The Problem of Evil: wiploc vs. seebs

[KnightWhoSaysNi]

Ladies and gentlemen,

The following is a debate between wiploc and seebs on the following resolution:

Resolved: the Problem of Evil proves that an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing god does not exist.

wiploc will go first, taking the affirmative, while seebs will oppose. The debate will have an undetermined number of rounds up to a maximum of ten, as agreed to from the parameters (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=65638).

A peanut gallery (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=66166) is set up in EoG for the rest of us to comment on the debate.

Gentlemen, best of luck!

Jason

[wiploc]

The Problem of Evil proves that a perfect god does not exist.

The traditional Christian god is "perfect." Perfect is a term of art meaning omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing), and omnibenevolent (all good). If there were a perfect god who was aware of our suffering, who could prevent our suffering, and who wanted to prevent our suffering, then we wouldn't suffer.

Thus, the Problem of Evil (PoE): Since we do suffer, we know that there is no such god.

The logic of the PoE is bulletproof. Since we do suffer, god (if he exists at all) doesn't want to prevent our suffering, isn't able to prevent our suffering, or doesn’t know enough to prevent of our suffering (either doesn’t know how to help, or doesn’t even know that we suffer). If god exists, he must not be the perfect god of traditional Christian theology.

How do Christians respond to the PoE? Aside from rolling over and conceding, there are five possible moves:

1. They can say that god isn't really omnipotent.
2. They can say he isn't really omniscient.
3. They can say he isn't really all that good.
4. They can say we don't really suffer. Or,
5. They can abandon reason, saying something like, "I have faith that a perfect god exists, despite the fact that logic says he doesn't."

The first three moves amount to rolling over and conceding, but Christians try to style their concessions in such a manner that they will not realize they have conceded. Move #4 is linguistic nonsense. Move #5 concedes the field also; it admits that the PoE is logically sound, and it claims for Christianity the territory of illogic or unreason. The land of non-sense.

Since these are the only moves available, every defender of the perfect god has to defend by making one or more of these self-defeating moves. Christians frequently use a trick to conceal their defeat from themselves: they redefine terms. For them, omnipotent means not able to ease our suffering, omniscient means not smart enough to ease our suffering, and omnibenevolent means not good enough to ease our suffering.

Not strong enough, not smart enough, not good enough; this is the new perfect god of Christianity. It is all that is left to them since the advent of the PoE.



The above should suffice for an opening statement, but since I seem to have fallen shy of my 2500 words, and since we already know what the five possible responses are, it is possible to continue by discussing one of them in more detail.



Move #3, redefining (or undefining) goodness: Plantinga uses this one, saying, in effect, “Hey, just because god is good, what makes you think he’d wanna help you out?” This raises the question of what’s good about god’s goodness. What’s it good for? What do Christians mean when they say that god is good?

Sometimes, they mean merely that god approves of himself in his own mind. However, this kind of goodness fails to distinguish god from Iago, Hitler, or Satan. In fact, if, “God is good,” really meant that he approved of himself, then “God is all good,” would suggest a consuming narcissism.

Often, Christians don’t mean anything when they say god is good. Ask what they mean, and they don’t know. They say there is something good about god’s goodness, but that what is good about it is not anything we mortals are given to understand. In other words, “We say God is good, but we don’t mean anything by it.” They could more cogently put it this way: “God has an unknown characteristic. We could call it an ‘X factor,’ but that wouldn’t confuse anybody; therefore we call it “goodness” for the sake of enduring befuddlement.”

Despite what I’ve just said, when Christians say god is good, they don’t usually mean that he approves of himself, or that he has an X factor. When they say god is good, they really mean he is good, that he is like a father, that he is loving, that he is a benefactor. They mean good in the normal human meaning of the word. It is only when they are confronted with the PoE that they retrospectively falsify what they have been intending to convey.




Notes:

- I’ve lived in Kansas and Texas. It was Christians who vandalized my property, threatened me repeatedly, kept the pressure up until I was an invalid. It was Christians who turned my schools into churches. It is Christians who are actively usurping my government. I realize that, in this argument it would be technically better to say something like, “Jews, Christians, Muslims, and other believers in a tri-omni god.” But that would be bulky. And I don’t really know anything about those other people. My experience has been with Christians. So, I’ll probably keep talking about Christians. You can think of it as a verbal tic.



- I need to say a little something about defensive move #1, where the Christians downgrade god from actual omnipotence. If god could actually do anything, then he could make a square circle. He could make a rock so big he couldn’t lift it. He could make 3 bigger than 7.

A lot of Christians say god can’t do those things, nor anything else that violates logic, but they still call him “omnipotent,” “all powerful,” and, “unlimited.” That’s a gimme --- it’s okay with me. I’m happy to play in that arena; the PoE still works if god can’t violate logic. In fact, the PoE (nor any other logical logical argument) can't work unless logic is inviolable.

Even though it is somewhat misleading, we don’t have a better word than omnipotent to describe a god who can’t violate logic but whose power is otherwise unlimited. So, having pointed out the difficulty, we are content to call such a god omnipotent ourselves.


- Seebs is right, it’s really hard not to post in the peanut gallery. In two or three rounds, though, the truth will be known, Seebs will concede the indisputable truth of the PoE, and we’ll both jump in among the peanuts. In the meantime I'm going to go look up the word, "axiological."

crc

[seebs]

The Problem of Evil proves that a perfect god does not exist.

Does not. We done now? :p

The traditional Christian god is "perfect." Perfect is a term of art meaning omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing), and omnibenevolent (all good). If there were a perfect god who was aware of our suffering, who could prevent our suffering, and who wanted to prevent our suffering, then we wouldn't suffer.

Thus, the Problem of Evil (PoE): Since we do suffer, we know that there is no such god.

Well, consider. I am a perfect parent; I know that my children will suffer, I can prevent them from suffering, and I want to prevent them from suffering. However, they will suffer; not because I don't exist, but because I want other things as well, and these other things (their existence, for instance) cannot be obtained without their suffering.

Thus we see one possible resolution; it could be that there is some X such that:

Suffering + X is better than no suffering and no X. X cannot exist without suffering.

In fact, this seems not merely possible, but fairly likely, to me. In such a case, God may choose to create X+suffering, and in so doing, be demonstrating greater benevolence than he would by creating neither.

The logic of the PoE is bulletproof. Since we do suffer, god (if he exists at all) doesn't want to prevent our suffering, isn't able to prevent our suffering, or doesnt know enough to prevent of our suffering (either doesnt know how to help, or doesnt even know that we suffer). If god exists, he must not be the perfect god of traditional Christian theology.

Well, there's two branches. Luther believed that God's omnipotence extended to logically-impossible things. But, if God is indeed that omnipotent, then God can do all these things and still be Good, because that's a verb too. So, let's look only at the God whose omnipotence is still constrained by logic; He cannot be logically inconsistent.

At this point, we find that it may be that God cannot prevent our suffering *without causing something worse*. Perhaps nonexistence is worse. Certainly, empirically, most people regularly affirm the claim that "this life is better than not existing", and indeed, when people claim otherwise, we most often consider it a mental disorder!

Thus, *if* it were the case that existence implied suffering, we would find there to be no problem of evil at all. And certainly, it's hard to describe exactly how we should avoid it, without removing free will from the picture.

How do Christians respond to the PoE? Aside from rolling over and conceding, there are five possible moves:

1. They can say that god isn't really omnipotent. 2. They can say he isn't really omniscient. 3. They can say he isn't really all that good. 4. They can say we don't really suffer. 5. They can abandon reason, saying something like, "I have faith that a perfect god exists, despite the fact that logic says he doesn't."

I think you'll interpret this as some variety of argument #1. Instead, however, I'm arguing that omnipotence doesn't get you the results you need.

The first three moves amount to rolling over and conceding, but Christians try to style their concessions in such a manner that they will not realize they have conceded. Move #4 is linguistic nonsense. Move #5 concedes the field also; it admits that the PoE is logically sound, and it claims for Christianity the territory of illogic or unreason. The land of non-sense.

Move #5 may actually be consistent with some degree of reason, as long as it's slightly altered from "logic says he doesn't" to "I don't understand how this is possible". It is quite rational to believe something you see without any understanding of how it is possible. Imagine that I were to declare that there is no soul. My inability to explain how consciousness and self-awareness arise from neurons wouldn't disprove my position; it would just be something I couldn't explain. It's perfectly reasonable to say "I don't know how this happens, but it does". It's sufficient to defeat the argument, to simply argue that it has not actually been *proven*, and await a real proof.

Not strong enough, not smart enough, not good enough; this is the new perfect god of Christianity. It is all that is left to them since the advent of the PoE.

Given that the PoE has been known since before Christianity, I doubt it.

I think the key is to question whether or not it makes any sense at all to speak of a being able to prevent suffering without adverse effects. If not, then God can still be omnipotent, just not logically ridiculous, and we can still suffer.

Move #3, redefining (or undefining) goodness: Plantinga uses this one, saying, in effect, Hey, just because god is good, what makes you think hed wanna help you out? This raises the question of whats good about gods goodness. Whats it good for? What do Christians mean when they say that god is good?

Hmm. Maybe you read a different Plantinga book than I did; the focus of his argument, to me, seemed to be to point out that it is quite consistent to claim that evil follows from free will, which is itself sufficiently good to *outweigh* the suffering.

My experience has been with Christians. So, Ill probably keep talking about Christians. You can think of it as a verbal tic.

Fine by me. And I'm sorry for the way people have treated you; it's wholly inappropriate.

- I need to say a little something about defensive move #1, where the Christians downgrade god from actual omnipotence. If god could actually do anything, then he could make a square circle. He could make a rock so big he couldnt lift it. He could make 3 bigger than 7.

A lot of Christians say god cant do those things, nor anything else that violates logic, but they still call him omnipotent, all powerful, and, unlimited. Thats a gimme --- its okay with me. Im happy to play in that arena; the PoE still works if god cant violate logic. In fact, the PoE (nor any other logical logical argument) can't work unless logic is inviolable.

Even though it is somewhat misleading, we dont have a better word than omnipotent to describe a god who cant violate logic but whose power is otherwise unlimited. So, having pointed out the difficulty, we are content to call such a god omnipotent ourselves.

Right. But this is where the argument seems to run into trouble. It is not clear at all that a world without suffering, but in which we exist, is *possible*. This isn't to say it's impossible in the sense that we talk about something which requires more power, but impossible in the sense of the square circle. I think this is the case that you need to make to tie the PoE together and make it work.

Here's the "Logical PoE" as I have always understood it:

1. God is omnipotent.
2. God is omnibenevolent.
3. Evil exists.

The argument is simply that these are contradictory; surely, an omnipotent God could simply cause Evil not to exist. And, indeed, perhaps He could; as Douglas Adams commented, "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."

However, it is not clear that omnibenevolence is best described as "trying to eliminate all evil". Eternal nothingness is perhaps free of evil, but it can hardly be described as good. As soon as we start looking for positive moral values, we limit the scope of possible actions considerably; while many other things may be theoretically possible, they may not be good.

The question is not merely one of how to minimize evil, but how to maximize good as well; naively, we can simply handwave, assign measurements to both, and try to find a maximum net good. Of course, such measurement is impossible.

