This is basically the premise of the thread. Is it a violation of free will to create a being (at once or through evolution) that doesn’t have an innate desire to do every evil thing possible? Would the world be less valuable if Bundy, Hitler and Manson could never exist?
Yes, I wanted to come back to the OP.
The argument seems to be that in order to be able to choose good, one must be able to choose evil, and in order to be able to choose evil, one must be able to choose absolute evil. Apparently there is a symmetry involved where if you are limited from choosing absolute evil, then you can’t really choose absolute good because there’s no contrast. That’s why Adam and Eve were neither good nor evil, they were incapable of being either until they committed wrong by disobeying.
Side argument about how it could be wrong if they don’t understand right and wrong. And on point, choosing disobedience would be exercising free will without understanding the consequences. How is that good? Now you have to be punished because you disobeyed, but you didn’t even know what disobedience was or that it was wrong.
Whereas god could have made it that “evil” was disbelief and “good” was belief, and that was the only free will that mattered, and the ability to choose to hurt other people didn’t exist. Because what is gained by that choice of “free will” over the free will to choose belief or not?
The “value” of free will in the Plantigina argument seems to be that the choice is not constrained. Options to hurt and kill don’t add value to choice, just add the opportunity for harm to be done and retribution to be meted out.
IMHO, “free will” is a side issue at most.
First, because if the universe was created by an omnipotent & omniscient being, there’s only one being that has any moral agency at all: that creator. Everyone else is just following the script laid out for them, “free will” or not. In such a universe Hitler killed millions of people for only one reason: because God designed him for the purpose before the universe began. It doesn’t matter if Hitler had “free will” since free will or not, he was always going to do and say and think exactly what God designed him to do. That’s an inescapable consequence of a creator being omnipotent & omniscient.
And another reason is that an omnipotent being could simple decide that committing “evil” is impossible, with no need to worry about will or choice. If the gun wont fire and the knife won’t cut, it doesn’t matter if the person armed with them wants to kill somebody else.
A creator being omnipotent & omniscient means there’s no moral wiggle room on their part; if something happens, it’s because they wanted and expected it to happen. By definition, or they aren’t an omnipotent & omniscient creator.
And we haven’t seen an answer, have we? But don’t include Bundy - he converted, and he’s going to heaven, or so they say. I wonder if one of his victims will meet him there.
There have been answers. Just not answers that everyone agrees on. That applies to every subject, let alone one like this.
Bundy’s conversion doesn’t erase the fact that he raped and killed over 30 women beforehand so my point about his existence not being possible in an ideal world still stands. I also used him as a notorious example of a specific kind of evil. I easily could have said Dahmer, Rader, Ramirez, Jack the Ripper, etc.
First, let me reiterate that I agree with you that this is not the best of all possible worlds. But if there were a god who planned this out how can we tell what calculus he uses in computing benefits.
Let’s use Hitler as the worst person. I think we’d all agree the world would be better without him. But, if no Hitler, no state of Israel. I have a friend whose parents met in a camp. His father’s first wife and children were killed, but he wouldn’t be here if that hadn’t happened. I’d probably not be here is my father hadn’t spent two years in Europe during the war. A large chunk of the people alive today would vanish without WW II, to be replaced by others. Who could tell if this would be a good thing or not?
I prefer to use a baby killed during a tsunami. No free will issues, and at least one of the killed babies would surely make a positive impact on the world. Much simpler, but leads to the same conclusion.
I know entire libraries have been written on the subject but I often wonder why God simply didn’t make the universe Heaven from the start rather than it being something you experience after death. There’s always the argument that an eternal Heaven would more than make up for a mortal lifetime of pain and misery but it isn’t particularly common or convincing to skeptics.
That runs into the omnipotence problem again. God can just skip Hitler and make there be a state of Israel, God can skip the missing ancestors and just make all the people who wouldn’t otherwise exist, and so on.
Omnipotence means there’s no such thing as a necessary evil or necessary precursor, an omnipotent creator can just make their ideal world from scratch with none of the undesirable parts.
