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.
How is misrepresenting supposed to fix anything?
More mind-powers? As you mostly manage to misunderstand, misinterpret or misrepresent what I write, I guess you should request a refund on that mind-powers package. Listen carefully. I support the right of anyone to think their own thoughts and to conduct themselves in private however they wish unless they, in doing so are harming someone other than themselves. They have the right to show Keiths the door if he calls to proselytise for his anti-theism. I’m in favour of a genuine secular society, a pluralist society. The best way to get people to change their mind on issues is education and demonstration of alternatives.
I’m glad to see you confirm point 2. You didn’t need to tell me about point 1.
You manage to state the obvious so eloquently!
Mindreading Lizzie, now! And misrepresenting me. The object is to facilitate discussion. Your particular forte of gratuitously insulting interlocutors is not challenging anyone.
How could an omni-god ever encounter an alternative. What would “alternative” mean to an entity that can do pretty much anything.
Let’s just consider one of many possible concepts: if said omni-god is not constrained by resources and exists for an eternity, could the omnigod not simply run every possible and conceivable living scenario? If every possible scenario is playing out, what’s there for our omni-entity to choose between? Heck, an omni-entity could, at least logically, run every possible configuration of matter simultaneously (at least from omni-entity’s POV) and rerun every configuration again and again and again and…ad nauseum. It’s not like omni-entity is constrained by space-time or single universes or anything.
What kind of things do you think an omni-entity could actually choose between? I really can’t come up with anything.
Now we may be simply approaching this from a difference of semantics POV. I see choice arising out of a desire for multiple things, but having constraints that prevent the ability of having or doing all those things either over time or simultaneously. Since an omni-god has no constraints (that I can think of), said omni-god can’t have choice either. Perhaps you have a different idea of choice though.
As an example from this discussion, I can’t come up with non-fallacious logic for an omni-entity allowing evil (as if such an entity has a choice between allowing and not allowing). To me, if an omni-entity didn’t or doesn’t “want” or “like” something (whatever that sort of drive or feeling could even be in such an entity), said thing would simply never have existed. Why would an omni-entity ever even consider something it didn’t like? HOW could an omni-entity “consider” in the first place; it would already fully know all events, effects, properties, side-effects, by-products, and outcomes long before said “thing” or “things” ever existed.
Ascribing choice to an omni-entity just strikes me as some kind of anthropomorphic holdover. It just doesn’t make sense though if one really considers the implications of omni.
Maybe what you mean by decisions are what I conceive of as “milestones” or “gateways”. In other words, given that within the material world, events take place along pathways and as they unfold, forks crop up where, depending on decisions made, events proceed down one of the forks.
While I can agree with that as decision, I think it really only applies within a material framework. For an omni-entity – like quantum particles – all paths are followed simultaneously.
No the baby didn’t have a free spirit. A spiritual being on the path to freedom had its locus in that baby at that particular time. The baby is just one aspect of the spiritual being. You have stated it the wrong way round. You wouldn’t look at your thumb and say, “this thumb has a body” The thumb is just one part of the body.
A free spirit acts from within. If we are compelled to act due to an external cause, then we are not free. We are evolving towards freedom and the more we are able to act from within out of love for the deed with no thought of any personal gain or reward then the more we approach freedom.
Okay I should not have said “instigated by future events”, I should have said “instigated in preparation for future events”.
No. I certainly don’t know the full details of this chain of events. It could very well be that this event was not preordained to happen. But now that it has happened it becomes the start of several karmic processes. If it happened through individual carelessness, then it will affect the future karma of the careless person/s. This is not punishment it is just the way things are. The law of karma works in the same way that, say, putting your hand in a flame will have unavoidable consequences. The pain may teach you a lesson but it is not a punishment for the act.
Whatever the ins and outs of the case I assume that it will affect the karma of all those involved in some way.
I wasn’t trying to prove god exists, and I wasn’t creating an “apologetics” for O3 theism. In my theism, whether or not you believe in god is, ultimately, irrelevant. Whether or not you believe you are in a simulation is irrelevant to the putative fact that you will find yourself there when you are finished with this particular simulation.
If I thought any flaws had been pointed out, I would indeed consider them. However, IMO, none have been pointed out. What has been presented are disagreements on what omni-benevolence means or entails, and how an omni-benevolence should proceed in certain situations, but I disagree with those views.
Oh wow. It just hit me. He’s been gratuitously insulting me. How could i have been so blind?
The Christian god is claimed to be omnipotent. Since the god you’re discussing is not, it is not the Christian god.
I’ve never read it.
It implies nothing of the sort. Look at the individual lives of people in general, some suffer due to their own fault, some choose to suffer for a cause, some suffer at the hands of others, some don’t seem to suffer much at all.