Thus, all God needs to do to continue existing is create a world which is more good than evil, and which is in fact, as much more good than evil as possible. Having done so, He may continue existing as long as He wishes, secure against logical attacks.

"Axiological: Of or relating to the study of values." Basically, we can argue over whether specific suffering is actually *evil*, or merely unpleasant, or possibly even to be desired for some reason. I think it's fairly naive to assert that suffering is necessarily worse than the alternatives, therefore evil.

Anyway, I'm not going to try to nail down every last bit of this; as you have doubtless noticed, whole books have been written on this. I think the core weakness we have to address is the free will defense; if free will is good (and I'm certainly liking it), it may be *justification* for evils resulting from it. This doesn't address evils not resulting from free will, but the argument is about any evil at all existing, so if *any* evil is justified, the argument is unpersuasive.

[wiploc]

The PoE Proves a Perfect God Does Not Exist
Second Affirmative Statement.


Originally posted by seebs
Well, consider. I am a perfect parent; I know that my children will suffer, I can prevent them from suffering, and I want to prevent them from suffering. However, they will suffer; not because I don't exist, but because I want other things as well, and these other things (their existence, for instance) cannot be obtained without their suffering.

If you were a perfect parent (in the sense I've been using the word perfect) then you wouldn't have to choose between desired things. An omnipotent parent can have it all. You would not, for instance, have to spank your child to teach it not to touch a hot stove. You could have the stove automatically become cool the instant a child touched it.

I call this the dental goodness argument: god is like a dentist, inflicting a lesser pain to prevent a greater one. The dental goodness argument assumes that god can’t do miracles. This in no way defeats the PoE. The PoE doesn’t even try to refute punk gods; it deals only with omnipotent gods.



Thus we see one possible resolution; it could be that there is some X such that:

Suffering + X is better than no suffering and no X. X cannot exist without suffering.

In fact, this seems not merely possible, but fairly likely, to me. In such a case, God may choose to create X+suffering, and in so doing, be demonstrating greater benevolence than he would by creating neither.

Logic is the only constraint that we have put on god's power; therefore this move is not going to work unless X is something logically incompatible with human happiness. So this move would work if we could have X stand for unhappiness --- but we can’t, because X has to be better than happiness.

I am familiar with two more things that have been offered as the X. One is god's glory. It has been said that god's glory is better than human happiness, and that god therefore invented sin, contrived to have us commit sin, established eternal torture as the punishment for sin, and then arbitrarily rescued some of us (but not others) to enhance his glory. I won't bother argue this one unless you actually want to take the position that such a god is good, that such glory is better than happiness, that glory thus purchased really is glory, and that it would have reduced god’s glory to rescue more people.

The other one (the other value that X can stand for) is free will. But, unlike misery, free will is not logically incompatible with happiness. Plantinga tried to argue that it is, but he cheated.

Illustration of one way Plantinga cheated (Inquiring peanuts want to know!):


Imagine that, in the real world, you are driving down the road, and the road forks. You have free will, so you can turn right or you can turn left. You pass a billboard advertising Doritos. You exercise your free will and turn left.

Now imagine that there is a possible world, unactualized, in which the ad was for Chapstick, and you turn right.

Plantinga's first move is to define free will so that it is about which way you turn rather than about your thought processes. Plantinga says that in the real world you have free will because god doesn't manipulate you, doesn’t turn the Doritos sign into a Chapstick sign. He says that in the hypothetical world you do not have free will because, in that world, god intervened to get his chosen result. (This seems to me a counterintuitive and not very useful meaning for free will. (If this is free will, how can it be better than happiness? The rocks have this kind of free will. And if this is free will, then every one of god’s interventions is a denial of free will.)

For Plantinga’s scam to work, we have to pretend to forget that god made the real world. We must forget that, in the beginning, god had the choice of which world to make, the Doritos world or the Chapstick world. God is the one who chose. For his own reasons, he chose to create the world in which there is a Doritos sign and you turn left. So, if you don't have free will with Chapstick and right turns, then you don't have free will with Doritos and left turns, because in both cases god is the one who selected the outcome. Therefore, after his peculiar setup, Plantinga should logically have reached these conclusions:

1. Free will is not better than happiness.
2. God can’t make free will anyway.
3. Since free will can’t happen, it can’t be the cause of evil.



At this point, we find that it may be that God cannot prevent our suffering *without causing something worse*.

But the only thing logically incompatible with happiness is unhappiness, and X can't be unhappiness because X has to be better than happiness.



Instead, however, I'm arguing that omnipotence doesn't get you the results you need.

It does unless there is a logical contradiction. An omnipotent god can do anything that doesn't involve a logical contradiction.



Thus, *if* it were the case that existence implied suffering, we would find there to be no problem of evil at all. And certainly, it's hard to describe exactly how we should avoid it, without removing free will from the picture.

We can certainly start by imagining god swatting all the mosquitoes before they bite us. Or he can fix it so we get a little thrill when we’re bitten. Or he can fix it so that they bite each other, and like it (and he can do a loaves and fishes thing with their blood so that this works for them), or he can cure hunger so that nobody bites anybody. Beyond that, we aren’t responsible for imagining how it would work. God is infinitely smarter than us; we can let him imagine it. And if the execution of his vision takes many miracles, that still won’t even make an infinitely powerful god breathe hard.



Move #5 may actually be consistent with some degree of reason, as long as it's slightly altered from "logic says he doesn't" to "I don't understand how this is possible". It is quite rational to believe something you see without any understanding of how it is possible. Imagine that I were to declare that there is no soul. My inability to explain how consciousness and self-awareness arise from neurons wouldn't disprove my position; it would just be something I couldn't explain. It's perfectly reasonable to say "I don't know how this happens, but it does". It's sufficient to defeat the argument, to simply argue that it has not actually been *proven*, and await a real proof.

This doesn't work when the argument has been proven. If goodness does entail wanting to make people happy, and if omnipotence does entail the ability to make people happy, and if god does know we are unhappy, then there is nothing left to prove.

If a Defender says god's goodness doesn't entail a desire to make people happy --- he might do this by saying, for instance, that "goodness" refers to a preference to the color blue, or to a desire to generate maximal glory for god, or even a to desire to cast people into hellfire for the fun of it --- then the god he describes is not forbidden by the PoE. But such a god is also not what people normally mean by good, and to call such a god good is a linguistic snare, a misrepresentation.



I think the key is to question whether or not it makes any sense at all to speak of a being able to prevent suffering without adverse effects. If not, then God can still be omnipotent, just not logically ridiculous, and we can still suffer.

I suspect miracles don’t make sense. I suspect that every miracle involves logical contradiction. Seven loaves and fishes had to be not-enough food to feed the multitude --- otherwise it wouldn't have been a miracle! So there wasn't enough food, but there was. But, if all miracles involve logical contradictions, and if god can’t do logical contradictions, then god can't do miracles at all. In which case, he is not what people mean by omnipotent.

So, for the purposes of this argument, we have to assume god can do miracles, can do weird stuff that doesn't make any sense to us, so long as they don’t involve logical contradiction. He can flood the earth without having enough water. He can create the sun from nothing, and he can stop it in its orbit without a lever. He can do any freaky thing he wants so long as it doesn't involve a formal logical contradiction. In which case, he can create us with a more cheerful disposition, remove that sharp stone from where we are about to step, keep the serpents out of the garden, and do whatever else is necessary to happiness. Yes, it would take miracles, but miracles are easy for omnipotence.



Hmm. Maybe you read a different Plantinga book than I did; the focus of his argument, to me, seemed to be to point out that it is quite consistent to claim that evil follows from free will, which is itself sufficiently good to *outweigh* the suffering.

The argument you mention was in there. So was the argument I mentioned.



Right. But this is where the argument seems to run into trouble. It is not clear at all that a world without suffering, but in which we exist, is *possible*. This isn't to say it's impossible in the sense that we talk about something which requires more power, but impossible in the sense of the square circle. I think this is the case that you need to make to tie the PoE together and make it work.

There is no formal logical contradiction, so a miracle-throwing god can handle the case. The fact that it is "far from clear" to us how he would do it is beside the point. He’s going to do it by magic, and magic is always unclear.



Here's the "Logical PoE" as I have always understood it:

1. God is omnipotent.
2. God is omnibenevolent.
3. Evil exists.

The argument is simply that these are contradictory;

I'm not saying that you can't write a version of the PoE that is uncompelling. Try this for comparison:

1. God really totally wants us not to suffer.
2. God can effortlessly fix it so we don't suffer.
3. God lets us suffer.

The only thing this version leaves to discuss is whether these characteristics are fairly said to follow from omnipotence and omnibenevolence.

Christians, faced with the implications of the PoE, will say that these characteristics don't follow. They'll say that god's goodness is mysterious, that it has no implications, that they don't know what it is, that they don’t mean anything when they say god is good. They undefine their terms, substituting X factors. If that's true, if they really mean nothing when they say god is good, then of course god can be “omnipotent” and “omnibenevolent” and still be the author of evil, because undefined words cannot logically contradict anything.

But on other occasions, when they are not defending against the PoE, when they are praising god's goodness for wanting to help them, and his power for being able to, then they really do mean something, and then we know their god doesn’t exist.



Notes:

- Somebody in the formal debate challenge & setup area requested that debates link not only to the peanut gallery, but also to the challenge that spawn a debate. Thus. (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=65638)

- In my last post, I explained why I tend to think of Christians as defenders of the perfect god. I vented, straying from the topic, causing people concern. Thanks, everybody, for your caring support. My tribulation was in the seventies. I'm currently having a great life. (And the True Scotsman need not make an appearance; this debate is about whether gods are omnibenevolent, not whether Christians are.)

crc


Edit:
Requested typo fixed - NS

[seebs]

Originally posted by wiploc
If you were a perfect parent (in the sense I've been using the word perfect) then you wouldn't have to choose between desired things. An omnipotent parent can have it all. You would not, for instance, have to spank your child to teach it not to touch a hot stove. You could have the stove automatically become cool the instant a child touched it.

This sounds great as long as we're talking about obviously external suffering. However, imagine that I have two children. They fight; each wishes the other to suffer, and will suffer if the other doesn't. What, exactly, can I do? Well, I can change them, if I'm omnipotent. But can I change them without, in effect, annihilating them and replacing them with different creatures entirely?

I suspect that to truly eliminate suffering requires you to eliminate the thing which suffers. I think this is a logical consistency problem.

I call this the dental goodness argument: god is like a dentist, inflicting a lesser pain to prevent a greater one. The dental goodness argument assumes that god can't do miracles. This in no way defeats the PoE. The PoE doesnt even try to refute punk gods; it deals only with omnipotent gods.

Mere miracles are not sufficient to resolve inherent conflicts and problems of logical consistency.

Logic is the only constraint that we have put on god's power; therefore this move is not going to work unless X is something logically incompatible with human happiness. So this move would work if we could have X stand for unhappiness --- but we can't, because X has to be better than happiness.

Not incompatible with human happiness; incompatible with human freedom from suffering. These are distinct. If, for any reason, some degree of suffering turns out to be logically necessary in order for me to be fully free, then freedom might well be a thing which is sufficient to justify the suffering. Certainly, it seems to me very hard to imagine that freedom could be obtained without any kind of suffering; to be able to desire things is to desire some things which cannot be.

