thus I would suggest that one reason why God tolerates evil acts (such as acts of rape or murder) is that there are some individuals in our world who would never have come into existence, were it not for these evil acts having been performed. The same logic can be applied to natural disasters: think of a man and a woman, living in neighboring towns, who both lose their families in a terrible earthquake, but are brought together in the aftermath of the quake, and who decide to get married, settle down and raise a family of their own. Such occurrences are by no means uncommon. Since the creation of any human being is good in an unqualified sense, God may decide to tolerate natural or moral evils, if doing so enables individuals to come into existence who would not have done so otherwise. Please note that I’m not saying He must, but merely that He may.
Fair enough; nevertheless, the skeptic might urge, the world is still a pretty awful place, and arguably much worse than it needs to be. Most natural and moral evils don’t result in the creation of new sentient or sapient beings, after all. There seems to be a lot of gratuitous evil in the world. Why is this so?
The Fall – and why it is needed to explain the mess we’re in
Traditionally, Christians have appealed to the doctrine of the Fall of our first parents at the dawn of human history, in order to explain why God allows these senseless evils to continue. John Henry Newman eloquently argued for this doctrine in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (Longmans, Green & Co., London, revised edition, 1865, chapter 5, pp. 242-243):
I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence. Did I see a boy of good make and mind, with the tokens on him of a refined nature, cast upon the world without provision, unable to say whence he came, his birthplace or his family connexions, I should conclude that there was some mystery connected with his history, and that he was one, of whom, from one cause or other, his parents were ashamed. Thus only should I be able to account for the contrast between the promise and the condition of his being. And so I argue about the world;— if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence; and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God.
In their recent book, Adam and the Genome, geneticist Dennis Venema and New Testament scholar Scott McKnight have marshaled an impressive array of converging scientific evidence, indicating that the human population has probably never fallen below 10,000 individuals. That certain puts paid to literalistic interpretations of the Fall, but as Denis Alexander has described in his book, Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose?, one can still defend some notion of a Fall at the dawn of human history. Here’s how he outlines one possible approach to the Fall (although it’s not his favorite):
In the first type of approach (which has many variants), some people in Africa, following the emergence of anatomically modern humanity, became aware of God’s existence, power and calling upon their lives and responded to their new-found knowledge of him in love and obedience, in authentic relationship with God. However, they subsequently turned their back on the light that they had received and went their own way, leading to human autonomy and a broken relationship with God (“sin”). The emphasis in this type of speculation is on historical process – relationships built and broken over many generations.
My own belief is that God bestowed upon our first parents the responsibility for deciding the scope of Divine providence in ordinary human affairs. In their pride, our first parents chose personal autonomy, knowing that it would entail death and suffering for the entire human race: basically, they told God to butt out of everyday human affairs, leaving Him free to intervene only for very special reasons. To skeptics who would object that God should never have given such enormous responsibilities to our first parents in the first place, I would suggest that it is simply impossible for God to make intelligent beings without offering them an allotted sphere or domain in which they can legitimately exercise their freedom: that is what makes them who they are. As the first parents of the human race, our first parents had to have the responsibility for deciding whether they wanted the human race to be protected by God’s Providence or whether to reject God and go it alone.
As a Christian, I believe that God is just and merciful. I do not believe that it was unjust of God to test the human race at the beginning of human history; but I will acknowledge that in order to make sense of the terrible consequences of that fateful test, we need to maintain a view of history which sounds very strange to modern ears – instead of a gradual ascent to human self-awareness, as we might suppose, there was a First Contact between human creatures and their Creator. We need to envisage this as a cosmic, Miltonian drama, with our first parents as larger-than-life characters who enjoyed an intimacy and familiarity with God which we can only dream of, and who were given the enormous responsibility of custodianship over the lives of their future descendants. It may seem incomprehensible to us that they would give up their relationship with a God Who could satisfy all their needs, in favor of a death-and-violence ridden world like ours, but what they gained (in their own eyes) was the freedom to live as they chose. This, then, is why we’re in the mess we’re in. How long it will continue, I have no idea.
