Whether you took “in itself” to be implicit, or not, is pointless at this point – it’s arguing just for the sake of it. The important thing is, that I have accurately summarized your position now, and even if you thought I was strawmanning it at some point in the last couple of posts, we didn’t get as far as making any claim so it didn’t go anywhere.
You agree with the statement: “No amount of suffering, in itself, with no additional knowledge of whether it’s necessary or not, gives us any reason to doubt that God is omnimax”
Right?
And @Max_S either doesn’t, or he is not being consistent.
I agree with the statement, but a better summary of my position would be “only gratuitous suffering (or evil or what have you), that is, suffering not expected given the existence of a tri-omni God, yields evidence against the hypothesis of a tri-omni God”. The above follows as a consequence, but not vice versa, so the two are not equivalent. And really, that statement is just a specification of “only evidence that disagrees with a hypothesis disfavors that hypothesis” to the case at hand, which is so close to a triviality as to hardly be called any specific position at all. And as far as I have understood him, I’d expect @Max_S to readily agree with the gist of this.
But I want to circle back to this:
Evidently, you have not stopped responding to me; you’ve merely stopped engaging with my arguments. And your reasoning for doing so is, essentially, that I’ve not so far agreed with you. The implication being that I’m being disingenuous, or unreasonable, in doing so. But of course, there’s other possibilities: I could, for instance, simply be misunderstanding your position. Or, I could be understanding it perfectly well, but mistakenly conclude it’s fallacious. That would make me wrong, but honest. Or, of course, you could actually be in error. So there are charitable ways of constructing my disagreement with you, that would not make it unreasonable. So one must wonder why you insist on the most uncharitable construal of my position.
After all, I have received hardly more agreement from your side. Yet I continue to try and give you the opportunity of spelling out where, exactly, you think I’m going wrong, by trying to find new ways to express myself, and reacting to where I think your reasoning errs. Because I think you are being honest in your disagreement, and I want to figure out where it comes from, and I’m giving my honest (to the best of my introspection) reasons for why I think what I think, and so far haven’t found your argument convincing.
Also, it doesn’t explain why you haven’t just stopped engaging with me, but also, with the cited literature. I could hold this entire debate without using a single word of my own, because my position is exactly echoed in the cites provided—some of which you brought to the table. So even if you think I’m just a lost cause, why not at least take on board what smarter people than me have argued?
Right, so it was just pointlessly being argumentative. You could have just agreed with it and then we’d get somewhere with the discussion.
Yep, but it sets up an impossible standard, which again, is just picked out for God.
e.g. When I asked @Max_S about Freddy Kreuger’s actions, he had no problem saying that seeing apparently sadistic actions would give us reason to suspect that he is a sadist – not prove, but certainly give us reason to suspect. He didn’t mention any requirement to know whether the action was necessary. Because, of course, if we always required such knowledge it would freeze our ability to make judgements about the world.
Of course, when I pointed out that Freddy Kreuger could be god, suddenly things have gotten more complex and equivocal.
Let me be clear since I am summarizing two people’s posts in my response: I am aware that your positions are not the same.
I think that your position on the evidential problem of evil is consistent, but absurd – you’ve chosen to bite the bullet.
And I think @Max_S, despite claiming his position is the same as yours is inconsistent right now, unless he can return and clarify.
No I genuinely haven’t read most of your posts since about ~650. Yes it’s a dick move but it’s just frustrating. You just beat people down until they walk away in disgust. It happens in every thread, and it’s happening in this one.
I’ll read your posts from this point, or leave the thread outright.
And no it is not because you don’t agree with me. I’m happy for disagreement indeed it’s much of the point of being here. But with good debates we can quickly establish points of agreement and we don’t need to be afraid of making concessions, especially when they are only a small part of the overall picture.
None of that has happened here, nor will it. We’ll go from point A to point A in 1000 posts.
I agree with the statement, but I don’t agree that it’s a good summary of my position, as you claimed. It is a consequence of it, but not equivalent to it. If you think that’s pointlessly argumentative, so be it; to me, it’s just being precise to avoid slippage due to vaguely formulated claims.
No, it’s exactly the same standard that’s applied to all evidence. If you find fingerprints on the scene, that alone does not constitute evidence for guilt. Only if those fingerprints aren’t expected to be found at the scene given the innocence of the person to whom they belong do they argue against the hypothesis of innocence. Your fingerprints, if you have no regular access to the crime scene, incriminate you; the butler’s fingerprints, who regularly cleaned there, don’t. Just fingerprints without any expectation tell you nothing.
