I’ll leave aside the idea that you never strawmanned my argument as being the logical argument of evil, because I want to actually move forward on this and have a productive dialogue.
So, good, we agree I am talking about observation and doubt. And you mentioned upthread about how much would be a “gratuitous” amount of evil (and seemed to agree that living in literal hell would be evil enough for us to have good grounds for doubting the existence of omnimax god).
Well, my position is that any suffering whatsoever gives us reason for doubt, and the more suffering, the more reason. Because – all else being equal – an omnipotent god that wants no suffering would have no suffering. The idea of necessary suffering requires us to posit additional facts; that there is some trade-off with other factors and the minimum trade-off level is greater than zero suffering.
That’s not thinking skeptically. Any position can be defended forever if we’re allowed to throw in motivated suppositions.
So it comes down to whether this specific supposition – of needing to compromise against free will – is convincing. And in my view the answer is no. I mean, you know that in my view, free will doesn’t even make coherent sense as a thing that could exist. But even for those that believe in it, it doesn’t appear to be a universe of maximal free will, or even where all humans have similar levels of choice. So we still need to posit additional facts for this to work.
And there are bigger problems for those who wish to believe in a heaven; a place where apparently we have free will and no suffering.
Yes. Suffering, it should be pointed out is a matter of biology; we suffer because our brains are built in such a way that certain stimuli causes suffering. Suffering isn’t some inherent aspect of the nature of the mind, people with various forms of brain or nerve damage or abnormality will not suffer in the ways those biological components are involved in.
Now in real life that’s a bad thing, because a certain amount of suffering enables us to avoid harm. People who lack pain for example tend to badly damage themselves over time. But…none of that applies with an omnipotent god, who can solve the whole issue more straightforwardly by simply decreeing that harm won’t happen.
“Necessity” works poorly as an argument to explain why an omnipotent being does something or not, since they are at most constrained by logic. It’s actually a way of trying to evade the “Problem of Evil” by claiming God isn’t omnipotent without having to admit it. A being that can’t do things out of necessity, is not omnipotent.
Well, I would say it’s reasonable to doubt the existence of God even in paradise, but the above was in the context of formulating a further argument that is amenable to evidential substantiation, which necessitates additional premises, e.g. about the amount or distribution of evil a tri-omni God would permit. These are always rather difficult to substantiate, because we’re arguing from a limited perspective. Combining this with your point regarding heaven, one could for instance appeal to a kind of ‘vale of soul-making’ style argument, that has this world merely be the necessary preparation for each soul to achieve the moral perfection necessary to choose God’s presence in heaven, so that this nasty, brutish and short existence is followed by eternal paradise, but is necessary for us to achieve the required moral perfection. (I’m positing this just as an example here; it’s not something I’m interested in defending.)
This seems to me to get things exactly backwards. Again, I realize that you’re not espousing the logical PoE here, but for the question of whether the presence of evil allows to reject or cast doubt on that of God, Plantinga’s argument is relevant. The way you’re putting this seems to say that one should think, absent reasons to the contrary, that God and evil are inconsistent, and that hence, you need to introduce additional justification to make them play nice. But this is exactly wrong: the FWD establishes that possibly, God and evil coexist, so that in some possible worlds, there is evil, and there is God. If we have nothing further to go on, we can’t exclude that we are in one of those worlds. That’s why you have to appeal to further information, so to speak, to better localize our situation within the set of possible worlds. Think of it as a Venn diagram: there are worlds in which evil exists, and worlds in which God exists, and Plantinga’s argument tells us that the overlap of the two is not empty; hence, merely affirming that there is evil does nothing to establish that there is no God.
To do so, you have to introduce further data, such that there is no longer any overlap between the set of worlds we could be in, and the set of worlds where God exists. You have to make that former set smaller, hence, locate us at the intersection of worlds with evil and worlds with, say, ‘gratuitous’ evil. If there is then no longer any intersection with the set of worlds in which God exists, you have a successful argument.
Hence, it’s not the case that one must appeal to some further data (‘motivated suppositions’) to justify the coexistence of evil and God; it’s the other way around: since we know that they can coexist, we have to appeal to further data to make the case we’re not in the overlap of the two.
