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.
Sorry you’re dying in agony with bone cancer little Timmy but fair’s fair!
Again. What the fuck? God is a schizophrenic who talks to himself and is accountable to his three personalities? He really has to rethink his marketing strategy.
dazz,
Protein sequence dependence is experimentally verified fact. The level of sequence dependence correlates with the protein function. Does the protein have to bind with a small molecule or does it bind with several other proteins and small molecules. This diversity of sequence dependence will unfold as more experimental evidence comes in. The death of this argument is a greatly exaggerated canard of evolutionists 🙂
The failure of TOE to validate RMNS as able to explain life’s diversity opened the door for a creation explanation of life on earth. If the evidence better supports creation then that helps support the historical evidence for Christ’s divinity.
No a Trinity is not one individual with three personalities, that is Modalism.
A Trinity is three persons one God
perhaps you are not part of his target audience
peace
Timmy suffers and does not understand therefore God does not exist
Is that all you got?
peace
Holy fucking shit, hahahaha
I can’t help but wonder whether global warming supports, or undermines, the historical evidence that Santa Claus lives at the North Pole.
I can’t help but wonder if the desperate plight of polar bears in a warmer world supports or undermines the existence of God 😉
Especially since I can’t think of a reason why God would let them suffer. 😉
peace
Actual evidence for creation would open up the door for a creation explanation. Only that. And it is contradicted by the lack of intelligent manipulation that would be expected to disrupt (or even destroy) the evolutionary patterns existing throughout life.
But you don’t care, you just blither on with your lack of knowledge and unwillingness to learn.
Nevertheless, it was understood by biologists even before Darwin that Paley hadn’t really explained life by using design, mainly because design doesn’t produce the opportunistic and hereditarily-constrained evidence that exists in life. Design failed before Darwin (as in, it led to no useful results or explanations) even if most of the public likely took it as the default. It certainly hasn’t been able to provide meaningful explanations since then.
But you don’t care because you never wanted explanations anyway (only demanding them exclusively one-sidedly to bolster your beliefs), you just wanted to believe. Why you don’t just believe and revel in your piety I can’t understand, since you don’t even come close to making a case for creation/design.
Glen Davidson
So, not accountable. Isn’t that what I said?
”
Based on what I have read, that is probably a good thing. I don’t look good in a pillar of salt.
Nope. But God being a sick sadistic bastard certainly explains Timmy’s unnecessary suffering. Unless you have a better reason.
LOL! You keep hammering this dismissal as if you’re some authority on the subject. You’re not. Most “serious” philosophers, for example, all dismiss Plantinga’s Free Will argument as a successful attack on a strawman. You and Plantinga want to limit an omni-god by claiming that god can’t do “logically impossible things”, but such – as Weisberger, myself, and many others have noted – is simply a semantic equivocation. God can’t make 2+2 = 5, not because it’s logically impossible, but because those are human defined conditions.
What’s really funny about your claim is that it’s just plain false. It’s still debated in colleges and churches around the world. So your claim is simply an empty dismissal. You’re welcome to it, but I’ll still reject the validity of your god simply because it is entirely incompatible with the characteristics it supposedly has.
Stories that oddly you have no answer for…
LOL! I don’t care if I’m taken literally or not; I’m not the one who loses anything from your god being a myth.
ETA: Seems I’m not alone in not caring if I’m taken seriously:
When the argument from evil is reformulated in that way, it becomes clear that the vast majority of considerations that have been offered as reasons for believing in God can be of little assistance to the person who is trying to resist the argument from evil. For most of them provide, at best, very tenuous grounds for any conclusion concerning the moral character of any omnipotent and omniscient being who may happen to exist, and almost none of them provides any support for the hypothesis that there is an omnipotent and omniscient being who is also morally perfect.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/#AppPosEviForExiGod
You still don’t understand.
Plantinga’s accomplishment was not the Free will defense it was showing that the presence of evil did not have to be seen in isolation but could be seen as part of a united whole that served a greater good
Are you actually suggesting that if there were no humans 2+2 could equal 5? Really?