I’m sorry you see things that way. I can only say that all I’m doing is trying to make my point as clearly as possible, as long as I feel it hasn’t been properly replied to, and try to respond to counterarguments in the spirit they were given. Do I sometimes get snarky or dismissive? Certainly. But I’m not sure you should be the one to throw the first stone here. I don’t recall you ever ceding much argumentative ground, either, although I confess I haven’t put much effort into keeping score.
But put yourself into my shoes for a second. What I see you arguing for is the following: if A entails the possibility of B, then the fact that B yields grounds to doubt A. Without more information, this is, I think trivially, false. You’d need something that says, perhaps, that B should be unlikely given A, or that there should be some bound on B, or anything of that sort. Otherwise, the mere fact that B—what is possible actually happening—simply doesn’t give you anything to go on. It isn’t surprising in the way fingerprints in a place you have no business being is.
Grant me for a second that this is my honest belief: what concessions could I make to what appears to me a logical triviality? What exactly are you asking for here? (And well, not to put too fine a point on the tu quoque, but what have you been offering?)
I hesitate to jump in months into the discussion, but I’ve been reading this thread on and off, and there’s an argument that either doesn’t make sense, or I am not making sense of it.
How do you know (or why do you assume) that there is a butler? Why should I, when evaluating, have to rule out an Invisible Pink Butler who touches things, before I can consider other explanations more likely?
This, I think, is another angle on your position (apologies if I’m getting it wrong) that any particular example of suffering might or might not be “necessary”, and there’s no reason to infer that just because there is suffering it is “unnecessary”.
What does “necessary” mean? How can any state of existence be “necessary” with a tri-Omni god (or even simply an omnipotent god)? What makes a baby recoiling from the pain of a life-saving injection more or less necessary than any other suffering? How do we evaluate the necessity of suffering?
I’m not assuming a butler. I’m just illustrating that evidence needs to be evaluated against a hypothesis, that is, we need to know whether, given the hypothesis (that is, assuming what is being hypothesised were true), the evidence is expected, or not. If it is unexpected, then the evidence lowers our confidence in the hypothesis. So fingerprints on the scene from a random person who has no business there are unexpected, hence, lower our confidence in the hypothesis of their innocence. Fingerprints of the butler, on the other hand, are expected on the scene, hence, don’t lower our confidence in the hypothesis of their innocence.
The point is just that you can’t say fingerprints are evidence against innocence, period. Only fingerprints that shouldn’t be there are.
Necessary means ‘true in all possible settings’. So a bachelor may be happy or sad (either is possible, i.e. there are possible settings where he is both), but he is necessarily unmarried. That there may be necessarily evil even if there is a tri-omni God comes from the possibility that there may not be any possible cases such that there both isn’t any evil and another divine desideratum, such as the existence of moral good, which may need free will, is fulfilled. Quoting myself from above:
This is Plantinga’s free will defense, and it establishes the possibility that if there is free will, even a tri-omni God has to admit some minimal amount of necessary evil, and hence the possibility that given that such a God exists, there is also evil. Hence, that possibility being true can’t be evidence against such a God without further arguments, because at best we can say that we don’t know whether the existence of any particular amount, kind, pattern, or intensity of evil should be unexpected given such a being.
Missed this bit. This is where the evidential argument from evil (as opposed to the logical one, which is generally agreed to be defeated by the Plantinga defense) starts out from: you have to make a case that a given instance of evil is unnecessary, and, to the extent that your case is convincing, you’ve provided convincing evidence against the existence of a tri-omni God. Of course, such an argument can never be made deductively, i.e. establish its conclusion as a necessary consequence, because our determinations of whether some particular evil is unnecessare are always going to be fallible. Hence, it’s an inductive argument that uses our ‘best judgment’ to probabilify its conclusion. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it:
The probabilistic nature of such arguments manifests itself in the form of a premise to the effect that “It is probably the case that some instance (or type, or amount, or pattern) of evil E is gratuitous.” This probability judgment usually rests on the claim that, even after careful reflection, we can see no good reason for God’s permission of E. The inference from this claim to the judgment that there exists gratuitous evil is inductive in nature, and it is this inductive step that sets the evidential argument apart from the logical argument.
This is the factual premise of evidential arguments, and various strategies have been advanced to substantiate it, most famously William Rowe’s appeals to the cases of Bambi and Sue (see the IEP article). To the best of my understanding, @Mijin denies the need for any such premise, while I (and @Max_S, again IIUC) agree with the sources cited in this thread so far that it’s necessary, and without it, the argument remains formally invalid.
