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.
Or a Crossfit instructor
William,
Your “holodeck”-like scenario is an improvement over Christianity with respect to the problem of evil, but I would say it still needs some tweaks.
There is a big difference between experiencing a virtual world or a horror movie as virtual, with the option of bailing out when things get too uncomfortable, versus experiencing them as real, with no way to escape.
The fact that people would agree ahead of time to the experience only goes part way toward alleviating the moral problem. People do make errors in judgment, after all, and they might misjudge what they’re signing up for (or their own ability to tolerate the suffering involved,)
A better scheme would employ the equivalent of a “safe word”, so that participants could opt out when things got too rough. But in your scheme, participants “forget” that the experience is virtual, and so this sort of safety valve wouldn’t work. Another possibility would be to “pause” the experience periodically, temporarily restore the participant’s awareness that it’s only a simulation, and ask “Are you sure you want to continue with this?” before plunging them back into it.
Thanks Keith. That pretty much sums up my issue with the whole “simulation” argument.
Here’s another issue I have.
As a person with a rather significant (and catastrophic) chronic illness, it’s possible I’m simply an NPC for some other “active” players’ experience (plenty of surgeons have treated me like a guinea pig to test new procedures on, hone skills, test new drugs, etc…so who knows, maybe this body really is one). If so, why give this body a first-person perspective and the ability to remember and (worse imho) re-experience all those experiences? Seems a little cruel in my book, even if this body is only some strand of code…
OTOH, if I am actual a voluntary participant, who in their right mind builds a simulation in which a participant in my shoes doesn’t get an option at some point to adjust the conditions, so to speak?
Those reasons strike me as pretty solid grounds for rejecting the concept.
Robin,
I agree, and I think that William recognizes that this would be unfair, which is why he writes:
That would presumably include any conscious NPCs. Unfeeling “zombie” NPCs wouldn’t present a moral problem, though a benevolent God would make damn sure that “unfeeling” really meant unfeeling before allowing horrible things to befall such an NPC.
Keiths & Robin,
Your objections are only valid if, in our hypothetical system, one can make an error of judgement before entering this world, or not understand the full experiential ramifications of their choice. That’s not the premise I submitted. Those that choose to enter this world know fully what they are in for. It is an informed choice and a contract they agree to knowing, in certain cases, that they are headed into a painful, even horrific experience.
Perhaps there are worlds, keiths, that have the comfort of “safe word” easy extraction, but that is not this world. There are some things one cannot experience if they know they can walk out of the movie or say a safe word and get out of whatever situation they are in. Surely you recognize that our mortality and and lack of knowledge about what comes afterward provides, in this world, a context – an intensity – which your scenarios cannot provide.
Also, not knowing why you came here (or even that you came here purposefully) again provides a unique experiential context. IOW, if you weren’t willing to submit to the “no safe words” rule and didn’t want to experience exactly what it is you are experiencing in this life, you wouldn’t have come here in the first place in the body, time and place you did.
So, if you have a painful disease and are a player character, then according to our hypothetical scenario you chose that experience for whatever reason, and you chose to have that experience with no safe words and no memory that you chose it – to ride it through to the end. Again, there may be reasons to have a different kind of experience where you do know why you chose pain and suffering, but there are certain qualities to an experience one can only get by not knowing why and not having an easy way out.
Now, from the outside, understanding that you really can’t be harmed by your experience here, and realizing that your time here will be relatively short, I imagine it’s quite attractive to have all sorts of experiences here in the physical realm. I think that is the key in understanding this proposed system; not what it looks like from the inside and how you might judge it from the inside, but rather what it looks like from the outside.
In any event, it’s a theistic scenario that resolves the issues you’ve described.
The concept either resolves the dilemma or it doesn’t. If we know what we are in for and, fully informed,choose to have the experience we have and the kind of experience we have, and nobody experiences anything they did not sign up for, there is no dilemma. We can have an omnipotent, omniscient omni-benevoloent god and the experience/observation of pain, suffering and evil.
