Absolutely. I usually go straight to natural suffering, since that has nothing to do with free will as you said, and is clearly more under the control of a god than dating. Plate tectonics is badly designed.
This has nothing to do with forcing the being to do evil, but it is about their capability of doing evil. The virgin may have the power to have sex, but loses the category of virginity the moment she does so. The omnipotent being who is also omnibenevolent loses the category of omnibenevolence the moment it does evil. (Or less than maximal good.)
If he can do any deed that reduces good, then he does have a power that an omnibenevolent god lacks.
Exactly. So the omnibenevolent being doesn’t do it. Exercising a power can’t be a prerequisite to having that power—I have the power of kicking everybody I meet in the shin, but I don’t, because I’m at least kinda-sorta-benevolent. If I did this, I would no longer be kinda-sorta-benevolent; but that doesn’t mean a person who’s not kinda-sorta-benevolent and routinely kicks people in the shin has any powers I lack. They just do things I don’t.
No, he just does things an omnibenevolent being doesn’t.
There is a difference between what a being does and what it can do. Say an omnipotent being wants to influence the outcome of a die roll. If it decides to make the die come up 6, it still had and has the ability to come up any other number, so there is no limit to its omnipotence by choosing one possible outcome.
Now, say it also has the quality of omni-evenness. While it can still cause a 6 to come up, it cannot cause a 3 to come up without violating the omni-evenness property. Clearly the entity without omni-evenness can. Sorry, saying it chooses not to throw odd numbers is no more an excuse than me saying I can fly but choose not to.
As I said above, I don’t know the optimal mix of omnis, but I do know that an entity is not omnipotent if there is a possible entity which can do things it cannot.
So I asked the question directly at the heart of arguments by @Voyager, @Mijin, and @Der_Trihs, and you sidestep the question.
Later, you seem to actually be answering it by saying an omnibenevolent god may have the power to do evil but will always choose not to.
Except “optimal moral good” seems to allow room to do an evil act if it causes more good than the evil it causes and the good that would have happened without that evil act.
And that goes right to the paraphrase I made earlier about the definition of omnibenevolence.
I’m saying that he could create the best world that contains evil, and then he can intervene against individual evil acts. Allowing someone to choose to do an evil act does not mean that evil act has to succeed.
Or how about not eliminating intentional evil outcomes, but protecting against unintended ones? Protect the innocent.
Say a road rage incident. Driver A somehow annoys Driver B. Driver B pulls a handgun and shoots randomly in the direction of Driver A. Baby C gets hit by a stray bullet, Baby C being in a stroller on the sidewalk with Mom.
Why doesn’t god intervene to keep innocent Baby C from dying? Bullets could still hit or miss Driver A, who may or may not have done something to prompt it, but why is Baby C left to pay the price?
Free will is upheld without Baby C getting hit.
As I’ve been saying, yes. So there is no reason to suspect an omnibenevolent being to be less in power than a non-omnibenevolent one—benevolence, after all, comes from ‘wanting good’, not ‘being unable to do bad’, or something like that. So there’s no grounds on which to argue that an omnibenevolent being lacks any powers; there’s just things it doesn’t do, because if it did them, it wouldn’t be omnibenevolent. Indeed, one could hardly say of a being that it were omnibenevolent if it were prohibited to do evil—then, it has no choice in the matter, so its intention—its volition—would not play a role at all. So I’d say it’s more reasonable to frame an omnibenevolent being as one that chooses to do good over evil, rather than as one that is forced to only do good.
No, because the counterfactual ‘@Voyager could fly if he chose to’ is false, whereas the counterfactual ‘an omni-even being could make the die come up 5, but chooses not to’ can be perfectly true.
Your question is both beside the point and sets up a false dichotomy from mistaken premises. If you ask me, is the moon made from Gouda or Emmental, I’m not sidestepping the question by pointing out that it is neither, I’m trying to correct the misapprehension that went into its formulation. The same here: as noted above, ‘benevolence’ comes from ‘wanting good’, and omnibenevolence is neither coextensive with can’t or won’t do evil. Indeed, some theologians (Aquinas for a prominent example) have held that God may permit evil if it is necessary for the greater good of the world.