So no, we don’t need to appeal to any further suppositions to make the case of possible coexistence. But taking for the moment the entirely separate issue of the status of free will in that part of the overlap where God, evil and free will coexist, there’s nothing that would require free will to be maximal in this context. Rather, we would have some sort of trade-off: the most free will we can get while admitting as little evil as possible. There is no reason to expect this to be anywhere close to ‘maximal free will’.
All else being equal is where we should always begin with claims. We can add confounding factors or justifications after we handle the straightforward case. And Plantinga implicitly agrees that the straightforward, initial position is that we wouldn’t expect suffering, because the whole need to suggest constraints like weighing against free will implies that.
It’s like if we had the Omnimax God of No Pizzas. There might be reasons why that omnimax god has for some reason deigned that pizzas would exist and be readily available. But, absent such reasons, we would expect that no pizzas means, well, no pizzas.
So that’s the start position, and the reason we should doubt an omnimax god (or a no pizzas god) exists. So it comes down to whether the various supposed constraints are convincing, and they clearly aren’t in my view.
Some people’s lives are much shorter than others, or they have fewer options than others, or they have far greater suffering. It’s nothing like what we’d expect either of an omnimax god’s benevolent creation or as some kind of test of free will choices.
Of course, one could argue that in God’s eyes a 4 year old who dies of leukemia was just as much tested in their free will or whatever as a man who lives to 80 and served as president of his country for 20 years. But it’s ultimately a “mysterious ways” explanation, because, on the face of it, it looks nothing like a fair test of free choices nor of a benevolent God trying to minimize suffering.
Try that again. If a being is not omni-even, it is impossible for it to be both omni-even and something else.
Remember, this being is omnipotent also. Omni-eveness by itself is not logically contradictory, it is only so in combination with omnipotence. Sure it can roll all the even rolls it wants to, but to test for omnipotence you have to ask it to roll an odd roll.
Let’s work this through. Your scenario has a god, somewhere outside of time, I guess, pick his actions for all eternity, in this case all evens. If this god can be called omnipotent, he is omnipotent only in the sense that he had all choices available to him at the decision point. Fair enough. Once he makes the choice, he is constrained to those choices. Within the universe instantiated by his choice he has no more choice. He had free will in making the choice, but no free will after. He’s locked himself into a very specific universe.
This is exactly the same problem as an omniscient and omnipotent god, who is only truly omniscient if he knows all his choices in the future, which implies that he made the choices at or before t = 0.
I wouldn’t call your god omnipotent since he has locked himself into a universe and cannot change his mind about his choices, but as I said he could be called omnipotent before he made the choices.
Now, within that universe, if God sometimes throws the die through a being, that being no longer has the ability to throw an odd die. A being God is not operating through does. (Damn useful in playing Risk.) Within that universe, the being not influenced by God has capabilities the being influenced by God does not have. And it is no longer a choice, since the choice was made before the universe was created.
I’m talking about testability. How can we distinguish between an omnipotent god who can roll an odd but chooses not to and one who cannot roll an odd. Clearly a god who does roll an odd - out of choice - demonstrates they have the capability of doing so. Omni-eveness in this case is a label, not a restriction. The god is still omni-even within epsilon, where epsilon can be as small as you wish. If omni-eveness is not a choice but a restriction, then the god cannot roll an even, and it would not be omnipotent.
Let’s try this again. You have two sets of possible worlds, the set G in which God exists and the set E in which evil exists. Plantinga’s argument shows that the intersection of these sets is non-empty. It does so by explicitly pinpointing a possible world within that intersection.
Consequent to this, pointing out that there is evil in this world simply means that we are somewhere within the set E. We might be in the set E\setminus G, one of the worlds where evil exists, but no God; or, we might be in the set G\cap E, where we have both. Simply pointing to evil doesn’t give us any more information, period. All else being equal, that’s all we can say.
If you want to make an empirical case against the existence of God, you have to argue that we’re somewhere in E\setminus G. This you can only do by introducing additional information, because you need to reduce the size of the set of possible worlds in which our actual world is located, which you can only do by introducing some additional constraint.