I won't bother argue this one unless you actually want to take the position that such a god is good, that such glory is better than happiness, that glory thus purchased really is glory, and that it would have reduced gods glory to rescue more people.

I think I'll pass on Calvinism, thanks.

The other one (the other value that X can stand for) is free will. But, unlike misery, free will is not logically incompatible with happiness. Plantinga tried to argue that it is, but he cheated.

I don't think so. I certainly think that free will implies suffering.

Plantinga's first move is to define free will so that it is about which way you turn rather than about your thought processes.

This isn't what I read in it, but I think I see where you're going.

For Plantingas scam to work, we have to pretend to forget that god made the real world. We must forget that, in the beginning, god had the choice of which world to make, the Doritos world or the Chapstick world.

This works if, and only if, there's only one choice, ever. If two people drive down the road, and one of them prefers Doritos, and one prefers Chapstick, the sign must be one or the other; it can't be both without problems.

God is the one who chose. For his own reasons, he chose to create the world in which there is a Doritos sign and you turn left. So, if you don't have free will with Chapstick and right turns, then you don't have free will with Doritos and left turns, because in both cases god is the one who selected the outcome.

I've seen this argument before, basically, and I don't think it works. It's easy for us to say "God could have made either of these two worlds", but it's not obvious at *all* to me that all such worlds are possible. For instance, I am not sure at all that it is within the scope of omnipotence to create a world in which the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is 3 exactly, I Kings 7:23 notwithstanding. The fundamental constants may or may not be tunable. However, it seems fairly likely that not much else is. There is no simple change you can make that produces a world exactly like this one except for one small change, except to intervene directly. If you start doing that, we have problems with free will, and problems with the underlying consistency reality must have for people to learn while living in it.

But the only thing logically incompatible with happiness is unhappiness, and X can't be unhappiness because X has to be better than happiness.

The initial formal statement of the PoE has no explicit contradiction; why, then, is it a "problem"? Because it is hypothesized that there is a contradiction which is implicit. Anything which necessarily leads to unhappiness is incompatible with happiness.

It does unless there is a logical contradiction. An omnipotent god can do anything that doesn't involve a logical contradiction.

Yes, but the logical contradiction may not always be *obvious*. It's easy to say "well, He can make the billboard say Doritos" and "well, He can make the billboard say Chapstick". But He *can't* make it say each of them exclusively, and not the other, at the same time.

God is infinitely smarter than us; we can let him imagine it. And if the execution of his vision takes many miracles, that still wont even make an infinitely powerful god breathe hard.

But it may have implications that have side-effects which turn out to be worse. It seems to me that a God infinitely smarter than us may have, in fact, found the best path to making us happy. I certainly lack the ability to suggest improvements and be sure they are not, in fact, worse than what we have.

This doesn't work when the argument has been proven. If goodness does entail wanting to make people happy, and if omnipotence does entail the ability to make people happy, and if god does know we are unhappy, then there is nothing left to prove.

Omnipotence may not entail the ability to make people perfectly happy; I suspect it's simply logically contradictory. Furthermore, I suspect there's more to goodness than just "wanting people to be happy". To love someone is not merely to want that person to experience maximal short-term happiness, but to want what is good for that person, even if this requires some adaptation or struggle.

If a Defender says god's goodness doesn't entail a desire to make people happy --- he might do this by saying, for instance, that "goodness" refers to a preference to the color blue, or to a desire to generate maximal glory for god, or even a to desire to cast people into hellfire for the fun of it --- then the god he describes is not forbidden by the PoE. But such a god is also not what people normally mean by good, and to call such a god good is a linguistic snare, a misrepresentation.

I tend to agree, but I will point out that a lot of what we describe as "happiness" is surface happiness at best, totally irrelevant to the interesting questions. I think there is some truth to the common assertion that you need contrast to fully appreciate some things.

So there wasn't enough food, but there was.

I see no contradiction here. Wasn't, then was; this represents a change, not a contradiction.

So, for the purposes of this argument, we have to assume god can do miracles, can do weird stuff that doesn't make any sense to us, so long as they dont involve logical contradiction. He can flood the earth wi create the sun from nothing, and he can stop it in its orbit without a lever. He can do any freaky thing he wants so long as it doesn't involve a formal logical contradiction. In which case, he can create us with a more cheerful disposition, remove that sharp stone from where we are about to step, keep the serpents out of the garden, and do whatever else is necessary to happiness. Yes, it would take miracles, but miracles are easy for omnipotence.

But they might have effects which end up contradicting His purposes, even without anything mysterious about His purposes. If He cannot remove the sharp stones without deleterious effects, then the stones cannot be removed without contradiction of our hypothesis of omnibenevolence.

There is no formal logical contradiction, so a miracle-throwing god can handle the case. The fact that it is "far from clear" to us how he would do it is beside the point. Hes going to do it by magic, and magic is always unclear.

And much magic is not merely impossible according to the laws of physics, but logically inconsistent!

Christians, faced with the implications of the PoE, will say that these characteristics don't follow. They'll say that god's goodness is mysterious, that it has no implications, that they don't know what it is, that they dont mean anything when they say god is good. They undefine their terms, substituting X factors. If that's true, if they really mean nothing when they say god is good, then of course god can be omnipotent and omnibenevolent and still be the author of evil, because undefined words cannot logically contradict anything.

I've seen this done, but I don't think it's necessary. I do think that God's goodness is not necessarily what we would first think of, but I think it's what, upon reflection, we'd grant is probably better anyway. Dental goodness, perhaps. To say that omnipotence should avoid this is missing the point; if it is truly inherent in the nature of this goodness that some suffering must be a side-effect of it, then it's dental goodness for an omnipotent deity as well.

The scope of the types of evil we're discussing is fairly broad here. For the Logical PoE, all that's necessary is that any evil at all be necessary. If that's the case, then the Logical PoE has failed; all we have left is the Probabilistic PoE, which says "well, certainly there should be less evil".

It's generally granted that we're including any suffering in the broad category of "evil". I do not believe it is possible to have multiple sentient creatures and not have some degree of suffering. Free will seems to imply the capacity to desire things which are impractical, or even mutually exclusive. Any such thing is potential suffering.

The potential for growth and development in humans appears to be closely tied to our ability to learn about our environment. This may require the environment to have consistent qualities, and this in turn implies the potential for suffering. I don't think you can make a logically consistent world in which fire warms but does not burn.

In the end, it is not possible to eliminate all suffering without eliminating other things which are more positive than suffering is negative. Without the possibility of defeat, victory is stale. Without adverse circumstances, there is no potential for heroism. These things are not trivial; they are foundational to our understanding of morality, and I don't think a world without them would be worth living in.

I guess it comes down to this; benevolence doesn't imply only elimination of suffering, but promotion of happiness as well. While suffering takes away from happiness, it is nonetheless benevolent to bring about a circumstance of mild suffering for a great return in happiness. Given this, the mere existence of suffering is not enough to be a threat to God's benevolence; we must be able to show that the suffering is not part of a larger package.

Logical consistency doesn't allow us to separate the inseparable; cause and effect stay together. If only suffering can lead to a given happiness, then omnipotence cannot create the happiness without the suffering. The contradiction may be implicit or subtle, but it's still there, and it's still beyond the scope of logically consistent omnipotence to bypass it.

[wiploc]

The Problem of Evil Proves the Traditional Christian God Does Not Exist.

Third Affirmative Statement



If
1. God knows the future, and knows our pain; and
2. Has the power to make us happy; and
3. Has our happiness as a top priority; then
4. We must all be happy. But,
5. We are not all happy. Therefore,
6. Such a god does not exist.

I assume we can agree on this much. The god described here cannot exist, and does not exist.

Our disagreement, then, must have to do with how well the terms of my PoE map onto those of more traditional versions. In other words, our disagreement has to do with whether these next three statements are true:

7. An omnibenevolent god has our happiness as a top priority.
8. An omnipotent god can, without violating logic, make us happy.
9. An omniscient god knows the future, and knows about our pain.



Omniscience:

Let’s take that last one first, because I assume we’ll agree on that one. We can put it out of the way. If god doesn’t know that we suffer, he is not omniscient, right? Suppose,

2. God has the power to make us happy; and
3. God has our happiness as a top priority; but
~1. God doesn’t know we are unhappy. (By “~1” I mean to indicate a contradiction of statement number 1.)

Such a god could logically exist; and the existence of such a god would be no affront to the PoE.

Likewise, if god doesn’t know the future, he isn’t omniscient. He could technically be said to have the power to make us happy, but if all his attempts to effect our happiness are based on guesses --- “What will happen if I drown all but a handful of them? Not happy? Well what if I have them slaughter the Mideonites? No? I know, I’ll have them cut the ends of their dicks off! Still not happy? How about if I restrict their sex lives? Burn them in Hellfire? Egad, what is it going to take to make them cheerful? Well, what if I …” --- then this god is not what we mean by omniscient.

Again, such a god could exist; and the existence of such a god does not affront the PoE.

Conclusion: If we take it as given that statements 2, 3, and 9 are true:

2. God has the power to make us happy.
3. God has our happiness as a top priority.
9. An omniscient god knows the future, and knows about our pain.

Then god either does not exist or is not omniscient. Either way, the PoE stands rock solid.

Are we agreed this far? If so, let us turn to god’s goodness.



Omnibenevolence:

Good is stuff that causes happiness. Evil is stuff that causes unhappiness. That’s what the words mean. To say that god is good is to say that he causes happiness. To say that he is all good is to say that he causes lots of happiness and no unhappiness.

That’s an obvious, reasonable, workable, and traditional meaning of the word good. If we use this meaning, then statement 7 is true.

7. An omnibenevolent god has our happiness as a top priority.

But, if statements 1 and 2 are true, and 7 is true, and god is omnibenevolent, then 1, 2, and 3 are all true, so 1 thru 6 are true, so we know that god does not exist.

If
1. God knows the future, and knows our pain; and
2. Has the power to make us happy; and
3. Has our happiness as a top priority; then
4. We must all be happy. But,
5. We are not all happy. Therefore,
6. Such a god does not exist.

Or, said differently, if 1, 2, and 7 are true, then we are reduced to these two outcomes:

a.) God is omnibenevolent. God does not exist. The PoE is sound.
b.) God is not omnibenevolent. God may exist. The PoE is sound.

Either way, the PoE is a logically compelling argument. But that’s if we use the above definition of good. Can we challenge the PoE by using a different meaning?

The thing is, the word still has to mean good. It doesn’t get to refer to a preference for the color blue or some other irrelevancy.

<Here I have tried to examine and dismiss substitute meanings of the word good, but kept deleting my efforts. So, I will leave this for Seebs. If he thinks he can offer some other definition of good that allows for a god to be omnibenevolent in the face of evil, I will entertain the definition he offers.>



Omnipotence:

This is where we consider statement 8 by stipulating statements 1 and 3.

1. God knows the future, and knows our pain; and
3. Has our happiness as a top priority; then
8. An omnipotent god can, without violating logic, make us happy.

If 8 is true, then, since we are not all happy all the time, a perfect god cannot exist.

Seebs takes the position that 8 is not true because free will is better than happiness, and because there is some, perhaps subtle, conflict between free will and happiness. But he gives no support for this contention other than saying that he can’t imagine how god could work it so that we have both happiness and free will.