It is the same with karma. Unless you know a great deal more than just the individual event, then you are not in a position to apportion blame.
What about the multitudes of people who have been inspired by Anne Frank? Her story has done a lot of good.
There are Christians who do not claim this. Besides, the God you are discussing does not exist in your opinion, therefore he cannot be the Christian God because, according to Christians, their God exists.
We are all discussing what the Christian God means to us. If there were no differences of opinion it wouldn’t be much of a discussion. If you don’t wish to discuss my views then the solution is simple, don’t bother replying to my posts.
Christians have a wide range of beliefs. I’m not aware of any denominations that do not consider their god to be tri-omni as a matter of canon. Do you?
I think it’s clear we’re discussing concepts.
My understanding of keiths’ argument is that a tri-omni god is essential to Christianity, the evidence is not consistent with the existence of such a god, so Christianity is false. You can certainly attack this argument by challenging the first premise, but I think dropping omnipotence means you’re no longer talking about the Christian concept of god.
Robin,
This is something I had not really thought through. I think my prior position was that an O3 God could choose whether or not to “instantiate” a particular individual, or universe, or whatever. But I now see that this “choice” is rather meaningless: as in, why bother? O3 already knows the outcome, so it makes no difference to O3 whether on not a particular universe is instantiated or not. What exists materially, and what does not, really doesn’t matter.
Being O3 means never being surprised by anything, ever. And never having to say that you’re sorry.
The God of the Bible certainly doesn’t appear to be O3. At all.
I do admire WJM for one thing:
Your common-or-garden solipsism is sufficiently ego-centric that no-one can take it seriously. After all, the speaker is proposing that everyone but him, including his buddies sitting smoking weed with him, is a figment of his mind. And they are all invited to explore the identical conceit. Except for the risk of joint Bogarting, there’s little downside.
But WJM’s introduction of two classes of humans, those with free-will (people like us) and those who are NPCs, is a truly impressive invitation to sociopathy. Or, at minimum, a weekend in Bangkok…
William,
I’ve explained in detail why your proposal fails. Where is your counterargument?
keiths:
CharlieM:
So now you’re saying that a free spirit doesn’t choose its full destiny — just part of it — and that the unchosen part may include having its head eaten by dogs and other horrible possibilities.
Why wouldn’t your benevolent God intervene to save the “free spirit” from these calamities?
Yes, this is exactly my point. I think far to many people fail to really think about why humans do some of the things we do and why those considerations and behaviors would never occur for an 03 entity. So most people have no problem envisioning a god making B I G decisions, not stopping to consider that to an 03 entity, no “decision” could be any bigger, smaller, more, or less important or more or less difficult. No decision or action could cost anything, not even a Planck of time. Everything would have been, be, and have not yet occurred all simultaneously to an 03 entity. There would be no characteristics to anything for an 03 entity; all “things” would be pretty much the same as all things would have exactly the same impact to an 03 entity (which would be none).
In fact, I think an 03 entity is a total paradox. Such an entity would exist and not exist simultaneously.
CharlieM, to Patrick:
By that logic, no argument against the existence of God, or phlogiston, or the Easter Bunny, or the Loch Ness monster can ever really succeed, because the moment it succeeds, it is no longer about the entity whose existence it sought to disprove.
You might want to rethink this one, Charlie.
“What about the multitudes of people who have been inspired by Anne Frank? Her story has done a lot of good.”
The struggle to defend a psychopathic god.
He may consider that bug to be a feature.
keiths:
Robin:
Being omnipotent increases the number of alternatives open to God. It’s omnibenevolence that is the straitjacket.
If two or more courses of action are optimal by his criteria, then the omni-God has alternatives. More than one option is open to him.
Also, note that the distinction between libertarian and compatibilist free will can be important in discussions like this.
To a compatibilist, the fact that God is severely constrained by his nature can be seen as a good thing and supportive of his free will: the freest actions are those that deeply reflect one’s nature rather than being arbitrary.
To a libertarian, an action isn’t free unless the entity “could have done otherwise”. If God’s omnibenevolence forces him into a single necessary course of action, then his will is not free in the libertarian sense. He could not have done otherwise.
I don’t accept your characterization of the nature of the relationship between our physical and spiritual identity. Look at it this way: you have higher and lower modes of consciousness. The physical consciousness is like being in a dream. Being awake is like being in the afterlife. The super-subconscious is the mind of God, which is always monitoring everything all the time (O3, remember?).
What the reduced-consciousness aspect of yourself wants does not outweigh what the awake consciouness wants. Additionally, no conscious state needs to ask god anything because god is omniscient. If it were the case that the higher consciousness of the individual changed its mind and now wants to be pulled out of the simulation, there’s no need to ask god or for god to ask anything; god already knows and would accommodate the wishes of the higher self.
