And an omnipotent god can also simply not have negative consequences happen. They (by definition) don’t need to make a universe that conveniently looks exactly like one without a god and runs on physical law; they can just optimize it for whatever purpose they have in mind and handwave away any inconsistencies or long term consequences.
It doesn’t matter that, for example cancer is a natural failure mode for multicellular life; an omnipotent god could just decree “there is no cancer” and there wouldn’t be.
Apart for some minor quibbles that seems fine to me. (I would not say they are ‘by definition’ not inconsistent, but rather that the existence of such a further premise demonstrates that they are not inconsistent; also, the argument doesn’t depend on there being other potential ways to reconcile the two premises.)
But then later on you say this in response to me saying that the premise establishing the consistency of evil and tri-omnihood need not be true:
Which is directly opposed to your earlier summary. So which of the two do you intend?
Well, I think the notion of a ‘moral sense’ is a highly dubious one, but that’s another debate entirely. For the present debate, the question is: if what your moral sense tells you is at odds with what can be established by deductive reasoning, which of the two should you rather trust?
As I’ve said, there’s no problem making an evidential argument against God that starts from a premise that effectively says that a tri-omni God wouldn’t allow a ‘gratuitous’ amount of evil in the world, and then aiming to demonstrate that the amount of evil is in fact gratuitous in whatever sense one may have in mind; that’s e.g. the argument William Rowe has put forward. But this isn’t an argument that somehow establishes evidentially that tri-omnihood and evil are incompatible after all, as @Mijin has been claiming: such an argument can’t exist post the demonstration that the two are, in fact, consistent.
Let’s untangle two distinct things here. One is Plantinga’s free will defense, which uses free will as a premise that establishes the consistency of evil and tri-omnihood; the other is the question of whether an omniscient God is consistent with free will in the first place. As for Plantinga’s argument, free will need not actually exist, this is strictly speaking a sideshow.
But like with Plantinga’s argument, I should again stress that there’s nothing about free will and omniscience that is original to me; as noted, I think the idea originates with Boethius in like the 6th century or something. The basic point is that knowledge of actions is only inconsistent with them being free if that knowledge temporally precedes the action; i.e. if what the action amounts to is known before it is taken. But with God being commonly considered atemporal (with time being a property of the world as created by God), the notion of ‘before’ does not have any meaning. Likewise with formulations like ‘God existed’ and ‘wanted’ to create a world, which seems to intimate God temporally preceding the world, which, again, if time is part of the world seems rather difficult.
Also, I intended the image of simultaneity to just serve as a kind of intuition pump; if temporal concepts have no meaning, neither does simultaneity. It was intended in the same spirit as the argument that a being existing at the end of the universe knowing every action ever taken doesn’t conflict with those actions being free, so it is not knowledge as such that conflicts with free will: simply a demonstration that other modes of experience are possible, without any commitment to this particular one as actual.
The reasons, as I gave them, are that doing so would make the world worse, remove moral value, or otherwise not yield a possible world. Think of it like a master artisan stopping his work at just the right point, knowing that any further tinkering—any more rock chipped off, any further cut made—would only lessen the work. God performs all those interventions that are necessary to perfect the world, if any, and none more. (Although of course recall that we need not believe this to actually be the best of all possible worlds.)
Neither of these follow. Godly interventions, a certain number of them, may simply be part of ‘the system’, as you put it. Necessary evil can be necessary even for God, and must be tolerated, but that doesn’t mean it is wanted.
And again, a false dichotomy: God intervenes wherever doing so does make the world better, and not where it fails to do so. It may be that there are few, or no, such interventions, but it also may be that they intervene in subtle ways all the time, or anything in between. Nothing requires God to either not intervene at all, or intervene whenever there’s evil afoot.
No: that God is omnibenevolent is one of the explicit premises of the argument; the consequent is, formally, the existence of evil, and by virtue of this, the consistency of that evil with the premise of omnibenevolence (and the other omnis). That God is omnibenevolent is nowhere a conclusion of the argument, nor is God’s existence, nor even any reason to believe in God’s existence.