He hasn’t made his case. If I suggested that there was an unspecified subtle error in his analysis, he would be right not to consider that a refutation. I am right not to consider his similar charge to be a refutation of my case. There is no explicit contradiction between free will and happiness, and no reason to think there is a non-explicit contradiction either.

At issue is not whether we can figure out how to accomplish both happiness and free will, but whether an infinitely smart and powerful person could.

I grant that, if we were all happy all the time, some of our happiness would be inexplicable, but I don’t see how that distinguishes it from the happiness we have now. Some of us are happy during sex, despite the terrible temperatures and events in Iraq. Some of us are happy as children despite the fact that we will die painfully in our old age. Some of us are happy even though the bad guys have the football because our team is doing better than we expected. Some of us are happy in spite of a long commute because it gives us time to think, to settle our minds and watch the sun rise.

All happiness is a mystery. The same stresses that cause some people unhappiness cause other people happiness. Some people have more of a talent for happiness than others. If we had a perfect god, everyone would be talented in this way.

Though he doesn’t see a logical problem with the miracle of loaves and fishes, Seebs thinks there may be a logical conflict if a stove will boil water but won’t burn people. But there is none, not if miracles are logically possible. (And if they are not logically possible, then god doesn’t get to be omnipotent.)

Often we think lesser sufferings justify greater happiness. “No pain, no gain.” But this wouldn’t be true if we had an omnipotent god looking out for us. We could have the gain without the pain. It may pain us to imagine that, in a perfect world, Dirty Harry and Hercules might be couch potatoes, drinking beer and watching the nature channel with no opportunity to exercise their heroism. But, if we really didn’t have problems, then we wouldn’t have opportunity to exercise stoic endurance of problems.



Conclusion:

Statements 7, 8, and 9 all prove to be true.

7. An omnibenevolent god has our happiness as a top priority.
8. An omnipotent god can, without violating logic, make us happy.
9. An omniscient god knows the future, and knows about our pain.

Which means that 1 thru 6 are also true.

If
1. God knows the future, and knows our pain; and
2. Has the power to make us happy; and
3. Has our happiness as a top priority; then
4. We must all be happy. But,
5. We are not all happy. Therefore,
6. Such a god does not exist.

If god were really perfect, then suffering would not exist. Since suffering exists, a perfect god does not. God may exist if he falls short of omnipotence, or omniscience, or omnibenevolence, but a god that falls thus short of perfection does not contradict the PoE. .



Notes:

This is harder than I expected. I’m out of time and frustrated, and I’m putting the ball back in Seebs’ court. I’m aware of some rough spots and stylistic inconsistencies, featuring this monstrosity:

That’s an obvious, reasonable, workable, and traditional meaning of the word good. If we use this meaning, then statement 7 is true.

7. An omnibenevolent god has our happiness as a top priority.


Yet I’m hoping I’ve made enough progress that Seebs can make further progress yet. Go Seebs!

I wasted a lot of time trying to invent wrong definitions of good so that I could shoot them down. I found myself in the Wikipedia, reading an article that said it would be nice if we knew what good was, but that nobody had ever come up with a definition, and after thousands of years the prospect of somebody coming up with a definition is bleak. Really interesting, but, not being a philosopher, I don’t see what is wrong with my definition. And if Seebs comes up with an alternative definition, well, it’ll either work or it won’t.

I didn’t deal with Seeb’s distinction between surface happiness and real happiness. I didn’t deal with it in the happiness section because I thought I’d do it in the omnipotence section. But, I notice, I didn’t deal with it there either. I see it as an omnipotence issue. Suppose we can have surface happiness by ignoring a coming calamity; or we can accept less happiness now and get more happiness in the long run. I figure a perfect god can take care of the calamity on his own. Any choice between short term and long term happiness is predicated on a lack of omnipotence.

crc

[seebs]

Side note: I may have lost some apostrophes, because wiploc's apostrophes aren't actual ASCII apostrophes. Hope this doesn't cause too much confusion.

I'm gathering all the numbered statements here, for future reference.


1. God knows the future, and knows our pain; and
2. Has the power to make us happy; and
3. Has our happiness as a top priority; then
4. We must all be happy. But,
5. We are not all happy. Therefore,
6. Such a god does not exist.
7. An omnibenevolent god has our happiness as a top priority.
8. An omnipotent god can, without violating logic, make us happy.
9. An omniscient god knows the future, and knows about our pain.


I assume we can agree on this much. The god described here cannot exist, and does not exist.

I think I'll grant that, assuming that by "happy" we mean "perfectly happy".

Our disagreement, then, must have to do with how well the terms of my PoE map onto those of more traditional versions. In other words, our disagreement has to do with whether these next three statements are true: (7, 8, and 9)

Oh, very, very, nice. I think you've managed to bridge the gap between the logical PoE as normally stated, and the "obviously true" version that people generally have in mind. I like. I like much.

Omniscience:

Let's take that last one first, because I assume well agree on that one. We can put it out of the way. If god doesn't know that we suffer, he is not omniscient, right?

Hmm. I think you can make a case for an omniscient being who knows present and past, but not future... Such a being could, theoretically, be unable to prevent some suffering, because it's impossible to predict. However, I think it's probably not the most productive line of reasoning.

Likewise, if god doesn't know the future, he isnt omniscient.

I'm not convinced. Is the future "things" yet? The future may not be "things" yet.

He could technically be said to have the power to make us happy, but if all his attempts to effect our happiness are based on guesses --- What will happen if I drown all but a handful of them? Not happy?

ROFL! If nothing else, let's agree that any God that bad at predictions is obviously lacking in crucial knowledge. (Hmm. We might be able to get a God who is omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent, but as dumb as the infinitely heavy rocks He's always making? Logically interesting, practically irrelevant.)

(If we grant statements 2, 3, 9) Then god either does not exist or is not omniscient. Either way, the PoE stands rock solid.

I agree that omniscience is probably the least viable defense.

Good is stuff that causes happiness. Evil is stuff that causes unhappiness. That's what the words mean. To say that god is good is to say that he causes happiness. To say that he is all good is to say that he causes lots of happiness and no unhappiness.

That's an obvious, reasonable, workable, and traditional meaning of the word good. If we use this meaning, then statement 7 is true.

Yup. But I'm not sure that it's correct. I would argue that "good" should probably imply something along the lines of "maximal net happiness, where net happiness is the sum of happiness plus unhappiness (unhappiness being a kind of negative happiness)". However, even that may be incorrect. There are values which may not map directly onto "happiness". For instance, "satisfaction".

But, if statements 1 and 2 are true, and 7 is true, and god is omnibenevolent, then 1, 2, and 3 are all true, so 1 thru 6 are true, so we know that god does not exist.

Either way, the PoE is a logically compelling argument. But thats if we use the above definition of good. Can we challenge the PoE by using a different meaning?

I think so, and I think we have to.

The thing is, the word still has to mean good. It doesn't get to refer to a preference for the color blue or some other irrelevancy.

Agreed.

<Here I have tried to examine and dismiss substitute meanings of the word good, but kept deleting my efforts. So, I will leave this for Seebs. If he thinks he can offer some other definition of good that allows for a god to be omnibenevolent in the face of evil, I will entertain the definition he offers.>

It's interesting, and probably very hard. Good is like porn; we know it when we see it. There are values which cannot exist without suffering; the question is, are they worth it? Would we be better off in a world where there were no heroes? I doubt it, myself. I believe that altruism is a virtue, and a very important one -- but you can't have altruism if there's no way to put yourself out for others. If you can't suffer at all, how can you learn the value of being willing to suffer to benefit others?

We could argue that, in a world without suffering, there would be no such value... But I think that makes that world sound flat.

Omnipotence:

This is where we consider statement 8 by stipulating statements 1 and 3. If 8 is true, then, since we are not all happy all the time, a perfect god cannot exist.

Seebs takes the position that 8 is not true because free will is better than happiness, and because there is some, perhaps subtle, conflict between free will and happiness. But he gives no support for this contention other than saying that he can't imagine how god could work it so that we have both happiness and free will.

If two creatures have free will, it is possible for them to desire mutually exclusive things. Therefore, at least one of them will be disappointed, and thus not totally happy. I don't think this can be corrected, except by making at most one creature with free will.

At issue is not whether we can figure out how to accomplish both happiness and free will, but whether an infinitely smart and powerful person could.

Right, but I think there is a logical contradiction, meaning that even infinite intelligence and power don't resolve it.

All happiness is a mystery. The same stresses that cause some people unhappiness cause other people happiness. Some people have more of a talent for happiness than others. If we had a perfect god, everyone would be talented in this way.

This is a very interesting argument, but I think it rests on turning happiness into something fairly meaningless. A creature which is "happy" when being tortured, simply because it's always happy by fiat, lacks one of the foundations on which free will rests. I don't think that, if you can't affect your own happiness, you can do much of anything.

Though he doesn't see a logical problem with the miracle of loaves and fishes, Seebs thinks there may be a logical conflict if a stove will boil water but won't burn people. But there is none, not if miracles are logically possible. (And if they are not logically possible, then god doesn't get to be omnipotent.)

I think it's not so much a logical conflict, but rather, a conflict with one of the prerequisites for human growth and development, which is a stable world. If we are to be in bodies made of matter, we must be subject to the laws of physics.

Often we think lesser sufferings justify greater happiness. No pain, no gain. But this wouldn't be true if we had an omnipotent god looking out for us. We could have the gain without the pain. It may pain us to imagine that, in a perfect world, Dirty Harry and Hercules might be couch potatoes, drinking beer and watching the nature channel with no opportunity to exercise their heroism. But, if we really didn't have problems, then we wouldn't have opportunity to exercise stoic endurance of problems.

Yes. And I'm not sure that this would be an improvement. I think heroes are worth it. Could we really have the gain without the pain? How would you get the benefits of heroism? Likewise, can we have charity without scarcity? I am not convinced that the virtues can exist without various privations, and I think the virtues may be worth the cost. If they are, then the PoE is refuted; there is justification for the evil we observe. Essentially, the PoE comes down to that question; is there unjustified evil?

This is harder than I expected. I'm out of time and frustrated, and I'm putting the ball back in Seebs court. I'm aware of some rough spots and stylistic inconsistencies, featuring this monstrosity:

That's an obvious, reasonable, workable, and traditional meaning of the word good. If we use this meaning, then statement 7 is true.

I think the weak points are the difficulty of describing what we mean by "omnibenevolent", and the difficulty of figuring out what the logical limitations of omnipotence are. It's hard to nail down exactly what should be maximally good, and indeed, most attempts to define "goodness" turn out to lead to unanswerable questions. If you have two free-willed creatures with contradictory desires, how do you decide what to do?

I wasted a lot of time trying to invent wrong definitions of good so that I could shoot them down. I found myself in the Wikipedia, reading an article that said it would be nice if we knew what good was, but that nobody had ever come up with a definition, and after thousands of years the prospect of somebody coming up with a definition is bleak. Really interesting, but, not being a philosopher, I dont see what is wrong with my definition. And if Seebs comes up with an alternative definition, well, it'll either work or it won't.