If I can get some one to debate me about a flat earth does that mean it’s not a settled issue?
You are welcome to do so but understand that that position has been abandoned by anyone who would count as a thoughtful scholar. Just ask walto or KN heck Even keiths recognizes this is a dead issue.
oh well Some folks cling to a flat earth with a similar tenacity despite the evidence so there is precedence for what you are doing
You don’t give “answers” for stories because they are just stories and not arguments
Again you don’t understand, there is no reason to “resist” the logical argument from evil. It’s simply a non starter.
If you are looking for reasons to resist a dead horse you deserve to be disappointed 😉
peace
Fifth you crack me up.
fifth, to Robin:
Oh, the irony.
fifth, to Robin:
No, fifth. Read this again:
Seems to me there’s a huge problem with the way our theist friends argue against the problem of evil: if all the observed evil is part of an optimal plan, if it’s all for a “greater good” that we’re not equipped to judge, why should anyone assist the victims of an earthquake? why interfere in God’s great plan by making moral decisions? Why exercise our free will at all?
Also, if our free will sometimes produces good, sometimes evil, the net result must be more evil than good, or else we would be improving on God’s plan… so the only way to not interfere with God’s “greater good” is to forfeit our moral judgment and our free will… but wouldn’t that itself require making a moral decision and using free will to implement it?
At any rate, seems to me all that line of reasoning promotes becoming robotic, amoral beings, who should never think for themselves… and looking at the evidence that’s what religion tends to do to people. I’ll leave it at that
dazz,
I still get the impression that many theists regard the ultimate goal as getting into Heaven. Death is just a step on the journey. Arguing about “evil” as if it was a coherent idea is only half the equation.
Alan,
Christians certainly think that evil is a coherent idea, and they are quite fixated on it — except when it’s their God that’s responsible.
dazz,
Let me play angel’s advocate against your argument.
If the free will defense is right (and I don’t think it is, of course), it doesn’t follow that individual instances of evil are necessary for the greater good — merely that our ability to freely choose between good or evil is necessary for the greater good. An individual’s efforts to undo or ameliorate an evil therefore don’t run counter to God’s wishes, because God never desired the evil to begin with — only that we be free to commit it.
Of course the free will defense is particularly lame when it comes to dealing with instances of natural evil like the earthquake you mentioned. Would any theists care to tell us why the “freedom” of tectonic plates to kill people, unhindered by God, is such a good thing?
Yeah, but theists also claim that evil stemming from human decisions might be “necessary evil”, like claiming allowing the holocaust might have produced a greater good in the grand scheme of things. So I’m not sure the problem is restricted to natural evil: who am I to intervene in a crime if God doesn’t either? It’s not like God didn’t use to intervene all the time according to the Bible
Also, this seems to support my argument that if one is to accept this defense, we should avoid at all cost to exercise our free will: we already have the ability, so if we manage to not use it at all, no evil ensues. If God never desired evil to begin with, that seems the only way to please God
perhaps our assistance at this time is exactly the greater good that was planned.
You argument works just as well against any form of determinism if I don’t have libertarian free will why should I do anything.
The answer is because you want to 😉
peace
Then it should be no problem for you to rebut Robin’s and keiths’ arguments. And yet you have failed to do so.
You make claims constantly. Doesn’t your scripture say something about bearing false witness? As I remember, it was against it.
The argument from evil is a response to the claim than an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god exists. You make that claim when you state that you are a Christian.
Wait, who’s serve is it again?
here is a very old article with another alternative theodicy
http://www.leaderu.com/theology/theodicy.html
I’m not saying it’s right I’m only pointing out once again that the free will defense is not the only game in town.
Regardless the important thing is not whether one of these speculations is the correct one. It’s that some reason to justify evil is indeed possible.
As long as that is the case the logical problem will remain dead
peace
You haven’t identified weaknesses, you’ve simply stated and restated your personal incredulity. There is no reason to leap from “it’s complicated” to “goddidit”. You certainly haven’t supplied one.