Of course not, and nobody claims otherwise. As noted, I think the free will defense is sound, but I don’t think God (or any god) exists. Those are perfectly compatible points.
I don’t know what point you’re trying to make here. Can you rephrase that?
I’m also a bit at a loss as to what you’re arguing against here, since I’ve only maintained (and the free will defense only requires) that God wishes to maximize goodness, which doesn’t entail anything either way on evil acts; but also, didn’t you earlier argue that permitting evil is already doing evil?
Regardless, as I’ve been maintaining, what constitutes evil, what may be permissible in terms of facilitating the greater good, and suchlike, are first very difficult philosophical questions, and furthermore theologically complex debates—neither of which need be settled for the present argument. If we have a sufficiently well-delineated notion of omnibenevolence to yield a problem of evil in the first place, we can appeal to that notion in the free will defense.
Again, that just isn’t true. The free will defense goes through even if it is false that it was not within God’s power to create a world containing moral value but not moral evil. This is why even if we have good reasons to believe this to be false, those don’t translate into good reasons to believe evil to be I consistent with a tri-omni God.
Let’s simplify this. Do you think an omnipotent being could decide to just use its powers for good? If so, wouldn’t it be fair to call them omnibenevolent?
What is the distinction? I think the latter is still you trying to mischaracterize my position as being about the logical problem of evil, which it never was. The clue has been the half dozen posts where I have said I am not talking about the logical problem of evil.
And I’ve acknowledged that you aren’t talking about the logical PoE, twice at least now, and never held you did. But that doesn’t mean that Plantinga’s argumentation has no implications on what you are talking about; and to the extent that you have repeatedly claimed that we have reasons to think that evil and tri-omnihood are inconsistent, Plantinga’s argument shows that those reasons can’t be sound.
The distinction to an evidential problem of evil is that this doesn’t try to establish an inconsistency between the existence if evil and a tri-omni God, but attempts to put some bound on the prevalence of evil given that there is a tri-omni God. Then, you can go and collect evidence that validly argues that there is ‘gratuitous’ evil of some sort or another, which then gives you empirical grounds to reject the existence of a tri-omni God. However, none of the establishes the inconsistency of evil and tri-omnihood.
Here is a new take on this. If God is omnibenevolent, he must make sure that all things contribute to this. Each person in the world must be the most benevolent possible to optimize good over the world - which might include some evil.
Now, when our parents made us the person we came out to be depended on when they had sex, the position, etc. To make us have an optimal contribution to benevolence, God must interfere and determine which sperm reaches the egg. This in no way interferes with the free will of the parents. Though, to make it work, God would probably have to “inspire” the position used.
So, in an omnibenevolent universe, God must be fiddling with every act of procreation.
The ancients who came up with this stuff didn’t understand reproduction very well, so no surprise they didn’t take it into consideration. The thing about concepts like omnibenevolence is that it has consequences far beyond the obvious, which is one reason the entire concept of god is so incoherent.
Alright, so it’s possible to be omnipotent and omnibenevolent without that leading to a loss of powers. But I don’t understand where the possible worlds are supposed to come in—if there’s nothing necessary about omnibenevolence (and there can’t be if you can be omnipotent but not -benevolent) then we only need it to be possible (i.e. the case in one possible world) that an entity can be both.
That’s getting it the wrong way round. An omnipotent god could choose to only throw evens, which is then what would make them omni-even without compromising on omnipotence.
You claim that there is no problem because god chooses not to do anything that compromises omnibenevolence. Now, if he chooses this, he must be able to choose to do something that does compromise omnibenevolence, otherwise it is not a choice at all. So, even if we accept that God only chooses benevolent actions in our world, there must be a possible world where he chooses otherwise. In this world he might not be omnibenevolent, but he would demonstrate more power than the god in our world. If the god in our world matches the actions of the god in the other world, he gives up omnibenevolence. If he cannot do so, he is clearly not omnipotent.
