POE Redux

Great Debates
1

Because we don’t have enough threads about the Problem of Evil and the Existence of God…

First, some disclaimers behind spoiler tags so I don’t waste valuable screen space in personal mumblings. Still, please read them before jumping in.

I call myself an atheist in keeping to what Dawkins says about some visions of god being so far from the mainstream that calling yourself a theist only confuses the issue. I am probably a deist if it mattered but under interrogation I might look more like an atheist than anything else, even if I keep open to the existence of some god(s) and the supernatural in ways that do not intersect the natural world. That is, if there are any, they are undisprovable and not worthy of discussion.

At any rate, my views of God and religion are not based on any of the major religions (that I am aware of). Please do not reply in rejection of any established religion. If you hate religion or god, rock on. Go tell it on the mountains, not here.

Finally, I am not set to convince anyone of anything. I just had an idea I had and haven’t thought all the way through that I wanted to toss around in the hopes that other perspectives might help me build it or teat it down. Don’t jump on me and before you jump on the ideas, bear in mind that I might not have the answers to your questions.

Thinking of the traditional argument against a benevolent omnipotent god of the widow in Darfur (or whatever suffering person is in fashion at the moment). Here I propose some potential scenarios of how these two could be reconciled. Ask for clarification and/or tear away at will:

1- Human life is not that special on god’s accounting. Human suffering is not different from animal suffering or rock weathering. It just happens and it somehow doesn’t affect the soul.

2- Some humans are not people. That is, they don’t have souls and are not different from animals on god’s accounting. Those with souls are living lives without suffering.

3- People agree to the suffering before coming to life. The universe is deterministic and a life’s suffering is all mapped out in advance. Before being incarnated in a suffering life, the soul knows what is in store for it and agrees to it.

4- Souls have more than one body. Be it simultaneously or at different times (reincarnation), a soul has different bodies with different experiences and degrees of suffering. In the end, they all even out and all souls have an overall positive experience.
Most of these could be combined. 2, 3 and 4 could easily be true at the same time, I think.
I am calling “soul” whatever it is that makes humans different from animals, if anything. I start on the assumption that there must be such thing. If there isn’t, then this discussion makes no sense so don’t try to knock that down.

I am calling “suffering” whatever material harm can come to a person (hunger, pain) as well as existential harm (anguish over one’s own fate or that of loved ones). I think suffering is inevitable in the universe as we know it. Let’s not argue that point here either.

Thoughts?

2

There are an infinite number of possible Gods we can postulate, each with his own unique properties.

The tricky part is coming up with a God who is:

  1. Logically consistent
  2. In accord with the universe as we observe it
  3. Worthy of being worshipped

Most people settle for two out of three and call it a day.

3

Good. Do you anything to say about the OP?

4

Taking these one at a time:

Rocks can’t suffer. Animals can. “Souls” (whatever those are), are irrelevant. An organism can either suffer or it can’t. For an omnimax God, it can never be logically necessary to permit any suffering, therefore all suffering is gratuitous, therefore God has to lack at least one omnimax quality, therefore there can’t be an omnimax God.

What do souls have to do with anything? Is it ok to torture animals if you think they don’t have souls?

Is there anyone who doesn’t suffer? If the only people who suffer are those who lack souls, then doesn’t that pretty much mean that nobody has a soul?

I didn’t agree to it. Even if “souls” DID agree to it (and why would they?), the suffering would still be gratuitous, and therefore incompatible with an omnimax God. It would also have the effect of pretty much rendering human morality meaningless. Nothing you did could ever be morally wrong because you wouldn’t be able to do anything to an other person that they hadn’t already agreed to. You’d have full pre-approval to rob, rape, murder or torture anyone you wanted, and no moral standing to ever judge or punish anyone else.

I don’t think you know exactly what “deterministic” means, by the way. It doesn’t necessarily mean consciously pre-determined. It just means caused as opposed to random. The causes don’t have to be conscious.

This doesn’t eliminate or explain gratuitous suffering, it just tries to hide it with parsley.

5

My point is that it’s fairly easy to construct new theological systems that account for suffering we see in the universe, but those systems either don’t synch up with what people want out of religion in the first place, or they are internally inconsistent.

For example, if human life isn’t precious to God, then why pray to him for help or guidance? Why turn to him as a source of morality or justice?

If some humans don’t have souls then why does suffering seem to be universal? Everyone suffers to some extent, even if everyone isn’t tortured.

If our lives are predetermined then God has no role at all in human affairs. Pray to him or not, follow his commandments or not, it doesn’t really matter.