It’s still weak William and creates an odd paradox when one tries to rationalize a scenario that makes sense for a “participant” like me: what is “moral” or “ethical” about a society or individual who would create a scenario wherein someone could impose a lifetime virtual catastrophe, let alone allow someone to play such a role without giving that person any “safe word” or several “opt-out” opportunities. What type of “participant” knowingly and willingly signs up for permanent kidney disease and five kidney transplants and all the ensuing consequences? In what sense could anything overseeing such a system be said to be “omniscient”, nevermind “benevolent”? I don’t see anyway to reasonably deal with those issues.
Back when I was younger, I used to fantasize about something similar to this concept to get me through the tough times (along with a myriad of other fantasies I might add). Basically, I came up with the idea that life was a virtual game-show for some extraordinary, but very natural, entities. For whatever reason (which I never fully worked out) this alien population had a real problem with limited resources. One way of obtaining more resources was to enter one of the many virtual game-shows. There were a variety of game-shows with different settings and conditions, but the basic idea was that players had a choice of how “weak” (relative to the conditions in the game-show) a character was they wanted to play and how much humiliation and pain they were willing to endure. Players got incrementally better rewards based the amount of things they accomplished, how much pain and humiliation they endured, and the amount to time they lasted in the simulation divided by their characters’ weakness ratings. I could then come up with a reward system and add up all the loot my counterpart was getting for every surgery, pill, side-effect, test, etc I had to go through. My counterpart was exceedingly well-off when I stopped calculating back in 1989…
I came up with all sorts of stories and conditions and plot lines for how this whole thing worked. It was a great way of occupying my mind and time. However, it didn’t take long for a thought to occur to me: how absolutely screwed up would some entities have to be to come up with this AND IMPLEMENT IT. It’s a pretty cool concept for a sci fi story, but it really would be an ethically vacuous basis for our actual existence.
It’s either a defense or it isn’t. The fact that you don’t like it doesn’t change that.
Remember, the world of the physicalist is one of blind, pitiless, indifference. So I’d be careful using the sociopath word if I were you.
It’s either a defense or it isn’t. The fact that you don’t like it doesn’t change that.
You say the stupidest things, Mung. Why on earth should the word ‘sociopath’ be problematic for a physicalist?
Far be it from me to try to get keiths to say exactly what argument he’s making. Are you of the opinion that there is just one single problem of evil?
And your reasoning stinks to boot. If I was to pigeonhole his argument to say that it’s already been answered that’s when I’d ignore it. If I were actually to figure out what his argument is then maybe I could deal with it.
For example, he’s made reference a few times in this thread to eternal torment. That really is a completely separate argument, unless you think there’s evidence for it in this life. So he needs to stop with the shell game.
Set forth the premises and the conclusion. Want me to show you how it’s done?
Also, I know what a non sequitur is. You, otoh, seem to be confused. Because if you’re claiming he’s made a logically valid argument you’re pretty mujch admitting his argument is the logical argument from evil.
Wikipedia:
In logic, an argument is valid if and only if it takes a form that makes it impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion nevertheless to be false.
Just curious, Mung. Do you expect or hope to have another and better life after this Earthly one? Something to look forward to? An eternity in Heaven or something else? Feel free not to answer.
What made me wonder was this piece by Ed Brayton.
Consider keiths’ example of a dog that ate a baby’s head. If your god couldn’t have prevented that, it’s not omnipotent.
Sociopaths don’t see other people as real. That’s the essence of your view.
William,
I addressed that already. Perhaps you missed it:
Perhaps that is the function of death. Reincarnation is the result
newton:
I could see death being an orderly way to “check out” of the simulation after you’ve decided not to continue, rather than just vanishing in a puff of smoke and confusing the other participants. But a benevolent God would “pause” the simulation and offer the choice much more often.
A variant of WJM’s idea is that the only real person in the virtual world is the self. Everybody else, and everything else, is pure simulation. There may be (or there may not be) other ‘selves’ that each inhibit their own virtual world, again only populated by them alone with everybody else as illusions. There would be zero interaction between the separate virtual worlds.
The point of this complicated setup could be to test if a ‘self’ does good rather than evil, using their free will, before they are allowed to pass into the ‘real world’ where all ‘selves’ meet and live together for real. Those ‘selves’ who fail the test won’t be let in – something else happens to them (but we don’t know what).
