Over in this thread discussing problems with the notion of an omnimax creator god, a bit of a tangent has developed discussing Leibniz’ answer to the so-called problem of evil, which essentially has him positing the creation of the world as a sort of optimisation problem with respect to the total amount of evil; i.e. ‘find the world that is logically possible and contains the least total evil’. Hence, the existence of evil is found to be not in conflict with either omniscience, omnipotence, or omnibenevolence. God created the best world it was logically possible for him to create; shit still happens, but in every other world he could have created, more shit would happen.
Myself, I’m a staunch atheist convinced that the notion of omnimaxness is inherently self-contradictory; however, I am also of the opinion that Leibniz’ argument shows that the existence of evil is not in conflict with this notion on its own. Several other dopers challenged me on this position, and the whole thing has developed into a bit of a hijack, the continuation of which I hope to avoid with this thread. Over in the other thread, I tried to outline my version of Leibniz’ argument as carefully as I could, couching it in the somewhat playful terminology of a ‘SimGod’, a being who has programmed and executed our universe in the form of a simulation on his computer; this is just a metaphor, and Leibniz’ argument should not be taken to be limited to these notions. Anyway, here’s my attempt at a summary, reproduced for your convenience so that everybody wishing to debate the argument can just refer to where exactly they disagree:
SimGod can start the simulation, and let it run through till the end. (He’s omnipotent.)
SimGod knows what’s good and what’s evil; alternatively, he defines it.
SimGod can keep a running total of evil.
When the simulation has concluded, it has a certain amount of evil associated with it.
SimGod wants the total amount of evil to be as small as possible. (He’s omnibenevolent.)
SimGod can run the simulation again, and again, until all possibilities have played out.
Among all these possibilities, one will have the least amount of evil.*
This amount may not be 0.
SimGod can choose the one with the least amount of evil as the ‘actual’ history of the world.
SimGod’s omniscience now means that he doesn’t have to go through this process to find the right one any more than we have to try all possible curves of descent to find the fastest.
Additionally, to make the argument that this best of all possible worlds is indistinguishable from the one we’re living in:
The denizens of this world may find themselves in the presence of some evil.
For any given act of evil, they can ask the question: ‘Without this act of evil, wouldn’t the world be a better one?’
The answer to this question would always be no, as the resulting alternative world would always be either worse, or impossible.
This is exactly the situation we find ourselves in.
(*Assume to the contrary that there isn’t any such world: then, for every world, there is a better world. However, then the problem of evil goes away on its own, as god can’t be faulted for not having created the best of all possible worlds if there is no such thing!)
Dang, I had already written up a reply to this post, but lost it due to careless copy-pasting. Anyway --:
It’s I suppose possible that multiple possible worlds rank equally on the evil scale, and hence, differences between them are not instrumental in determining the best possible one – i.e. if for instance in one world, you had rice-a-roni, while in another, you had baked ziti, and yet both worlds rank equally, then the matter of your meal is immaterial with respect to determining which world is best. However, I’m not at all sure that different worlds can place exactly equally on the scale; in general, I think, everything will matter.
As for your second question, as I’ve stated in my summary, the metric with respect to which to optimise is god’s to choose – and after all, in common Christian belief, he’s what determines goodness (and by extension, evilness) anyway. Furthermore, it’s not at all a problem to optimise with respect to multiple parameters, however, in this case it is likely that optimisation in for instance two parameters will end up with a world placing worse on each of them than if either had been optimised for separately – for instance, god might desire a world in which there is as much free choice, but as little evil as possible, and choose the world that places best on these two parameters combined; however, he will generally wind up with a world that is less free than had it been optimised solely for freedom, and more evil than if the optimisation had been towards minimum evilness exclusively.
As the original context of the discussion was with respect to the problem of evil, evil as understood in whatever framing of the problem you prefer was what I used as optimisation parameter.
I don’t understand point 12. Why would an alternative world free of, say, the world wars, the holocaust, religious crusades, etc., be either worse than this world or impossible?
All sorts of comments can be made. One big one is how one defines and measures the quantity of “Evil”. Because it’s pretty clear that, if SimGod’s goal is to have as little Evil as possible, He should either nor create a world at all, or not create one with the potential for Evil (like one with no sentient beings in it).