To apply this to the die example, say God claims to be omnipotent and omni-even. He chooses to only throw 2s. Fine. But then some shmendrick comes along and throws a 3, and challenges god to match it. If God does throw a 3, which is within his power, he gives up omni-eveness. If he cannot throw a 3 because of omni-eveness, the shmendrick is more powerful than he is and he is no omnipotent. And, sorry, him saying, “I could if I wanted to but I don’t want to, so there,” is not an answer.
No, not at all. That god would just do things an omnibenevolent one doesn’t do. I mean, by that logic, there’s no such thing as an omnipotent god: because generally, no god will do all possible things, there will be a set of things r such that a given god doesn’t do them, so that god is omni-not-doing-r, but god in some possible world does r, so ‘demonstrates more power’. Not doing something doesn’t mean having less power.
Of course it is. After all, if that god has merely chosen not to make the die come up odd, it’s just the truth. For some reason, you keep wanting to argue that ‘doesn’t do’ means ‘can’t do’ but there are lots of things one can do and never does, god or not. Powers aren’t actions, but potentials, and don’t get lessened by never being exercised.
In the end, it remains that there is no contradiction at all with an omnipotent being simply never doing bad stuff.
I’ve covered this already way back. A god cannot cause all the faces of a die to show up at once. But in some possible world he can and does force each face to show up. But there is no possible world where he can do that and stay omni-even. So it is not that a god could do things an omnibenevolent god chooses not to do, it is that the omnipotent only god does things the omnibenevolent god cannot do while staying omnibenevolent.
It is not potential, it is possibility. An omnibenevolent god does not have the potential to do things that increase suffering, and stay omnibenevolent.
There is no problem that he chooses to not do bad stuff. It is that he cannot do bad stuff. It is the difference between me choosing not to flap my arms and fly and not being able to.
I mean, it can; it would just have to play some games with the local structure of space.
And I’m not nitpicking or fighting the hypothetical, or even criticizing your argument. It’s just that that line is a good example of a problem in this thread; how the “omnipotent” god in this thread is being portrayed as incredibly weak, at best no more powerful than needed to, well, influence a die roll. Which really lets this hypothetical god off the hook for the evil in the world, if only by implication.
But a world actually optimized for being as “good” (or most anything else) as possible - or even close - wouldn’t look anything like the real world, or a natural one at all. It would be a mish-mash of phenomenon, sustained as needed by the omnipotent creator. That’s one reason the “omnimax” claim is absurd, we can just look around and see a natural world running on consistent natural laws, not one optimized by an omnipotent regardless of physics for a purpose. Any purpose.
Someone might as well point to a tree and claim it’s a divinely created perfect kitchen knife. The claim is so utterly far from the reality that it can’t be taken seriously, and not because of the “divine” part.
Really, I wouldn’t be surprised that an actual god would be insulted by the “best of all possible worlds” claim. Because it is an insult to claim this is the best they can do.
I would agree that rephrasing is better. And I think what you mean is that if there is even one way the two premises could be not mutually exclusive, then they are not mutually exclusive. Either they’re pregnant or not.
My position is self-consistent. I said that it didn’t have to be true, but it had to be logically consistent.
The point of the free will justification is that god might not have been able to make a better world. If god made the best world possible there still might have to be evil. But the definition of omni-benevolent requires that god made the best possible world, whatever that means. If god didn’t make the best possible world, then that god is not tri-omni, so the argument fails on the grounds that the premises are untrue.
Deductive reasoning relies on definitions. Perhaps the moral objection is the “gratuitious evil” argument.
Again, I will accept that at theoretical demonstration of non-conflict works without that method being real. It does need to be logically consistent, or it’s just saying “There’s no problem of evil because Yoda.”
I understand the temporal nature of human existence is embedded in our thought process and it is hard to avoid. My attempted explanation was trying to grasp how there is a universe and there are people and why people having a moral sense is required. Could god have made a universe without people? Could he have made it without moral choice?
Those concepts get into philosophical debate related to the gratuitous evil concept.
But if you recall, my comments about god’s interventions were in response to prayer, i.e. people requesting changes.