Well, I think the PoE depends a lot on trying to figure out exactly what we mean by evil. Is suffering evil? Is only intentional, malicious, behavior evil? Worse yet, are there things the lack of which would be evil, too? If not "evil", then perhaps "less than maximally good", and the PoE probably works fine with "less than maximal good" as a substitute for "evil".

I didn't deal with Seebs distinction between surface happiness and real happiness. I didn't deal with it in the happiness section because I thought I'd do it in the omnipotence section. But, I notice, I didn't deal with it there either. I see it as an omnipotence issue. Suppose we can have surface happiness by ignoring a coming calamity; or we can accept less happiness now and get more happiness in the long run. I figure a perfect god can take care of the calamity on his own. Any choice between short term and long term happiness is predicated on a lack of omnipotence.

Not necessarily. Imagine that it's not a coming calamity, but rather, a potential outcome which is inextricably linked to short-term suffering. If this link is a logical connection, not merely a practical reality, then it may be beyond the scope of a merely-omnipotent being to bypass it.

I think the first hurdle for the PoE is the question of whether or not anything conscious should ever have been created. Who benefits? Does God benefit from having a creation? Do we benefit from existing? If we had never existed, would it even be meaningful to ask whether or not we were worse off?

Going back to an early example, I think it is possible for people to have children, believing that doing so is benevolent towards such children; they think that life is, on the whole, good enough to be worth living, and expect their children to agree. So, imagine that God conceives of a possible world -- this one -- and decides that, on the whole, there will be more joy than sorrow, and that it would be benevolent to create such a world. I think that people, in general, would agree that this is morally justifiable.

The question, then, becomes whether or not He should instead have created some different world in which things were different, and if so, how they should have been different. Here is where we run into the logical consistency questions. I think we can take it as a given that the world we are in now is logically consistent. I'm not nearly as sure that we can show any given hypothetical world to be logically consistent. The most we can say is that we don't *see* anything wrong with it.

This leaves us with an argument from ignorance on both sides. On one side, we have "this hypothetical world must be consistent, I don't see anything wrong with it". On the other side, we have "I can't imagine any such world". Both are arguments from ignorance.

Still, I think the killer is trying to figure out what is, or isn't, logically consistent. I think that free will requires the potential for evil actions. That leaves us with natural evil, but luckily, we're arguing the Logical PoE, which requires me only to find justification for some evil. (Plantinga's excuse for "natural evil", which I summarize as "Maybe Satan does it", is logically possible but, IMHO, unsatisfying.)

The question, then, is "is free will good?"

I see no way to answer this except to say "I like it so far."

I think we're stumbling about a bit on terms, but in the end, I think that makes it a lot more likely that we (and the readers) will come to positions which are well-considered. Too many of the academic papers on this subject gloss over the terminology, or the question of how we reach our understanding of certain terms. These are foundational problems we face in addressing or discussing the PoE; it turns out to be very hard to get a definition of evil, or of good, which consistently lines up with our moral intuition.

I probably shouldn't be trying to help you nail down what you mean by good and evil, but I think the debate is better served by a mutual effort to reach terms we can agree on. :)

Back to you. Maybe you can get some ideas from my efforts at trying to describe "good" in a meaningful way.

[wiploc]

The Problem of Evil Proves a Perfect God Does Not Exist
Fourth Affirmative Statement

The Numbered Statements:
• 1. God knows the future, and knows our pain; and
• 2. Has the power to make us happy; and
• 3. Has our happiness as a top priority; then
• 4. We must all be happy. But,
• 5. We are not all happy. Therefore,
• 6. Such a god does not exist.

• 7. An omnibenevolent god has our happiness as a top priority.
• 8. An omnipotent god can, without violating logic, make us happy.
• 9. An omniscient god knows the future, and knows about our pain.


Omniscience:

In this section we stipulate statements 2 and 3 in order to test statement 9.
• 2. God has the power to make us happy.
• 3. God has our happiness as a top priority.
• 9. An omniscient god knows the future, and knows about our pain.


Hmm. I think you can make a case for an omniscient being who knows present and past, but not future... Such a being could, theoretically, be unable to prevent some suffering, because it's impossible to predict.
Such a being is not precluded by the PoE, so here’s one place we can draw a line. I wouldn’t call a non-future-knowing god omniscient, and neither would the PoE. If a god doesn’t know the future, or otherwise fails to effect human happiness due of a lack of knowledge or smarts, then that god is not omnipotent as the term is used in the PoE.
(There is still the issue of whether even infinite knowledge and cleverness could do the job, but that can be dealt with below, under omnipotence.)

Omnibenevolence:
In this section, we stipulate statements 1 and 2 in order to test statement 7.
• 1. God knows the future, and knows our pain; and
• 2. God has the power to make us happy; and
• 7. An omnibenevolent god has our happiness as a top priority.
The more I think about it, the more I think happiness is the only good end. All other goods are good only because they are means to this end.

if free will is good (and I'm certainly liking it),

See, what we like (what makes us happy) is what is good.




I would argue that "good" should probably imply something along the lines of "maximal net happiness, where net happiness is the sum of happiness plus unhappiness (unhappiness being a kind of negative happiness)".

I’d call happiness good, and maximal happiness best. I don’t know how much happiness is maximal, but a world with as much happiness as we have in this one, but no unhappiness, would satisfy me. So, tentatively, I’ll say that any god who shoots for less than that is less than all good.



However, even that may be incorrect. There are values which may not map directly onto "happiness". For instance, "satisfaction".[QUOTE] [B]

I’m going to continue to talk about “happiness.” I’m too lazy to say, “bliss, cheer, contentment, delight, ecstasy, elation, enjoyment, euphoria, exhilaration, exuberance, gaiety, geniality, gladness, glee, good humor, jubilation, mirth, optimism, playfulness, pleasure, and all other positive emotions.”



[QUOTE] [B]
Well, I think the PoE depends a lot on trying to figure out exactly what we mean by evil. Is suffering evil?

Yes, Well, technically, no, but. If we were being pedantic, we would say that suffering is the result of evil, rather than evil itself. But I’m happy to conflate the ideas. It’s easier to say, “A world without evil is a world without unhappiness,” than it is to say, “A world without evil is a world without the causes of unhappiness.”




Is only intentional, malicious, behavior evil?

Nope, anything that causes unhappiness is evil. In fact, intentional malicious behavior that fails to cause unhappiness is not evil.




… and the PoE probably works fine with "less than maximal good" as a substitute for "evil".

I agree.




I think the first hurdle for the PoE is the question of whether or not anything conscious should ever have been created. Who benefits?

Robert Frost wrote, “The universe may be as great as they say, but it wouldn’t be missed if it didn’t exist.” But I’ll give you this one anyway. For the sake of argument, I’ll concede that it is a good thing that we exist. That’s assuming that Hell is fictional. If there is even one person suffering eternal torment in Hell, then I’m against the universe existing.

No, I’m reconsidering here. If unhappiness outweighs happiness, then existence is bad even if Hell doesn’t exist.




Does God benefit from having a creation?

I don’t care. He’s only one person; his happiness counts no more than anyone else’s.




Do we benefit from existing? If we had never existed, would it even be meaningful to ask whether or not we were worse off?

It seems obvious to me that a person suffering torment in Hellfire would be better off non-existent.




Going back to an early example, I think it is possible for people to have children, believing that doing so is benevolent towards such children; they think that life is, on the whole, good enough to be worth living, and expect their children to agree. So, imagine that God conceives of a possible world -- this one -- and decides that, on the whole, there will be more joy than sorrow, and that it would be benevolent to create such a world. I think that people, in general, would agree that this is morally justifiable.

I agree; it’s cool that he made a world. But he’d be even cooler if he’d made a better one. If he was way cool, he’d have made a great one.



The question, then, becomes whether or not He should instead have created some different world in which things were different, and if so, how they should have been different. Here is where we run into the logical consistency questions. I think we can take it as a given that the world we are in now is logically consistent. I'm not nearly as sure that we can show any given hypothetical world to be logically consistent. The most we can say is that we don't *see* anything wrong with it.

If we suppose that god can do miracles to change the world, then we suppose that the world can be changed without violating logical consistency. If god can’t to miracles, then he isn’t omnipotent. So, either miraculous modifications to the world don’t violate logic, or the PoE is right about an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god not existing. Either way, you have to punt this line of argument.



Omnipotence:
In this section, we stipulate statements 1 and 3 in order to test statement 8.
• 1. God knows the future, and knows our pain.
• 3. God has our happiness as a top priority.
• 8. An omnipotent god can, without violating logic, make us happy.
My position is that only unhappiness logically conflicts with happiness. Free will, if it really exists, does not conflict with happiness, so there is no reason that arranging our happiness would create a logical conflict. We frequently do things to make people happy without destroying their free will. There is no reason to think that if more were done to make people happy that it would destroy free will any more than if less were done.


Not necessarily. Imagine … a [good] potential outcome which is inextricably linked to short-term suffering. If this link is a logical connection, not merely a practical reality, then it may be beyond the scope of a merely-omnipotent being to bypass it.

Well! This is very frustrating. If Seebs would come out with a specific claim that something better than happiness is somehow logically incompatible with happiness, then I could deal with it. But he doesn’t use specifics (okay, he really does, and I’ll deal with that later, but he also makes the general claim) he just says there may be some conflict between happiness and something else good. How am I supposed to cope with a non-specific charge like that? It seems so unfair.

Of course, I did take an affirmative position. I’m here to prove there is no conflict between logic and happiness. So Seebs’ move is not unfair. And yet … how am I supposed to reply?

I’ll use analogy. Suppose I argued that two plus two doesn’t naturally equal four. Suppose I said it would naturally equal five, but because the constant intervention of a miracle-throwing god, it seems to us to equal four.

How could anybody argue against that? I don’t see how they could, other than to point out that if we are going to use our minds to learn about the world, we get to assume that our minds work. We get to assume that logic works. We get to assume we understand logic. These are the universal presuppositions that we make when undertaking any logical proof, and we get to make them this time too.

So, for the purposes of this debate, I’m going to assume there isn’t some secret rule of logic that makes some secret goodness secretly conflict with happiness.

I turn now to known rules of logic, specific goods, and specific conflicts.




This leaves us with an argument from ignorance on both sides. On one side, we have "this hypothetical world must be consistent, I don't see anything wrong with it". On the other side, we have "I can't imagine any such world". Both are arguments from ignorance.

There isn’t any reason to believe there’s a conflict between free will and happiness. Unhappiness conflicts with happiness; free will is a different thing. Frequently, we observe people with free will being happy. All I’m asking for is more of this known-to-be-possible thing.




Still, I think the killer is trying to figure out what is, or isn't, logically consistent. I think that free will requires the potential for evil actions.

The potential, maybe, but not the actuality.

Suppose an omnipotent god knows that Joe will pick a fight Thursday night if his wife feeds him pancakes for breakfast on Monday morning. God could turn the milk sour. (Actually, I don’t know how to make pancakes, but I’m assuming they involve milk).

There are other ways to deal with it. An infinite number of other ways. In Boys Don’t Cry the protagonist was pleased to get a black eye. She thought it was a badge of her manhood. Joe could pick on someone like that, or someone who loves to get drunk and fight. Or he could pick on someone who has been afraid of his own cowardice, but learns during the fight that he can stand up for himself. There are endless ways that a potentially bad thing can have actually good results.