For those readers who would like a theological explanation of animal suffering, I would recommend Jon Garvey’s excellent online book, God’s Good Earth.
The problem of evil: A summary
We have seen that in order to make sense of the evil in the world, we need to abandon the notion of an omniscient God Who knows all counterfactuals and all possibilities, and Who knows what we do without needing to be informed by us. Rather, we should simply say that God (timelessly) knows everything we do, by constantly watching us. We also need to abandon the notion of an omnipotent God Who can do anything that’s logically possible. It turns out that there are a number of constraints which God is subject to, which prevent Him from creating any old world that we can imagine, and that prevent Him from having created us in a perfect world where no-one ever sinned. Furthermore, we need to abandon the notion that God is omnibenevolent. Christians have never worshiped an omnibenevolent Deity. Rather, the God they worship is a Parent Who loves us personally, and Who will never stop loving us. Such a God may however be willing to allow His creatures to be subjected to a great degree of suffering in the short term. He can only be called “benevolent” from a long-term perspective, insofar as He has prepared us for eternity with Him.
Finally, the sheer pervasiveness of the suffering in this world points to what Newman referred to as “some terrible aboriginal calamity” at the dawn of humanity, in which the entire human race paid the price for the proud decision made by our first parents to isolate themselves from God’s benevolent protection, for the sake of pursuing what they perceived as independence and freedom. God did not know that they would make that choice, but He gave them the power to decide the fate of the human race, and to “turn off the lights” in our world until God started turning them back on again, culminating in His Revelation of Himself to us 2,000 years ago in a manger in Bethlehem.
To sum up: the Christian view of history is capable of being cogently defended, provided Christians are willing to remove the theological barnacles that have attached themselves to its system of belief, and abandon the “three omnis,” in favor of a more intimate but less extravagant notion of God.
“To me, an omnipotent entity cannot be constrained by the rules of this universe. If an entity is limited by anything – resources, time, physical laws and rules, scientific principles, technology, or methodology, it isn’t omnipotent by definition.”
A lot of fine-tuning proponents don’t understand they’re proposing limits on god. I forget who said it, but the paraphrase was, “If god can only make life between this little parameter and this other little parameter, then he’s not an omnipotent being, he’s just a technician adjusting dials.”
Since the challenge I sought to meet was to provide a hypothetical scenario that was successful in reconciling an O3 God with what we experience in life, you’ve just admitted I have done so, vacuous or not.
My proposition is not “compatible with” a world where no O3 god exists because it premises such a god exists; it is not “compatible with” a reality where no afterlife state exists because it assumes one exists. It is also not compatible with an existence where the afterlife condition by itself is sufficient for the full expression and experience of its inhabitants.
Perhaps what you mean to say is that there is no way to prove my scenario true, because nothing in our experience could contradict or disprove my scenario (which, by the way, is you admitting it is air-tight and complete). Fortunately, in this discussion, it’s not my burden to prove the hypothetical scenario to be true. My burden is just to come up with a possible scenario where an O3 god can be reconciled with certain kinds of experiences.
Interestingly, my scenario also explains why the existence of god and the afterlife cannot be proven – at least, cannot be proven to many or most experiencers; such proof would undermine what it is they are here to experience/accomplish. It is precisely the not knowing that grants much experience here it’s particular nature.
Robin,
Let me ask you the following so that we can perhaps focus the issue.
IF it is the case that we choose our lives with the full knowledge of what those lives will entail and the conditions they are subject to (no safe word easy out, no remembering or knowledge of god and/or the afterlife); and
IF it is the case that what we will achieve (not possibly achieve, but will achieve) is something we hold to be worth the price of what that particular life entails; and
IF, in the afterlife, you will find yourself healed and retaining only the desired benefits of the experience,
THEN is it at least reasonable to consider that, while it is certainly benevolent to save people from or prevent them from experiencing harmful experiences, it can also be said to be benevolent to respect their wishes and not intervene in them pursuing and acquiring a goal they seek, even if they are temporarily experiencing extreme pain and suffering?