And so on. It’s not enough just to say “Oh here’s an explanation for human suffering!” You have to extend the ramifications of that explanation to the entire theology you build around it. Or admit that the new theology you’ve constructed is logically inconsistent.

6

Honestly, I’m a bit at a loss as to what it is we should be debating. You can very well choose to believe any and all of your four propositions, or think of others. For instance, my personal favourite was always the Leibnizian (or, as some prefer to refer to it, Panglossian) view that we live in the best of all possible universes – shit happens because it wouldn’t be possible otherwise. For some reason, this is taken to be (excessive) optimism by some, but I never quite got that.

As for my opinion about the stated options, I find the idea that some humans may not be people to be abhorrent – both an excuse for not caring about others’ suffering, as well as inflicting it yourself, because if it’s true that only humans who aren’t people suffer, you couldn’t truly harm somebody, because if they suffer, they weren’t people anyway. Also, that people agreed to the suffering beforehand invites some Oprah-esque philosophy that ultimately people who suffer are not worthy of pity, because they brought it onto themselves, though they may not be aware of it.

7

Bolding added for emphasis. Perhaps you should explain what you mean by benevolent and how that applies to a God who does not regard human life as special or suffering as more significant than rock weathering.

I am far from omnipotent and I don’t think I’m all that benevolent (I just finished eating a chicken sandwich), but I will occasionally expend a little effort to relieve an animal’s suffering or extend a little happiness to it if the animal is right in front of me.

Positing the existence of a soul but not defining it, this proposition is unfalsifiable. It strikes me, however, as a particularly dangerous line of reasoning that can (and frankly has) led to all kinds of atrocities. From a pragmatic point of view, I don’t see what good can come of it. On an emotional level, it’s disgusting.

So pretty much no one has a soul then, except for a very few enlightened ones (if we take their word for it, which I’m not inclined to do). Why postulate a “benevolent” God whose benevolence extends to virtually no one?

Unverifiable and unfalsifiable of course, but such a believe leads to more harm than good. If someone chose to suffer, why, it would be wrong of you to help them!

Sure. Why not? Except that there’s absolutely no evidence that this is true and the only reason to believe it is to make someone feel better about God, or themselves, or both, and by minimizing the significance of suffering you again excuse (even if unintentionally) selfishness and apathy.

8

The earth is the setting for a gigantic role playing game. ‘Souls’ in heaven actually ‘run’ the ‘characters’ on earth, with angels as individual ‘game masters’ in constant contact with god, the ‘reality engine’ running the whole thing. The ‘souls’ themselves are immortal, generating new characters as the old ones die. New characters are created on a random basis, not a point build. Evil is the result of severe imbalances in the game due to the open nature of the rules.

Shrug, it’s as likely as any other theory.

9

Human suffering is generally caused by other humans, in the cases it is not, it is caused by nature. In all cases, the natural world has dominion over humanity because the natural world owns what we believe to be the concept of time. Therefore the effect suffering has on what is commonly referred to as the ‘soul’ is negligable. Human suffering is a state of mind caused by environmental stimuli.

I do not know if the weathering rock feels or suffers, I can only assume it does not because my mind can not construct a scenario wherein a rock can say ‘ouch’.

All humans are people, not all people ACT human. If you believe in humanity as we know it to exist and at the same time believe that humans have souls then all humans have souls at the start as standard equipment, if you will. Nothing that lives does so without suffering.

This seems outlandish to me, except for the possiblity that logic, being a trapping of humanity, does not exist until we are in fact human or born. Therefore it is possible to agree to the suffering without the consideration of consequences because before life, there is no logic, no if-then scenario by which to decide whether or not we will be born into a suffering world.

Well, if you believe in reincarnation then you must admit that not all souls have an overall positive experience. Unless by this you intend to say that all souls ultimately reach nirvana which by its’ definition would be positive. If you’re saying that from birth to death the experience if positive overall, I would disagree, if you’re saying that from the creation of the soul until it reaches nirvana is the overall experience, with this, I would agree.

I personally believe that even animals possess what we consider a soul. I believe if you feel, or emote or otherwise connect with another human or an animal of any kind, that you in fact possess a soul. There may be a distinction with a slight difference here, but the mother of a calf loves the calf as the mother of a human child loves the human child. Of course, the depth and understanding provided by evolution has made the love real and tangible in the human moreso than in the cow, but the existance of it proves the existance of the soul, IMO.

Suffering is life, life is suffering. If you can fear, feel pain, love, hate, you suffer. No arguments here.

10

A few general responses.

