In practice they are effectively the same thing, since a tri-omni creator means that the “necessary” level of evil is zero.
If the free will defense (and other such arguments, like the vale of soul-making etc.) fails, then yes. But @Mijin has previously stated that he accepts this argument, which means that the existence of evil and a tri-omni God are not incompatible, which means that the expected amount of evil in a world in which God exists can’t be zero (since that would mean that both are incompatible after all). (And obviously, if the free will defense fails then there’s no reason to take into account the much weaker evidential argument: any evil at all renders God impossible.)
Nope. I have said, many times that there is no expectation as such. How much evidence did I expect to find that the butler did it? The answer is I set no expectation, but data can support the claim that he did nonetheless.
I also reject this casual slip between possibility and probability. I can say that it is unlikely that a golden teapot orbits the moon, while acknowledging it is possible.
That’s all I’ve done with the compatibility of suffering and an omnimax god. I acknowledge it’s possible, but I’d still bet my life savings, heck my right arm, that an all-powerful perfectly loving god would make a world with no suffering and more free will choices than this one.
You may have said that, but it’s meaningless and doesn’t help your case: either the expectation is zero, or it isn’t. This is a mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive set of alternatives (trivially so), so one of them must obtain. On either it’s false to say that any amount of evil at all yields disconfirming evidence for God.
What is possible has a non-zero probability; what has zero probability is impossible. There’s nothing to reject there.
If you acknowledge it’s possible, you’re saying that your expectation should be non-zero, and hence that there is an amount of evil that is not evidence against the existence of God. There are no two ways about this; these are logically exactly equivalent.
Which is silly for the reason I said in the line right after: that it would seem to entail we can’t say the butler did it unless we predicted how much smoking gun evidence we’d find in advance. That’s not rational.
No, free will is irrelevant to the issue. A tri-omni creator means that any and all things that happen are according to their desires, free will or not. As well as order the world and the perceptions of those in it as they see fit; any suffering that happens, does so because they want it and for no other reason. Cause and effect are irrelevant as well, as is the reality of anything that happens as such a god can just make anything happen they want and everyone perceive anything they want. Such a world is effectively a fantasy that the creator can reshape and edit at will to the smallest detail, with no effort or worries about consistency or causality. Not even a simulation, more a hallucination or lucid dream.
Plus of course such a god could simple choose not to create the suffering or evil beings at all.
Then show what’s false about it.
Also, your analogy doesn’t work. After all, given that that logical PoE doesn’t work, we know that we should e a non-zero expectation. If we have a non-zero expectation that there is ‘smoking gun evidence’ (whatever that may be) that the butler did it despite not having done it, then indeed upon finding such evidence we can’t rationally conclude that they did, in fact, do it.
It’s simple logic. There’s either zero or non-zero expectation of evil. If it’s zero, then God and evil are logically incompatible. If it’s non-zero, then there’s some amount of evil that doesn’t constitute disconfirming evidence for God.
If that is true, and if also no other defence works, then God and evil are logically inconsistent—as I’ve been saying. Of course, pretty much everybody familiar with the discussion, believer or not, agrees that the free will defense works, but that’s actually beside the point right now.
No, that’s just playing word games, as has already been repeatedly pointed out. The existence of evil doesn’t disprove God, just the logically impossible tri-omni version. And hammering on “non zero evil” is massively disingenuous given the extreme level that actually exists, as has also been pointed out. And the triviality with which such a god could fix all of it.
Not to mention the constant, careful avoidance of “suffering”, in favor of “evil” no matter how often the former is mentioned, presumably to avoid having to answer questions like “why does God torture animals?”
Again, it’s just simple logic. If there is a non-zero amount of expected evil, then a commensurate amount of evil (or suffering, personally I don’t care about which word to use) doesn’t disprove God. That’s not word games, that’s just what those words mean.
“Disproof of God” is not the argument being made in the first place. And you ignored the issue of suffering again, of course.