Prior to any explanation of how it works or what anyone could possibly want that would move them to choose such a life, or how it could be evidenced, etc., my question is if it is just reasonable, in your opinion, even in principle to consider the non-intervention of god in such situations ultimately benevolent?
IOW, IF the goal is worth the price, and IF the pain and suffering is temporary, and IF you will be fine and better for it afterwards, and IF it was your fully informed choice, THEN, in principle, could the non-intervention of God be considered benevolent?
Don’t mention it. I’m not saying that these examples are the workings of karma. They are demonstrations of actions that begin at one point of time in preparation for another event to come in the future.
My understanding of individual karma is that it is not the workings of cause and effect within one lifetime. It is a case of causes in one lifetime producing effects in future incarnations of the individual spirit.
Babies do not have that capability. Consciousness comes gradually with individual development. Babies do not have the awareness required to make conscious decisions. Even in adulthood many things happen to us that we did not wish for.
Yes, I agree. Humans have forethought.
Individual actions may lead to karmic processes which have implications for the future or they may occur as a compensatory result of previous karmic actions. The working out of karma may not happen as intended for various reasons in which case it will need to be worked out in some other way in the future. But it will need to be worked out if we are to progress in the intended way
Now unless someone had knowledge of the various incarnations of an individual they would not be able to be sure whether an event in the individuals life was a karmic cause, a karmic effect or something in between.
I do not hide the fact that I am a follower of Rudolf Steiner and in order to better understand his teachings on reincarnation and karma it’s a good idea to know a bit about his teachings about humans. Humans have a physical principle in common with inanimate nature, we have a life or etheric principle in common with plant nature and a feeling or astral principle in common with animals. In the natural world only humans have a self conscious or ego principle. These are not rigid boundaries, they overlap somewhat.
At death our physical body is laid aside and soon after that the etheric principle is also laid aside. The ego also frees itself from the astral principle but this is a more drawn out process.
Say during life I hurt someone, then in order to become free of the astral principle the feeling we engendered in that person returns to us and we feel their pain. This is a learning process and it brings about in our ego the desire in our next incarnation to act in a way that makes amends to that person.
That is a very simplified explanation of the idea of karma. If you think of all the dealings and interactions you have had during your life you will appreciate how complex the working out of karma becomes in this scenario.
Robin,
I said:
I’d like to add to that last line:
“THEN, in principle, could the non-intervention of God be considered benevolent, or at least an inaction that does not necessarily violate God’s presumed omnibenevolence?“
If Hitler could have been doing God’s work of giving people the experiences that they signed up for, I guess.
Perhaps that’s why just-so stories full of excuses for grotesque behaviors are rarely considered to be sufficient explanations.
Glen Davidson
In other words,are root canals compatible with an omnibenevolent God?
Yes
If Hitler could have been doing Nature’s work by giving people the experiences that happened to have been the result of their particular history of happenstance chemistry and physics, I guess.
Perhaps that’s why just-so evolutionary stories full of naturalistic excuses for grotesque behaviors are rarely considered to be sufficient explanations.
Unlike sound reasoning, weaponized, rhetorical commentary can always be turned back on the user.
That’s the 2nd person that agrees that the premise is at least in principle a rationally sound answer to the problem. Anyone else?
Really. What’s Nature? And how could Hitler be giving people the experiences that are the result of happenstance chemistry and physics?
You’re just stringing together IDiot bafflegab there.
What “naturalistic excuses” does evolution provide? You’re just babbling idiocies.
If you’re not interested in considering the issues, but pretend that Nature is an agent that does something and that evolution provides any kind of excuse, you can write some strained bullshit, like you did. Of course it’s all “happenstance chemistry and physics,” as if you’re encapsulating any kind of actual proposition, rather than IDiot caricatures.
I guess that’s you being clever.