In this setup there is no evil except for that which a ‘self’ inflicts on themselves. No ‘souls’ are ever hurt in the leading of this life because (apart from oneself) there aren’t any.
Solipsism as a lesson from God.
An omnipotent god could rearrange spacetime so bad things don’t happen. Or perhaps bad things happen, but spacetime is rearranged so that perfection eventually ensues. Or perhaps everything happens and perfection eventually percolates to the top.
Where was I going with this?
CharlieM:
So what happens to people who don’t suffer enough — for example, a child with a short, happy life that ends in an instant due to a car crash? Do they get sent back for their proper quota of suffering, in your view? Or is it just that they didn’t “need” as much suffering as the typical person, in order to “advance”?
I don’t know your particular views on reincarnation, but most Christians reject it, so the idea of sending people back for their proper quota of suffering wouldn’t sit well with them.
Why not both?
Still no direct address of keiths’ argument, but you got to make another comment and get a response so your goals are being met.
The true meaning of “Crossfit”:
You’re the expert on omnibenevolent beings.
The omniexpert.
I’d simply be happy with an omnipotent, benevolent god-ish…whatever that actually interacted from time-to-time and said, “see what I did there? Now what did we learn today? Excellent! So next time…?”
Yes, that would be nice. God isn’t very talkative, is he?
It’s almost like he’s… not there.
Imagine if that were thinkable.
Now, on to work feverishly to save the assumption.
Glen Davidson
Keiths, if you are saying that god might suspend the simulation periodically for each individual, give them their outside awareness and memory back and ask them if they want to continue, then if they say yes put them back seamlessly in the simulation where they have no memory of the interruption, how do you know that isn’t what is going on?
(1) Can you support your assertion about sociopaths?
(2) No, it’s not the essence of my view. It’s not even in the ballpark.
Meanwhile God is thinking, “I wonder why that keiths guy never talks to me. It’s almost like he’s not there.”
I can see I’m going to have to do all the heavy lifting.
I don’t think about heaven much, other than to think that what most people think about it is probably wrong, lol.
Pearly gates? No. Streets of gold? No. I really don’t think the bible has much at all to say about heaven. So I don’t spend time thinking what it will be like or wishing I were there rather than here. I’d much rather make this world a better place. Even if it means putting up with keiths and Patrick.
Easily and already answered: You knew what you were getting yourself into and this was the kind of experience you wanted, complete with no “safe word” easy out.
Depends on what the participant is doing and what they are trying to accomplish while they are here. The crucible of going through pain and suffering is an extremely intense experience both for the individual and those around him or her, and is probably a fantastic learning experience for many involved, revealing much about character and demanding that one find some way to deal with it. Being there for family when they go through pain and suffering can be transformative, humbling, highly revealing. You may have come here to experience it, or to play the role for others you love so that they could experience it.
Well, the situation you painted was kind of screwed up, but in my system no one forces us to come here at all and we’re not compelled to come here because we are competing for resources or credits in some other realm. In my premise, we come here to this particular kind of experience in order to live through certain kind of situations and events. It’s here for our use at our discretion, fully understanding what is in store for us should we decide to enter it.
There’s absolutely nothing non-benevolent in that whatsoever. You and keiths seem to think that “benevolence” means that god keeps us from experiencing any kind of harm whatsoever. But, what if harm and tribulation and pain grant us all sorts of experiences that cannot be had without their presence, and what if we want to experience those other things even if we must pay the price?
You and keiths seem intent on trying to find some kind of petty quibble with the system for some reason – perhaps you don’t want such a god to comport with what we experience for some reason – but, my system does the job, at least hypothetically. There can be an O3 god and the experience/observation of pain, suffering and evil.
That you or Keith’s don’t know why you’d come here where you don’t have a safe word easy-out (or anything else you’d prefer to have as the “you” inside the system) doesn’t challenge the logical validity of my premised system.
Perhaps god created individual entities in a realm where there was no harm, no pain,suffering or evil. Perhaps some of these individuals wanted to experience a larger variety of things, including pain and suffering in order to experience some things that only exist in contrasting or associated relationship to those commodities.