Furthermore, the relevance of omnibenevolence is just that God wishes to do the most good, which in terms of the argument means instantiating the world with the most moral value; from that point of view, questions like ‘does God do evil’ etc. are simply beside the point.
Also, I don’t think the question goes to the heart of the other objections being raised. @Voyager is concerned with omnibenevolence, but doesn’t seem to put it in the context of the free will defense; @Mijin is stuck in a logically unsound position, trying to argue that ‘God possibly couldn’t bring about certain circumstances’ is refuted by ‘God possibly could do so’; @Der_Trihs refuses to comprehend that the notion of possible worlds as used in modal arguments and as appropriate for quantifying the overall good of the world is one of completed histories, and effectively keeps attacking the same strawman over and over. All of these are mistaken in their own way.
That’s an immediate contradiction. If there were a world in which God intervenes at a particular point so as to make it better, then that is the best possible world, and hence, the one God instantiates; they can’t create the best possible world and then proceed to make it better, because that would just mean it wasn’t the best possible world in the first place. At every point where you think God should’ve intervened, it is at least possible that doing so either would make the world overall worse, say by indirect longterm consequences (think butterfly effect or what have you), or would lead to the reduction of moral value of the world by removing morally significant choice in such a way as to offset the reduction in evil, or would lead to an impossible world in some other way. Again: this only needs to be possible for the argument to go through, so telling plausible stories about individual cases where things may have shaken out better in fact doesn’t do anything to refute it, because the free will defender can just agree with you that God’s action in some situation could have made the world better without that being in the least bit inconsistent with their position that it also might not have done so.
No, your “arguments” just totally ignore what being omnipotent means, or benevolent for that matter. History is whatever an omnipotent being wants it to be, it doesn’t have to be consistent, stable or even exist. If an omnipotent being wanted to make a “perfect” world they could just do it, with no history. If they wanted everyone to have their own history inconsistent with everyone else’s, they could. If they wanted to change history every Tuesday, they could.
And no matter how often people point out how much suffering in in the world you just ignore it in favor of restating nonsense about this being “the best possible world”. As if that was even a possibility, which it isn’t.
Again, I have hardly advanced any arguments of my own in this thread, but simply restated the current state of the debate in as much as I am aware of it, which is that the overwhelming majority of theistic and atheistic thinkers alike accept the soundness of Plantinga’s defense. The argument is clearly logically valid, and to date, nobody to the best of my knowledge has found a credible refutation of its premises. What has been developed are additional theses that one might like to hold that are in conflict with both the simultaneous existence of evil and of a tri-omni God, but of course, that isn’t really an invalidation of the argument, since it doesn’t touch the conclusion that tri-omnihood and the existence of evil are compatible.
Is it possible that all those thinkers are wrong, and you are right? Of course. It is also possible that all other vehicles are going the wrong way when they are coming towards you, and you’re driving in the right direction. It isn’t how anybody should rationally bet, however.
Well, then show where the argument as I’ve laid it out above goes wrong, rather than just flatly asserting that it does. As it is, this is just empty bluster.
By your own admission, you haven’t laid out any arguments.
I really don’t get this type of thing. What’s the point of misrepresenting my words when what I actually wrote is right there for everyone to read? Do you think this scores you some rhetorical points? Are you just trying to keep the discussion going for its own sake, so you don’t have to admit you’re out of actual points to make? Really, what do you hope to gain from this?
And just as a desperate attempt of keeping some semblance of honest discussion going, what I was referring to was my summary of Plantinga’s argument (largely for your benefit) in this previous post. So again, if you think there is fault with this argument, I invite you to pinpoint where, exactly, you think it goes wrong.
Except you have gone on to answer it specifically while addressing other posters. To whit:
That is directly answering the question. You could have just said that instead of going on about the moon being made of cheese.
Wait. Hold on. Earlier you said
So now my “redefinition” of omnibenevolence matches something proposed by Thomas Aquinas. And you just contradicted your own arguments.
No, it is directly to the point. The very question of the tri-omni god requires a coherent and consistent definition, and to accept Plantinga requires we agree with his definitions.
Which is clear people here do not.
