Or we wouldn’t have free will. You’re right, it should be least suffering within the boundaries of whatever is deemed more important than suffering (or perhaps that level of suffering).
No, it is just that as RT said in his last post, an omniscient god already knows every thing and has reacted in advance. There is no need to react when it already accounted for every possible circumstance and its reaction is built in on the creation of the universe. Every thought it had to have is already had, everything it needed to perceive it already foretold.
If the universe is Tic-Tac-Toe, god’s mind is the whole tree of possible games, and creation the final board with best possible outcome. Alas, you know how it goes with tic-tac-toe and rational computers…
Again, you don’t explain how two beings can want and not suffer for wanting mutually exclusive outcomes.
They are either limited in what they can want and therefore as good as mindless or you are just settling for suffering but unaware of their suffering, which is probably a worse case of mindlessness. Or unable to want the same things, which would be thoroughly isolated.
RT, is it clearly not the case that we are living in the universe with he least possible suffering? How do we know that this is not the best case scenario. That all other possibilities eiher have more suffering or that they are impossibilities?
Before saying something as simple as “bumping into walls could hurt less and we know this because we have invented painkillers that make it hurt less and that could have been built in”, remember that this is a whole mess of strings and pulleys and you cannot change one while everything else stays the same.
Maybe a uinverse where we suffer less physical pain required universal constants that didn’t add up to evolution at all. Or maybe it resulted in duller beings with no motivation to get off the trees and became extint.
Scary as this might sound, this might well be as good as it gets.
They just don’t have the capacity to suffer, any more than I have the ability to see gamma rays.
No. Once again; suffering is a mental state. If they aren’t wired to be capable of it, they won’t suffer. There are people born unable to feel pain, for example.
Because we can and do make the world better. A god should be able to do better.
An omnipotent God doesn’t need to bother with evolution. Besides, your god could just run us all as simulations in a virtual world with arbitrary characteristics and no pesky physical laws.
I imagine that this people unable to feel pain either require a ton of attention or die very young. I am disappointed if you are really arguing at this level. If all you ask is that we have less pain receptors in our brains, you might be asking for a species that nature selected against very early in the process and for good reasons.
In OUR world, a world clearly not constructed by a benevolent god.
That’s a deeply flawed understanding of omnipotence. That has been well covered by Disney et al with those movies about 9-year olds that inherit millions and have no parental supervision. Yes you can eat all the candy you want for breakfast, lunch and dinner. No, you cannot grow healthy doing it.
I don’t think a universe where god is constantly bending logic to save the day is a perfect creation. This creation must be fully coherent to make sense to an unchanging omnimax god.
As for this “virtual” creation. Well, I guess the universe is as good as virtual to a god that is not bound by it, isn’t it?. Even this simulation should have some rules, arbitrary as they may be. Sure ogd is free to choose all the parameters, but after you are set on your conditions, they must remain the same. Otherwise you are just talking to a sock puppet.
I already stated that I am not shooting for a god that is benevolent in the sense of catering to every want of his creation. I personally think that that is an impossibility. So yes, I can agree with you about this universe not being built by a benevolent god. I am now shooting for probing the possibility of a reasonable god.
Because they aren’t built that way; a god could either make them able to eat healthily like that, or design them to prefer a better diet.
That statement makes no sense. There’s no “bending logic” involved in eliminating suffering or running a simulation. And an omniscient god would hardly need something to be coherent to make sense of it. And a god that isn’t doing everything it can to “save the day” isn’t omnimax.
Your version of god is doing that regardless, having by your account already plotted out ever last occurrence.
The universe isn’t even close to what a “reasonably” benevolent god would make. If it was, we would not be so easily be able to improve upon it.
I thing I mentioned this as an aside. Greek Gods (see the Iliad) had no problem being nasty, so the PoE doesn’t apply. This is only a problem for western religions which keep trying to argue for omnibenevolence in a world which shows any existent god isn’t omnibenevolent.
Not that at all, though I must confess what I wrote was a bit incoherent. Supposedly something to keep humans from doing evil would eliminate our free will. Yet God certainly has free will, but does not do evil, thus it is always possible to have a nature that always chooses not to do evil with free will. If God does evil (which he seems to, actually) he is clearly not omnibenevolent.