Glen Davidson
In my view and experience, suffering is cumulative. That is to say, there’s no way to experience a lifetime of suffering without going through a lifetime of suffering (as noted above in our agreement). So your comment that others could obtain my goal by spreading out smaller experiences over several lifetimes conflicts with that general premise we agreed upon. And by golly, if I could have just died when I was 8 and restarted the simulation a few times, I’m going to be really pissed and kick the ever loving %
outta said omni-asshat.
Or it could be entirely purposeless.Oddly, there’s no way to know. If only the designer(s) had left a note…
If “I’m” in a simulation, then from my perspective this “me” is simulated as well. That is to say, my counterpart participating in the simulation is somewhere else outside the simulation. At least, that’s how I understand simulations…you know…The Matrix type thing. The holodeck concept is interesting to me, but without the direct stimulation of the senses, the illusion can’t be sustained in my view.
Now maybe your idea is something completely different. Maybe you mean that everything here is actually physical – an actual manufactured modeled world with a “real” larger world outside it – something like The Maze Runner. To me, such things would not be “simulations” so much “arenas”. But I digress…
In any event, while your premise is that anyone can run through the simulation I’m running through, oddly there’s no evidence anyone ever has. So while billions of people have run through the simulation of happy-married-couple-with-two-point-three-kids-a-dog-and-a-white-picket-fence almost no one has bothered with the super suffering scenario. Wonder why that is? Makes much more sense to me if there is no simulation, no omni-nonsense, and no beyond, but rather life is exactly what it says on the tin and you make the best of what your born with and what your biology implores you to do.
Which then leaves the Problem of Evil completely intact from my perspective.
Who cares if one is in a simulation? If they are NPC, their amazement isn’t real and any “profound affect” amounts to nothing but some echo in a simulation. Even on the small chance that some of those folks are also participants, my “profound affect” is of little, if any value unless they didn’t pre-choose an encounter with me in the first place. But then THAT would create all sorts of epileptic trees and continuity snarls and lord only knows how many space-time-simulation paradoxes.
Seriously, the whole thing is just a Godwin’s Law away from going back in time to kill your father in terms of it’s internal consistency. And it really doesn’t solve the problem of evil to boot.
See above. Trying running the inherent consequences and unimaginable coordination mishaps that come out of an individual like me in the simulation and a whole lot of other simulation experience “jumpers” (those just taking simple experiences, but “jumping” through them over several hundred tries”. Just try counting the number of “deja vu” experiences one is going to have indicating a glitch in the matrix. It would be just mind-bogglingly erratic.
Well it has to be random on some level, otherwise there is no “experience” of anything. If you know everything that’s going to happen in detail and explicitly before doing it, what exactly is one gaining through the experience?
But if there’s no point in the experience from the perspective of those outside the simulation, why would anyone bother? That makes no sense William. Who cares if it seems “real” and “new” and “something” while you’re in the simulation; if you already have whatever you’d gain by doing the simulation before you’ve done said simulation, no one would bother.
And further, if everyone knows everything about said simulation in advance, then there can be no such thing as “profoundly affect” or “here for others’ benefit” or anything like that. Nothing in the simulation would have any meaning at all.
The whole thing reminds me of a parody/joke visual I recall from years ago: a 1950s style family sitting on a checkered blanket having a picnic with kids and a dog playing in the background. The scene pulls back and it turns out the whole thing is staged in some vault stage somewhere with words across the container to the effect of “Outdoor Park Simulator” or some such. There’s a notice on the side indicating several options: “breezy”, “still”, “cool”, “warm”, “cloudy”, “sunny” and so forth. The caption was something like, “no ants or allergies!” But of course, no “park” or “outdoors” either…
But with the bonus that we all PRE-CHOSE the reason, but forgot we did so…
Robin said:
That’s irrelevant to the argument. That would matter if I was trying to prove my hypothesis true, I’m not. I’m just trying to show that the hypothesis is rationally consistent. Whether or not we can find evidence if it is true or not is a different conversation.