Some are disagreeing that an omnibenevolent god could ever do evil, even if it lead to a greater moral good.
Some have argued against omnipotence could be limited to a “best possible world”.
Some have argued over the definition of omniscience and how it limits free will.
If any of those definitions are not accepted, then the argument fails because the "it’s possible"s fail.
You are trying to argue a systemic world must be a whole, and god can’t institute a system that works one way and then change individual acts that detract from the overall moral good.
So in that model god is a passive observer of the universe he created, and prayer is worthless because God won’t do anything anyway.
Which is at least consistent with the world we experience, but not the world of the Bible.
Remember, we don’t even ask the question of the problem of evil without the Bible. We don’t posit a tri-omni god without the Bible. That’s the only reason omnibenevolence is even considered.
We’re back to “god knows more than you, you can’t judge him or his actions, you just wouldn’t understand, god works in mysterious ways, god has a master plan” etc.
I did give that answer immediately, only then you accused me of sidestepping the question.
Permitting evil is of course hardly the same as doing evil. If faced with a situation where there are both ‘evil’ and ‘good’ options, an omnibenevolent being will never choose the former (hence, do no evil), but in situations where actions taken by humans are in and of themselves evil, but lead overall to a ‘greater good’ of some sort, an omnibenevolent being may allow these to occur (hence, permitting evil).
And all that is required by that definition is that an omnibenevolent God chooses to instantiate the best possible world, for which we don’t need to consider the question of whether such a being is constrained to never do evil or merely chooses not to do so.
And this disagreement is entirely beside the point, as far as the free will defense is concerned. You can both agree or disagree with that as much as you wish and agree that an omnibenevolent God chooses to maximize moral value.
And those I have repeatedly invited to pinpoint where the Plantinga argument goes wrong, since its conclusion directly is the possibility of such a limit on omnipotence. So far, I haven’t received any takers.
Like omnibenevolence, omniscience is only very weakly constrained in its meaning by the argument. In fact, I don’t see any credible constraint on it that would prevent the argument from going through. Could you elaborate what you have in mind here?
The definitions as used are the same that lead to a problem of evil in the first place, so if you disagree with these, there isn’t any problem to solve, anyhow.
That doesn’t follow. Recall God’s vantage point is timeless: they act in the world as they experience it, but those actions are part of the best possible world. So there is no contradiction with the possibility of prayers being answered, for example.
I think I understand the problem now. You seem to be defining omnipotence in terms of what a single being can do, which is affected by its other characteristics. I’m using it as what any possible being can do. You seem to be saying that God A is omnipotent because he can do all the things permitted given he is also omnibenevolent. I’m saying he isn’t because we can conceive of a being who can do things he cannot. That it is impossible for me to run a five-minute mile does not mean it is impossible for someone else to do so.
But the second he rolls a three he is no longer omni-even, so if you have his omni-eveness as a necessary part of his being, he cannot do it without violating this necessary part of his being.
There is nothing to prevent a bachelor getting married, in which case he is married - but no longer a bachelor. Thus “married bachelor” is self-contradictory.
Once again, I point to the inescapable role of omniscience in this context; if an omniscient god has determined that the world we live in is the best possible world of all, despite all the suffering, then She must have modelled all the other possible worlds as well. And as I have also pointed out, if this omniscient god has modelled all the other worlds, She will have modelled them down to the level of every single thought and emotion inside the participant’s heads, and down to the level of electron probability density clouds.
If we were inside one of these models, inside the head-equivalent of this hypothetical omniscient god, then we would literally be unable to determine whether we existed in ’reality’, or merely as a figment of the omniscient god’s (presumably infinite) imagination. This means that the existence of an infinite multiverse of perceived reality is a necessary condition of living in a universe with an omniscient god, and it seems that choosing one of these possible (but necessarily perceived) worlds to be the ‘real and best’ one is the only claim to omnibenevolence such an entity could have.
This is not a good enough claim. Suffering and evil would exist in a very large but indeterminate number of worlds, so long as She imagines them with sufficient fidelity.
No, you said neither. That doesn’t answer the distinction between can and won’t.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.” — Albert Einstein
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It is generally morally accepted that if you know someone is going to do evil and it is in your power to stop them but you don’t, that is an evil act of your own.