I’m sure I am revisiting already-well-worn ground, but:
Have we defined evil? Can I use ‘suffering’ in this argument (I read your IEP link, and it seems like suffering can be used as one example of evil. That works for me.)?
It seems that if you (or Plantinga) are saying that in a world with free will, a tri-omni god needs to accept that people will suffer (or be subject to ‘evil’), then you’ve introduced a paradox that argues against the existence of free will or a tri-omni god (or possibly both).
A tri-omni god can’t end suffering because free will must exist?
Why does one also not have to make a case that a given instance of evil is necessary? Again, it seems like you’re starting from the inherent assumption that tri-omni god exists and that evil is necessary, and are requiring others to disprove those assumptions.
Reading your link, it seems like much of the arguments presented against Rowe is that “because god is ineffable, we are not in a position to evaluate the necessity of suffering.”
We don’t really need a precise definition of evil; it suffices to stipulate that it’s something an omnibenevolent entity would prefer to avoid.
Not really. All this says is that it’s not possible to both maximize free will (which plausibly is needed for true moral goodness) and have zero evil—so it’s just an optimization problem where the optimal point of both objectives fails to coincide with the optimal for either alone. Nothing really problematic about that.
Because we’re not trying to make an argument on the basis of the existence of necessary evil. If, as the proponents of the evidential argument do, one wants to make an argument on the basis of unnecessary evil, one first has to show that there is such a thing. Otherwise, any given evil may or may not be evidence against God. What do you think a judge would say if you come to them claiming that you may or may not have evidence for the guilt of this suspect?
I’m not starting from an assumption that God exists, after all I don’t believe such a thing, I’m merely pointing out that if God existed, there may be necessary evil, hence to show that any particular evil is evidence against God, the person making the argument faces the burden of substantiating it by showing that at least some evil is unnecessary.
I don’t see why that would be a problem at all. Even if one holds that there is genuine free will, it’s pretty clear that most of our choices are heavily constrained. Think of an addict, for instance, or even just somebody with a serious sweet tooth (he said, nibbling on a piece of chocolate on the couch). And it’s not a reduction of omnibenevolence at all to have to conform to what’s logically possible.
If there’s evil, it may be necessary or unnecessary. Only unnecessary evil yields evidence against God. So without making a case that some evil is unnecessary, you haven’t made a case for there being evidence against God.
Because of the free will defense. If God wants to maximize moral good, for which you arguably need free will, it may be the case that in all possible circumstances, free creatures also freely choose evil, meaning that there is a necessary minimum amount of evil present.
It isn’t, and I illustrated as such with the Freddy Kreuger example where @Max_S agreed that of course we can doubt someone’s omnibenevolence without making a knowledge claim.
Because that’s how it works with all empirical claims. We could never gain confidence in anything if we need to begin with absolute knowledge of causes.
In terms of your fingerprint example, you have it backwards. If I found a body, and there’s fingerprints near to it then that’s evidence that we should take seriously up to and until we become aware of some benign reason that it’s there. And while we don’t have awareness of any such reasons, the fingerprints can stack with other circumstantial evidence to build a case.
No, that’s not my position. It’s really quite simple: the observation of apparently X gives us reason to think X.
Observing apparent sadism by Freddy Kreuger might not prove anything, but it gives us reason to suspect he’s a sadist. Yes or no?
(“apparently sadistic actions” presuppose at least a provisional determination that the action was sadistic, which itself presupposes background knowledge to distinguish sadistic from non-sadistic)
I would agree with these statements:
No amount of suffering inflicted by some guy, in itself, without additional knowledge/context suggesting a sadistic motive, gives us any reason to believe that guy is sadistic.
Merely asserting there is evidence that some guy inflicted suffering gives no reason to believe he is not benevolent.
Evidence that God allows gratuitous suffering gives us reason to doubt God’s omnibenevolence.
I might be persuaded to agree with this statement personally, but it is neither trivial nor self-evident:
As for what arguments I might be persuaded by, see here (emph. added):
I don’t know what you mean by ‘absolute knowledge of clauses’, or where you think anybody required that, could you elaborate?
Anyhow, the point is simply that to disfavor a hypothesis, evidence must disagree with that hypothesis—i.e. that if the hypothesis is true, the evidence is unexpected. That’s all I’m saying, and it’s an obvious necessity for empirical reasoning.
