Does it violate free will if the person was never given the desire to do something in the first place?

Great Debates
521

It’s a (Protestant) argument framed in metaphysical terms, not lay terms. You believe you had breakfast this morning because of a “basic metaphysical intuition” of memory, but if you asked 99% of people, they wouldn’t call it that. They’d just say, “I remember it.” Belief in God is not dependent on high IQ or education in philosophy. If your neighbors believe in God because they feel His presence in nature, in prayer, or in the liturgy, Plantinga would say they are using the sensus divinitatis, whether they know it by that name or not.

~Max

522

Yes, but it may be fear, not love.

523

While it is possible to believe in God solely due to fear, my understanding is that this is not how most Christians think it is supposed to work.

Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love. In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him.

1 John 4:8-9

~Max

524

And this is the reason why I call it a rationalization. But I will have to refrain from posting anything here. I’ve already promised not to participate in this discussion. :slight_smile:

525

You seem to have elected to ignore my words on the topic, which of course is your prerogative. But since you also keep name-checking me, I’ll at least offer up a correction for the record: I don’t consider myself to have bitten any bullet. This typically implies accepting some uncomfortable implications of one’s choice, but there really isn’t any choice here, and I don’t see accepting this as carrying any special difficulty.

There are two options: in a world created by a tri-omni God, you should either expect no evil, or you should have some non-zero expectation of suffering. The former is mathematically only possible if the probability of evil existing in a world created by a tri-omni God is exactly zero, in which case any amount of evil at all would immediately disprove the existence of said God—the two notions would simply be inconsistent. There could not be a possible world such that it was created by a tri-omni God and contains evil. This is, in fact, the logical problem of evil.

If on the other hand we believe that the logical problem of evil can be defeated by some means, then the expected amount of evil in a world created by a tri-omni God is non-zero. However, this is all we know: that we should expect some amount of evil. At this point, we have no information at all about how much evil to expect. It could be very little, or it could be very much: hence, even hellish circumstances are consistent with our knowledge at this point. Accepting this is entirely painless, hence no bullet needs to be bitten.

In order to be able to say anything more, we thus must find some way to put a bound on our expectation. It’s here that the inductive reasoning of the evidential problem comes in, such as Rowe’s Bambi-case. These give us arguable reason to expect less suffering than we observe, meaning this suffering allows us to reduce our credence in the hypothesis of God’s existence. But we absolutely have to appeal to this further argumentation to make that case; without it, there is simply no grounds on which to claim that the observed amount of suffering exceeds what we ought to expect.

526

Because omnibenevolence is defined as being perfectly loving, or all good, which many people find to be in conflict with allowing suffering. I don’t like to see anyone suffer, and would prevent it if I could, and yet I am far below the standard of omnibenevolence.

Again, it seems a solution to the problem of evil means we must abandon all logic, reasoning and sanity. Yes, in the analogy we are going from the definitions of “meat” and “vegetarian”, and the common use of a domestic fridge to make an inference. If I am not allowed to lean on any knowledge of the world, then let’s just throw out any possibility of analogies because they are all impossible.

Can you summarize the argument please? Because when I am looking this up, I’m seeing it explicitly stated as being only an argument against the logical argument of evil, as I’ve cited previously.

Ah, abandon all logic. Ok then.

It’s a doubly bad argument, because first of all, anyone that is experiencing doubts about God’s existence on the basis of seeing suffering cannot be convinced by this argument, by definition. Because if they were beginning with belief in God as the first logical foundation then they couldn’t have a doubt in the first place.

But secondly of course this logic could work for anything. I could solve the problem of why we’ve never seen godzilla stomping round tokyo with the logic that Godzilla being real needs to be the foundation of all logic, therefore no empirical observation (or the lack of) could ever cause us to doubt.

527

Ah apologies, I just saw the plantinga quote.

So it seems Plantinga, @Half_Man_Half_Wit and @Max_S all maintain that we could be in hell, with our skin being peeled off daily, and with God apparently laughing at our suffering, and it would be irrational to doubt even for a moment, that we were in the best possible world made by a perfectly loving god.