I try not to “believe” in anything. I do provisionally accept some positions as being in accordance with the available evidence. You haven’t yet provided any.
I would be very interested in seeing the historical evidence you claim exists. To the best of my knowledge there isn’t any.
first you need to specify what you would qualify as evidence from your perspective. For example you need to layout the historical evidence for Plato’s existence. Once you do that we can see if there is similar evidence for Jesus
peace
not quite, since evil does not make God’s existence impossible, We are free to look at the rest of the evidence. When we do that we find that his existence is virtually certain
peace
Sure! it work both ways: whatever you do or don’t, evil or good, could be part of the Great plan. Why care about moral decisions then? And why should anyone accept moral criticism for their acts? Who are we to question the plan?
That position amounts to renouncing morality wholesale
Another thought experiment:
Let’s say I’m right next to this child, who is just about to fall off a cliff. All I need to do to save him is to reach out and grab his arm. But I don’t. Was that evil on my part? I think we would all agree it was evil. But if we hold FFM’s position, my letting the kid die would not interfere in the great plan: this should still be the best possible world despite of my evil action(s). But there’s a problem: God didn’t intervene either, just like me, he also let the kid die. But that would mean that God’s action was just as evil as mine
Just to clarify the point, FMM might argue that God’s omission is not evil because He knows it will work for the best, but if one holds FMM’s position, and decides to let the kid die, he also “knows” that it will work for the best. He may not know the plan but what difference does that make? Either it’s evil when I do it and evil if God does it, or it’s not evil if I do it and not evil if God does it
We can all look back and consider all the evil things we’ve done in the past. Why should someone like FMM regret or even deem those act as evil? Why shouldn’t he boast about them if he knows they are part of God’s great plan for the world?
dazz,
For some reason this reminded me of something I’ve recently seen described as a way of proving the multiverse theory. You put five bullets in a six-shooter and just keep shooting yourself in the head. If you find that you’re still alive after ten shots, the multiverse theory is true.
Personally I don’t think that there is any objective evil. Something’s “virtue”, or value comes from individual perspective. Although the vast majority of us would refer to the holocaust as evil. But there were, and still are, some people who perceive it as a good. We would consider these people to be pathological in some respect, but you can’t argue that they don’t feel that it was a good thing.
Good and bad can only be categorized when compared. For example. I think that we would all agree that giving a starving child some bread is a good thing. But what if we had armloads of nutritious food and still only have that starving child some bread? Good? Bad?
LOL, I’m really sorry if my argument made you want to “prove the multiverse”
Oh, I understand completely. It’s evident however that you really don’t understand.
Except, he didn’t show that. He simply proposes that it’s possible that an omni god cannot create a world of moral goodness without allowing people to do evil (by noting that such logic can be seen as similar to such a god not having the power to make 2+2=5. But, as noted, that is simply a questionable semantic equivocation. Further, his concept doesn’t actually address the issue of suffering at all. At best his argument demonstrates an approach to understanding why such a god might allow humans to be engage in evil, but it does nothing to provide a reason why such a god would allow cancer, kidney failure, ichneumon wasps, tsunamis, and all manner of other non-human bases of suffering.
No, I’m suggesting that 2+2 is a human defined concept, just like “square” and “circle” are human defined concepts. So there can be no “square circles” and 2+2=5, not because it’s logically impossible for gods to generate them, but because humans have already defined the distinct parameters and characteristics for understanding what 2+2, “square”, and “circle” mean.
If you can show that the flat earth concept has as many proponents as the problem of evil, sure.
Hmmm…gee…why do I not trust or find terribly compelling your opinion on who ranks as a “thoughtful scholar”. I’ll simply note that your rebuttal of opinion is noted and rejected as weak.
