What is “will” if not an emotion? If a person doesn’t want to do something, they lack the will. They may end up doing it anyway, but only because they don’t want to face the consequences of not doing it. Like, they may clean up their room just so their mother doesn’t yell at them. But a person can’t will themselves to “want” to do something, and neither can they can will themselves to be afraid of consequences. No one does anything without being compelled to do it. Take away a person’s motivation, and you have someone who is catatonic.
What’s funny to me is that people often seem to think emotion is more like a voluntary action than an internal, involuntary state. They say stuff like, “Don’t be sad”. “Quit crying.” “Be happy!” “Get motivated!”
No argument there. An omni-benevolent God would care, by definition, but just a glimpse at our world is enough to show that such a thing does not exist.
Since an omnipotent and omniscient god could be maximally benevolent, and isn’t, even if you believe in a bi-omni god you have no reason to worship him - except out of fear, that is.
Then we have to get to the root of what emotions are. As far as I can tell, they are chemical processes that affect our mental condition. In which case, you would completely lose the independent agent argument: our decisions would be fully regulated by our body chemistry.
This is semantically incorrect. “Free will” refers to the ability to make a choice, you are using “will” in the sense of “motivation”. You can still choose to do something the you do not really want to do.
I am curious where this term came from. When I first heard the omnimax spec decades ago (in reference to Yowee), it was tripartite, this element was not included. I have only seen it used in the past five or six years. And, honestly, it makes no sense. Two guys vying for the same girl will end up half-satisfied (one of them will be disappointed), there is nothing an “omni-benevolent” deity can do to fix that. A perfectly balanced system cannot do anything, there must be imbalance or there will be stasis. An omniscient deity must surely know that “omni-benevolence” is unworkable. It is not clear to me where this absurdity came from, but it was not the adherents and clerics who ultimately failed to save me. They never went anywhere near it.
I think monstro is right; our emotions are a vast part of our decision-making machinery. We’re much more swayed by our “feelings” about things than by our rational deductions.
What’s impressive is how good a job we do, even on this basis.
Two things, you’re making assertions about science that haven’t been proven. Weather models imperfectly try to predict the weather … you have no way to show that these methods could be expanded to predict every subatomic particle’s destiny forevermore, even ignoring Chaos Theory. Furthermore, as ridiculous as trying to have a discussion about God and free will in non-religious terms sounds on the surface, I do understand what you’re saying, but … you’ll have to explain to me how what I said … " If he knows what we’ll do , how does that hinder OUR free will?" is a religious question. I didn’t say, "According to Catholic doctrine, blah, blah , blah … " The discussion is about God. Take Him out of the debate, I could just as well ask, “If I were clairvoyant, how would that hinder MY free will?” What makes me no longer free to do whatever I choose simply because I already know the outcome and what I will choose? And I’m not accepting your assertions. Explain why.
I don’t get why a benevolent God would spare us pain. For all we know, if we accept, for the sake of this discussion, that God exists and is all-powerful, what’s to say that He doesn’t know that brief pain in this life can lead to eternal bliss in the next? How is allowing bad things to happen to be interpreted as a negative attribute for an eternal supreme being? Maybe whatever He does is the best thing He could possibly do for our long-term benefit. There’s no possible way to know (except maybe die?). I’m not getting that letting us suffer is necessarily bad. Maybe you’re resentful of not being explicitly told all the reasons and details relating to your destiny or future, but why would a supreme being be expected to explain Himself to His creatures? Children hating the parent for not letting them eat nothing but candy and stay up all night … and making them get that painful vaccination. Why, if that parent were benevolent, he/she wouldn’t let me experience any pain. Bad parents.
If a good parent knew for certain that it’s child would suffer, I would think they would do all they could so it wouldn’t suffer A human parent can’t know what will happen in the future so they can only guess at many things, but they don’t keep themselves hidden from their child, No good parent would make a child beg for it’s necessities nor grant them any thing harmful, no matter how it begged.
I am just a human parent with limited abilities, but I would not make my child beg for anything I knew was for it’s own good nor give anything that would bring him or others pain. One has no free will to be born with a Handicap or illness that causes suffering as some must go through today. I would expect a Supreme all knowing being would be kinder than me.
Suffer? So the world should be structured so no one ever suffers? Does that go for all animal life, too? Are you saying no creature should exist if it doesn’t have a perfect existence? Is aging and dying suffering? Should we not die? So, a good God should only create perfect beings? Gods? You resent not being a god.
What are your necessities? Oxygen? Water? Everything handed to you on a platter? Or the raw materials to make what you need?
How do you know what’s for your own good? How do you know that no one should experience pain? No pain, no gain.
It’s certainly not the least disturbing thing about a religion!
