POE Redux

Great Debates
61

Of course not, because it’s not happening now. But I see no reason to buy the claim that it hurt less then. The burn I suffered as a child by stepping on a soldering iron doesn’t hurt anymore either, but that’s because it healed, not because it hurt any less than it would if I burned myself again.

The rule; that pretty much IS most of what evil is.

As pointed out, the rational choice is not to make the bully. And if you can’t do that, go up and stop the bully, by force if necessary.

However, another problem with your analogy is that suffering is not nearly as relative as you pretend. Suffering that inflicts extreme lifelong trauma or even madness isn’t the same as being teased.

To smite him, or never make him. And driving people to despair or madness isn’t “teaching them coping skills”. It’s ruining them, and their lives.

Unless, of course you are a god and can make sure that never happens.

62

Both reasonable, but a better solution is that none of us have completely free will. We are not psychologically wired to kill babies, for instance, yet our will is free in most areas. God making mass murder impossible wouldn’t significantly decrease free will from what it is now. That we can’t fly doesn’t make us any less free in moving around.

However, I’ve found that natural evil is a simpler disproof of an omnibenevolent deity, since it doesn’t get into free will issues at all.

63

The problem is that the slave owner devalues the suffering he is causing, by denying the humanity of the slave. Thus he considers his benefit to outweigh the suffering he causes - just as we do when we fish or hunt. (I’m not against either, but if we considered the pain of the fish to be equal to ours, we wouldn’t fish, would we?) A God should have perfect empathy, and thus not devalue our suffering and allow it to happen above a minimum necessary level.

Omnibenevolence means minimal suffering, not no suffering. Pain is necessary to protect us from unwittingly hurting ourselves. That doesn’t make a migraine necessary.

I see you have downgraded a bully into a teaser. I can see a parent staying out of teasing, since this is a good learning situation. However if the bully were to start hitting a kid, a parent who did nothing would not be much of a parent. God lets nature and others hit us all the time.

Do you think this is the best of all possible worlds? If not, then you cede omnibenevolence.

64

You’re going a lot further than that: your argument only makes sense if the ONLY thing that matters is a human soul, and every thing that happens to anything/anyone doesn’t, even if it’s the most evil and disgusting thing possible. Since we don’t have any evidence for souls even existing, as far as I’m concerned, this is just an attempt to define evil away.

65

I know that in my own life, I have experienced suffering—physical or emotional pain—that at the time I thought was pretty awful, but in hindsight doesn’t seem like such a big deal. My overall life experience isn’t significantly worse, and may even be better, than it would have been without that “suffering.”

I do not claim that all human suffering falls into this category (that viewed from the proper perspective, we’ll think “it wasn’t so bad” or “it was worth it”), but the subset of suffering that does, does not seem to me to be a “problem” in the sense of any apparent incompatibility with a benevolent, powerful God.

66

Hmm, some people would say that what you’re talking about isn’t free will (especially if they don’t have a decent definition of the term, like if they think it means your decisions aren’t directed or controlled even by your inclinations).

Otherwise, I think that was sort of the first of my two solutions, wasn’t it? If god has free will, then free will doesn’t need to include the inclination to do every nasty thing. Nasty behavior could be limited just by building us with the inclination not to be nasty, eliminating murder without effecting free will at all.

(So I think I’m covered. :D)

Sure, but both discussions are fun - as long as you remember that if you fail to convince with the complex argument, the simple argument remains and continues to prove your point.

So you’re saying that god deliberately caused unnecessary suffering by creating us in an immature state, then? 'Cause if he’s omnipotent, there’s no need to require us to learn or grow - we could start out learned and grown. Doing otherwise would be like zapping adults into children just so you can get pleasure from their innocent suffering without their pesky maturity blunting their pain and interfering with your fun.

The rational answer is to create the “child” with the ability to shrug off and/or prevent painful experiences fresh from the factory. “Learning” is a clumsy and inefficient process that we humans only put up with because we do not have a painless and instant way to gain and gift information. God doesn’t have this problem.

67

Because in the commission of a great evil, at least in theory, lies a dichotomy that can only be solved by evolution. There would be no point in an omnipotent god creating a world filled with nothing but other ominpotent gods. Rather, both us and God are free and those souls, or persons or what have you who have lived a pure and righteous life or several of them (perhaps not all as humans) have followed the path to being like god and do therefore exist in the image of god. Not that free will incites evil, rather, humanity or personhood has an inherent ability if not desire to commit acts that are ‘evil’ and only through personal, spiritual and actual evolution do we then become more like god. This idea though will continue forever because we will never become one people, because we continue to breed hatred and anger amongst ourselves which takes us further away from the path that leads to god.

68

I couldn’t figure out what dichotomy you were referring to.

First: the issue isn’t why not make people omnipotent gods. It’s why not make people uninclined to choose evil? If god is free and manages not to choose evil, why couldn’t we?