The old “God works in mysterious ways, god has a master plan, you don’t
know everything god knows so how dare you judge him,” response.
I.e. the Job defense: “I’m god and you’re not!”
Basically the claim is that this is the best possible world God could make. Well, let’s take Plantinga against himself. Plantinga’s ontological argument goes something like
If we can conceive of god, God is the greatest of everything. Existence is greater than nonexistence, so god must exist.
So my revision is that this is the best universe that god could create or he would have created a better one. But we humans can conceive of better universes. Therefore, god is either incapable of making a better universe, incapable of thinking of a better universe, wants this universe with evil in it, or doesn’t exist.
In fact, we can make it better. The fact that humans can and have improved matters directly implies that either God doesn’t care, isn’t actually omnipotent (or even as powerful as humans), or just doesn’t exist. Because the idea that even a moderately powerful & benevolent god (much less a tri-omni one) couldn’t do better than we have with all our limitations is frankly absurd.
If humans are doing better than God, is he really a god? The “this is the best of all worlds God could create” argument is actually pretty insulting to him.
Ah, but an omnipotent god can do evil, but an omnibenevolent god can’t. That’s how we can prove a bi-omni god cannot exist, being logically impossible.
As for god making people up, that reminds me of a baseball game I had as a kid. There were disks for players divided into the results expected from being at bat. A slugger’s home run section would be bigger than that of a pitcher. It came with cards for people in the ML at the time, but you can make your own. Maybe we’re just one big baseball game with god scratching out cards for us.
But god popping people into being is possible, but he appears not to want to be so obvious these days. In the Bible however he had no trouble with it, supposedly. Odd, that.
Yup. Best of all possible worlds is just an assertion, which seems to be false on the face of it, unless you use circular reasoning. I’ve read a philosopher who introduced the idea that this is the worst of all possible worlds, and the god who made it hates us. You may think that you have a blissful relationship with your spouse, but God lets you have that to make the inevitable death that will end it worse. The worst world and best world can be argued for in the same way.
I wanted to come back to this remark.
The god we are talking about is expressly a Christian one. The concept of God being our creator and the creator of the universe and the descriptions of God being all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good come from the Bible. The stories may not be literal descriptions of anything, but they are the stories used to define the concepts we are taking about. We wouldn’t have this concept of god without those stories. So they are fair game for exploring god’s motivations and principles and moral code. If we are discussing what God is like, then we have to respond to the ones making the claims, and those claims are drawn from the Bible.
We can argue the logical concepts without the Bible, but this thread discussion is greater than just the logic of Plantinga’s argument.
Yeah. As much as people like to deflect criticism by claiming or implying that they are talking about some unspecific, totally-not-Christian creator, we all know that this conversation is about the Christian God. That’s why nearly all conversation in the thread has been aimed at the qualities allegedly possessed by that specific god; a lot of the arguments people have been making are pretty meaningless otherwise.
Kind of. Yes, the modern Christian Church has generally embraced the view that God is omnimax. The Bible is much more equivocal though.
On the one hand, yes there are omni-like descriptions. On the other there are plenty of passages in the bible where god doesn’t know something (multiple times where he needs to “go see” whether something is happening or not), or can’t do something (e.g. iron chariots) or commits atrocities, or asserts characteristics like jealousy (elsewhere described as a sin).
I think most of us are aware of the various hermeneutics but most need to drift pretty far from a straightforward reading.
Anyway, this is arguably a bit of pedantry; we only need to change the point to be: the Christian God as it is popularly understood / taught now.
I don’t really have any interest in defending conceptions of the Christian God beyond what’s relevant for this thread—indeed, my invocation of that particular deity, which seems to have brought on this tangent, was just because I’m mostly familiar with the argument for their atemporal nature from a Christian tradition, mostly Boethius via Saint Augustine. But the central question of this thread can be discussed without this context, and arguing for a stance within that discussion doesn’t require me to accept any particular historical baggage—Plantinga’s argument can be correct even if the concept of the Christian God, or any god, is (as I think it is) nonsense.