What is an omni-benevolent god to do? Deny his beloved creations the experience of certain characteristics, values, and emotions that would indeed be wonderful, when they have said they are willing to pay the price in pain and suffering? Perhaps a benevolent god would decide to create a wide variety of simulations – worlds his creations could experience through a physical avatar where they themselves would never be actually harmed, but they could experience the variety and juxtapositions and contrasts of various situations that were not available to them in the eternal safety and beauty of their home.
Now, that sounds to me like what an omni-benevolent god would do.
Nothing more enriching than believing your child is dying an excurciating death, look out Disney. God loves to make you suffer because He loves you so much and you asked for it.
And those simulations could be identical to the variety an evil God might produce, both good and evil. God’s actions contingent on the consent lesser beings.
So they were created to long for pain, doesn’t sound like an loving God to me.
Mung,
Alan didn’t ask whether you thought heaven would have streets of gold and pearly gates, or whether you pondered heaven much.
He asked:
I. too, would be interested in hearing your answers to those questions.
keiths, to Robin:
Mung:
Only a rather slow God would think that. A smarter God would put two and two together: “I never responded when keiths used to talk to me. Perhaps I should have. Now he thinks I don’t even exist.”
ETA: After the problem of evil, perhaps we can discuss divine hiddenness. It’s another big problem for Christians.
William,
Yes, that’s what I’m saying a benevolent God would do, rather than forcing people to precommit without the option of changing their minds later when things got rough. Your proposal is lacking in that respect. I’m suggesting this feature as an improvement.
I have no reason to believe that any of this stuff is going on, but what we’re discussing at the moment is how well your proposal fits with the posited existence of an omnibenevolent God, not whether it is plausible in other respects. I’m explaining how it could be improved for a better fit with your God’s purported omnibenevolence.
newton:
William has some, um, interesting ideas about pain and suffering. I’ll see if I can dig up the example I’m thinking of.
Found it.
keiths August 6, 2015 at 6:44 am
This is especially amusing because William’s own behavior demonstrates the need for the “pause” feature I introduced earlier:
If William is correct, then he precomitted to enduring whatever suffering this earthly simulation might throw his way. Yet when an “opportunity” to be tortured arises, suddenly he’s not so eager for that particular earthly experience.
Thank you for making my point for me, William. An omnibenevolent God would provide some kind of “I’ve changed my mind” feature so that people like you could opt out when the going got tough.
It seems then that WJM does not himself have ‘free-will’.
Keiths is diverting from the point, which is that there are scenarios in which an O3 god is reconcilable with the observation and experience of pain and suffering. The scenario I’ve laid out demonstrates the issues are at least hypothetically reconcilable.
Keiths (when he’s not busy trying to de-legitimize his opponent) and others raise some interesting objections to the scenario, but what do their objections really represent, when unpacked and examined?
It appears to me that the argument keiths and others present is that unless god acts as a genie that immediately grants us relief from pain and suffering (and, I would extrapolate, relief from any situation we don’t find to our liking or uncomfortable), then god is not omnibenevolent, because it would be in god’s power to act like a genie and come to the aid of every conscious challenge or discomfort – or, better yet, act to prevent any such challenge or discomfort.
As Newton says, why even create beings that crave such situations at all? Why not just create them to be ecstatically happy existing in a perfectly safe, perfectly comfortable situation? IOW, why not just program them to be happy in that environment? Further, why create “free will” creatures at all, if the goal is to just create a population of perfectly happy, perfectly safe beings with no option available to experience any discomfort? Of what value is free will in the first place?
There are some modes of experience that are only available in relationship to comparative values, challenges, hardships, discomfort, pain and suffering. Most of our experience of what is good is because we have an understanding of the comparative value of a good thing. For example, how would one experience appreciation for good health, if perfect health was all one ever observed or experienced? Universal, ubiquitous good health, good character and enjoyment with no contrasting comparatives whatsoever would mean that we have no regard whatsoever for our perfect health, character and enjoyment; they would just be the permanent state of what is.
In other words, we’d have no appreciation for that state of existence because we would have absolutely nothing to compare it against. Our experiences would have no value because there would exist no comparatives upon which such value is based. There would be no such thing as “good” or “enjoyable”, because those states would be all that ever exist. It would be like a wealthy person that has never been poor nor has any concept of what lack of wealth means or feels like, much less what poverty is like – their wealth has no value to them because they have no comparative experience. They take it entirely for granted.