So one way to do so is to argue that there is a set S of superevil possible worlds, such that S\subset E\setminus G. This is something you have to independently introduce. Then, you can start with the empirical work, because now, we’re ready to talk about the characteristics of the actual world. That work then substantiates that our world is an element of S. That there is some world in S is an argument analogous to Plantinga’s, which demonstrates that there is some world in G\cap E. Then, the characteristics of the actual world can be investigated to see whether it is one of those worlds within S. However, Plantinga’s argument is done when establishing that there is some world in G\cap E, because this suffices to show that merely asserting that we are somewhere in E does not suffice to show that we are not in G. While for the counterpoint, you have to show (or make evidentially plausible) that we are actually in S.
Yes, that is exactly what I said: neither an omni-even nor a non-omni-even omnipotent being can be both omni-even and make the die come up odd, so that’s just not a possible power.
Simply, no. One does not need to do x to be able to do x. And no omnipotent being owes you a demonstration of their powers. That being omnipotent entails having to demonstrate this to @Voyager strikes me as a rather unreasonable requirement.
An omnipotent being that chooses to only throw even rolls is perfectly simple and absolutely free from contradictions.
Sure. If a choice is made, it’s made; but that’s the same for all potential gods. All choices are made freely; the infinite set of all decisions is all the choices possible, and each god makes all of those same choices.
Such a god also could change their mind, they just don’t. Again, ‘do’ is not a requirement for ‘can’.
Well, we can’t, but nothing says that a being can only be omnipotent if it can, or bothers to, demonstrate that fact to us. Again, you’re making something very simple unnecessarily complicated: any omnipotent being can choose to only do good, but that doesn’t mean that they are in any way unable to not do good. They just don’t. There is nothing complicated about this.
Good. This bi-omni being is not possible. However a singly omni being - either omni-even or omnipotent - is possible. Unless you redefine omnipotence as omnipotent except for some logically possible actions, you have just shown that the bi-omni being is not truly omnipotent, and so isn’t bi-omni at all. Which is good since being bi-omni is impossible.
I don’t understand why you’re not a deist at least. Maybe God gives no indication of his existence, but that doesn’t mean he can’t. He just doesn’t want to, and is in that way indistinguishable from not existing. The god here is indistinguishable from not being omnipotent. It could be anyone doing the testing, not me. And, again, you are saying that there is no possible universe where god submits to this test. Because if there was such a universe, we could focus on that one not ours.
You realize that you are multiplying entities, don’t you? Occam’s Razor is a heuristic, not a rule, but I’d hate to be on the wrong side of it.
I’ll say it differently. The FWD is unnecessary if the tri-omni god is false. There is no problem of evil to justify.
I mean making moral choices. Choices aren’t moral choices if the person making them doesn’t have a moral sense, an awareness of what is good and what is evil. A lion isn’t immoral for catching and eating a zebra. Dogs aren’t evil for rolling in poop.
To be fair, Plantinga’s argument isn’t the original topic of the thread, either. The OP asks about limiting the desire to do some evil acts and if that means there is no free will. For the OP, the meaning of Free Will is the topic, not whether it as a concept potentially solves the POE.
I’m not talking about my arguments, I’m talking about the objections from other posters. They are playing out exactly the statements I said would be played out.
And @Voyager said that, too. You just seem too hung up on the FWD to see this thread topic is broader.
Yes, people are responding to your statements, but they are rejecting elements of the tri-omni god concept.
Again, formal logic is not the right tool here, as evident by the fact that it can be used to defend any position whatsoever.
Let’s say I want to believe in a flat earth. But oh noes! I notice on a holiday to australia that I cannot see Polaris, and the stars instead circle round the Southern Cross over the course of a night. A naive person might see these observations as inconsistent with my position…
But no problem, because all this observation shows is that is that I belong somewhere in the set of universes with those observations. It’s logically possible to reconcile these observations with a flat earth (it’s a standard premise of skeptical reasoning that any hypothesis can be defended with enough ad hoc suppositions), ergo it shouldn’t give me any doubt I live on a flat earth. Right? That’s exactly what you’ve done with the problem of evil.