Otherwise, on the construal you propose, evidential reasoning simply wouldn’t be a valid means to move towards beliefs more closely approximating truth: suppose you’re in the best possible world, and all evil is in fact necessary, and God exists. You would nevertheless take any evil to be evidence against God’s existence, thus in your beliefs further diverging from truth. Hence, evidential reasoning ceases to be a useful means to get closer to truth, and no evidential argument is convincing anymore.
Because you have background knowledge that renders the presence of these fingerprints surprising, namely, that the vast majority of people shouldn’t be expected to have been at the scene. Remove this—say, by making this a kind of dinner party mystery where you don’t know who might have been where for legit reasons—and that ceases to be valid. The fact that there is background knowledge that could change whether evidence is incriminating means that without any background knowledge, you can’t decide whether it is. If you know there may be necessary evil, you can’t just assume all evil is unnecessary, or even that any given evil is probably unnecessary, at least not without an assumption on the relative prevalence of necessary vs. unnecessary evil.
This is simple, yes, but in general false. Observation of apparently X tells you that apparently X. Only with an assumption to the effect that ‘apparently X probably means actually X’ does the above follow. This is a sensible assumption in a great many cases, but it’s not clear if it’s sensible with respect to whether is evil is necessary—the child feeling the sting of the needle may not be a good judge of whether that suffering is necessary. And even if it is a reasonable assumption, it is still one you need to make.
And even granting you that means that your contention ‘any suffering is evidence against the existence of God’ is false, because there is lots of apparently necessary suffering, such as the aforementioned child being vaccinated, which then would not be evidence against God.
Perhaps to make this point more clearly, I would agree that you’re making a valid evidential argument if you were to say that observing apparently unnecessary evil together with the assumption that observing apparently unnecessary evil under ordinary circumstances yields grounds to believe that there probably is unnecessary evil allows one to conclude there probably is unnecessary evil, and hence, evidence against tri-omni God. But without that assumption, there’s a clear missing link here.
Here we disagree. Observing what appears to be X gives some reason to think X, if observation is evidence consistent with X. It does not imply X, however.
I watch a bigfoot documentary and see what appears to be a bigfoot monster flash across the screen. Seeing that gives me at least a negligible reason to think bigfoot exists. That reason may crumble with later investigation (e.g. the video is a hoax, or is later determined to depict a bear), but at that moment it is valid evidence. I can admit that without ever concluding bigfoot actually exists.
Not without further, generally unstated, assumptions. After all, if you say ‘I see X, hence I have some reason to believe X’, I can ask why, and you would probably readily give some answer of the form, ‘because under reasonable lighting conditions, without being under the influence of drugs, etc., seeing X typically gives me a good reason to believe that there is X’. If I believe this, then you’ve given a satisfactory answer. If it were immediate that seeing X yields grounds for believing X, to some degree at least, there would not be such a possible open question.
I mean, the realization that we need some grounds on which to believe that our perceptions are typically veridical is essentially what got the entire enterprise of modern philosophy started…
I edited to clarify “Observing what appears to be X”. Also, the reason why is built-in: “if observation is evidence consistent with X”. If you have a problem with that, you need to change your hypothesis.
Sure, if observation that apparently X is evidence that actually X, then that follows—but that this needs to be assumed is exactly what I pointed out, so I don’t see where we disagree?
Certainly, in very many cases, observation that apparently X is good grounds to believe that actually X, but even so, this is a necessary, if probably nearly universally granted, assumption. But in a case like (un)necessary suffering, I don’t see that it’s reasonable to assume that what appears to us as unnecessary suffering actually probably is unnecessary suffering—at least it seems a strong assumption regarding our ability to discern ultimate ends to hold this.
Consider the hypothesis: if unnecessary suffering exists, all observed suffering will appear unnecessary. Therefore, observing apparently unnecessary suffering is evidence of unnecessary suffering. This can be attacked for various reasons, but it does not rest on an assumption that what appears to us as unnecessary suffering actually probably is unnecessary suffering.
This is the distinction between the propositions ‘X’ and ‘reason to suspect X’ / ‘reason to think X’ / ‘evidence of X’.
ETA: Generally, affirming the consequent does not prove the antecedent.
If A is the culprit, A’s fingerprints will be found on the scene. Finding A’s fingerprints does not prove A is culpable, but per the hypothesis, it is evidence.
If A is sadistic, A will appear to act sadistically. Observing A’s apparent sadism does not prove A is sadistic, but per the hypothesis, it is evidence.
If God is evil, then some suffering will appear to be gratuitous. Observing apparently gratuitous suffering does not prove God is evil, but per the hypothesis, it is evidence.