I would agree that suffering under those conditions is pretty much inevitable, but that doesn’t to me mean that therefore suffering is ok. It simply moves the acceptability on behalf of an omnimax god to the least possible amount of suffering, rather than none at all. And since such a god can avert quite a bit of suffering, he should do so - people shouldn’t need to fall off bikes.
Plus of course there’s those elements of suffering not cause by the presence of other beings or ourselves (or at least, not under their or our control), such as natural disasters. As with your leaf example, not all suffering is the result of a free willed choice of another being - if the god in question values free will over a certain amount of suffering, it’s still no excuse for suffering stemming from events where free will isn’t a factor.
And I wouldn’t necessarily be willing to write off existence as a whole.
Just for fun, I have found it interesting to speculate whether life is one big Role-Playing Game (like Dungeons and Dragons), with myself as one of the players and God as the Game Master/Dungeon Master. Put in those terms:
The suffering of a human character in the game is not special on the GM’s accounting. Human suffering is not different from dragon suffering or rock monster suffering. It just happens and it doesn’t affect the player playing the character.
Some humans are NPCs (non-player characters controlled by the Game Master) without a will or life of their own. They don’t have souls and are not different from trolls or zombies on the GM’s accounting. Anyone who’s suffering through a miserable, dreary, one-dimensional life or who exists only as “cannon fodder” is an NPC.
People agree to play the game, knowing that they will face monsters, traps, and battles, and their characters could easily be injured or killed.
Players can have more than one character. Either they can play multiple characters at the same time in the same game, or they can have other characters at different times or in different campaigns. In the end, all players have an overall enjoyable, fulfilling experience playing the game.
For what it’s worth, I don’t really believe this or find it fully satisfying, but it does appear to be one way a benevolent God and human suffering could coexist.
But then we are on an issue of drawing a line. We all draw the line at different levels, so this goes nowhere.
Fall off an airplane, fall off a bike, bump into a rusty fence, bump into a smooth surface, touch a surface. What is acceptable? (and whichever you choose, you know we can come up with a thousand cases between that one and the next unacceptable one and repeat until we are measuring nano Newtons).
Have you ever seen kids do, well, anything, really?. They bump into stuff all the time and that is how they learn and move around. Most of those bumps are just that, bumps lighter than how you touch things. This is how animals work. See a worn navigate around. They bump into stuff, back a bit and try at a different angle.
Physical pain is a measure of what is out there. This is how we process the world around us. Things that should be more urgently avoided we read as more pain because our brain tries to avoid a certain level of damage. When you caress someone’s skin, you are being damaged. There is friction, there are chemical interactions, you lose a lot of skin cells. I personally don’t want to avoid that damage.
It’s how animals work because they have no alternative. The end goal of the bumping into things is to learn how not to bump into things, or which things it is not good to bump into. If you had a way to teach that lesson without the bumping - if you could spare a kid the pain before the lesson is learnt - then it seems to me only reasonable that you do so. An omnipotent being can, literally, provide that lesson without requiring any suffering at all
Neither would I. In all honesty, I don’t think i’d count losing skin cells (at least, to the extent in touching) counts as suffering. But if I were an omnipotent being, I could make it so that you had all the good things about caressing someone’s skin without the damage. All the good stuff - everything a-ok still in place, still effective - but without the bad. For us, it’s a case of accepting the bad along with the good because we have no other option. An omnimax god does have other options at its disposal.
Think of it like this. We could, if we so wanted, make the process worse - that’s within our power. Take a handshake - we could smear our hands with poison, or with an infection we have an immunity to, to hurt the other person more. We could pinch, or draw blood. We could grip their hand in a painful crush. We could do all these things without providing any added benefit. I’d hope you agree that doing these things would be morally wrong. By the same token, if we have it within our power to improve the experience without providing an added disadvantage, then it would be morally good of us to do so. An omnipotent being can remove all disadvantages while keeping the advantages intact. And omnipotent and omni-benevolent being should, logically, choose to do this.
The only way to solve the problem of evil* is to make it so your ‘benevolent’ God doesn’t care two figs about human suffering. This is required, because an omnimax god who cared two or more figs could ‘fix’ human suffering without any costs or negative consequences whatever (being omnimax) - and thus there isn’t any reason whatsoever not to do it.
*presuming an omnimax god, which the POE generally does
The first two scenarios given in the OP do this (presuming in the second case that people with souls are completely suffering-free), and are thus potential solutions to the POE. Similarly, the “role-playing game” scenario also renders human suffering inconsequential (or even entertaining and thus desirable, justifying its existence) and thus is also a potiential solution.
The third scenario in the OP presumes that the souls are willing to endure the suffering they do - but logically, this implies that they percieve a potential benefit greater than the ‘cost’ of enduring the pain. For that to be possible, the omnimax god must be allowing the situation where pain is necessary to achieve a reward. This is not something that a benevolent omnimax god would do if it was bothered in the slightest by human suffering. So unless you suppose that God is indifferent to or amused by human suffering (which is a solution to the POE on it’s own), scenario 3 of the OP is not a solution to the problem of evil.