If interventions are an inherent part of the world as it was made, then God is already going to make the interventions that make the best possible world - he must or he’s not omnibenevolent. So we’re back to prayer not having value for changing god’s actions. God will do what god will do with or without a prayer asking god to do something, and god won’t do what god won’t do even if there is a prayer to the contrary.
So if interventions are a part of the world, then they are automatic and no prayer can work. If they are alterations to the world, then the world isn’t the best possible world if prayer changes god’s actions.
Of course I’m sure you’re now going to turn to the atemporal concept to handwave how this can be reconciled. I don’t buy it.
If godly interventions are part of the system, then god can intervene and make things better. Then if god doesn’t, god must not want to.
Intervention is just like pregnant. It doesn’t matter if the interventions are huge or tiny, few or many, dramatic or subtle. If it’s interventions, it’s interventions.
That comment is not in regards to the whole of Plantinga’s argument. It applies to the context of how God decides when and how to intervene. It’s interrelated to the concept of “what constitutes a world”.
It’s a bit too stream of consciousness trying to express the confusion over the concept of an “omnibenevolent” god doing acts that would be considered evil except for the fact that god is doing it so it must be moral by definition.
Different arguments against different philosophical points. As I said before, it doesn’t necessarily address the logic of Plantinga’s argument so much as the notions of the omni-god itself by the meaning of those words.
Here is your own statement about Plantinga’s free will argument:
Bolding added for emphasis. That’s declared IN THE ARGUMENT.
Before, I stated that people were debating on the grounds of the definitions of the omnis, and outlined the structure of those arguments. Despite you poo-pooing my statements, this is precisely what is being argued.
It may be separate from Plantinga’s argument, but it’s rejecting the concept of omnipowerful and omnibenevolent as non-conflicting.
The concepts “necessary evil” and “omnipotent” aren’t really compatible, anyway. An omnipotent being can make things be the way they want, no “necessity” of any sort required.
Sure, but a ‘merely’ omnipotent being can’t do that, either: it’s just not a possible power.
Yes, but ‘can’t do while remaining omnibenevolent’ isn’t ‘can’t do’. Such a god still has the power to do these things, it’s just that if they were to do them, they would no longer be omnibenevolent—which is why they don’t do them. But that doesn’t infringe on their power to do them at all.
But again, this conflates ‘can’t do and be omnibenevolent’ with ‘can’t do’, but that just doesn’t follow. I can’t paint my car red while it remains green, but that doesn’t entail that I can’t paint my car red.
And the situation of the omnibenevolent god is exactly that of being able to fly, and choosing not to. It’s not that because they are omnibenevolent, they are unable to do certain things; it’s that because they refrain from doing certain things (that they are however entirely able to do) that they are omnibenevolent.
There is no loss in power for an omnipotent being in choosing to do only good; they still have all the same abilities as before. If they were to flap their arms, they would fly, so to speak; they just don’t do so. You seem to envision omnibenevolence as a sort of cage that forces a certain kind of behavior; but it’s just a certain kind of behavior that has a particular label, namely, omnibenevolence.
Consider a simple toy model. Suppose all choices are binary, and either good g or evil e. Any set of actions a god might take in this framework is then a (potentially infinite) set of es and gs. If they have some temporal ordering to constitute a world in which actions are taken, it’s a string. Each possible string is a possible world, and by omnipotence, a god can make any of these reality. One god might choose randomly, creating a world eegeggeeegeeeggggeg… Another might always alternate, creating a world gegegege… But just as well, one god might choose ggggg… Because of that, this god is called ‘omnibenevolent’. That doesn’t mean that this god couldn’t have instantiated any other world: they just chose not to. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t have the power! They are just as omnipotent as their ‘omni-random’ or ‘omni-alternating’ brethren. Each god makes a particular choice of actions out of the ones available to them; that one of these choices has a special name attached to it doesn’t impose any constraints on that selection.