Unless, of course, Not Creating a World with Sentient Beings itself has some price tag of Evil associated with it.
Or SimGod can personally attend to each and every thing that happens in His Universe (according to some philosophies, God already and inevitably does just this anyway) and can correct or fix every instance of incipient Evil so it doesn’t happen. Result: zero Evil.
The SimGod approach strikes me as a sort of jury-rigged tinplate model of Godhood, where God acts like a limited human Gamesmaster limited by the capabilities of his software. To my mind, an Omnipotent, Omnibenevolent God would be able to create a world without, say, several varieties of painful, long-lasting cancer. These clearly contribute to Pain and Suffering, which I’d lump in with Evil. They aren’t strictly necessary for anything, including population control. If you need something to kill off excess people, there’s no need to make it so emotionally and physically devastating on the victim and his/her family.
I’ve never heard a really convincing explanation of the Problem of Evil, including the old standby that we need Evil to be able to contrast with goodness. The existence of puppies and hot-fudge sundaes doesn’t need AIDs and leprosy and psycho torture killers for me to appreciate their goodness.
Because world wars and other forms of evil are the result of human free will. To eliminate the consequences of bad choices is to remove free will from the world, And a universe without free will is not “the best of all possible worlds”.
Ah, you’ve already found the thread (directed to Chakra Nadmara), I was just going to reply to your last post in the other one. So let’s tackle this together:
First, I’d challenge your assertion that you can imagine a world – a world in all its completeness, from the microscopic level to the movement of the galaxy clusters, from its beginning (should it have one) to its end (again, should it have one), or otherwise, for all of infinity. (If you can, I’m impressed!) Similarly, I don’t think anybody has a handle on which worlds are possible and which aren’t.
As for point 12, it’s a simple consequence of our inability to survey the totality of all possible worlds: take two worlds that at some point in time differ by some evil action, say, a murder. Now, you might well argue that obviously, world A, in which the murder didn’t happen, was the better one of the two! However, you’d neglect that you don’t have the whole picture: in world A, the murder might be the one that leads to the killer, a notorious serial murderer, being captured; in world B, through neglecting to kill this one person, the killer avoids capture, and is free to kill another 27 persons before eventually dying happy and content of old age. Bottom line being, you can’t point to any single evil deed as being responsible for a world to be, in the end, better or worse.
The way I understand it, what you’re arguing is that there is no way to quantify evil, and therefore there is no such thing as a world that is better or worse than this one. If that is the case, you cannot apply labels like “best” or “worst” to this world, because it implies, obviously, that this world is either better or worse than another, when this is completely subjective and impossible to determine.
well, you see, that’s not altogether obvious, as I state above. It’s a question of how you define that “best”.
I’ll grant you that a world with inhabitants having Free Will would make it harder to minimze the quantity of Evil, by most definitions, and therefore the creation of such a world is arguably a more worthy effort. But it’s not clear that it is “better”.
Why couldn’t a creator invent a world with a different method of behavior modification other than suffering? Why not create a world where experiencing trauma causes intense lethargy and physical weakness instead of pain?
Another factor is the concept of pain and suffering themselves. Are they the only effective tools that could’ve been invented to control behavior so organisms avoid life threatening stimuli? I seriously doubt it. Only a universe with no concern for the subjective well being of conscious organisms would invent pain. One with a caring creator would’ve found some other method to stop organisms from destroying themselves.
In the military and police there has been a massive movement towards non-lethal and less than lethal methods of behavioral control. Rubber bullets, tear gas, stink gas, sticky foam, heat waves, EMP pulses, bean bag shotguns, stun guns, mace, etc. The goal is to change/control the behavior of other organisms w/o inflicting pain and suffering, or at least lessening the amount.
If police officers and military officials can figure out how to do it, so should god. If pain and suffering exist to make us avoid behaviors and situations that threaten our physical survival, other emotions or tools could’ve been invented for that.
That’s a widespread counter to the ‘best of all possible worlds’ concept, and you already anticipate the common response. Perhaps godly boredom is inherently evil, so god created the world to keep himself entertained.
However, I’m not sure it’s possible to create a world without the potential for evil (that’s not devoid of sentience at least). Consider opposed interest: the maximisation of good for A may entail harm coming to B, and vice versa.