How about the experience of helping others? Of being there for them and supporting them in their time of need? That experience cannot be had unless there are people that need your help and support – beings in discomfort or pain. What about the joy and sense of personal achievement in overcoming a particularly difficult and frustrating challenge? Such experiences would not be possible if we are programmed to be perfectly happy and god prevented every obstacle that causes us discomfort.
Virtually all of the experience we enjoy in life is enjoyed because we understand the comparative values and exist in a continuum of experience ranging from the horrific to the ecstatic. The good that we experience we only experience because of its relational and, yes, temporary nature. Its temporary, relational status is what generates the value.
IOW, a permanent and perfectly happy and safe space is a null experiential space where there is no “happiness” or “safety” because those concepts and experience only exist in a temporary and relational context. We can see that to be true even in our experience in this world where we take for granted and never give a thought about that which is ubiquitously provided for us and for which we have no sense of comparison.
More to ponder to come.
In the perfect world which keiths and others seem to be arguing an O3 god should provide, what is bravery? What is sacrifice? How do we experience grace under pressure or the triumph of will over seeming insurmountable odds? How do we appreciate the kindness of others, if all our lives are perfectly safe and enjoyable? What would kindness or mercy or empathy even mean in such a scenario? There would be no sympathy because there would be no situations where sympathy could be invoked. There would be no standing together through the tough times because there would be no tough times. There would be no defining, refining moments of character, no choices of any great import, no sense of urgency. There would be no thrill or adrenaline associated with dangerous activities. What would you have to work towards? What would motivate anyone? What would having “good character” even mean in such a world?
Now, in our simulation hypothesis, how much of the value of what we experience here would be ruined by having an “easy out” to a happy-safe zone? As I’ve said, perhaps “easy out” simulations also exist. In my worldview, I believe they do, but that is not this world.
A reasonable question that has been asked is, why would I submit myself to endure a lifetime of pain and suffering in a simulation with no safe word extraction? So, let’s explore one possible answer to that question.
In this hypothetical scenario, the afterlife is posited as a place of increased safety and happiness – not perfectly so, obviously, because if it were that, all good things would lose all their value and there would be no simulations where pain and suffering are possible. How could one gain a deep appreciation and sense of value for these afterlife conditions unless one has the opportunity to experience imperfection, and the lack of safety and pleasure?
One way to do this would be to enter a simulation like this where you commit to the entire experience, with no “safe word” out, in order to provide the experiential context where you can appreciate the value of the afterlife conditions and appreciate more even the other kinds of simulations that have safe words. I think a lifetime of pain and suffering in this world would provide a comparative context for meaningfully enjoying and appreciating the safe conditions of the afterlife forever.
But, there is a lot more experience in these lifetime simulations that would provide the context for many other carryover characteristics, values and appreciations in the afterlife. Such simulations would provide all sorts of permanent sensations of comparative value and could develop character traits that would otherwise have no value or meaning. Such simulations could provide motivations and ideas that would otherwise not have any reason to exist in the afterlife.
IMO, these simulations would exist largely as a means to develop a richer, deeper and more meaningful existence in the afterlife realm than is possible under the “perfect world” scenario with no such simulations. I don’t think the objections here make much logical sense when fully unpacked and when the consequences to the objections are fully explored.
Now, I get it – I get the resentment that there is no easy out safe word, and I get the sense of resentment if you think that you purposefully chose a life of pain and suffering. I get why some would find that a troublesome view – but maybe we should also unpack what it means to (1) believe your pain and suffering is the happenstance result of circumstances, or (2) believe that your life of pain and suffering was a deliberate choice you made to serve a higher goal or purpose.
Whether or not either belief is actually true, such beliefs have consequences in how we live, think and feel about our situations.
It’s not just the lack of talking that’s an issue for me; it’s the lack of overt and obvious comfort, instruction, patience, understanding, concern, clarification, encouragement, or other such feedback. Color me silly, but I just assume that something labeled “benevolent” would act…Uh…I don’t know…benevolent.
Seems considerably more likely given the evidence.
You’re simply begging the question William.