IOW, keiths, if the higher you that decided to live your life ever decided to stop living it, you’d be gone. You’d either drop dead or your actions would be taken over by the system for the benefit of others.
William J. Murray,
making things up is fun!
Rich:
Especially when you disregard evidence and claim not to care whether your beliefs are true.
William’s mistake was in not throwing out reason along with evidence and truth, Had he done so, he would have eliminated the last killjoy constraint on his kookiness.
As it is, he still pays lip service to reason, which means that inconsistencies like the one I pointed out still spoil his fun.
William,
Well, this is progress. At least now you’re conceding that when “the higher you” agrees ahead of time to accept the suffering, this is not sufficient reason for an omnibenevolent God to force the suffering to continue unconditionally. People can change their minds, and a God who doesn’t take that into account isn’t benevolent. As I explained to Vincent earlier in the thread, jot and tittle legalism is not the acme of morality.
A flaw was pointed out and you changed your proposal in response. That wasn’t so bad, was it?
William:
You’re running head-on into the personal identity issue again.
Now you’re essentially claiming that in-William isn’t a person at all. His agony is unimportant. It carries no moral weight, nor does his urgent desire for the pain to end now.
Screw in-William. Unlike out-William — the “higher” William — he simply doesn’t matter to God.
And you call that God benevolent?
Keith said:
No, I’m not. That’s just a false dichotomy characterization convenient to your argument.
And useful!
keiths likes to make up questions and then pretend that they are arguments.
I am not concerned about the creeds of various sects, I think that the reality of the Christian God is best demonstrated through the experiences of individual Christians.
Excerpt from The Essence of Christianity by
Rudolf Frieling
IMO true Christians may have their beliefs about God the Father but the facts lie in the reality of their experience with God the Son. And of course they can pass on their beliefs but they cannot pass on their experiences.
Any human views on omnipotence has no bearing on the reality of Christianity.
Excerpt from The Way of Anthroposophy: Answers to Modern Questions, by Stewart Easton
(My parenthesis)
IMO there is an important difference between power and love. A person can hold a certain amount of power, and if they allow another person to take some of their power then their own power is reduced as a consequence. On the other hand a person can give out as much love as they possess but this in no way reduces the love they have.
What makes you think that I bellieve this baby to be the incarnation of a free spirit?
Karma is a process which works itself out over a number of incarnations. It is a working towards freedom. To be totally free is to act in such a way that produces no karmic consequences for the actor. Karma involves an imbalance that needs an action that restores the balance. If one acts in perfect balance and harmony then there is no further compensatory action required.
And how would you know what this human being, whose life was so tragically curtailed, may have experienced had her life continued on to old age? She may have gone on to contract a long drawn out painful, debilitating illness. How, without being omniscient, are you able to tell us what may or may not have taken place if her life had taken a different course?
Do you think it is achievable to irrevocably disprove the existence of God, or phlogiston, or the Easter Bunny, or the Loch Ness monster? In what way can it be proven that these entities do not exist? How could it ever really succeed?
Anyway, don’t mess with the Loch Ness monster, you might find yourself behind bars.
It might be interesting to research exactly which Christian creeds demand confession of the keiths “omnigod.” But to me it seems that is something keiths ought to do.
For example:
Apostles’ Creed
No mention of omni-this or omni-that or omni-other.
c.f. List of Christian creeds
CharlieM:
Who said anything about “irrevocability”? An argument against an entity’s existence succeeds to the extent that it demonstrates the improbability of such existence. Absolute certainty isn’t achievable.
But by your goofy logic, the argument fails to the extent that it succeeds:
CharlieM:
keiths:
Your logic needs an overhaul, Charlie.
What is the earliest Christian creed that you can find that demands that Christians adhere to your concept of “omnigod” in order to be considered orthodox Christians?
keiths:
CharlieM:
Because that was your excuse for why God didn’t intervene:
keiths:
CharlieM:
You’re losing track of your own arguments, Charlie.
keiths:
William:
Sure you are. You’re saying that only out-William is a real person having moral standing. In-William is merely a ” reduced-consciousness aspect” of out-William. The fact that he’s suffering horribly and wants the pain to stop doesn’t matter to your God.
Such a God is monstrous and hardly omnibenevolent.
Your proposal fails.
Not keiths, but it is possible to disprove some specific claims about putative gods. keiths is demonstrating that observed reality is not consistent with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god. That doesn’t disprove all gods, but it argues against the existence of the one worshipped by many Christians.
Another false, extreme dichotomy. Just because God doesn’t alleviate the suffering doesn’t mean the suffering doesn’t matter to god. That’s poor logic. It matters or else there would be no reason to provide access to it for the ultimate benefit of God’s creations.
