Trivial. I do that any time I take an aspirin. The world is full of preventable suffering, even for us mortal non-omnipotents.
I’m not talking about the Christian god, but the incompatibility of omnipotence and omnibenevolence in general. If you say they deny it is possible for God to do evil while being omnipotent, that would be because they have baked omnibenevolence into God’s nature by definition. If you don’t do that for a small-g omnipotent god, I don’t see why the claim that god can do evil should be controversial in the slightest.
Sure there are no square circles, but there are square rectangles. If god is square by nature, fine, but you seem to be saying there couldn’t be any rectangular gods.
A rectangular god has a long axis and a short axis. A square god has both axes the same. It’s impossible for a square god to have a long axis, but long axes are possible for rectangular gods. Ergo, square god is more limited than rectangular god.
This is not the evidential PoE. If the expected amount of evil were zero, it immediately follows that the probability of evil existing if God does must also be zero, and you have deductively established the inconsistency of the existence of God and evil. So this is in fact the logical problem of evil.
If on the other hand there is a non-zero expected amount of evil, then not every evil constitutes evidence against God (finding only what’s expected can’t lower your credence in a hypothesis), and hence, you must inductively argue for particular examples of evil that exceed what would be expected in the presence of a tri-omni God. That is the evidential problem.
These are the only two options. That doesn’t change if we don’t know or ‘have’ an expectation, as you put it. Either the logical argument goes through: then any evil at all disproves the existence of God. Or it doesn’t: then, the expected amount of evil must be non-zero, and not every instance of evil can be evidence against God.
But claiming that both the logical argument doesn’t work and that any evil at all should make us doubt God’s existence is just not consistent.
You first replied to me in post 395, where you quoted my point on why Reformation theologists reject the suffering’s negative utilitarian value.
Yes, you can formulate an evidentiary problem of evil which presupposes all suffering is bad, either categorically or in a utilitarian sense, and then you get a litany of contradictions with the traditional concept of God. But you have accomplished nothing by such proof, in my opinion.
In classical theism, evil is privation, the exercise of omnipotence implies teleological perfection, omniscience is atemporal, omnescience extends to eschatology, omnibenevolence covers acts rather than effects, omnibenevolence does not imply utilitarianism, the world is fallen, suffering is a natural consequence of the Fall, the cosmic telos is salvation in Christ (Augustine-Thomistic) or God’s glory (Reformation emphasizes unrevealed purpose). Add to this the additional premise - modern, not classic - that libertarian free will exists and is good (some Christians deny libertarian free will).
From these premises, the evidentiary problem of evil ceases to exist. The classical definition of omnibenevolence itself destroys the evidential inference. There are no mitigating factors at all because suffering is not a defect in the exercise of God’s will. No matter what suffering is observed, it can be deduced that it would be contrary to God’s purposes for Him to prevent that suffering.
The problem of evil (evidentiary or logical) is not a tool for Christian proselytization. Let me ask you a few rhetorical questions: What is the purpose of the evidentiary problem of evil? What do you seek to gain by discussing it? What does a Christian theist seek to gain by discussing it?
The evidentiary problem of evil as stated presupposes a consequentialist or outcome-oriented account of divine goodness, according to which suffering is a detachable moral negative. That account is fundamentally incompatible with classical Christian theism, in which divine goodness concerns the rectitude of divine willing within a teleological and eschatological order. Consequently, the evidentiary problem does not refute mainstream Christianity as historically or theologically understood, but only challenges a modern, moralistic conception of God.
(Hume, you may recall, does push back on mainstream Christianity as he knew it through Scottish Presbyterianism, but he critiques it as if God’s goodness were measured only by observable outcomes, ignoring the teleological and eschatological context central to classical theism.)
~Max
It doesn’t hurt the “evidential argument” at all. All it does is effectively redefine benevolence and God as evil. Which is both an argument against respecting God, and that the way to be “benevolent” is to torture and murder people.
It’s the sort of claim that is only likely to ever be used to “win” theological arguments, since somebody who actually took it seriously would end up in prison or dead. And a society that took it seriously would slaughter itself to collapse almost immediately.
Also it does make God out to be evil, which is usually considered undesirable by his followers.
At any rate, I don’t see how you get any of that.
~Max
How is this:
No matter what suffering is observed, it can be deduced that it would be contrary to God’s purposes for Him to prevent that suffering.
Not calling God evil? It just avoids the word is all. It’s the sort of thing some mad tyrant would say to justify him torturing and murdering as he pleases; that everyone else exists just to serve his desires and that if he has somebody tortured, they are just fulfilling their function.
And if suffering and death are “benevolence”, then so is torture and murder. It’s a straightforward relationship, literally mortals emulating God’s “moral” example.
It explicitly says God is not evil. If you disagree with the conclusion, you must either disagree with a premise or find the argument fallacious. I would appreciate if you could be more specific.