Scenario 4 of the OP proposes that every soul experiences an equal amount of suffering. This answers the challenge of why life isn’t fair, but actually doesn’t resolve the POE in the slightest. A benevolent omnimax God wouldn’t inflict any suffering on its children, creations, or passersby, becuase it has no reason to cause or allow any suffering at all. Making everyone suffer the same isn’t compatible with this. So this isn’t a solution to the POE either.
The most rational solution to the POE, of course, is to presume that your God isn’t omnimax, but is instead constrained in ways outside of its control that prevent it from just fixing everything - wether by some kind of rule that evil must be punished or sorrowed over rather than erased, or an inability to give people free will (which is already incoherent itself) without allowing suffering (despite himself being a free willed being that supposedly doesn’t cause suffering), or perhaps because It isn’t aware of all suffering or consequences in time to fix them, or perhaps because It is just too weak to control the critters and world It’s created. Many ways of removing the omnimax factor have the added benefit of making the god-theory immune to other logical arguments as well.
Of course, most theists would rather have their cake and eat it too, so logic is what gets jettisoned instead.
You’ll have to add omnibenevolence and omniscience to make this interesting. A god who is not omniscient may cause unintended suffering because he does not know the results of his actions. The problem of evil from our world comes from the possibility that the amount of suffering can be reduced - even a little - without causing other problems. If God is omnibenevolent, we have a world where suffering is minimized - which does not mean it does not exist. So, disproving omnibenevolence just rules out certain classes of gods, not all of them. I doubt one could call the OT god, not to mention the Greek gods, omnibenevolent.
You’ll have to define benevolence. I’d hardly call this kind of god omnibenevolent or even very benevolent. Nasty gods don’t have a problem of evil associated with them.
If this was true, we’d have to wonder why God didn’t make this distinction when handing down various commands. This is true of almost any culture. Aztec gods, which seemed to enjoy seeing the hearts of warriors from other tribes being cut out, might fall into this category. However, it can be said that every one of us suffers more than is absolutely necessary, so this implies none of us are people.
Do they have a choice? In any case, agreeing to suffer more than is necessary doesn’t change the fact of the suffering.
Maybe, but not a maximally positive experience which would be required with an omnibenevolent god.
Again, we’d have to consider suffering greater than what is minimally required.
The one argument you didn’t make was the free will one, that is, free will implies that we must be permitted to make others suffer. To a certain extent this is true - my free will to get out of a relationship, say, might make the other person in it suffer. However it would not be much of a limitation on free will to make it impossible for people to become mass murderers. The problem of natural evil makes the free will argument moot in any case.
There are two (well, three) answers to the free will argument. (The third being maybe there’s no such thing as free will.)
The first possible answer is based on the fact that God Itself is typically described as a being with free will who will, nonetheless, never lie, never cheat, never steal, never slaughter virtually everybody with a flood - okay, not the last. But nonetheless, if God has the properties of an entity with free will that by its nature doesn’t use it to its full possible extent, then it logically follows that he could have created all of us the same way. This would remove all suffering that is the result of deliberate or accidentally harmful acts, which would be a respectable chunk of it. Also many religions state that god prefers good people. So why not make everyone good by nature?
The main problem with this explanation is that it clearly didn’t happen - it’s more an explanation of what a benevolent omnimax god would do. Oops. Well, it might fold neatly into Scenario 2 of the OP - perhaps only Ghandi and Mother Theresa were real people and all the rest of us are valueless constructs, or something.
The second way to get around the free will objection would be to leave free will (and the nature of humans) unaltered, but instead to have instant heavenly intervention happen to nullify the consequences of harmful acts. For example, one way to do this is to make everyone involnerable and infinitely tolerant of everything. Only problem with this is it clearly didn’t happen. Oops. Another possible explanation (which might actually have happened) is to leave everything as it is, but the instant somebody tries to do something bad, yank them out of the ‘real’ universe and stick them in a ‘fake’ universe, filled with all fake people but themselves, who will not be meaningfully hurt by the person’s harmful actions. In the ‘real’ universe, the person would either just vanish, or be replaced by a ‘fake’ person indistinguishable from the first except that it would be programmed to, like God, never behave in a destructive or malicious manner. (Of course, in no time at all there’d be nobody in the real world but constructs, but that’s not a logical problem -and you might even be able to twist it to fit poorly into an existing theology by calling the ‘real’ world ‘heaven’ and everyone’s personal ‘fake’ world ‘hell’. In which case the answer to the POE is that the world is bad because it’s hell itself.)
The second solution is non-optimal in that it lets the person, who is fooled into believing he’s doing harm to god’s chillun, can feel guilt and behave self-destructively, so it’s not really a solution to the POE. However, you can have a nearly-omnimax god, who is only constrained by the rule or opinion that people should be allowed to do harm to or punish themselves.
As I see it, a major problem with the idea that our souls consented to the suffering of the world or that we are just characters in a game is that it doesn’t make suffering moral; it just make souls or our “players” into separate entities. * I * most certainly did not consent; if “my soul” did, then “my soul” isn’t me, but some sort of parasite. If I’m just a character in a game, then my player is my puppetmaster, he’s not me.