All our difference of opinion boils down to is whether or not allowing temporary suffering that is the intentional choice of a free will creation, experienced to achieve a desired, worthwhile goal is reconcilable with an omnibenevolent entity. IMO, it is.
Talk about beating a dead horse.
That is the logical problem of evil and it was defeated decades ago, time to get on with your life.
peace
This whole thread:
Patrick:
fifth:
As I pointed out earlier, the logical problem of evil is just a limiting case of the evidential problem of evil.
And don’t forget your pitifully lame response to the latter, in which you argued that God allows dogs to eat babies’ heads (and other horrific events) because otherwise he would appear to be “winking at sin”.
How you managed to blurt that out with a straight face is beyond me. You haven’t even begun to deal with the evidential problem of evil.
Come on, William.
You said that in-William is a ”reduced-consciousness aspect” of out-William. An aspect of a person is not a person.
You have denied personhood to in-William, and furthermore you have assigned him zero moral weight. Out-William’s desires always prevail, no matter how horribly in-William is suffering or how badly he wants the suffering to end.
There’s nothing omnibenevolent about that. Your proposal fails.
William,
You’re making my point for me. In-William regards the suffering as a huge negative, but that isn’t why it matters to God. It matters to God only because out-William considers it a positive to which he seeks “access”.
That’s monstrous. You’ve denied the personhood of in_William and given zero weight to his suffering. That’s not what omnibenevolence looks like.
Your proposal is inconsistent.
Keiths,
Reiterating your characterizations of the individual, god and the nature of my scenario as if they are my characterizations doesn’t make it so. Your characterizations are straw men.
Not that I expect you to understand or accept it, I’m going to provide a couple of analogies that may help illustrate my position.
From a child’s perspective, a child may feel like they are suffering horribly and they may see their parent’s actions (or inactions) towards them “monstrous”. However, the parent understands that there are some things that, in the long run, are good for the child, and some things that are bad. The parent knows that the “suffering” of a child, if the child doesn’t immediately get everything it wants or doesn’t get something at all while they are a child, is ultimately temporary.
The parent knows that in the long run the “suffering” experienced by the child is worth what it gains the child in the long run. The parent also knows that when the child reaches adulthood, they themselves will see the true nature of that “suffering”; that it was necessary to develop good characteristics and an adult perspective.
Now, does the parent not consider the child a person? Of course the parent considers the child a person – just not a person always capable of making good decisions for themselves at that time because of the nature of their identity at the time and the situation at the time. Is the suffering a child thinks it is undergoing not as valid as the suffering adults feel in this world? Do they not think it as severe?
We can also use the analogy of a drug addict or alcoholic that wants to get clean, and they make the informed decision that the best way for them to get free of addiction is to sign themselves into a facility they cannot sign themselves out of for a certain duration. Is it wrong for the operators of the facility to ignore their agonized pleas for release while they go through the rehab they signed up for?
Now, am I trying to draw an equivalence of degree between the suffering of a child when they don’t get what they want and the suffering endured by burn victims or the terminally ill or those with chronice, painful disease? Of course not.
What I’m pointing to is the principle the analogies illustrate. While from the perspective of the junkie in rehab or the child not getting its way those that will not grant them relief may appear monstrous and uncaring about their suffering who ignore their repeated pleas, that doesn’t mean that those people do not care deeply about them and are not indeed being benevolent to them in a way the child or the addict cannot, at the time, comprehend. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t break their heart the whole time to see them suffer, even though they know it’s what is best for them.
However, I understand that from your perspective it is necessary that this not just be a difference of opinion about the nature of our experience here and what benevolence can encompass, but rather that the “monstrous” nature of god be “obvious” to any rational person, and that there be no scenario that could possibly reconcile an O3 god with what we observe and experience here.
I’ve been through some fairly serious, temporary degrees of suffering in my life that I wanted relief from; however, on the other side of that suffering, I understand what that suffering granted me in terms of understanding and perspective and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I wouldn’t want to have acquired it any other way because of the value of the experience when observed from the other side of going through it.
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars. – Khalil Gibran
There is no problem for me. All things considered I think the universe is a decent place to live. There is amazing beauty and love and joy almost every where I look. I think God did a great job.
If I was in charge I’d change a detail here and there but taken as a whole it’s pretty alright in my book especially when you consider the kind of universe I deserve.
peace
Quite probably. But even false statements can stimulate thoughts. And different applications of logic can lead to different conclusions without either being false.
Steiner relates a fable about logic here:
If the god you claim exists isn’t omnipotent then that concept is not the same concept as the god most Christians claim exists. keiths’ argument addresses the latter.
Then it should be no problem for you or Mung to directly address keiths’ argument. And yet, neither of you have.
and
and
Romans 9:21-23
yawn
peace