A grave mistake.
~Max
I almost get your point here. I would make an analogy to livestock. It would not hold for people who embrace veganism, and it doesn’t hold for gratuitous torture, though. But by and large, livestock exist to satisfy human desires, and if we have an animal executed, that is all well and good.
~Max
So what? It can say what it wants, but it describes a God that is evil. Any evil being can claim to be good, that doesn’t make it so.
And it’s certainly functionally evil; if that’s what “good” is, then everyone should be “evil”.
Except livestock aren’t people, and if they were they’d be justified in despising us and trying to overthrow us.
A god that treats mortals like livestock is a monster and an enemy, not “good” or “benevolent”.
Judging a chess grandmaster’s strategy by whether every pawn survives is a misunderstanding of the game rules.
I can only guess that you refuse to entertain the premises and arguments I wrote above. Which is fine. What are your thoughts on Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds?
~Max
We are not even close to the best of all possible worlds. And an omnipotent could certainly do far better than we have, given that they wouldn’t need to worry about things like historical development, limited knowledge or the laws of nature.
And your chess comparison just underlines the problem; if we are just “pawns” to God, that makes God the enemy.
A final remark. There is a reason religion has such a strong grip on humanity. Your arguments, taken to their logical conclusion, invite absurdism. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m half convinced you’re right, personally. But most people aren’t willing to live in an existential or nihilistic framework. One of the big selling points for the Protestant Reformation is that it allows people to maintain a sense of purpose and cosmic order while sidestepping suffocating hierarchial authority, compulsory ritual, and the raw, unsettling confrontation with existential contingency that thinkers like Nietzsche demand.
~Max
Thousands of years of systemic killing and persecution. Humans have selectively bred themselves to be irrational in that specific way, since not being willing to make a show of being religious has so often been a death sentence for long enough to be significant even in evolutionary terms. And religiosity has a strong genetic component, so there’s actually something for natural selection to work on.
In other words we’re mostly religious for the same reason we’d mostly be over six feet tall if everyone shorter than that at adulthood was executed for 10,000+ years.
But what you said was “You singled out Reformation theologists”
When I didn’t bring mention them, and when I quoted you, that was not the part I was responding to.
But to eliminate any doubt: I have no interest in talking about what different denominations believe, or the history of the church. I am purely interested in discussing the problem of evil itself, on its own terms.
Now, if you take the position on PoE that suffering may be a good, or necessary, in itself, then fine.
I doubt it’s very convincing for people who are doubting God on the basis of witnessing great suffering, because of the way suffering is distributed. How does it help a bunch of schoolkids’ personal growth to be killed in a mudslide? And do we suddenly “need” less suffering since the invention of painkillers? etc etc
I’m discussing it out of interest. I am an atheist so I gain (and lose) nothing significant by discussing this.
They’d just tell the about-to-be slaughtered cattle that they were going to a wonderful pasture in the sky, and then everything would be hunky dory.
We clearly disagree as to what the problem of evil assumes. But on your own terms, these are your claims:
But you won’t deny Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds, as Rowe does in the standard modern formulation of the evidentiary problem of evil:
You admit (for the sake of argument) that some suffering has instrumental value:
And you admit God’s omnipotence does not extend to impossiblilities:
Taken together, your position appears contradictory. On one hand, you treat suffering as something an omnimax God would ideally minimize to as close to zero as possible; on the other, you acknowledge that suffering is not categorically wrong. If suffering is not inherently bad, why should any instance of it—even extreme suffering—cast doubt on the existence of an omnimax God? You highlight extreme cases but stop short of denying that all suffering might be necessary.
~Max
Because it renders the entire concept of benevolence meaningless if sadism and benevolence have the same result.
Firstly let’s be clear on the distinction between my claims and the problem of evil. Because retorts about why we are claiming that suffering is a net negative are disputing the very formulation of this problem.
But I didn’t invent this theological problem; it exists because it is extremely common (although not universal) to consider suffering to be bad, without sufficient upside. And, frankly, I think it’s a bit disingenuous to question why people think that way while at the same time ducking questions of what supposed good comes from gratuitous suffering.
Anyway, on to the supposed contradiction in my claims…
Well I find it to be a ludicrous claim, but not necessarily impossible. Just as, say, if we were in a universe where everything around us was barbed wire and broken glass it wouldn’t prove that the universe wasn’t made by the god of maximum softness; who sought to make the comfiest world. It would just make it very, very implausible.
No, not quite. I admit it’s hypothetically possible. It’s the difference between admitting a golden teapot might orbit Mars and believing that one actually does.
Sure; I’m fine with the definition of Omnimax being the maximum logically possible.
When did I say suffering is not inherently wrong? Inherently means in itself
Acknowledging the possibility of suffering being necessary in some greater context does nothing to say it is somehow a good in itself