So, I guess we’re done here. If you’re willing to swallow the argumentum ad absurdum, I have nothing more to say.

528

It’s really one of the best criticisms of the idea of a benevolent - much less tri-omni - God that can be made. That even the people trying to defend such a position ultimately can’t find a better argument than "deny all logic and what your eyes see and your own suffering, and just believe".

529

- Amen

530

The only absurd position in the sense of a reductio is the one that says that any amount of evil reduces belief in the hypothesis of a tri-omni God—because that entails an actual logical contradiction, namely, that we should expect both zero and non-zero amounts of evil in a world created by such an entity.

But I realize the futility in persisting.

531

There’s the difference: you have to misrepresent my position.
Where have I said there’s a logical contradiction; indeed I must have said at least 20 times by this point that I am not talking about the logical problem of evil.

Whereas you did explicitly bite the bullet that no amount of suffering should supposedly give a rational person any reason to doubt the world is the best possible and god is perfectly loving.

532

Generally, argumentum ad absurdum means that you have taken (‘reduced’) a position to a logical contradiction. But even if you think that accepting that we have no means of setting a bound on the amount of evil to expect is absurd, it is not logically contradictory—in contrast to the position that you have been promoting, that any amount of evil reduces our belief in God. There, a contradiction logically follows.

As explained above, there is no biting a bullet involved. It’s the only consistent option.

533

You keep focusing on only knowing “none” or “some”. But you are ignoring the inherent nature of benevolence.

Benevolence means wanting to reduce the amount of suffering. If the god is omnibenevolent, he would seek to reduce the suffering as much as possible.

That is not a data point, but it is a trend. All things being equal, the limit of EvilinWorld(God) as God goes to omninenevolent = 0 + X, where X is the minimum amount of evil for the world to work.

We agree X is unknown. But the function still has a trend downward as God becomes more benevolent.

We don’t know X, but every instance of suffering is in conflict with the expected trend of an omnibenevent God.

534

‘None’ or ‘not none’, because that’s a mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive set of options—it has to be one or the other, obviously.

It’s neither, it’s a goal. The question is to what degree this goal can be reached. And the answer is: either fully—or not.

I have no idea what you mean by ‘God becoming more benevolent’. God, at least on the conception under discussion, is absolutely benevolent—omnibenevolent. They can’t get ‘more benevolent’ than that.

Even so, that’s just wrong—evil up to X is just what is expected for an omnibenevolent God, so can’t be in conflict with that idea. Only evil exceeding X would be. But to judge whether total evil exceeds X, we have to have some idea of X.

535

No, it means an argument that’s either shown to lead to a conclusion, or an absurd consequence, or an impossibility. So no, this does not excuse you misrepresenting my argument.

This is also not part of the argument, as has also been stated many times.
I don’t need to set some threshold amount of aftershave smell or romantic gifts or flirty text messages to suspect my partner is cheating on me. A single example is already reason to start to suspect, even if there is no X that proves she’s cheating.

But there’s still a bit of reluctance to own this conclusion, because I think at some level you understand the absurdity of it.
There you are, getting a hot poker put into various orifices, while going through the emotional pain of watching your children having their bones shattered for the third time today. God’s booming laughter rings out once again. The dude next to you says “I’m starting to doubt that this is a perfectly loving God” and you just roll your eyes at the irrationality of such a doubt.
Yes?

536

Sorry, I originally wrote a lengthy post using math structure to visualize the argument, but I ended up deleting it because I wasn’t sure my presentation was accurate. But it has colored my interpretation and I let it slip back in.

Suppose we treat an omniGod as a function on the variable benevolence. I’m specifically expanding the God category beyond omnibenevent ones.

We know that since God created the world, then the maximum amount of evil allowed in the world is limited by God. For this example, I am not denying there is a minimum required evil to achieve a world. But evil could exceed that minimum if God allowed.

So the maximum evil in the world Eiwmax = 1 / God(benevolence).
This shows that Eiwmax is inversely proportional to benevolence, which is what we expect.

Now I know if we plug in benevolence = infinity, the result is undefined. But we can evaluate undefined outcomes using limits.