To summarize what we’ve both said, there is a false dichotomy between the cases where free will means be able to do any physically possible thing, and not having free will means to be fully controlled and constrained. We are actually somewhere between these points, where we are sometimes driven to do some things or unable to do others. Redrawing these boundaries slightly will not change our level free will much from what it is today.
I meant psychological limitations. While a phobia might be cured, it’s possible that in the heat of a moment a phobia would prevent someone from saving a life (see Vertigo). Yet someone with a phobia still has free will.
The train example can be excused by the normal free will defense, since if someone must save another person, his free will can be considered somewhat limited.
No we cannot easily improve on the universe. We manage to tweak some things to our taste at some expense to the rest, but that hardly amounts to improving uopn it.
Pain killers have side effects, adverse reactions, limitations. We make them in factories that hurt the environment and create less than ideal conditions to people working in them. Your temporary relief from pain comes at a great price to the rest of creation.
And the fact that you can create them hardly means that it could have come built in without that meaning that the whole house of cards of our evolution would come crashing down. Even if you had access to change things like e and pi and all other universal constants.
And again, you keep inserting the word benevolent when I have already stated that I do not need a god to be benevolent by your definition of it.
They can be wired so it is unimportant to them. Say you are playing Monopoly with your kid, and he buys the property you need to get a monopoly. Does this make you suffer? I hope not. If we were constructed like a Zen master, knowing that in the end it all means nothing, we could lose out some times without suffering. It would be a very different world, but perhaps a better one.
Damn right it makes me suffer in the context of the game. We play to win and his win is my loss. It does not, of course, make me suffer as a person. We are playing to have fun and I know that someone will have to win and someone will have to lose and neither will be more or less by virtue of it.
I contend that if you wired people not to suffer, they would not strive to better ther lives either. If our marine ancestors would have been wired to be happy not finding food and being eaten, they would have never come to land. It is our condition of being wired to suffer that has driven evolution since the very beginning.
Even if you know managed to eliminate suffering with the proverbial snap of the fingers, all that does is reset the scale. Now the absence of suffering or pleasure, what used to be zero, becomes the new bottom of the scale. Even not suffering, you would know that this is the very worst you can do and should strive to do better than live on your worst case scenario. Don’t you think?
By the way that what you are suggesting is basically what most religions seem to promote. Making people be content with their shortcomings and not care about them. Taking them as part of the deal and hoping that it will be alright in the end.
Yes, that does qualify as improving upon it. We reshape the world for our comfort and convenience.
But once again, a god wouldn’t need to worry about evolution. It could just skip all the intervening steps and create what it wants directly.
But your definition is so far from what anyone else uses as to be useless, or outright deceptive. If you want to say God is uncaring, call it uncaring; don’t call it benevolent using a special definition of benevolent that is synonymous with uncaring.
Certainly; and that would be a vast improvement.
I think you just demonstrated that it’s possible for there to be goals and activity without suffering, simply by the addition of a contextual separation. That is, if you make life a game.
When I’m feeling mature, I theatrically feign pain (“Oh! You got me!” Mime knife in chest, fall over) when somebody punks me in a game. No real suffering occurs.
When I’m feeling immature I get pissed. But we need not be immature - we could be mature by nature.
God doesn’t need evolution though - if It existed, I mean. God need not have made there be shortages, either; we could either need nothing or have everything, or some combination (having some things without limit and not needing the rest). Conflict is, objectively, utterly unneccessary.
In short I think you’re grossly underestimating the options available to an omnipotent god.
I think that it’s theoretically possible to be at equilibrium at the absolute top of the scale, never straying from it. Yes, this might be a little boring, but we could be made not to get bored. God clearly is, because by definintion he’s unchanging, and if he couldn’t handle that he’d clearly have gone insane by now. (Which might explain a lot.)
Actually the idea is to just make everything alright now, and forever. Postulating that people could be content if they lacked problems is different from saying people should suck it up.
Well, no. If suffering is a state of mind, then no matter how high you set the zero, suffering will always come as relative to that zero but still be suffering. Things could be a lot worse than they are now. I think it was you who suggested a universe filled with light years of brain matter shortwired for pain. We are doing lot better than that. And even then, there would be gradations of suffering and we would still whine about the highs and celebrate the lows.