If two creatures have free will, it is possible for them to desire mutually exclusive things. Therefore, at least one of them will be disappointed, and thus not totally happy. I don't think this can be corrected, except by making at most one creature with free will.

One creature with free will could be unhappy all by himself. Or happy. With two creatures, it works out the same. Let’s take your example: two people want the same thing. Let’s say they both want the last donut. Again, there are many ways to deal with this. It could happen when the person who doesn’t get the donut is in such a good mood that he doesn’t mind. It could happen to someone who is so benevolent, so altruistic, that he is happy the other guy got the donut. It could happen to someone who remembers his diet, so his pride in his self restraint outweighs his disappointment in not getting the donut. The guy who is not going to get the donut could be distracted by a loud noise so that he never even sees the donut. Or, and we should never forget this one, god could just make another donut.



There are values which cannot exist without suffering;

There is no reason to believe this is true. Not, at least, if there is an all powerful god.



the question is, are they worth it? Would we be better off in a world where there were no heroes? I doubt it, myself.

As well you should. We need heros in the this world; we are adjusted to this world. But would we need them, would we revere them, would they be beneficial, in a world where things didn’t go wrong? No. In this world we need them; in a perfect world we would not.



I believe that altruism is a virtue, and a very important one -- but you can't have altruism if there's no way to put yourself out for others.

The Lord loves a cheerful giver. It is entirely possible to feel good about being altruistic. It happens all the time. This isn’t magical. The magic would only come into play in choreographing events so that things work out okay. A lot of little Dutch boys would love to save a bunch of people’s lives by putting their fingers in a leaky dike. Arguably, it’s a problem that there aren’t more opportunities for altruism, opportunities where people are matched to the task (the little Dutch boy couldn’t have saved anybody if his fingers had been the wrong size to stop the leak) and where they can see the good results from their sacrifice.



If you can't suffer at all, how can you learn the value of being willing to suffer to benefit others?

How about divine revelation? None of these individual questions are hard if we really have an omnipotent god.




We could argue that, in a world without suffering, there would be no such value... But I think that makes that world sound flat.
“Flat.” As in, not much fun? An omnipotent god could deal with that. He could rig near escapes, or run extra current to the pleasure center of your brain. He could provide roller coasters, attractive members of the appropriate gender, corn chowder, or whatever else you personally need to make the world unflat.
These specific examples could all be taken care of by specific solutions that an omnipotent god could easily manage.


Yes. And I'm not sure that this would be an improvement. I think heroes are worth it. Could we really have the gain without the pain? How would you get the benefits of heroism?

Heroes are definitely worth it in this world of woes. They wouldn’t be needed in a better world. If we didn’t have problems, we wouldn’t need them to solve our problems.

The other benefits, aside from problem solving, could be had the way they are now. We can admire each other for our good features. We can read hero stories and get a vicarious thrill.



Likewise, can we have charity without scarcity?

You can give to someone with needs greater than yours --- even if that person is cheerful. If you want to, you can think of charity as being even more admirable in that circumstance.




This is a very interesting argument, but I think it rests on turning happiness into something fairly meaningless. A creature which is "happy" when being tortured, simply because it's always happy by fiat, lacks one of the foundations on which free will rests. I don't think that, if you can't affect your own happiness, you can do much of anything.

But there are happy people now, and you don’t say they lack free will. This happiness wouldn’t be any different, just more plentiful. We don’t say we lack free will when circumstances turn out to be bad for us; there would be no reason to say we lacked free will if they always turned out to be good for us.

crc

[KnightWhoSaysNi]

wiploc,

Your recent statement has somewhat exceeded the agreed debate parameter limit of 2500 words. Please try to keep future statements within that length. Thanks. :)

Carry on gentlemen,

Jason

[seebs]

The Numbered Statements:

1. God knows the future, and knows our pain; and
2. Has the power to make us happy; and
3. Has our happiness as a top priority; then
4. We must all be happy. But,
5. We are not all happy. Therefore,
6. Such a god does not exist.
7. An omnibenevolent god has our happiness as a top priority.
8. An omnipotent god can, without violating logic, make us happy.
9. An omniscient god knows the future, and knows about our pain.


Omniscience:
In this section we stipulate statements 2 and 3 in order to test statement 9.
I wouldn't call a non-future-knowing god omniscient, and neither would the PoE.

This may be a flaw in the PoE. If the future is unknowable, then an omniscient deity won't know it. Once again, we're presupposing logical continuity. So, one possible case where the PoE fails has been discovered; if the future is unknowable, God may be unable to anticipate some evil.

Omnibenevolence: In this section, we stipulate statements 1 and 2 in order to test statement 7.

The more I think about it, the more I think happiness is the only good end. All other goods are good only because they are means to this end.

I am not convinced that this is necessarily correct, but we can run with it for a while and see where we end up.

I'd call happiness good, and maximal happiness best. I don't know how much happiness is maximal, but a world with as much happiness as we have in this one, but no unhappiness, would satisfy me. So, tentatively, I'll say that any god who shoots for less than that is less than all good.

Let us imagine that we sum up the numbers, and find that this world contains X units of happiness, and Y of unhappiness. Thus, you postulate that we currently have X-Y net happiness, but you would consider a world with X net happiness "satisfactory". How about a world with X+Y happiness, and Y unhappiness? This has the same net happiness as your hypothetical world with X happiness and Y unhappiness. Which is better?

I'magine that we have gotten to your world with X net happiness, and we discover that we can have X+2Y happiness, and only Y unhappiness, by making a given change. Should we?

How much happiness does it take to justify a given amount of unhappiness? It seems to me it's most reasonable, since the scales are totally invented, to simply arbitrarily norm them... But of course, this makes the mistaken assumption that the scales are linear, and I'm not sure they are.

However, I can't see any way to tell whether or not the improvements discussed have already taken place. The only one we can rule out is the one leaving us with no unhappiness. We may already be experiencing a great deal of extra happiness.

Yes, Well, technically, no, but. If we were being pedantic, we would say that suffering is the result of evil, rather than evil itself. But I'm happy to conflate the ideas. Its easier to say, A world without evil is a world without unhappiness, than it is to say, A world without evil is a world without the causes of unhappiness.

This is a good point, though, and an interesting one. Can you prevent suffering without preventing evil? Can you prevent evil without losing something greater, such as free will?

Nope, anything that causes unhappiness is evil. In fact, intentional malicious behavior that fails to cause unhappiness is not evil.

This contradicts most understood moral usage. We generally think of an incompetent rapist as evil, but a person who bungles in a way resulting in death as merely unlucky.

No, I'm reconsidering here. If unhappiness outweighs happiness, then existence is bad even if Hell doesn't exist.

In that case, I guess I have to disagree with the claim that unhappiness outweighs happiness.

I don't care. He's only one person; his happiness counts no more than anyone else's.

It seems to me we regularly place the needs of more complicated creatures above the needs of less complicated creatures in morality. Isn't turnabout fair play?

It seems obvious to me that a person suffering torment in Hellfire would be better off non-existent.

I think the question depends greatly on specific doctrines of Hell. However, to make a long story short, I'm not sure that this can be arranged in a way that isn't actually worse.

I agree; it's cool that he made a world. But he'd be even cooler if he'd made a better one. If he was way cool, he'd have made a great one.

I think the best we can hope for is "the best logically-consistent one", and the standards for "best" may be slightly odd. For instance, they may be rooted in outcomes that don't happen within mortal lives. Christian theology has an easy out here; we can simply say that a given event is iin some way helpful to the soul. I'm not sure it's necessary, but it's a good response.

If we suppose that god can do miracles to change the world, then we suppose that the world can be changed without violating logical consistency. If god can't do miracles, then he isn't omnipotent. So, either miraculous modifications to the world don't violate logic, or the PoE is right about an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god not existing.

Fallacy of the excluded middle. It is possible that some miracles, but not all miracles, are logically impossible. Perhaps God can create fish, but not a cube which is also a sphere. The trick is figuring out into which category the miracles we'd need fall. The main problem, it seems to me, is the implications they would have. In the resulting world, people might lose some of the framework in which moral decision-making is possible, and this sounds to me to be very bad.

My position is that only unhappiness logically conflicts with happiness.

I think this is false in two ways. First, they can coexist, so they're not entirely in conflict. Second, I think other things can be exclusive of maximal happiness.

Free will, if it really exists, does not conflict with happiness, so there is no reason that arranging our happiness would create a logical conflict. We frequently do things to make people happy without destroying their free will. There is no reason to think that if more were done to make people happy that it would destroy free will any more than if less were done.

Imagine that "all malicious acts will be null operations" were to be enforced. I think this would clearly make many people happy in individual cases, but would eliminate any meaningful concept of "free will".

Of course, I did take an affirmative position. I'm here to prove there is no conflict between logic and happiness. So Seebs' move is not unfair. And yet how am I supposed to reply?

I'm not sure. :)

So, for the purposes of this debate, I'm going to assume there isn't some secret rule of logic that makes some secret goodness secretly conflict with happiness.

I don't think it's so much "secret" as "non-obvious". When I was a child, I was frequently unable to understand the strange rules my parents had; now that I know what they were based on, I agree that those rules were intended to maximize my happiness, and that, insofar as I followed them, they succeeded.

It seems likely to me that there exist ways of maximizing our happiness which are incomprehensible to us, but which would work if we followed them.

There isn't any reason to believe there's a conflict between free will and happiness. Unhappiness conflicts with happiness; free will is a different thing. Frequently, we observe people with free will being happy. All I'm asking for is more of this known-to-be-possible thing.

People with free will can indeed be happy in this world. However, they can also be unhappy. That's the thing about free will; multiple outcomes, and you can't preselect for them.

If you give a man free will, he has the choice of being miserable. How do you stop him? He also has the choice of causing unhappiness in others. How do you stop him? Anything which totally prevents those courses of action has eliminated his free will. I think free will logically guarantees unhappiness.

Suppose an omnipotent god knows that Joe will pick a fight Thursday night if his wife feeds him pancakes for breakfast on Monday morning. God could turn the milk sour. (Actually, I don't know how to make pancakes, but I'm assuming they involve milk).

That's not free will, that's causality. The question is, what if Joe will pick a fight if he's a mean sun of a bitch, and he is, because he wants to be?

There are other ways to deal with it. An infinite number of other ways. In Boys Dont Cry the protagonist was pleased to get a black eye. She thought it was a badge of her manhood. Joe could pick on someone like that, or someone who loves to get drunk and fight. Or he could pick on someone who has been afraid of his own cowardice, but learns during the fight that he can stand up for himself. There are endless ways that a potentially bad thing can have actually good results.

Yes. But most of them involve letting it have bad effects. For instance, the black eye is suffering. It's just mitigated suffering. However, all this does is support the theory that potentially bad things, such as those we see around us all the time, may have net positive effects. Which would justify them, and eliminate the PoE.

One creature with free will could be unhappy all by himself. Or happy. With two creatures, it works out the same. Lets take your example: two people want the same thing. Let's say they both want the last donut. Again, there are many ways to deal with this. It could happen when the person who doesn't get the donut is in such a good mood that he doesn't mind. It could happen to someone who is so benevolent, so altruistic, that he is happy the other guy got the donut. It could happen to someone who remembers his diet, so his pride in his self restraint outweighs his disappointment in not getting the donut. The guy who is not going to get the donut could be distracted by a loud noise so that he never even sees the donut. Or, and we should never forget this one, god could just make another donut.