I believe the first part but not the second. Free will exists subjectively whether you believe in it or not, and whether you want it to, or not. It’s a lot like the existentialist claim about value systems.
Well, yeah. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that if an all-powerful entity created something like life as we know it, they wouldn’t necessarily have to create the concept of suffering. In fact, it seems pretty sadistic that they did.
A theoretical all-powerful being would be able to get off in whatever way pleases it most, I seriously doubt that Og gets a hard-on from human misery. In fact, it is a tough row to hoe to convince us that Og is anything but blasé about the whole thing. Why should it even care? How much more self-important can we get, to think that we matter to the almighty? What a bunch of egotistical pricks we are.
This god would not fit any definition of “good” that us humans have come up with. In other words, if a human created sentient entities that could suffer when there was really no need to allow them to, then we would most certainly consider that evil.
Yes, but only because you fear the consequences of not doing it. As a kid, I ate canned asparagus against my will every time they were served with dinner. No matter how much I gagged, I would eat those nasty things. But it wasn’t out of virtuousness or pure masochism, but rather out of fear of my father’s wrath. Take away that fear, and I wouldn’t have had any compelling reason to eat those asparagus.
Which is why “training” with violence can so effective. If I hadn’t been literally knocked out of my seat a few times at the dinner table, my brain wouldn’t have “thought” to be afraid. My father is a big believer in free will, and yet his fear-based parenting style constrained the will of his children, limiting our options to “what will make daddy beat me” and “what will make daddy not beat me”. If your decisions are determined by fear, then you are not free.
Christians believe we have the freedom to make both good and bad choices, completely independent of God. But how can this be? God supposedly created us. He supposedly created the natural processes that dictate our neurochemistry, which determines our behavior and cognition. He triggered the cascade of events that have lead us to our present state.
Some even believe he can change the course of events if someone pleads with him effectively enough. If someone asks God to help them win over everyone at the job interview and he grants the request, then someone’s free will has been taken from them. Whether it be the interviewee or the hiring panel’s. And then the poor sap that doesn’t get hired because of God’s invention finds himself in a bad situation. If he makes a poor choice because of his unfortunate position, is it really all his fault? Or does God deserve a lot of the blame?
This is getting funny. But you quoted me so I’ll reply. We have no way of knowing all the ramifications of existence and eternity. Perhaps pain is required in life for spiritual reasons beyond our comprehension, or at least, unrevealed to us thus far. Everything that lives, ultimately suffers to some degree. I don’t know that there has to be a reason, but I know that “Q” isn’t letting us in on that reason in this life (and I’m in no hurry to find out).
I’ve seen it for ages, and have read a huge philosophy book which considers it. Omnibenevolence does not mean that everyone is happy all the time - it just means that happiness is maximized. You can easily construct cases where two people cannot be simultaneously happy - guy loves a girl who hates him. I don’t know how happiness gets maximized there, but I’m not god. But any needless death falsifies omni-benevolence.
A common argument is that this is indeed the best of all possible worlds - but anyone thinking that is sorely lacking in imagination.
Like I said in the last post, some suffering is not impossible under omnibenevolence, But it has to be the least possible suffering.
For your shot example, the small pain of a needle is good in the long run. But what if the doctor didn’t numb the area, or used a too big needle, or plunged it too deep, or wiggled it about. He’s not minimizing the pain associated with the benefit, and is a monster.
A god who cares about our worship would at least explain the general reasons behind things, right? A parent will tell a kid why the shot is needed. Has god spent his bandwidth budget for eternity?
A god who doesn’t give a crap about us, or who actively hates us, is a lot more in keeping with the world than the loving god we hear about. Wouldn’t get the tushes in the pews, though. God’s product seems a lot like the ones made by Dilbert’s company - crap, too expensive, kills people, but the suckers still buy.
Maybe God doesn’t have a long white beard, but pointy hair instead.
He can change - but then he didn’t know what he was going to do, and how it affected the world, and is thus not omniscient. You can have one or the other, not both.
We can have two gods, one omnipotent and one omniscient. The omnipotent one bonks the omniscient one on the head with a lightning bolt, and the omniscient one says “I knew you were going to do that.”
What’s amusing to me are the line of posters applying average human intelligence and limited knowledge and experience to analyzing what they appear to acknowledge as an eternal all-powerful being responsible for the creation of all existence … the dust mites trying to analyze Einstein from the perspective of his carpet
But when you create the concept of a universe, you also create the concept of “required” and the concept of “pain”. An all-powerful god created the concept of pain or suffering when they didn’t even need to.
You may find it amusing that we mere humans are trying to figure out the reasoning behind such things as pain, but what’s the alternative? Logic is all we have to approach the asymptote of truth in our realities. All we can do is assume our logic is universal and if it’s not, all bets are off.