As for the argument that excuses God for the suffering of the world due to a lack of power, that makes God to be very weak indeed. Weaker than WE are, considering that we’ve eliminated a great deal of suffering over the centuries. Why follow a God who is weaker than a bottle of asprin ?
The very idea of God is an artifact of those religions, so yes your ideas are based on them to that degree. If you reject them, there’s no reason to believe in God at all.
We seem to be running into the issue of what constitutes omnipotence. I don’t think omnipotence means being able to create a light so dark that it drowns all the marbles with fish. It is not a free license to bypass logic.
Interacting with the physical world means that this physical world affects you. If this effects somehow make you diverge from an arbitrary unattainable ideal, you could call that suffering but it is just an inevitable consequence of being able to interact with the world. Eliminating this “suffering” would mean eliminating the ability be real.
If the ability to somehow make experience happen without this extremely low level of “suffering” is required for omnipotence, then I must fall back on my humanity and lack of imagination to conceive the divine, I guess.
Plus, it would run into the issue of free will. What if I want to make myself suffer. Could I do that on this universe of a god that eliminated suffering?
We also seem to be running into the matter of omnibenevolence. To me, benevolence is just a byproduct of omnipotence and omniscience. It just means that a god that knows all and can make anything happen will be efficient about his doings and do the right thing once and no more.
Benevolence is not about catering to human whim, which is a changing taste. Benevolence is about attaining perfection for perfection’s sake. About not wasting power on fruitless things. If this perfection is not to the taste of someone, then so be it. As long as there is more than one individual in creation, there is bound to be someone who would want something else.
As in begbert’s scenario, it would take a universe for every person to make it satisfy everyone’s whims. So maybe we are just NPCs on Reagan’s universe.
Suffering is a mental state, and has nothing to do with the reality or otherwise of something.
It’s not hard to imagine; simply create everyone in a virtual world, or one where the creator has so much control over the environment that it might as well be virtual. At the very least you can eliminate all natural suffering that way.
Not significantly; you simply wouldn’t have been designed with much if any capacity to suffer. As for the free will argument; first, you need to come up with a definition of free will that makes sense. Second, it’s irrelevant since your nature and desires aren’t chosen by you, suffering or no suffering. If we had been created our creator would be the one who chose our nature; since we evolved, it was natural selection and no real choice was involved; in both cases our free wills had nothing to do with it even if free will exists.
Um, no. That’s simply redefining "benevolence " into something that bears no resemblance to how people normally use the word. A universe that was composed of nothing but light years of nerve tissue or the equivalent, constructed to feel nothing but suffering in the maximum capacity eternally would by your definition be benevolent. It’s about attaining the perfection of pain.
Perfection is a morally neutral term, not a benevolent one. And it’s highly questionably that it even has meaning when applied to anything as complex as a person or society. A circle can be perfect, but what does it even mean for a person or a tree to be perfect ?
Then that “old me” that gave consent is dead, or an alternate personality. NOT me.
then what? lobotomyland? Is it befitting a benevolent god to create a place where people just don’t take damage for suffering and blissfully self-destruct? I could buy that, by the way.
You could argue that bacteria don’t suffer when you kill them, but then again, how is our suffering any different from bacteria being put out? It’s all just chemical reactions. You could argue all suffering away with this argument.
Fair enough. What is benevolent, then? All the definitions I can come up with are somehow tied to an expectation of the person receiving the “good acts”. With a whole range of different tastes and expectations, how could this god be benevolent to all at the same time?
What I like of my conveniently made up definition is that it is centered on the needs and doings of this god, and not on the variety of creation.
What makes you think suffering is so fundamental to personhood ? We suffer because that’s the solution evolution found to the practical problem of keeping us alive long enough to breed, not because personhood and suffering are intrinsically linked.
That doesn’t work; benevolence is an attitude a creature has towards another creature. The needs, rights and desires of the targeted creature are intrinsically part of the process.
I don’t see why. Would eliminating all natural disasters make the world unreal? I don’t see how it affects free will, since it isn’t the choice of anyone to cause the problem.
The problem with an omnimax god is that while we mere humans can be given leeway as far as our ability to halt suffering goes, such a god can’t. Even one example of needless suffering, one iota of suffering more than is necessary, is enough to disprove such a god’s existence. Each and every example of suffering must be justified. And I don’t believe that’s possible.
You don’t even need an omnimax God; a God wouldn’t have to be all that powerful, and only moderately benevolent to do a better job than what we see in the real world. Why were we the ones who had to wipe out smallpox ?
If free will is limited in any way, it’s not really free will. God is not benevolent by nature, but by choice. He wants people to do the same, but he doesn’t want to constrain them. So he won’t stop them doing bad things, or take away the consequences of their choices, because that would interfere with their free will to make bad things happen.
It’s possible that people’s physical suffering is about as meaningful to God as what clothes they wear. People’s own relentless focus on whether they are happy or not, or getting what they deserve, or whether the world is going according to plan, is a failure of perspective (or a choice to constrict perspective) on their part. God’s just waiting for us to see the bigger picture (of how to become benevolent beings like him).