Fine: “…then a commensurate amount of evil doesn’t serve to lower one’s credence in the hypothesis of God’s existence.” Of course, even a minimally charitable reading would’ve picked up on the way ‘disprove’ was intended there, but naturally that’s not something to reasonably expect.
As for suffering, I don’t get what the particular bee in your bonnet is this time. If you insist, you can mentally transpose ‘suffering’ wherever I write ‘evil’. If you wish to merely point out that the amount of suffering, or evil, or moral depravity, or whatever else you might want to draw out of a hat exceeds what one might expect given that a tri-omni God exists, I readily agree: I’ve never denied that a proper evidential argument has weight. All I’m insisting on is that one needs to make the argument in a sound way, and not as @Mijin is doing by simply ignoring the argument’s factual premise.
And that’s still not the argument. The argument is over the (logically impossible) tri-omni God, not “God” in general.
I already made that clear; why would a tri-omni God let animals suffer? What does “free will” have to do with a dinosaur dying of cancer millions of years ago?
I take these to be synonymous for the purposes of this thread, since the problem of evil doesn’t arise for any other kind of God. But again, thanks for reminding me that only the most hostile, straw-manned readings of my arguments will be considered.
And I don’t know what you expect of me, here? Yes: such cases, like Rowe’s Bambi, are plausibly problems for a tri-omni God, although I think there are possible responses. But again, that’s completely beside the case I’m making. You seem to just lump a bunch of viewpoints in together, but that I think the logical argument is inconclusive, and argue for the correct version of the evidential argument, doesn’t mean that I think there is no good evidential argument possible. I think there is; it’s just that the arguments both you and @Mijin have been making are too weak, or directly contradictory. The problem is that a bad argument for a position is often more damaging than a good argument against it, so all I’m trying to do is sort the good from the bad.
I took the W ages ago when you first bit the bullet. You accepted that, according to your logic, that even living in a world of infinite suffering, where God peels off our skin daily while laughing at our suffering, and heck, let’s add spitting in our faces, we would have no reason to doubt the universe was the best possible world created by a perfectly loving God.
Not merely that it wouldn’t prove God is not omnibenevolent, that we would not even have reason to doubt.
It’s turning off all rationality – the very way that we interact with the world on a daily basis – just to maintain that your solution to the problem of evil works.
So that’s what matters to you, is it—‘winning’. Not reason, not logic, much less ‘fighting ignorance’. You want to ‘take the W’. Well I guess that’s as good an explanation as I could hope to get.
Of course, there’s no bullet to be bitten. If the logical PoE can be defeated, we know to expect a non-zero amount of evil, but we have no information about that amount whatsoever—this needs, as every formulation of the evidential argument explicitly acknowledges, additional arguments. This is just simple logic, but of course, you can’t allow yourself to consider that, because it would mean that you might not be ‘winning’ at all.
Evil is not the same as suffering. Say two people who really want a painting compete to get it at an auction. Only one wins. The other might suffer somewhat at being thwarted, but neither are evil, nor is the auction.
I can accept that the level of evil could be zero, but not the level of suffering.
Now our world has far more suffering than the minimal amount due to things like this, sure. But that’s different from it not being none.
Suffering is a brain state, not some mystical quality of consciousness; it can most certainly be zero. Somebody can be in intense pain and still not suffer if the relevant area of the brain is disabled; it’ll just be another sensation. It would be quite possible for an omnipotent - or even fairly advanced mundane genetic engineers - to create a species outright physiologically incapable of suffering.
You are mistaken. Though I did make that argument (because you asked me to), put that out of your head. Here, I am actually attacking your argument. I have quoted, above, my understanding of all the premises you assert to make your argument. Your conclusion–that observing suffering leads a rational person to doubt the existence of tri-omni God–does not follow from the premises I see you assert. I am asserting that no rational Mijin could conclude tri-omni God is improbable without additional assertions. So either I misunderstand your argument, or I missed one of your premises, or your argument is faulty.
~Max