Again, whether or not the details can be sorted out for any specific situation, it’s irrelevant as to whether or not the hypothesis in principle satisfies the problem of reconciling an O3 god with the experience of pain and suffering.
If you would, please respond to the IF/THEN distillation I provided. Please don’t worry about how such a system would be implemented, or if there is any evidence that supports it, but rather just judge the principle involved in the hypothesis.
“IF the goal is worth the price, and IF the pain and suffering is temporary, and IF you will be fine and better for it afterwards, and IF it was your fully informed choice, THEN, in principle, could the non-intervention of God be considered benevolent, or at least an inaction that does not necessarily violate God’s presumed omnibenevolence?”
🙂
And if my experiences of good can be questioned, so likewise can their experiences of evil be questioned. Perhaps it’s all just a matter of misinterpretation.
Heh! That’s funny!
I admit, in principle I have no philosophical problem with the idea of an entity that creates a universe based on a specific set of rules such that life can only exist within some narrow set of parameters. However, I do have a philosophical problem with labeling such an entity as omnipotent, but when faced with the a plethora of ugly implications, insisting there are limits to what said omnipotent being can do. My personal favorite absurd semantic gymnastic is the claim, “God cannot do anything outside His nature”. That makes me chuckle every time.
What else follows from your premise? If the pain and suffering is good then wouldn’t pain killers be evil? Would it be self evidently true that torturing infants for pleasure was right?
newton asks:
No, it doesn’t follow that pain and suffering are in and of themselves good.
Self-evident truths are not derived from premises.
Robin,
Yes, and most omnitheists don’t realize how much of a straitjacket omnigoodness actually is.
From an old comment of mine on the “illogic of intercessory prayer” thread:
Simply put, no. Is it benevolent to let someone jump out of plane without a parachute just because said person wants to see what it would be like? I don’t think it is. Is it benevolent to let someone with no training try to fly a plane or drive a car simply for the experience? Again, I don’t think so. Is it benevolent to let someone shoot themselves in the hand to find out what it feels like? Not to me. But then worse, is it then benevolent to not provide any care for the person’s wounded hand if one has the power to do so? Absolutely not.
What you are describing is essentially allowing people with dementia or other forms of memory related mental illness to “experience” anything because it’s just as benevolent to let unaware people fulfill their wishes as it is to protect them. That to me is nuts.
No.
No.
That doesn’t change my answer above.
A simple Google search returns a number of descriptions of sociopathy. All include a lack of empathy and a lack of conscience. Sociopaths do not see other people as anything other than means to the sociopath’s ends.
I apologize for overstating the case. In your view some, but not all, people are actually not really human. They are NPCs or zombies. The risk to the rest of us is what happens when you decide a particular person falls into that category. Making that decision is a sociopathic behavior.
Putting up with? Your continued refusal to engage directly with keiths’ arguments while commenting prolificly shows how important a reaction, any reaction, is to you. What would Mung be if no one paid attention to him?
Yeah, but within a natural framework of biological products of evolution, “we”…some collective group can decide what is right and wrong and horrific and loving and so forth. It may well be arbitrary and it may well be all relative, but if the majority decides what Hitler did was wrong, then people will resist it on their terms and ultimately condemn and even stop such behavior on their terms. That Hitler’s perspective on right and wrong is “just as valid” as the majority’s is fine too, but ultimately irrelevant since the majority decided he was wrong and overruled and condemned his value system…again…on their terms. And society is presumably better for it as measured internally. No wacky simulations or non-benevolent gods needed…
This discussion is about the Christian god which is claimed to be omnipotent.
Whatever keiths motivations, the problem in the U.S. is that these “poor benighted souls” vote. Their personal beliefs have consequences for other people. To that extent, those beliefs are subject to challenge.
Why won’t you just directly address his argument as he states it?
(Yes, I know the answer. You’re getting to comment and receive responses. Your goals here are being met.)
It weakens the plausibility of your concept and creates and internal contradiction. I realize you’re not trying to prove your concept true, but if it’s not credible, there’s not a lot of reason for me to consider the implications or logic.