That is why a have mandatory report laws and loopholes for when therapists can violate confidentiality.
Again, this is definitional.
We mere humans can conceive of a better possible world that allows free will.
That god created this one means he is not all-powerful so cannot create the better world, is not all-knowing because he doesn’t imagine the better world we do, or not all good because he created this world.
Saying that our imagined better world might not be possible is rejecting the premise of omnipowerful.
Maximize moral value is under debate. Why must there be a world? Wouldn’t a non-world without evil existing be better than an existing world with evil in it?
Your counter claim about atemporal existence is a response to the claim that omniscience limits free will. It doesn’t necessarily convince everyone.
No, I didn’t say God was unable to respond. I restated what you said, if god intervened it would change the world he created that is supposed to be the best possible world. Ergo, changing would by your definition makes a worse world. That’s the very argument given for why evil is possible.
But I will admit that prayer might still have a role in asking to be saved. Just not in making any physical difference in the world. Pray to cure your baby’s cancer? Tough noogies. He made the best possible world and in that world your baby has cancer.
No, I’m just saying that it’s at the very least consistent to hold that an omnipotent, non-omnibenevolent being and a bi-omni one have all the same powers, the bi-omni one however due to their omnibenevolence chooses not to do certain things.
But if there are possible omnipotent beings that are non-omnibenevolent, then omnibenevolence can’t be a necessary aspect of a bi-omni being, as it is contingent whether omnipotent beings are omnibenevolent. Contrariwise, if omnibenevolence is necessary, then there is no conflict.
So either omnibenevolence is contingent for an omnipotent being: then, there is no conflict with a counterfactual account that such a being could do certain things, but then would no longer be omnibenevolent. Or, omnibenevolence is necessary: then, there is no omnipotent being that could violate it.
There are two assumptions here, both of which are highly non-trivial and controversial, and neither of which I think we have good reasons to accept as true. The first one is that knowing something entails modeling it. But there are multiple modalities of knowledge, the majority of which don’t depend on any modeling. If I read something somewhere, I gain (declarative) knowledge about something, such as ‘Sherlock Holmes lives in Baker Street 221b’, without any need for modeling—and indeed, without any entailment towards any sort of ‘reality’ of the objects of my knowledge, as there is not, in fact, a Sherlock Holmes. Or I can obtain inferential knowledge by logical relations, such as knowing that Socrates is mortal from the premises that Socrates is human and that all humans are mortal: again, I don’t have to model anything. Or I can have direct knowledge of certain things, such as how I know I have a headache by simply having a headache, again without me modeling anything. And so on. So I see no reason to accept the claim that God must have modelled other possible worlds, merely to obtain knowledge about them.
The second claim is that a model is equivalent to the object modeled, at least as far as experiential properties are concerned. This also strikes me as vastly unlikely: modeling is formally a structural equivalence between two systems, an ‘object’ and a ‘model’, so to speak, with the elements of the model standing to one another in relations that are isomorphic to those of the object. Thus, model and object are equivalent only along their structural properties. But experiences, in many theories of the mind, are non-structural properties. Thus, there is no reason to assume that just because an object has certain experiential properties, so too must its model, no matter to what detail we model the object. So I don’t see any reason that simple knowledge of the moral value of possible worlds entails the actuality of the suffering within them.
And neither does the answer I provided later. I did say that an omnibenevolent being may refrain from doing certain things, but this doesn’t entail that it refrains from all or only evil things: rather, it does whatever is necessary to maximize moral value. I’m not trying to be evasive, here: the thing is just that the question of whether an omnibenevolent being can’t or won’t do evil is complex, and answering it in any definite sense isn’t something I consider myself fit to do; but it’s also not a question we need answered for the free will defense. So I just consider it an irrelevant aside.
Well, are lies evil? Is it therefore evil, as Kant famously argued, to lie to a murderer about the location of their intended victim? Is a God that permits somebody to perpetrate this evil then a God who does evil, or is there a distinction between allowing this to happen and facilitating an act themself? Again, my point is: these are difficult and open questions, neither of which has, to the best of my knowledge, a widely accepted answer. But they are also rather beside the current issue. So requiring these to be answered before we can make any headway with the problem of evil strikes me as a kind of diversionary tactic. If we have a sharp enough concept of tri-omnihood to formulate a problem of evil in the first place, we have a sharp enough concept for the free will defense.