And, supposing for the sake of argument that there actually *would *be no point in an inclined-to-only-do-good god creating a world filled with nothing but inclined-to-only-do-good people - what could possibly be the point in an inclined-to-only-do-good god creating a world filled with nothing but not inclined-to-only-do-good people? Where in the world is the sense of that??

Heck, could an inclined-to-only-do-good god create a world filled to a large degree with agents of evil? I’m thinking not, for the same reason a person who could not kill could not point a gun at a person and pull the trigger, despite the fact that the bullets, not him, would be the murderers.

69

Why ?

Since the God you describe is at best sociopathic, having deliberately created us as flawed, limited and suffering, I don’t see how “righteousness” is compatible to becoming like God. Unless you mean “acting like the Inquisition” by “righteousness”; the way to become more like your God is to torture people, as he has tortured us.

That isn’t even coherent. If we have an inherent tendency to evil, as part of our deliberately flawed design, then how is “breeding hatred and anger” NOT becoming more like God ? It’s what he did with us, according to you.

Your argument seems to be that we were all made flawed and weak on purpose by God, that the evils and stupidities we commit are however our fault not God’s, and that by acting in the opposite way that he has we become more like him. And that becoming more like him is actually desirable, for some reason you haven’t explained. AND, you completely fail to address the question of natural evil.

70

On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be an evidence that God hasn’t chosen to do evil - that is unless you define any action of God as not being evil. The OT God certainly did. If you believe in hell the NT God has also, and by creating killing and hurting natural features almost any creator God can be said to have done evil. So, god certainly does have free will.

Since we are limited by our physical bodies and by the wiring of our brains, we have significantly less free will than God, who seems to be free to do whatever nasty things he chooses.

71

This, and only this, I will excuse him for. When discussing the problem of evil with respect to free will*, there is no reason to discussion the problem of evil with respect to natural evil.

  • Which is clearly what he was trying to do, because the notion of making all humans omnipotent hasn’t come up and doesn’t even make sense with respect to the topic.

Yeah, but if you make God capable of doing (and allowing) evil, the Problem Of Evil evaporates anyway, in an uninteresting way. The argument’s only applicable to full-omni gods, including omnibenevolence.

Huh? I don’t see how this makes sense - are you arguing that humans are (necessarily?) less evil than God? Due to their meatiness?

72

Say a runaway freight train is barreling down on an innocent child. I’m standing right next to a switch that can divert it harmlessly onto a nearby siding. My friend is standing next to me, with his broken arm in a sling.

Would you not agree that failing to throw the switch is a greater moral failing for me than my friend? It would be easy for me to save the child, but hard or impossible for my friend to do so. Because my *capacity *to act is greater, my *duty *to act is also greater.

An omnipotent God has a greater moral duty than us mere humans. And if he fails to act, he is more evil than we are.

73

I guess what confused me was the “wiring of our brains” part. Presumably God has a ‘thinking mechanism’ of his own; why couldn’t ours be functionally like his? If necessary, simulate the details.

(Also I don’t consider physical limitation to be a limitation on free will - but there are various ways to define “free will”, and I suppose with some definitions it might be.)

I grant that with great power comes great responsibility, though. :wink:

74

I’m not sure that hindsight should technically work in that way as far as suffering goes. I mean, at some point we shall all be dead, and we won’t consider our suffering as bad at all. If we judge suffering by our later reaction to it, what’s to stop us going all the way to our death and judging it then?

I would say a fairer method would be to measure the suffering as far as it affects our entire life. Rather than take a measure at one point and say that it is representative, we come up with a total measure of the whole of that suffering that it has ever caused us. That way a particularly mild piece of suffering - say, accidentally touching a hot stove - takes into account both the initial considerable suffering, as well as the likely lack of continuing suffering for most of our lives, while a severely traumatic attempt takes both the initial suffering and the continued high levels of suffering.

My objection to the “it was worth it” problem i’ve already stated.

75

Sorry I neglected this thread for a while. I am having computer problems (I am typing this on my PS3 which sucks big time for heavy reading. Also, no spell cheching, so bear with me). During my absebce I see many have drifted to the usual territories, but there are a few points I still want to make.

For context, I will once again drift into my personal motivations hoping to make you understand where I am coming from. Even in my most religious moments (4 years of Catholic seminary) I was always dismayed at the petty and unimaginative images of god(s) that different religions have come up with. So I am try to think my way on the opposite direction: what would I need to see from a god to accept it as a god?

For starters, and more important than anything else, stasis. A god must be unchanging and unchangeable. Never reactive nor influenceable. Eternal, not created (otherwise is just some higher level creature playing games). After that, it must be the creator of the natural world which implies external to it and not subject to it. My requirements so far mean that this god will be unfalsifiable from the natural world, which renders all discussions about it simple shooting of the wind, which is pointless but not for that less desirable or entertaining.