What no god can do, in this toy model, is instantiate a world with any e in it and still be omnibenevolent (of course, to ward off misunderstandings, I have here for simplicity just disregarded any additional constraints on any putative god; this doesn’t mean that the all-good world is necessarily possible, and it’s then the action of the omnibenevolent god to create the world with the leaste). But this is just an analytic consequence from the meaning of the word, so not a restriction on any god’s power.
Remember my die influencing god goes along with being omni-even. I’m trying to get away from the fuzzy concept of omnipotence (not too hard to conceive of an omnipotent god who can make any face show up) and the even fuzzier omnibenevolence (and its dual, omnimalevolence.)
I agree that the world is not even close to being maximally good, but that’s still hard to prove.
Not if the being is omni-even. It can if the being is not omni-even. Thus, omnipotence and omnieveness in the same being cause a paradox/contradiction, and thus no being can be both. The same goes for omnipotence and omnibenevolence. That’s been my point for a long time now.
Again, it cannot be both. Your point is very close to saying that a god can create a rock too heavy to lift, but chooses not to.
This has nothing to do with anything I said, and I think it would be pointless to add a case where having a green car is somehow essential to your being. The die example is good enough.
I’ll go with minimal number of es, not all gs. But, as you said, adding even on e makes god not omnibenevolent. And the gods of the other worlds are not omnibenevolent.
You said some gods get random worlds while one god chooses the all g world. (for simplicity.) Is he omnibenevolent because he happened to choose that one? Did he choose all the events in that world at the beginning, so he has no more choices? First, the all g world is clearly not our world, so the point is moot. Second, how does a god who has no choices for actions be considered omnipotent? And if the all gs represent choices up to the present time, then god is restricted in only choosing g events in the future. He clearly has less freedom of choice than a god who chose a random, not maximally good, universe who is unrestricted in his choices.
Consider our friends Gods A and B, both supposedly omnipotent, but God A is also omnibenevolent. They are sitting on a cloud. B says, I’m going to zap that sparrow and make it fall. He does so. He asks God A if he can do so. God A says “I can, but I choose not to.” This is repeated an unlimited number of times, in each case God A not doing something God B does and claiming it is a choice.
How many times must this happen before we can conclude that God A cannot do it? How can we distinguish a God A who is limited to doing good from a God A who just chooses to do good? How is God A’s omnipotence testable?
This (and your later point) confuses two things: first, for the free will argument, it need not be true (nor likely, nor feasible, nor plausible) for this to be the best possible world. It is merely the case that this possibility allows to demonstrate the consistency of evil and a tri-omni God, without this in particular implying any stance on the existence of such a God (accepting the free will defense isn’t grounds for believing in God).
Then, if you further believe in such a God, i.e. take yourself to have sufficient reason for such a belief, you can infer from there that this God would’ve made the best possible world, and hence, this must be it (and then you can for instance contend with evidential arguments that cast doubt on this and hence, on God). So it’s not the case that the FWD leads to this being the best possible world, but rather, belief in the existence of a tri-omni God (on which, again, the FWD is mute) does.
Consequently, the FWD can’t fail ob the grounds of this not being the best possible world; this isn’t a premise of the argument.
Sure, but we need not extend definitions beyond what’s required for the argument. I can infer that Socrates is mortal because he is human without settling whether ‘human’ is adequately characterised as ‘featherless biped’.
What’s needed of free will is really just that it’s incompatible with causal determinism. Beyond that, there need not be a fleshed-out concept of it; it suffices that we agree that whatever this ‘free will’ thing might be, of your actions are fixedly predetermined, you don’t have it.
I don’t understand where this ‘moral sense’ thing comes from all of a sudden and what it’s supposed to be. But as for the two questions, God could conceivably have made a world without people or moral choice, but these would then also be worlds without moral value, which they want to maximize by omnibenevolence.
Sure, but as noted, that’s an entirely separate barrel of fish.
That doesn’t follow. Whether a person prays is a choice on their behalf, and God may choose to act on that basis. They could’ve chosen differently, which then doesn’t open the possibility for God to respond to their prayer. That’s not in conflict with the world in which a person prays, and God intervenes, being the best possible world as a consequence.
