Did any of these hundreds/thousands of works make any headway on the POE?
I suspect not, since of all the times I’ve been to church or looked at christian media, “explanations” that appeal to the masses (but which don’t make much sense on reflection) abound.
e.g. “This suffering won’t seem like much compared to the infinity of happiness that awaits”. So I shouldn’t mind being slapped around because god’s gonna take me out for ice cream afterwards.
If there are good responses to the POE, please, do share.
Well? Some people will insist on living on an earthquake fault, or below sea level in a hurricane-prone lakeside city, or on being born with cancer-prone genes.
Because something has to generate the will. The will has to be either determined or random. If it’s determined, it’s not free, if it’s random it’s not free. The will cannot determine itself. That leads to infinite regress.
Well, I guess if I were interested in Mijin’s personal experience of religious life, your reaction to things would be relevant. As it is, I’m not, and so your own personal exposure to ideas or recollection of what those are (the afterlife is only one of many, and not one usually proffered by serious thinkers) and how much you are impressed by them are pretty uninteresting.
If, on the other hand, you would like to talk about ideas—and not a diary of the feelings experienced by Mijin at Mass—I’d be willing to engage that discussion.
Atheist here, happy to send useful stuff like aid workers and assist in fundraising. The less time spent praying, the more time available for helping, I’d rather have an atheist aid worker than a religious one anyday.
Why do you say that this doesn’t make much sense? Certainly, it is not, by itself, a definitive answer to the Problem Of Evil—and if it was presented as such, you are right to scoff. But as a response to at least some human suffering, it is both (1) likely to be true if Christianity is true, and (2) comforting if one believes it to be true.
I can answer your questions for you since I’ve read the the various theodicies (which I doubt Kimmy has).
The answer is that no, no one has ever devised a defense to the POE that really holds up. And despite the protestations of those who say that there are “thousands of pages” written about, those pages really only represent a small handful of defenses that get reiterated ad nauseum.
The POE can be simplified as thus: It is impossible for all four of the following statements to be simultaneously true.
**1. God is omnipotent.
God is omniscient.
God is omnibenevolent.
Evil exists.**
If 1 and 2 are true, then evil can’t exist without God’s will. If evil can’t exist without God’s will, then 3 is false. God’s “goodness” is a sine qua non for worship, so the most common defense is to postulate a higher “good” which is being served by the allowance of evil. One very common, but essentially empty response is the “mysterious ways” argument (if that can be called an argument") which basically just says “We can’t understand God’s reason. We can’t see everything he sees.” etc. We just have to stop trying to understand God with our puny little brains and have faith. This is putting the cart before the horse, of course, but it also doesn’t hold up to logic, since the complexity of God’s “plan” is immaterial. If the first statement above is true (God is omnipotent), then God doesn’t need a plan. Omnipotent beings don’t require means to ends. They need only will the end. If no plan is necessary, then no evil is necessary, and we’re back to either 3. being false or 1. being false.
Another common (and currently most chic) apologetic in the “greater good” vein is the Free will defense. I alredy briefly addressed that upthread. basically it says that God allows people to do evil so as not to interfere with their free will. To reiterate what I’ve already stated upthread. This fails not only because the notion of free will is nonsense in itself, but because God can still allow free will (such as it is) without allowing evil simply by only creating people who will freely choose good. If God is omniscient, he will know this before he creates them.
Another tactic is to do what Kimmy did which is to attempt to change the definition of God so as not to include either omnipotence or omniscience, but as I pointed out upthread, this just amounts to a concession of the argument. The POE contradicts an omnimax God, not a non-omnimax God.
All of the thousands of pages written devoted to formulating theodicies essentially break down into various iterations of one of the above defenses. There are not really a lot of them, and there are no good ones.
This is certainly an adequate summary of the problem of theodicy, and as I mentioned, I don’t think very new information to anyone in this thread. The responses tend to divide into two great camps: those that reject one of the three standard premises and those that try to stake out a compatibilist position.
There is a kernel of some worthwhile thinking in Dio’s paragraphs after his bulleted list. Unfortunately, they come wrapped in the Diogenized packaging of tiresome personal attacks and blowhardy assertions of irrelevance. This makes most people disinclined to engage Dio in any kind of conversation, and certainly I do not plan to either. Perhaps he could get a spokesperson one day.
So Pat Robertson is a man of faith, and is regarded as a leader by a large portion of the faith-based community, and his faith led him to believe that the Haitians made a pact with the devil. So if those of you of faith do not believe in what Robertson said, then why should those of us without faith put any stock at all into your faith-based beliefs? Aren’t you just as likely to be wrong as dear old Pat? For that matter, why should you yourself have any confidence in your own faith-based beliefs if someone like Pat Robertson is so misled by his faith?
Sorry, but if you’re going to make accusations, I’d like you to clarify and not run away. Who did I “personally attack” in that thread? The only thing even close was that I said I doubted you had read much POE apologia. If you took that as a personal attack, my apologies.