I always feel I have to push back on this sort of thing at least a little. Yes, we need a degree of mutual intelligibility, but this doesn’t entail having perfectly clear and unambiguous definitions of everything (that’s just the Socratic fallacy)—if it did, no discussion ever would get off the ground, since there’d be no real way to get started. Rather, concepts and preconceptions are sharpened only through discussion, and reaching a point of mutual understanding is exactly what good discussion is for.
The idea is that actions only have a moral value if they’re freely chosen—if you’re forced to, say, give alms to a beggar, you can’t really claim credit for that being a particularly good deed. But then, it follows that one also must be able to choose otherwise—i.e., choose evil. So a universe that played out according to a fixed plan where everybody always did the right thing because they can’t do differently would, on that conception, have less moral value than one where people choose good over evil even a small fraction of the time.
Why wouldn’t God be able to act in the present? Even I can do that. Besides, of course, this is just one attempt at offering a different characterization of an atemporal existence—‘everything happening simultaneously’ obviously still presupposes a certain sort of temporality. The point is that God’s knowledge of anybody’s actions, if God is atemporal, credibly doesn’t constitute foreknowledge, i.e. knowledge that temporally precedes the act, and that it is only such knowledge that is inconsistent with (a could-have-done otherwise conception of) free will.
That’s the intuition that Plantinga’s argument challenges. If we’re free beings, then at every juncture, we could have chosen the right way; that we don’t always is up to us, not God. And if this works out—which logically, it does—then it can’t be true that there is a contradiction between tri-omnihood and the existence of evil, no matter whether there’s free will. Essentially, you can read it as an argument that even omnipotence doesn’t allow an entity to do anything, such as create a square circle or a stone they themself can’t lift, but rather, imbues it just with all possible powers—and it’s not possible to create a world with moral good, but without moral evil.
I think Plantinga’s own move here is to recast physical evil as moral evil by a non-human spirit, e.g. the devil—to whom then the free will defense again applies, just taking into account the larger set of humans and non-human spirits that can choose between good and evil. I’ll leave it up to you if that moves the needle.
In what sense? Free will requires you to be able to choose between the options available to you, but those options are of course relative to who and what you are. It’s not a choice available to you, for instance, to take flight and soar into the skies, but that doesn’t diminish your freedom. Likewise, a mentally challenged person may not have the same set of choices as a mentally sound one, but can choose between those just as well.
It’s not a given that such an additional constraint would make the world as a whole a better place, however. Think of it like an optimization problem: maximize the moral value of the world, while keeping moral evil minimal. If you’ve found a solution to that problem, then any further constraint you add will move you away from that—either increasing moral evil as a whole, or decreasing the moral value of the world. It may be counterintuitive, but so is the fact that when you fall into a black hole, any attempt to escape with the strongest engines conceivable will only lead you to reach the singularity faster.
I mean, do we have a desire to do every evil thing possible? If there were some evil things prohibited to us, we’d have the same discussion, just with whatever is the apex evil then replacing whatever it is now. Would the world be less valuable if we couldn’t take candy from babies? And I think at some point it becomes clear that we’re reaching the threshold where the world almost has no moral value, since we’re basically not free to do anything but choose good anymore. If we are at the point where the moral value is highest, then any change will take us toward a lesser moral value.
This is just false in a universe with free will. And again, you don’t have to agree that this is plausible, or even possible: but if there is free will, then any agent in the universe does stand before a real choice in every action they perform.
I think the most common answer to this is that it isn’t God that commits us to heaven or hell, but rather, we choose to turn towards or away from God. But for that, we do need to make choices. So heaven (or hell) isn’t so much a realm which we could’ve been born in, but a state we reach through the way we live our lives.