Several of these depend on essentially making the people in question lose their free will. If you can only have donut conflicts with altruists, there's something very weird going on.

As to making another donut, I think that eventually gets us down the slippery slope to the world where there's no bad effects, and morality loses most or all of its meaning.

There is no reason to believe this is true. Not, at least, if there is an all powerful god.

Well, keep in mind, logical contradictions don't count. Values which are defined in terms of suffering or evil require suffering or evil to exist. So, for instance, forbearance doesn't make sense without some kind of suffering. Forgiveness makes no sense without sin.

As well you should. We need heros in the this world; we are adjusted to this world. But would we need them, would we revere them, would they be beneficial, in a world where things didn't go wrong? No. In this world we need them; in a perfect world we would not.

And in the process, that world becomes, as I put it, "flat". We go from a world with blacks, greys, and whites, into a world with only greys. Perhaps they're all a little above 50%, but they're still grey.

Arguably, it's a problem that there aren't more opportunities for altruism, opportunities where people are matched to the task (the little Dutch boy couldn't have saved anybody if his fingers had been the wrong size to stop the leak) and where they can see the good results from their sacrifice.

And yet, at some point, the entirely staged nature of the event would show. Or, more tellingly, in a world with free will, people would decide not to take these opportunities.

How about divine revelation? None of these individual questions are hard if we really have an omnipotent god.

I am not convinced that it is possible to communicate experiential things through revelation. There's a difference between having experienced something and having been told about it.

These specific examples could all be taken care of by specific solutions that an omnipotent god could easily manage.

I don't think any of that would work. A world where everything is uniformly pretty decent or better lacks the range of experience which makes life interesting. To borrow a koan:

A Zen master was chased by a tiger. He jumped over a cliff to escape and found himself hanging from a vine. He looked up and saw the tiger waiting patiently. He looked down and saw a second tiger waiting below. Two mice began gnawing through the vine. Just then the Zen Master saw a strawberry growing wild on the cliff. He picked it. How sweet it tasted!

We can read hero stories and get a vicarious thrill.

But hero stories make no sense without the experiences they refer to.

You can give to someone with needs greater than yours --- even if that person is cheerful. If you want to, you can think of charity as being even more admirable in that circumstance.

It'd be misleading to do so. I think charity would be empty in such a circumstance. After all, if someone has needs, haven't we just broken the assumption of a perfect world, in which all needs are met, and there is no suffering? I think charity demands that people have unmet needs. Furthermore, for it to be particularly meaningful, you have to be giving up something that matters to you --- more suffering!

This happiness wouldn't be any different, just more plentiful. We don't say we lack free will when circumstances turn out to be bad for us; there would be no reason to say we lacked free will if they always turned out to be good for us.

Except it's not just circumstances, but the things people do, that would have to change. Furthermore, that world would deny us opportunities we have in this one. On the whole, I think the proposed world has less net happiness in it than we do in ours.

The conflict isn't "happiness prevents free will". The problem is "free will can create unhappiness".

[wiploc]

The Problem of Evil Proves That a Perfect God Does Not Exist.

Fifth Affirmative Statement

Omniscience:

[B]
If the future is unknowable, then an omniscient deity won't know it. Once again, we're presupposing logical continuity. So, one possible case where the PoE fails has been discovered; if the future is unknowable, God may be unable to anticipate some evil.

Suppose I said, "If by 'peanut butter,' I mean peanut butter; and by 'jelly,' I mean jelly; then a peanut butter and jelly sandwich includes jelly." And suppose you responded, "Yes, but if we redefined 'jelly' to include pickles, then a 'peanut butter and jelly sandwich' wouldn't necessarily include actual jelly."

I don't think we have any real disagreement here. If we imagine an otherwise perfect god who doesn't know the future, then that god could coexist with suffering. But, this is not a failure of the PoE, because the word "omniscient," as used in the PoE does imply knowledge of the future.

Therefore, we must conclude that the PoE and the PBJ are both sound if we stick to using my given definitions.


Omnibenevolence:

I don't care [about god's happiness]. He's only one person; his happiness counts no more than anyone else's.

It seems to me we regularly place the needs of more complicated creatures above the needs of less complicated creatures in morality. Isn't turnabout fair play?

We do that in everyday practice, not in morality. I don't think a moral case could be made for such discrimination based on complexity.

On the other hand, we might be able to fix up something similar based on ... oh, call it sensitivity. You know, "Corn has no sensitivity at all, so it is okay to eat corn. And Lobsters don't suffer much if you kill them right, whereas humans suffer a lot if they don't get to eat lobster." To make that work for you, though, to make a single god's suffering outweigh all of humanity's suffering, you would have to posit a god who really knows how to suffer. He'd have to have special talent for it. Seriously, he'd have to be worse than a billion Jewish mothers. And if humans suffer infinitely in Hellfire, then god's talent for self-inflicted suffering would have to be beyond infinity, one of those aleph numbers. And then, of course, you would also have to come up with a logical reason that this magnificent sufferer's omnipotence couldn't cure his own suffering without causing ours. And even if you could do all that, it still wouldn't help you unless you could explain why we wouldn't be better off if god had disincluded himself when he created the world.

I don't think you could do that, but I'm not going to put you to the task anyway. I define good as stuff that causes human happiness. According to this definition, if something isn't good for people, it isn't good at all.

I do this to avoid the problem of the scorpion god. A scorpion god could create people for the pleasure of stinging them to death with his tail. He could have this "higher" good of getting to sting people. This good, being "higher," could totally outweigh our displeasure at getting stung.

But any such "higher goods," goods that aren't good for people, goods that may in fact be congruent with what people call "bad," are not what we're discussing here. Human suffering wouldn't exist if god were omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent towards people.



Omnipotence:

Can you prevent suffering without preventing evil? Can you prevent evil without losing something greater, such as free will?

I think it's time for you to tell us about this free will stuff --- because it occurs to me that I may get to agree with you. Some kinds of free will might be precluded by happiness, and others not.

It worked that way with omniscience: An otherwise perfect god with a non-future-knowing type of omniscience can coexist with evil, but a perfect god who does know the future cannot coexist with evil. In order to make the PoE meaningful, I had to say what kind of omniscience I was talking about. In order to make the free will defense meaningful, you have to say what kind of free will you are talking about.

For instance, when I think of free will, I think of a mental phenomenon, what determinists might call "the illusion of free will." Even a person in solitary confinement has this kind of free will. Plantinga has another kind of free will in mind, one that can't co-exist with a perfect god. I would not be at all bothered to see Plantinga's kind of free will eliminated by the PoE.



Notes:

[B] Let us imagine that we sum up the numbers, and find that this world contains X units of happiness, and Y of unhappiness. Thus, you postulate that we currently have X-Y net happiness, but you would consider a world with X net happiness "satisfactory". How about a world with X+Y happiness, and Y unhappiness? This has the same net happiness as your hypothetical world with X happiness and Y unhappiness. Which is better?

This would be a reasonable argument if we had to have unhappiness to get happiness. And in this world, the real world, we do often have to trade short term happiness for greater happiness in the long term. But it wouldn't be that way if there were an omnipotent god on our team.




Nope, anything that causes unhappiness is evil. In fact, intentional malicious behavior that fails to cause unhappiness is not evil.



This contradicts most understood moral usage. We generally think of an incompetent rapist as evil, but a person who bungles in a way resulting in death as merely unlucky.


Sure, people often conflate "evil" with "sinful." And they do so legitimately; "evil" is a word with multiple meanings. But, here, we are dealing with the problem of evil, and you've made me define what I mean by the word. Evil is the sources of human unhappiness, or, if you want to conflate cause and effect, evil can refer to the unhappiness itself. With this specific meaning of the word in mind, we see that intent to cause harm is not evil unless it actually does cause harm.

This, by the way, is a legitimate and traditional meaning of the word. In the Adam and Eve story, evil is the punishment for sin; they are separate concepts.



The question is, what if Joe will pick a fight if he's a mean sun of a bitch, and he is, because he wants to be?

It would be up to an omniscient god to decide how to cope, but I offer these possibilities: If Joe was going to be an inherently bad person, we might not create him in the first place. If he was going to be bad because of his formative experiences, we might give him different formative experiences. If he was only occasionally going to have bad intent, then we might choreograph his life so that he didn't actually succeed in making other people unhappy.




[Here I discussed different ways to cope if two people wanted the same donut.]


Several of these depend on essentially making the people in question lose their free will.

Again, you are going to have to say what kind of free will you are talking about if you want to make this case.



If you can only have donut conflicts with altruists, there's something very weird going on.

Miracles are inherently weird. It seems to me that your case requires that you two-step on the issue of whether miracles are logically allowable. If you want to have an omnipotent god, then you have to have him do miracles; and if you are letting him do miracles for you, then you are estopped from saying he can't do miracles for me.




As to making another donut, I think that eventually gets us down the slippery slope to the world where there's no bad effects, ...

That's the goal, yes.



... and morality loses most or all of its meaning.


Now this is an interesting move. I'd like to hear more. Are you valuing sin, the breaking of rules, above happiness? I'm willing to follow the logic of this to see where it leads.



Well, keep in mind, logical contradictions don't count. Values which are defined in terms of suffering or evil require suffering or evil to exist.

I'm not sure this isn't tangential to our discussion, but I don't see why this should be true. An omnipotent god could make a virgin give birth, he could create a 6000 year old world that looks billions of years old, and he could give us memories or understandings based on experiences we haven't had ourselves.



So, for instance, forbearance doesn't make sense without some kind of suffering.

Would we miss forbearance if we didn't suffer? We certainly wouldn't suffer over the lack of forbearance if we didn't suffer.



Forgiveness makes no sense without sin.

Even if that were true, which I don't concede, sin doesn't make sense anyway.




And in the process, that world becomes, as I put it, "flat". We go from a world with blacks, greys, and whites, into a world with only greys. Perhaps they're all a little above 50%, but they're still grey.


Only if our omnipotent god is too lazy to kick things up a notch for us. Only if he is less than omnibenevolent.



I am not convinced that it is possible to communicate experiential things through revelation. There's a difference between having experienced something and having been told about it.


It might take a miracle, but your omnipotent god is supposed to be able to do miracles. Implanted memories (if that's how god chooses to go about it) are not logical contradiction.




You can give to someone with needs greater than yours --- even if that person is cheerful. If you want to, you can think of charity as being even more admirable in that circumstance.



It'd be misleading to do so. I think charity would be empty in such a circumstance.

Well, then you'd best see that United Way earmarks your donations as specifically for ungrateful malcontents. Your contribution may be meaningless otherwise. :)




This happiness wouldn't be any different, just more plentiful. We don't say we lack free will when circumstances turn out to be bad for us; there would be no reason to say we lacked free will if they always turned out to be good for us.


Except it's not just circumstances, but the things people do, that would have to change. Furthermore, that world would deny us opportunities we have in this one.

As this world denies us opportunities we would have in that one.



On the whole, I think the proposed world has less net happiness in it than we do in ours.