Then this god should be omnipotent and omniscient. The definitions of these we should first agree to, if we are going to understand each other and have some hope of ever agreeing on something. And I think we are failing to connect on the definitions of benevolence and omnipotence.

I am happy to put some limits to both. I expect god to be logical and coherent which limits these powers to knowing only what is there to be known and able to do what is logically possible. Therefore the “can god make a burrito so spicy he couldn’t eat it?” is moot as is “does god know all the numbers?”. I don’t see the inability to create impossibilities as a shortcoming.

I somehow expect this god to create a single creation. If god creates more than one individual, then they all must share that creation somehow. This might mean some level of interaction among those beings which might mean some conflict of interest among them. That interaction and conflict will read as suffering and I find that inevitable. What is not a given, of course, is that god needed to create more than one individual, or that they had to overlap in space or time. So I do admit to the possibility of creating pocket existences with no suffering, if pocket existences are somehow acceptable. If interaction between individuals are in some way important to creation, then suffering is inevitable.

Benevolence, I seem to be finding out, is less of an issue. At least until we agree on what benevolence means. I do think that this god in being unchanging and omniscient and omnipotent, would make his single creation “perfect”. Once again, we have a term to define. By perfect I just mean that this god would not have it made in any other possible way. That this creation would be entirely satisfactory to god. Which is not to mean that it will be satisfactory to his creatures, of course.

I do realize that this is not the concept most people have of “benevolence”, which is why I am thinking that I wouldn’t need my god to be benevolent. If benevolence means catering to the conflicting wants of non-omniscient creatures (all of them at the same time, to boot), then that might not even be possible to the scope of a single perfect creation.

This leads us to a God that is not liked by his creation. Oh well. Yes, you can call him The Devil, if you want. As I said in the beginning, I am not seeking to make a god marketable, I am just trying to see if it is reasonable.

My tentative conclusion then: Suffering exists because the wants of overlapping natural non-omniscient creatures make it inevitable under a single creation of a reasonable god.

Fire at will.

76

Basically, that means God is dead. It also means it couldn’t do anything, such as create the universe; performing an action is change.

No, it’s not. Just make the creatures incapable of suffering. Or all in a world where harm to one another isn’t allowed.

77

Well, no. It just means that as soon as god “comes online” at the beginning of eternity (:rolleyes: :stuck_out_tongue: ) it does its single creation. This of course would make god more of a universal force than a person (I don’t need a god person, which is why I say that some people might peg me as a deist, if anything)

So yes. You could call it a dead god in the sense that it is not reacting to what’s going on on his creation.

I am not sure what you mean by “incapable of suffering”. I do think that interaction and suffering and inextricable. Since we are nothing more than chemical reactions, you could argue that salt suffers when disolved in water, as it stops being as it was (or suffers when it crystallizes, whatever makes atoms happy). Atoms “suffer” the loss of electrons that takes them from the ideal stable state. All our wants and needs are the product of physical reactions. These follow rules and when things follow rules, sometimes randomnes leads to alignments that you don’t want.

All interactions at any level mean some degree of suffering. Living miles away from you, I could light a match and make you suffer infinitesimally by taking some oxygen from the atmosphere. Or maybe that’s what you wanted and then it is your enemy who suffers.

Even at a higher level, there will always be people wanting different things. When we flip a coin, one of us will suffer as the coin inevitably falls either heads or tails. How could you prevent two individuals from wanting mutually exclusive outcomes to anything? And this without simplifying them to the point of not wanting anything?

78

Or acting or thinking or perceiving in any way; all those require change. In fact, your changeless god can’t be omniscient; in fact, it isn’t -scient at all. Perception and awareness require change.

Wrong, suffering is a mental state; mindless things like atoms or water can’t suffer. There is nothing incompatible with having a mind and being incapable of suffering.

Simply don’t build them with the capacity to suffer.

Besides, your argument misses the point. The problem is not that the world is imperfect; the problem is that the world is far, far, far worse than we know it can be.

79

I’d actually say these should be taken the other way around - if a god is omnipotent and omniscient, then it will be unchanging and unchangeable. There’s plenty of cases where a god is given personality of some kind, and while that means change is theoretically possible, for change to actually happen new experiences are required, or new thoughts on old ones. An omniscient being isn’t going to change their minds on an issue because they’ve heard all the arguments, thought all the thoughts they’re going to have on the subject.

This doesn’t explain all suffering though, and when we’re talking omni-benevolence then there must be the least amount of suffering possible. An example; if two people hate cheese, and one person loves it, the fact that whether cheese exists or not is going to cause suffering either way isn’t justification for selecting the option with the maximum amount of suffering. If suffering is something to be avoided, then logically an omni-benevolent god would choose all the situations that cause the least amount of suffering possible. And that’s clearly not the case.

80

Well, minimizing suffering would not be the only goal. (If it were, then non-existence of everything and everyone would be the best way to achieve it.)