Sure, but any good-faith effort at doing so would require engaging with reams of scholarship on biblical exegesis. The prevailing opinion is that the bible is a divinely inspired, but historically contextualized artefact; so any attempt to get at the core of the divine revelation within will have to strip back layers and layers of historical context, interpretation, mistakes, biases, will have to take into account the audience the writer was anticipating and their knowledge and preconceptions, the genre they were writing in and its conventions, the way the bible was later assembled from often contradictory source materials by committee, the political calculations that went into this assembly, the notion that God purposefully revealed different aspects of themself in different ages to suit the understanding of the people at the time, and on and on. Compare this to the difficulty of getting at the facts of a case from just eyewitness testimony, where people actually saw something not too long ago and may differ wildly in their recollections. If you want to go through all that trouble and make a real case, rather than just cherry-picking literal interpretations of bible verses, be my guest; for me, it’s both beyond my capabilities and interests.
Again, not in a universe made by an omniscient and omnipotent being, by definition. It’s not an “intuition”, it’s a straightforward consequence of those two qualities.
Free will is an incoherent concept in the first place. It’s not even wrong, it’s just an undefined assertion of human specialness. Pure ego gratification.
And at any rate, it doesn’t matter: again, in a universe made by an omniscient and omnipotent being nothing can happen that was not foreseen by that being, otherwise it isn’t omniscient and omnipotent in the first place. That’s what the words mean.
Free will doesn’t even come into it, even if the phrase had meaning.
I don’t know if this is what others in the thread are alluding to but I do think free will exists in the sense of being able to practically act according to your desires without coercion. You can sign a contract of your own free will or choose one cereal over another of your own free will. It doesn’t exist in the sense that you can magically make an uncaused choice divorced from your nature and everything that happened beforehand or in the sense of basic desert. Either one doesn’t necessarily let God off the hook for creating the universe as is rather than a post scarcity utopia like Heaven is supposed to be. I want to add that even though we’re primarily discussing the free will of people most beings that suffer harm and inflict harm are non human animals and their hardships can’t be handwaved away merely because they aren’t intelligent as we are. I don’t like that animals have to fight and eat other regularly to survive just as much as I don’t like the horrible things humans do to each other (and animals).
That’s not what most people mean when they use the term; they use it to mean some undefined…thing… that is neither random nor determined. Even a simple computer can make choices as long as its program has an IF/THEN branch; that doesn’t give it “free will”.
You keep asserting this, why don’t you try and make an argument? Because omniscience and omnipotence are absolutely compatible with free choice. There’s only a problem with knowing how a choice plays out if you do so before the fact, but with God being an atemporal being, their knowledge isn’t foreknowledge. Compare an entity existing at the end of the universe: they can plausibly know everything that’s ever happened (hence, be omniscient) but without that being any problem at all for the issue of free will. Consequently, omniscience isn’t in conflict with free will.
Also wrong, but not something I’m interested in debating with you again—you seem to have some need to disparage the concept as something that to have belief in is almost akin to a character flaw, the origin of which would certainly be interesting to interrogate, but seems beyond the scope of this thread. Let’s just say that out of those people who think about these things for a living, only a minority of 11% agrees with you.
I would disagree with the “i.e.” there – the opposite of giving alms is not giving alms, not necessarily choosing evil. Now, sometimes, the absence of an action may result in suffering (as in this example), but that’s not always the case, and most Christians would maintain that’s never the case in heaven. Free will does not entail suffering; another reason why it doesn’t work as a solution IMHO.
As mentioned in other threads, I agree with you on that point, and it is great that on the dope there are others willing to call out the big picture – just because this is a long-standing philosophical topic doesn’t entail that the premises are valid nor that the definitions are clear.
I would differ slightly in the description though; I would say ego gratification is part of it certainly. But a bigger part is that theories of the mind go way back before either neuroscience or computer science. Decisions certainly felt like they came from nowhere, and there seemed no prospect of ever linking thoughts to the physical world.
Free will was never adequately defined, but it’s still understandable why people would believe that such a thing existed.
In the modern world, I think people just start from the premise that free will has been sufficiently defined, and that it’s incompatible with determinism, and go from there. I don’t think they look skeptically enough at the foundations of that debate.