Well, I have some difficulties with that, as I’m not sure I have the ability to conceive of a world, in full; but even if that is true, once again, the key point is that this mere fact does not argue against the free will defense: this at best just establishes possibility where necessity is needed.
Yes, that is the intuition behind the problem of evil; it’s just that Plantinga’s argument shows this intuition to be flawed, as intuitions often are. It is, in fact, possible that God, despite their omnipotence, is unable to create a ‘better’ world, given the premises of Plantinga’s argument. So without something to assail these premises, the simple declaration that God could do so carries no logical force.
The point is that no world would also have no moral value; if the moral value of this world is greater than none—which, again, has to be only possible, not likely, not plausible, just the barest imaginable amount of possible—then instantiating this one is morally preferred.
Again, it doesn’t need to: it need not convince anyone. It just needs to be the case that there is no convincing (read: logically sound) argument establishing the opposite.
You’re somehow making a distinction between ‘Godly intervention’ and the ordinary course of the world. But there is no reason to think that such interventions aren’t simply part of the course of the world. So there might well be answered prayers within the world, and if so, it is those that are part of making it the best possible world (which, again, nothing in the argument requires this world to actually be: only the possibility that it might be is needed).
@Half_Man_Half_Wit, you asked about the logic of Plantinga’s argument as you layed it out in the thread. It feels like it’s too much assuming the consequent. But I will just say that @Mijin summed things up fairly well here.
I don’t really care to continue arguing Plantinga’s argument. I concede the logic flows. The elements that make it unsatisfying are the reliance on possibly and then context of what the omni’s mean. But I concede that objection.
This is highly unsatisfying. But I leave it that the flaws are in the conception of the tri-omni god itself, not Plantiga’s argument.
Your argument outlining Plantinga said
If God changes outcomes in response to prayers, then he is making a morally significant change. If he’s making a morally significant change, then his world was operating at less-than maximum moral value. Ergo, he could have made a better world that didn’t require tinkering, i.e. changing outcomes based on prayer.
That may be the case. But a god that has omniscient knowledge of all possible worlds, could easily determine that the best of all possible worlds is one where She is continually tinkering with outcomes and responding to (carefully selected) prayers to make things better. That does not seem to be the world we live in.
Again, you seem to be missing that we’re talking about omnipotence. A bi-omni being is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent by definition. A simply omnipotent being is not omnibenevolent. If you accept that an omnipotent only being is logically possible, it can do things that a bi-omni being cannot do and remain bi-omni. Again, we’re talking about what this being can possibly do, not choose to do. Remember, we defined omnipotence as being able to do all logically possible things, which does not include anything about omnibenevolence.
Is your solution to the Spanish Barber paradox that the barber chooses to not shave himself? But can?
Or in other words, you can’t find fault with the logic of the argument, but you’re just gonna go ahead and not accept its conclusion anyways.
These are both points that strengthen the argument. That one only has to show possibility means that a dissenter would have to show impossibility, a far more demanding—indeed, I believe intractable—task; that one only needs a very weak conception of the omnis means that for virtually any way that one might further specify them, the argument will apply.
Not if that action was baked in all along, so to speak: certain godly actions may be required to make the world the best it can possibly be. It’s not necessarily the case that this world is just set up, then runs its course. The point was that any further change on that world then can only make it worse overall (increasing evil or decreasing moral value), or be impossible on other, e.g. logical, grounds.
Yes. And my point is merely that the fact that there are certain things an omnibenevolent, omnipotent being doesn’t do doesn’t mean that there are things it can’t do. It just doesn’t want to do them, but that isn’t in conflict with the counterfactual that if it wanted to do so, it could. So it has all the powers of an omnipotent being, but exercises them differently.
But benevolence is always about what one chooses to do—it’s right there in the word. That you don’t want to do bad things, and hence don’t do them, doesn’t mean that you can’t do them.