From my perspective as I’ve noted, your concept doesn’t do a very good job of reconciling such. I just don’t see an entity that allows people who are under-the-influence (as it were) to sadistically fulfill their wishes as benevolent in any way.
I did.
No.
Robin,
Thanks! There’s really no reason to continue that discussion then. I appreciate your time.
Likewise. Interesting concepts regardless of agreement.
William:
keiths:
William:
No, because your scenario is still internally inconsistent. Your God’s purported omnibenevolence is incompatible with the requirement that people precommit to their suffering, with no way to back out later if they find they’ve gotten in too deep. An omnibenevolent God would give them an out.
(There’s also a subtler concern having to do with personal identity, which I’ll broach in a later comment.)
The flaw in your proposal can be corrected by adopting the change I suggested earlier:
That doesn’t address the vacuousness problem, however.
Actually, before you drop this completely, I’m curious: in your concept is obesity a chosen experience that is rewarded? What about alcoholism and opioid addiction? Type 2 diabetes? Pornography consumption? Nose picking? Smoking?
I really don’t think “rewarded” is an accurate term. It’s not like you get “rewarded” with knowledge when you study, or are “rewarded” with a sense of triumph for meeting a hard challenge; it’s really just the natural result of engaging in the exercise which is why you would have to go through them to acquire the goal in the first place. I think some behaviors are required for the completion of the challenge and are wired into the interface, so to speak; others may be expressions of the individual operating the avatar. I would think that most if not all of the serious aspects of the simulation avatar would be designed aspects of that program with the ultimate goal in mind.
So in your opinion only two positions are allowed to be aired here, Christians who believe in an omnipotent God and atheists who believe that there is no god. No other views should be tolerated.
Is that your position?
Interesting summary.
One issue I have with most descriptions of omni-gods is that such entities regularly encounter choices and will (and do) make decisions. That to me is another internal inconsistency. The only reason humans (and other animals) have choices is because a) we have limited resources and time, and thus can’t do everything, or b) can’t see all that far into the future, so we can’t be sure how a give action will ultimately unfold. An omni-entity has (or should have) no such constraints, so the concept of choice for such an entity is an oxymoron.
ETA: I forgot to add: c) we have feelings (well, some of us do anyway) and occasionally run into situation where we have a choice between actions that might have negative consequences that we don’t feel like causing or contributing to. Similarly, there are all sorts of situations that arise for humans wherein we have to choose between things we want to do vs things we feel we ought to do. How could such situations make any sense for something omni-anything?
Nope. I’m not an authoritarian. Write whatever you like. I’m just particularly interested in the main topic.
I’m tempted to ask, are you suggesting that right should be curtailed? I know you’re not suggesting that but that’s the problem with democracy – everyone in the group (let’s not go there for the moment) has an equal vote.
This is where the clear bright line should be drawn. When my beliefs embolden me to involve myself in other people’s personal life, I need a damn good smack down. Secularism should guarantee the freedom of individuals to hold to whatever personal beliefs they have, limited only at the point when it impinges on the rights of others.
Any beliefs, publicly stated, should be subject to challenge.
I don’t think it should be curtailed, although I do think a lot fewer things should be subject to the force of government and therefore voting.
I’m simply pointing out that religious beliefs aren’t just private, they impact other individuals. That’s why it’s important to continue to challenge foolishness like intelligent design creationism long after it’s been proven to be scientifically vacuous. As a political movement it is losing momentum, but not fast enough.
When creationists have the same power as flat earthers, I’ll agree we should leave them to their delusions.
Yes so am I. That’s why I’m discussing it and not politics. 🙂
Robin,
I think the concept of choice still makes sense for an omniGod, who is selecting among alternatives, after all. He evaluates the alternatives and picks one that best satisfies his criteria.
The decisions aren’t unfolding in time, of course, because he has all the information he needs to make them at time 0 (or outside of time, if you hold him to be timeless). But they are still decisions.