Yes, this is all unfalsifiable. I don’t see how it would not. The supernatural is so, by definition.

Yes, any of this could have ramifications on whichever cosmology surrounds it. It could be the excuse for all kinds of abuses. It could mean a god too lame or too pointless to care about. So be it. I am not trying to make any god more worthy of worship or its worship beneficial to humankind. If this ends up in all of us agreeing that there is a god and that it needs to be placated with human sacrifices, then that’s what it is.

Suffering is not avoidable unless each individual is an island. As long as living beings interact, there will have to be some degree of interference among them that makes life a bit less for at least one of them. The leaf of a tree shades part of the leaf of another for a fraction of a second. Bam. Suffering. There really is no way around it. We could try to make a scale of suffering and decide what the threshold is for acceptable suffering, but there will be suffering.
I guess the unresolved question remains as to what “benevolent” means. I do not have a definition that settles anything. I tend to think that an omnimax god would have no need to engender a flawed creation. So benevolence is somewhat redundant.

11

I think maybe it should be clarified that the POE is not supposed to be an argument against any possible God, but only against an omnimax one.

12

This is certainly a possible solution, though it would in turn affect quite a lot of others things, depending on what other attributes the god in question has. For one thing, why we’re here in the first place.

I would say that everyone suffers, to a degree. I honestly can’t imagine a person going through life never suffering at all. This would also get into the problem of free will, since no person (nor non-person, but they wouldn’t count) would be able to cause suffering in another person.

I’d say a problem with this is that it precludes that life affects us. That is to say, that we are who we are because of our upbringing and the things around us. Our “us” before life, not having experienced our life, is a different person than the “us” now, and so don’t have any ownership over us. One way of getting out of that might be to say that the god in question creates us before our life as we will be in life, but that has problems of its own, namely that it again calls into question why we’re being incarnated and also doesn’t cope with the fact that we’re not the same person throughout the entirety of our lives.

I really don’t think this one works. By this justification, it is perfectly acceptable for us to do all sorts of horrible things just so long as we do a moral good greater in extremity than it. If I donate a million pounds to a hospital, I get to break someone’s leg and be morally righteous. No, I don’t think we can take an average like that.

Interesting points though.

13

I tend to agree. I think that “soul” is a sliding scale and that all creatures experience reality to a degree given by their awareness of their environment and their place in it. Which is why I think the weathering of rocks is not particularly different from all other degrees of suffering. It is all chemistry in action and I don’t want to be the one who says that humans and cows have souls but flatworms don’t.

14

Why would an omnimax god need to eliminate evil? It could be a maleficent omnimax god.

Except for my own argument that an omnimax god would see no need to diddle with flawed creations and his creation would then be perfect and this must somehow mean benevolence in the sense that what god did is good (dangerously equating good (as in not evil) with good (as in not bad).

15

Pardon my cherry picking, but I just don’t have good answers to all the points made and I don’t want to waste anyone’s time reading fillers with intention to confuse or distract.

Ok. I was thinking more along the lines of overcome obstacles or learning experiences. You get some suffering but after all is said and done you emerge a better being so the suffering is not a deal breaker.

Just as you could go on vacation and one day it rained but you still had fun in a museum and had a blast all the other days. It wasn’t perfect in the sense that one day it rained and that limited your options for that day but all in all, the vacations were a success and you are glad you went.

Or a fall learning to walk or ride a bike. It hurt, you lived, you learned, life carried on. In the end, you are better off having fallen that time than not having learned to walk or ride.

16

Ah, I get you. Connected events - something having a downside and an upside in and of itself, and being acceptable because the good outweighs the bad. Fair enough. But if we have an omnimax god, then the problem arises that it doesn’t need for us to experience the bad in order to learn the good lesson; if it deems that lesson important, it could simply make us know it, implant the knowledge. Start humans off knowing how to walk or ride a bike, so that the falling over part isn’t necessary at all.

17

I would add:

  1. God grants his creatures free will. Free will is meaningless if God is always hovering over us like an overprotective parent, blocking us from making mistakes and protecting us from life’s hurts. To be free, we must be free to commit sin and evil and work harm on other creatures; and we must be at the mercy of natural disasters and diseases, except to the extent that we invent our own ways to protect ourselves.

See Kipling’s “Natural Theology.”

18

Omnimax in this instance does include omnibenevolent. You’re right that an omnipotent, -powerful, and -present deity doesn’t necessarily need to be good.

19

Well, I think that:

So unless we are spared of existence as a whole, there will always be some level of suffering as long as we live under physical laws, in the presence of other beings and are free to act.

20

I can buy that.