Or, we can reason empirically and skeptically, and say that the inconsistent observation is indeed a problem for the hypothesis and should give us (significant) reason for doubt.
Upthread, when I talked about the scenario of everyone living in a literal hell, with our skin being burned off over and over again, while God smiles and laughs…there you seemed to agree we’d have reason to doubt that God is omnibenevolent.
But following this new summary of your logic, that would seem to be incorrect. Even if we lived in a literal hell, it would just show we are somewhere in the set E. It would not prove we’re in the set E ∖ G. So, following it through, we have no reason to doubt God’s omnibevolence. Indeed it would be irrational to think that, supposedly.
Is this really what you’re saying? Otherwise can you finally agree that this appeal to absolute logical proof is flawed here?
Nonsense. No being can both be x and do something that implies not-x—this isn’t different from creating a stone too heavy to lift. That’s not a limitation on omnipotence. A bi-omni being is trivially possible, you just need an omnipotent being that chooses a particular way to act, which, being omnipotent, is perfectly within their capacities. If you insist on that only counting if they demonstrate their ability to do otherwise, then you’re putting a limit on omnipotence.
Because not being able to disprove something doesn’t entail a reason to believe in it.
Now you’re just throwing random crap at the wall to see if anything sticks. Occam’s Razor concerns explanatory entities, and furthermore is a rule to systematically choose hypotheses for empirical testing (otherwise, you’d be faced with an infinity of possible explanations for some data standing on exactly the same grounds). Neither of which has any relevance here.
Your argument was that it is impossible to be both omnipotent and omnibenevolent; whether an entity can demonstrate these qualities to your satisfaction doesn’t enter into that. If an omnipotent being can consistently choose to just do good things, your argument fails; and if it can’t, it’s not omnipotent.
The relevance of Plantinga’s argument is that it gives a possible reason why we have the level of choice we do: to maximize moral value while incurring the least amount of evil. It furthermore removes the need for such a curtailing of choices in the first place.
As I explained in my previous post, that’s because your question to me came in the context of discussing the FWD, with you positing that the other comments went ‘to the heart’ of the disagreement with it. Hence, I explained why I didn’t think they applied there.
But if we go that route, we also have no problem of evil to contend with, and that seems to be integral to the OP’s question.
That’s such an absurd statement that I hope I’m either grossly misreading you, or you’re just having me on at this point. First of all, I’m hardly reasoning very formally—the tiny bit of set notation was just in lieu of me painting pictures, an illustration of the logical flow of the argument. Furthermore, formal logic just uncovers the consequences of whatever premises you hold, such that if these are true, the consequences necessarily obtain.
This is ad hoc reasoning, which is logically fallacious.
No, of course not. I (rather Plantinga) am not concerned with showing a tri-omni God exists, but rather, with the validity of a certain kind of inference: from the existence of evil to the non-existence of God. In showing that this inference can fail in a specific instance, one validly shows that it doesn’t hold in general, hence showing that inference to be logically fallacious without additional premises. This is a deductive argument: it follows immediately from the stated premises.
What you’re describing is empirical, and hence inductive or abductive reasoning to the best possible explanation. This sort of reasoning never establishes its conclusions with absolute certainty, and hence, is always open to defeaters. (Which is the reason for the whole falsification thing and so on.) The fallaciousness of ad hoc reasoning then comes about because of this inherent defeasibility: if you’re allowed to ‘shore up’ your thesis with additional assumptions, you’re blocking the path to correcting the original, possibly flawed, inference.
These are not nearly the same thing.
Your question was whether the FWD meant it’s irrational to doubt the existence of God in hell. I answered it’s not: the FWD says nothing about whether one should believe in God, it just defends such belief (if it is there) against a particular attack. So it remains as reasonable to doubt God as before, however much you think that is. It’s the same in paradise: there, too, it’s not unreasonable to doubt the existence of God. But as I said in that response:
And furthermore, in trying to correct your apparent misunderstanding that I had somehow agreed that the suffering in hell gives us reason to doubt God, more explicitly:
So the gotcha you’re trying to pin on me doesn’t stick.