Yeah, and some people cling to mythical sky daddies. Go figure…
Hand waving is a refuge for people who have nothing. So noted…
You keep telling yourself that…
I don’t need reasons to reject mythology; I’m simply noting that your opinion about the validity of given perspectives doesn’t carry much weight.
Let’s be very clear here. The discussion isn’t about a god, as no such thing has ever been shown to exist. The discussion is about theists’ claims. You’re saying that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god exists. People point out evidence that is inconsistent with that claim. When your only response is “Well, gee, I guess my god works in mysterious ways.” then you have admitted that you can’t support your claim. You believe not just without evidence but despite the contradictory evidence.
No, that’s not required. colewd claims to have been persuaded by “historical evidence”. I’m simply asking him to provide it. To the best of my knowledge there is no contemporary evidence that Jesus even existed.
It does, however, make an omnibenevolent god inconsistent with the evidence.
Ah yes, all the evidence you’ve got . . . where, exactly?
dazz,
In response, theists will typically say something like this:
The problem with this reasoning is fairly obvious: our free choices are routinely prevented from coming to fruition. If Kim Jong-un decides he wants to wipe out the city of Washington, DC, but cannot, has his free will been denied? Yes, by the theists’ argument above.
So God is perfectly fine with denying free will to us, negating the premise of the free will defense.
If the theist backpedals and says that it is the free choice that matters, and not the ability to carry out the choice, then the atheist can ask:
That obviously isn’t the kind of world God set up.
The whole thing makes no sense:
Meanwhile, the atheist’s explanation makes perfect sense: there is no God, so it’s no surprise that some evil desires and choices come to fruition while others do not.
The question is whether the two propositions are inconsistent. That doesn’t require anybody to say that either of them is true. FMM is correct: the problem of evil is an argument against the possibility of an Omni-God given apparent evils in the world. It’s a good argument or it isn’t regardless of whether anybody believes in God.
So, you are, again, incorrect, Patrick. Will you admit this? I’m guessing not.
Acartia,
I don’t either, but the problem of evil doesn’t depend on that.
Reading back through the comments, the gist boils down to:
1) Some omni-god finds that evil is a necessary element of free will in order for moral good be able to come about. However, since said omni-god is apparently dumb as a box of hammers and didn’t consider that such a situation makes the concept of “goodness” and “evil” arbitrary and, worse (at least for non-omni-humans) interchangeable and inaccessible, anything and everything humans do must be “good” by definition. I mean, if one is going to say that it’s possible that murdering, cheating, raping, lying, idoltry, etc are necessary for the greater good, then these actions must be necessary as well. Sure, maybe the greater good in the case of a robbery is the act of intervention, but the fact is since we humans are idiots and don’t have omniscience, how the #@$#!* do we know? Maybe the greater good is supposed to come after the robbery, but some “do-gooder” just screwed that up. Or maybe it doesn’t matter what anyone does and the greater good comes about no matter what (in which case, one has to wonder about the validity of the whole free libertarian will/evil being necessary for greater good argument).
This is, of course, completely contradicted by things like the Adam and Eve story, Noah and the flood story, everything Paul, John, Luke, Matthew, and Mark write, but meh…
2) That evil is not in fact necessary for goodness to exist, in which case said omni-god is ultimately responsible for all evil. And we’re right back as square 1.
It strikes me that those who think that the logical problem of evil is a dead concept are simply relying on an inconsistent application of the omni concept.
People who believe in the objectivity of moral judgments don’t have to argue that there are no people who think the Holocaust was a good thing. People who think that all such judgments are subjective have to be ok with the view that the Holocaust was a good thing is just as acceptable as the view that the Holocaust was a bad thing.
But God could let me choose, and intervene if I don’t choose to save the kid, there’s no reason why his intervention should negate my free will. It would still be evil to not help the kid even if you know God will intervene
Interesting.
dazz:
That’s what I was getting at here:
Thanks, not sure how I missed that.
walto,
Acceptable to whom? It isn’t acceptable to me, and in fact I regard the Holocaust as a great evil.
That’s perfectly compatible with the view that evil is subjective.