This is a great example of an internal contradiction. If the above were even remotely valid, everyone (or at least a good majority) would have every disease from birth and everyone would have five or more transplants (or other similar operations) along with all the ensuing consequences to contend with. That I’m one of 12 people to every have and survive five or more transplants however suggests that this god of yours isn’t particularly concerned with “character building”.
A couple of things: 1) No one was ever forced to come here in my scenario. It was totally at the individual’s discretion. When I was 8 or so and coming up with this, it seemed a fairly plausible reason to go through such absurdities however. 2) Your scenario is just as absurd as you can’t come up with an internally consistent argument for why some people would get an easy enjoyable life while others suffer. Yours still lacks the ability to deal with the problem of evil.
It makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever that an “omnipotent” and “benevolent” god would ever allow anything to experience the level of pain throughout a life I’ve experienced. It is a total contradiction to my understanding of those terms.
This actually relates to a previous issue Keith pointed out – the whole idea of basic friendship and decency. An actual friend would not think twice about bringing a friend of roll of toilet paper if asked. It’s just not something anyone even considers; it’s just a nice and decent thing to do. It’s nothing for mortal, and limited resource supplied entities. So when one posits a supposedly omnipotent and benevolent entity – an entity who could instantaneously provide toilet paper to every human on the planet, it seems a little odd then that there are – daily – people who sit down and stalls and find they are without. That’s an internal contradiction. It defies any sort of logic or reasonableness given the characteristics applied to said entity. This is what your scenario creates in terms of kidney disease and transplantation. Such conditions are contradictory to the definition of benevolence. Completely. And unless you’ve had a transplant or two or at least know some folk personally who have, you are really in no position to lecture me about what “benevolence” could possibly mean.
Not impossible no. But if, as I believe, we are all spiritual beings, the truth is as many religious texts including the Bhagavad Gita relate, the spirit never ceases to be. The body can be killed but the spirit cannot. Free spirits choose their own destiny. If God were to decide on the course our lives have to take then we become automata, incapable of acting in freedom.
I would think that in the case you bring up the greatest suffering belongs to the parents and loved ones of the baby rather than the baby itself. We will never know what the baby felt. But we do know that extreme pain causes some people to pass out and that frequently severe wounds received in battle do not feel significantly painful.
Hard as it is, we progress as spiritual beings by overcoming all the trials that life throws at us:
We have to learn to take pleasure and pain, not with indifference or apathy, but with equanimity. Just as marathon runners have to endure a certain amount of pain if they wish to achieve their goal so it is with life in general. Women who wish to have a family know that the process involves a certain amount of pain but they are willing to endure it for the sake of the child to come.
Totally doesn’t to me. An omni-benevolent and (and here’s the kicker) omnipotent entity could quite easily create a reality in which pain could be experienced once and minimally and then allow said participants to revisit the pain if they wanted to. In other words, there’s no reason whatsoever to ever create a life-time of pain. I can, quite literally, recall and reexperience the pain I had from one of my first procedures back when I was 6. It was…to put it mildly…horrifying, humiliating, excruciating, terrifying, exhausting, nauseating, and beyond stressful. I actually doubled over twice with light-headedness thinking about it as I typed. Amazingly, I only passed out twice during the 40 or so minute procedure. I think I can state with some authority that having an uncountable number of similar experiences over the passed 40-some years is something no one should have to go through. If any entity were in any position to actually stop such from occurring and did not, such an entity would be vile in my book.
Now, in a world of no gods, such an existence is understandable; out of all sorts of biological configurations, some are going have defects and some of those defects are going to be severe. And while most organisms won’t survive severe defects, a few are bound to. At that point, it’s simply a factor of what the organism is willing to do and what the organism is driven to do.
I have already said in a previous post that I do not believe God to be omnipotent. To create free beings out of love one must be willing to relinquish some power.
People don’t encounter pain and suffering just for the sake of it. It happens because of the interweaving of destiny. It can be brought about by previous actions or it can be instigated by future events. It can come from within or it can come from without.
Well from what I have said above it will be clear to you that I believe in reincarnation and destiny (karma). I don’t care how it sits with orthodoxy, to me Christianity makes no sense without these factors.