Then you miss the whole picture. Or you're just denying it. When you swerve your car to avoid hitting a dog, when you donate to charity, when you do anything to make people happier, you are admitting that there can be changes for the better. All I'm asking for is a plentitude (perhaps an infinity) of such changes, however many are necessary to achieve the effect that a perfect god, by definition, desires.

When you teach your kid to drive carefully, when you show by example how to live without lying, when you give advice on diet and sex and racial prejudice and changing tires, you are trying to make your child's life better not grey and tepid, but better. No single one of these moves even tends to reduce your child's free will; no cumulative amount of them would even minutely do so.

crc

[seebs]

I don't think we have any real disagreement here. If we imagine an otherwise perfect god who doesn't know the future, then that god could coexist with suffering. But, this is not a failure of the PoE, because the word "omniscient," as used in the PoE does imply knowledge of the future.

As noted, I don't think omniscience solves the problem, but I maintain that, if the future is indeterminate, than an omniscient entity need not know it, any more than it need know "what would have happened if X had happened instead of Y, which really did". Hypotheticals are not real.

We do that in everyday practice, not in morality. I don't think a moral case could be made for such discrimination based on complexity.

It's been done. I'm not sure I buy it, but I think it's been done.

On the other hand, we might be able to fix up something similar based on ... oh, call it sensitivity. You know, "Corn has no sensitivity at all, so it is okay to eat corn. And Lobsters don't suffer much if you kill them right, whereas humans suffer a lot if they don't get to eat lobster." To make that work for you, though, to make a single god's suffering outweigh all of humanity's suffering, you would have to posit a god who really knows how to suffer.

Not necessarily make it more-painful, just make it more morally wrong. Keep in mind, the connection between pain and wrong is not always there. Not all pain is wrong, and a minor pain which is injust may be considered worse than a greater pain which is just.

I don't think you could do that, but I'm not going to put you to the task anyway. I define good as stuff that causes human happiness. According to this definition, if something isn't good for people, it isn't good at all.

Hmm. I'm not sure humans are the only things which matter, although I do see your point about the scorpion god. However, I think there's a problem with "causes happiness". You're sort of using this to imply "doesn't cause suffering", but in fact, it's not clear that the two cannot coexist. As I said, I think it may be reasonable to accept some tradeoffs; suffering which produces greater happiness.

Since we're talking Logical PoE, it doesn't matter if this explains all the suffering in the world; it only needs to justify that there can be any suffering at all.

I think it's time for you to tell us about this free will stuff --- because it occurs to me that I may get to agree with you. Some kinds of free will might be precluded by happiness, and others not.

I think the essential idea is the ability to choose in what way you wish to change over time. If you can form the ability to want a thing, then you necessarily acquire the ability to make yourself unhappy by wanting an impossible thing. Similarly, if you can form malicious intent, you can guarantee suffering; either you will cause suffering, or you will be disappointed, which is also suffering. If we allow you to form intents freely, then suffering is possible.

For instance, when I think of free will, I think of a mental phenomenon, what determinists might call "the illusion of free will." Even a person in solitary confinement has this kind of free will. Plantinga has another kind of free will in mind, one that can't co-exist with a perfect god. I would not be at all bothered to see Plantinga's kind of free will eliminated by the PoE.

I am not entirely sure I fully understood his description, honestly. However, it seems to me that it might well be reasonable to conclude that such free will, despite necessarily leading to suffering, is also useful. For instance, I'm really not sure it even makes sense to discuss the great joys without the assumption of free will. There is no personal accomplishment or worth without the ability to influence your environment, and if you don't have free will, there's no influence to be had.

This would be a reasonable argument if we had to have unhappiness to get happiness. And in this world, the real world, we do often have to trade short term happiness for greater happiness in the long term. But it wouldn't be that way if there were an omnipotent god on our team.

I think it depends on the other qualities of the omnipotent god.

Sure, people often conflate "evil" with "sinful." And they do so legitimately; "evil" is a word with multiple meanings. But, here, we are dealing with the problem of evil, and you've made me define what I mean by the word. Evil is the sources of human unhappiness, or, if you want to conflate cause and effect, evil can refer to the unhappiness itself. With this specific meaning of the word in mind, we see that intent to cause harm is not evil unless it actually does cause harm.

Fair enough; really, the PoE is the Problem of Pain, as Lewis puts it.

It would be up to an omniscient god to decide how to cope, but I offer these possibilities: If Joe was going to be an inherently bad person, we might not create him in the first place. If he was going to be bad because of his formative experiences, we might give him different formative experiences. If he was only occasionally going to have bad intent, then we might choreograph his life so that he didn't actually succeed in making other people unhappy.

But consider:

Can you choose which people to create, if they are to be free willed? Can you create only people who happen to turn out good? I don't think the issue is inherently bad people. I think the issue is basically tolerable people who err; they are sufficient to bring suffering into the world. I don't think it's meaningful to speak of creating genuinely free beings, who never choose to cause suffering.
The formative experiences strike me as question-begging. If some of those formative experiences are inflicted by others, we have to look to see whether we can fix them. (Here, BTW, the omniscience definition does matter. As I've said, for now, I'm going to ignore it.)
If Joe does not make other people unhappy, what about his own happiness? If he is the sort of person to want others to be unhappy, isn't that itself going to lead to unhappiness?

Again, you are going to have to say what kind of free will you are talking about if you want to make this case.

The kind where you have the capacity to choose weird things.

Miracles are inherently weird. It seems to me that your case requires that you two-step on the issue of whether miracles are logically allowable. If you want to have an omnipotent god, then you have to have him do miracles; and if you are letting him do miracles for you, then you are stopped from saying he can't do miracles for me.

I think it's sufficient to observe that the side-effects may be problematic in the long run.

Now this is an interesting move. I'd like to hear more. Are you valuing sin, the breaking of rules, above happiness? I'm willing to follow the logic of this to see where it leads.

I am valuing the potential for it, because I think that, without it, happiness is inherently empty. I find a lost wallet; I return it. I feel that I have done well. I feel good because I know that I could have done something other, which would have been bad. I went over to a friend's house to help move furniture. I am pleased to have helped. I would not be pleased by this if it were entirely compulsory.

Moral choices seem to be the name of the game. The fact is, I see lots of pain, but the people who are truly miserable are often not the ones who have every reason to be - the poor, the downtrodden - but rather the greedy and the malicious. At some level, morality seems to dominate human joy sorrow. Our choices matter. Without choices, what could we do?

I'm not sure this isn't tangential to our discussion, but I don't see why this should be true. An omnipotent god could make a virgin give birth, he could create a 6000 year old world that looks billions of years old, and he could give us memories or understandings based on experiences we haven't had ourselves.

Ahh, but could He do it without lying? Perhaps the problem is that God cannot do immoral things, even "for good ends". This seems to me to be a subtle clash between omnibenevolence and omnipotence. Note the subtlety here; we are proposing a conception of "good" which is not defined solely in terms of the happiness of others, but in terms of an underlying moral structure. However, this is certainly a key component of the traditional Christian understanding of God. To want us to be happy is part of the moral system, but it is not the whole moral system proposed.

Without the memories, I can doubt the understanding. If the memory is false, I have been deceived. The former leaves me without the benefit of the experience; the latter strikes me as contradicting the intent of omnibenevolence.

Would we miss forbearance if we didn't suffer? We certainly wouldn't suffer over the lack of forbearance if we didn't suffer.

We might not be aware of the lack, but I think we would be worse off for it. Many people are worse off for the lack of things they don't miss. However, the omniscient God might well be able to determine that we benefit enough from the experience of forbearance that it is worth having things to forbear.

Even if that were true, which I don't concede, sin doesn't make sense anyway.

Well, forgiveness implies sin. What doesn't make sense about sin? Er. Maybe we're using the word differently. Pretend I used "tresspass". You cannot forgive someone who hasn't wronged you. You need to be wronged to have forgiveness.

Only if our omnipotent god is too lazy to kick things up a notch for us. Only if he is less than omnibenevolent.

Yes, but what He sees as benevolently kicking things up a notch, we see as a world full of suffering. But hey, it's a great time to be alive. Stuff is happening. It's hard, but it's the rewarding kind of hard, by and large.

It might take a miracle, but your omnipotent god is supposed to be able to do miracles. Implanted memories (if that's how god chooses to go about it) are not logical contradiction.

Two problems:

1. If we can ever find out that there are implanted memories, we have serious problems with our belief in a coherent world, which is itself valuable to us.
2. I think they constitute lying, and contradict the omnibenevolence.

Well, then you'd best see that United Way earmarks your donations as specifically for ungrateful malcontents. Your contribution may be meaningless otherwise. :)

This is one of the reasons I prefer small and directed charities. However, a certain amount of the benefit of charity is the experience of giving; it is good for us to be charitable, even if we're incompetent.

As this world denies us opportunities we would have in that one.

Right. The question, then, is how exactly we compare the net benefits of the worlds. I think this may be impossible, but a good effort can perhaps be made. I think the net result is that, in the hypothetical alternative world, there is a vast sea of tolerable mediocrity.

It's food without spices, on the grounds that red peppers can burn your tongue.

Then you miss the whole picture. Or you're just denying it. When you swerve your car to avoid hitting a dog, when you donate to charity, when you do anything to make people happier, you are admitting that there can be changes for the better. All I'm asking for is a plentitude (perhaps an infinity) of such changes, however many are necessary to achieve the effect that a perfect god, by definition, desires.

If they're all done for us, there's nothing left for us to do. We need to have chances to practice being good, to learn what it is to be good. If this is beneficial to us (and I have found it beneficial so far), then we obviously need a world in which there's beneficial things left to do. How many do we need? Perhaps enough to make it clear to us that we have to do them.

When you teach your kid to drive carefully, when you show by example how to live without lying, when you give advice on diet and sex and racial prejudice and changing tires, you are trying to make your child's life better not grey and tepid, but better. No single one of these moves even tends to reduce your child's free will; no cumulative amount of them would even minutely do so.

However, if you try to shield your child from all possible harm, you are no longer making that life better - only safer. At some point, the baby needs to learn to walk. This involves bruises, but the bruises are part of learning to walk, and, on the whole, it pays off.

I will grant that the PoE disproves an overprotective god, but I think that's not the most benevolent one imaginable.

[wiploc]

The Problem of Evil Proves That A perfect God Does Not Exist.

. Sixth Affirmative Statement

. (Round six, top of the inning.)


Omniscience:

I think I have laid this issue to rest, and don't see why you are dragging your feet. I have described a god who cannot exist. Your argument that a different god could exist is irrelevant.

The PoE proves that an omnipotent omnibenevolent god cannot know the future. It is true that a non-future-knowing god could exist, but there is no way to construe this as an impeachment of the PoE.



Omnibenevolence:

I have defined "good," and shown that the PoE works if we use this definition. We can call the omnibenevolence section of the debate resolved, or we can look at other things people might mean when they use the word "good." For each such meaning, there will be two issues to consider: whether the PoE would still work if that were the meaning used, and whether it is plausible that people who believe in a perfect god intend that meaning.



Omnipotence:

Here we may have come to a standstill.

My real position is that miracles can't happen, period. They would be a violation of logic. I can't articulate how they would violate logic; but I still believe it.

For the sake