If we take the limit of Eiwmax as benevolence goes to omnibenevolent, we get a result that Eiwmax = 0 + X, where X is the minimum necessary evil.

In other words, an omnibenevolent God would eliminate all unnecessary evil. Any evil left is necessary.

That’s what I meant by evaluating the trend.

We can set experienced evil as 100 for an arbitrary value for comparison, and we don’t know X, so it could be 2 or 2 million. So we don’t know if 100 is above or below minimum, even vastly below minimum.

However, we can see that the expected trend for an omnibenevolent God is for maximim evil to go down.

That is the inconsistency that even Christians recognize. Thus the existence of the problem of evil.

Thus even if 100 is well below X, any observance of evil moves counter to the expected trend.

A vegetarian has a steak in his fridge, ok. You see him coming out of a steakhouse alone. Ok. He brings his lunch to work in a Burger King bag. There might be an explanation such that he is actually a vegetarian, but each event raises the question of if he is lying.

There might be an explanation for the amount of evil we see, but without a scale on either necessary evil or for how much effect the proposed explanation can provide, we can still say that more evil is more inconsistent with an omnibenevolent God.

537

Do I understand you correctly: the definition of a vegetarian is someone who doesn’t consume meat, and by analogy, the definition of omnibenevolence is someone who doesn’t allow suffering.

Because this seems to go beyond what was admitted. In fact, this seems to be enough to pivot to a logical argument of evil, which is not your argument, so I think I misunderstand you.

I have no issue with you using knowledge of the world. But, I think you must assert additional knowledge about the world to make an evidentiary argument of evil. You so far have rebuffed my suggestion. You made the analogy to a vegetarian with meat in his fridge, but it seems that the only reason we may rationally expect a vegetarian to have no steak in his fridge is because we have additional knowledge, viz., because we know that people with steak in their fridges probably eat steak. If you remove that additional knowledge, your whole argument falls apart. We would have no reason to believe it more likely that the “vegetarian” eats steak than we would to believe the vegetarian has steak in his fridge for some unrelated reason.

I am not saying it is unreasonable to conclude that person is not a vegetarian. I am saying, if you want to make the same argument about God and the existence of evil, you need to first assume analogous additional knowledge about the world. It is not self-evident that we should expect a world with no suffering, given the existence of God and nothing else.

This is a criticism of your argument. The fact that you find my defense to the argument ad absurdum unconvincing (not surprising since the defense is not supposed to persuade people who reject its premises, and the absurdity of the result relies on premises not admitted by the defense) is entirely independent from the integrity of your evidentiary argument.

~Max

538

Evil is not fungible; necessity is a qualitative property.

I kill a man in self defense; the resulting suffering, though great in magnitude, is necessary for my self defense.
I pinch a man out of spite; the resulting suffering, though trivial in magnitude, is unnecessary for my self defense.

~Max

539

The absurdity cuts both ways. A tri-omni God simply wouldn’t inflict such torture gratuitously. It would be a logical contradiction for God to exist and for gratuitous suffering to exist. Hell is traditionally reserved for people who turn away from God of their own free will. The Hell hypothetical does not ask someone who believes in God to assume, for the sake of argument, that God does not exist or lack the tri-omni qualities. So those are assumed to be true when a theist addresses the hypothetical. From that starting point, the result is rational and not absurd. It can be deduced notwithstanding evidence of suffering. You would have a very different result if the hypothetical assumed agnosticism as a starting point.

~Max

540

No; I am explaining my position, which is basically that the evidential problem of evil is sound.

I am aware that upthread you gave the argument that suffering may actually be a good in itself; that it might be essential for personal development or whatever. But frankly, I thought you had abandoned that argument. Both because you have shifted over to the Plantinga argument; which is not the same thing. But also because when I asked questions like how lots of people being crushed to death in an earthquake is good for their personal development, you didn’t engage with such questions.

Right, because it’s exactly the other way round.
In the vegetarian example, just as with the problem of evil, our doubts are based on nothing more than the definitions that went into the analogies.

Whereas the Plantinga and similar defences, need not only those definitions but they also need to posit additional, external facts, like that free will is more important than no suffering and that a world with full free will and no suffering is not possible.