No, only godly interventions that make things better make things better; hence, only those are undertaken. There may be no such interventions; then, God doesn’t intervene.
That latter part I don’t understand where it’s from. Even if God sometimes permits evil for the greater good, that doesn’t make it somehow not evil. The evil in this world isn’t made non-evil just because of God. Necessary evil is still evil.
Alright, but since I’ve got no interest in defending belief in a tri-omni God, and that’s not the topic of the thread, I’ll just consider that beside the point.
No matter your shouting, you’re misreading this. It says that if such a God exists, we must live in the best possible world. But the FWD doesn’t establish, nor seek to establish, that such a God exists.
You asked your question in the direct context of the FWD, claiming later that it goes ‘to the heart’ of the objections being raised:
And all I said was that @Voyager’s objections were not in the context of the FWD. One can certainly debate about sense and nonsense of the concept of a tri-omni God, but you seem to keep wanting to nail my position as having some obligation to defend that concept as such, or to content with literal interpretations of the bible, or with actions described therein as history; but this isn’t a case of having to buy the whole cow if you want to buy the milk. Defending Plantinga’s argument doesn’t commit me to any particular positions on tri-omnihood, biblical history, Christian faith or the like. I’ve been an atheist for basically my whole life. My interest is merely in knowing and understanding the best, most charitable reconstruction of the arguments that contravene my position, in order to make sure it holds up; that’s also why I react strongly to sloppy or just plain bad arguments in favor of my own position. Any number of posts in this thread could be harvested for ridicule in a ‘what atheists actually believe’ kind of meme, and this rankles my sense of fair debate. Extend maximum charity to arguments opposing your position, and be maximally critical towards those seeking to support it. Anything else is dogmatism.
No, if a being is not omni-even, it also can’t be both omni-even and make the die come up odd.
I understand that, it’s just false: an omnipotent being can just make the die come up even every time and be omni-even by virtue of that. There’s no power it is lacking in consequence. There is absolutely no paradox, no contradiction here. Any omnipotent being chooses some set of things to do and not to do. An omnipotent being where that set is the set of even die rolls (or contains that and only that set of die rolls) is omni-even simply because that’s the name we’ve decided to give to such a being.
Sure, but all of them are omni-doing just that stuff that they choose to do. It’s just that in the case of omnibenevolence, that’s got a special name.
Yes, that’s exactly right. It’s just a name we give to a god that chooses to instantiate that particular world.
Sure, but neither is the all-even world, yet you thought it a suitable simplification. If you want, we can use that example: some gods create random die roll worlds, 261535514211…, some alternating ones, 14325232…, some even worlds, 242246244222… The latter ones are called ‘omni-even’. They can do exactly the same things other gods do, i.e. fix the outcome of a die roll at each instance, but choose only even outcomes. There is nothing particularly troublesome about this, and nothing that sets them apart from their brethren but the nature of their choices.
He does have choice—exactly the same amount of choice as any of the other conceivable gods: that of one string of events from all such possible strings. We just give a god that makes a particular choice a special name.
You’re adding extraneous details and confusing yourself. Each god stands before two infinite buckets of es and gs, or before six infinite buckets of possible die rolls, and can choose from them at their leisure. They can choose randomly, they can think of some system for choices, whatever: they all have the same power of choice. It’s just that if a given god chooses all gs, that god is one we call ‘omnibenevolent’, and if a given god chooses all even die rolls, that is one we call ‘omni-even’. Otherwise, it would in fact be a restriction of choice to tell them, you can make any choice you like, but not always g (or even)!
And as Hume taught us long ago, there is no time we can logically conclude this. Again: what force of the universe should there be that requires an omnipotent being to deviate from their choice once in a while just to prove they can? What contradiction is there with just never doing x despite being able to?
If I can take aspirin for a headache and it works, that’s proof the world isn’t maximally good because in a maximally good world I’d have never had a headache. If it’s possible for limited mortal beings to make conditions in the world better in any way whatsoever, then the world isn’t maximally good.