Alan:
Fixed that for you.
Also, you continue to think that challenging a belief is somehow tantamount to denying the right of people to hold it.
For example, you write:
Please contemplate the following until it sinks in:
1) I think Christianity is a ridiculous belief system; and
2) I absolutely support the right of Christians (and everyone else) to believe as they wish.
There is nothing at all contradictory about those two statements.
ETA: Last, it amazes me that after all these years you’re still baffled by the concept of a “Skeptical Zone”. Lizzie did not intend for this site to be a “safe space” where certain beliefs were exempt from challenge, Alan.
Patrick, to Mung:
A lonely Mung.
Mung reminds me of Trump in that he seems to regard negative attention as vastly preferable to no attention at all.
Snore. Why not lead by example? Bullies have often found me irresistible for some reason.
William:
keiths:
Robin:
Which brings me to the personal identity issue I alluded to earlier.
If William’s scenario is correct, then everything that happens to him here in the earth “simulation” is something he agreed to before entering the simulation. Let’s use “in-William” to refer to William when he’s in the simulation, and “out-William” to refer to him when he’s outside of it.
Suppose that in-William gets into a situation in which he is being brutally tortured. We already know that in-William does not wish to be tortured, despite his comical bravado in claiming that he can simply choose to enjoy even the most excruciating physical pain. In-William wants the torture to stop, and of course an omnibenevolent God would step in and rescue him, except for one thing: according to William, God refuses to rescue in-William because out-William agreed in advance to the torture and insisted on no rescue.
Does this make sense? No, and it’s easy to see why.
First, note that in-William wants the torture to stop, while out-William wants it to continue. Also note that out-William and in-William have differing sets of memories. This creates a quandary: are in-William and out-William really the same person if their desires are diametrically opposed and their memories differ?
William would presumably argue that yes, they are the same person. “In-William” and “out-William” just refer to William at different times. But if so, that means that William changes his mind about the torture when he’s inside the simulation and actually experiencing it. An omnibenevolent God would obviously not force the torture to continue if William has changed his mind and clearly wants it to stop.
So William’s scenario fails if in-William and out-William are the same person.
What if they are two different people? In that case, it’s obvious that an omnibenevolent will halt the torture immediately. He is not going to permit an unwilling victim to be tortured at another person’s insistence.
So either way, William’s proposal fails. An omnibenevolent God will halt the torture, while William’s proposal requires it to continue. William’s proposal is incompatible with an omnibenevolent God.
You didn’t ponder it carefully enough, William. But I’m glad you brought it here so we could identify the flaws for you.
keiths:
CharlieM:
But according to you, that baby had a “free spirit”, and free spirits choose their destiny:
keiths:
CharlieM:
So according to your logic, this particular free spirit chose her destiny, and part of that destiny was to be a baby whose head was eaten by a dog.
keiths:
CharlieM:
Yet your claim went far beyond that:
CharlieM:
newton:
CharlieM:
As my two scenarios illustrate, a student studying for an exam is not an example of an effect preceding a cause.
“Free spirits choose their own destiny.”
Basically the thesis of The Secret, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and a bunch of other tripe. And it implies that if people are suffering it’s their own fault.
Why didn’t Anne Frank choose a different destiny? Maybe she was just stubborn.
In times past, god moved in mysterious ways. Now we have concepts like VR it’s just another excuse for the theists to make excuses as to why their god is a p-o-s.
Nothing really changes. Apologetics with a cyberpunk coating.
William, how do you know your wife is not an NPC?
Like so much of apologetics, WJM’s scenario appears to be yet another attempt to excuse the lack of meaningful evidence for theistic claims. First the omni-God is proclaimed, then the reasons why this claim can hardly be based upon the evidence are given (no, I don’t need any dreary ID non-evidence to “back up” the rest of the non-evidence).
Somehow, the whole exercise is supposed to settle the matter in favor of the omni-God. “But I gave you all of the excuses.”
Glen Davidson