No, I’m not going to agree that logic doesn’t work because it goes against your intuition.
…which is not consistent with your other posts. You have said that it is not rational to doubt the existence of omnimax God based only on observing evil in the world. However, when I take this to an argumentum ad absurdum and ask about living in a literal hell, now you claim the argument is merely agnostic with regards to doubt.
It seems you don’t like the entailment of your position.
I don’t know why you bother with this grandstanding – no-one is reading these back-and-forths except you and me.
And very obviously I did not say abandon logic, I was saying the thing that I explained very clearly: that being able to prove / rule something out in formal logic is the wrong standard for empirical claims, as literally anything can be defended.
While I can’t rule out that I live in a universe with an omnimax god that allows suffering because reasons, I also can’t formally rule out that I have 5 hands and live on the moon. There are infinite ways that my observations of having two hands and living on earth could be reconciled with that “truth”. So it’s a completely pointless angle to come from.
The reality is my observations of planet earth, my two hands, and suffering, give me good grounds to doubt or have confidence in particular claims.
There is no contradiction. Observing evil gives us no rational reason to doubt the existence of God, but that doesn’t mean doubting the existence of God is irrational, because there’s a million other reasons for such doubt. The FWD doesn’t remove these.
An argumentum ad absurdum takes something to a contradiction. You don’t have a contradiction, you have a conclusion you don’t like. Observing evil tells you one thing, that you’re in the set of worlds where evil exists. Since you know that this set has overlap with the set of worlds where God exists, it follows that this can’t tell you anything about whether you’re in one of those worlds.
There are eminently reasonable empirical arguments against the existence of God from evil. But all of these must start from additional premises, since what you have to do is locate our actual world in a set of possible worlds that has no overlap with the set of worlds in which God exists. That’s all that Plantinga’s argument tells you from this point of view. I genuinely don’t understand why you find that so hard to accept.
The thing is that we first need to understand what conclusions our empirical evidence licenses, and that’s where we need deductive arguments. So we know, deductively, that the observation of evil does not conflict with the existence of God. Thus, we need something beyond that.
Empty insults. Calling your arguments “logic” and your opponents “intuition” is just trying to win the argument by throwing insults.
It’s all nonsense, anyway. Literally. There is no logical reason to believe that “God” is even possible, much less real. It’s all driven by pure emotion, people believe in God because they want to, and care nothing about the facts, or whether it makes sense, or how much harm it causes. All this “logic logic logic” about something that is fundamentally not logical in any sense is futile, except as a distraction from the OP and the fundamental incoherence of the “omnimax God” concept.
Heck, how long has it even been since the question of the OP has even been addressed? Rather than endless attempts to defend the least defensible concept of a deity ever invented, which wasn’t even part of the question.
So really, the whole discussion around Plantinga’s argument is relevant to the OP. Although I didn’t expect to have to spend quite so much effort explaining its logic, but as you say, this is a mainly emotionally driven debate.
Show me a legitimate definition of omnipotence that includes choice and not capability. The one you tried before, as I demonstrated, does not. Any omnipotent god (or anyone else) chooses to do only a subset of what is possible for them to do. That’s not a good metric for anything. The important thing is what they are capable of, not what they choose. A god choosing to throw only sixes can still be omnipotent if it has the capability of throwing anything. If it does not, say by being omni-even, it is not omnipotent.
One of the “proofs” of god is that god is defined as the maximal being. It is hard to justify a bi-omni god as being maximal if there is another, possible, god who can do things this god can’t. Which demonstrates that the bi-omni god fails as a god and it is logically possible to do things the first god cannot. And I say “can’t” not “chooses not to” since choice is irrelevant here.
Again, please give me a way of distinguishing a god who chooses not to do something in all possible worlds from one who cannot do that thing.
Way back in the thread, I asked if there was a difference between can do and will do. This seems to be the heart of your objection, and the disagreement sticking point with @Half_Man_Half_Wit.
I’m fine with that, though I’d say increase local suffering to decrease global suffering more, since evil is poorly defined. But there are clearly some actions that increase global suffering, and those are the ones an omnibenevolent god cannot do and stay omnibenevolent.