Again, is such a world possible? I don’t know that it is.
Yes, the whole thing grew out of the previous thread, in which it was argued that some features of god may be more easily understood using this model; however, as I said, I would not wish to see the discussion limited to this concept.
But perhaps the changes in biochemistry needed to avoid those cancers would lead to even worse, more common debilitating illness (cynical as that may sound).
Really, I think positing hypotheticals of the ‘but the world would be better if little Timmy hadn’t kicked the puppy’ are missing the point; you can pose them with respect to every single instance of evil, but keep in mind that, unless you oppose the possibility of a best world, so could the denizens of such a best world, and hence, this is no way to tell whether or not we are not exactly those denizens.
Who, me? No, I’m arguing pretty much the opposite. There is a world that is the best possible one, and we can’t conclude that we’re not in it. If there’s no measure to quantify evil, then there’s also no problem of evil, as there’s no meaning to asserting that it’s possible that there were less evil in this world. Similarly, if there were no best possible world, there’d be no meaning to pointing out that a better one is possible: it always is, and there’s no problem of evil in this case, as well.
First, most people don’t demand a world with no evil at all, just the minimal amount of evil also preserving good things like (supposed) free will. Let’s posit that free will exists for the moment, though in the scenario it does not, since SimGod discards all worlds not to his liking. If you throw a die the result is not determined - but if you do over rolls until you get a 6, the roll is not free.
Second, the most interesting problem is that of natural evil. Can God not design a world without earthquakes and other nasty stuff. In the other thread it was stated that all who die in an earthquake do so to maximized the goodness of the world. But this implies that God more or less put evil people together, and given the usual circumstances of natural disasters this doesn’t seem too plausible.
Third, when you claim something is optimal you can test it by flipping components and comparing the result according to some metric (which we also will assume exists.) You’d have to be willing to argue that each baby dead of a disease somehow makes the world better off. Unless you assume that this is the best world, that is hard to do. I’d say the evidence is against it.
Finally, whether or not we have any free will, we certainly don’t have perfect free will. Most of us couldn’t take a machine gun and mow down a crowd of children. We are born with various phobias - even if we can eventually get over them, while we have them our range of action is limited. If God designs most of us not to be mass murderers, he could have designed all of us not to be mass murderers. He could also not have designed in the sociopath gene or upbringing. There are people driven to do evil, which both speaks against this being the best of all possible worlds and total free will.
So, as I said in the other thread, this is a textbook case of begging the question, since neither logic nor evidence leads to the conclusion, but only the assumption that if this is the best all the things we see are for the best.
If the world exists so that mortal beings can exist, and become immortal it makes the balance of good and evil somewhat different. It also makes the plan inherently unknowable to mortal beings. Of course the possibilities are infinite, or at least unimaginably large.
Try to be good. Do it hard, all the time. It’s not much, but it fits your abilities. Good is better than evil. When you fall down, get up again.
Yes we can, by making a small change to the world and evaluating the new world against our present one. We can easily find cases where the change will make the new world better by any metric we can imagine. Only if you assume it will be worse can you argue against this. Are you willing to try to argue that changes won’t make the world better, or will your response be that our world is best by measures we can’t understand?
ETA: If you do, I can make the counter argument that our world has been designed by an evil deity who has selected the worst of all possible worlds, and any change which we might think cause more evil would actually cause more good if we understood more. If you accept your argument you must also accept mine, since they are complementary.
That sounds as if God is at the mercy of His Chemistry Set.
If He’s really an Omnipotent God, he can determine the properties of His own created biochemistry.
Really, every time you say something like “But if God did That, it might make This worse” it simply points out deficiencies in God’s supposed omnipotence. I can see those objections being raised in the case of the Tinplate SimGod, who really is stuck with the limitations of His software, but a real Omnipotent God, by definition, can fix the problems of his chemistry and biology. If you say “It’s too much work”, then your God really isn’t Omnipotent.
Like most people, I have an aversion to systems that are logically inconsistent, although that might be simply my mortal limitation speaking. But (to employ your own construction), it’s not clear to me that any realizable universe with negligible Evil requires anything logically impossible.
I asked the question as a bit of a trap. I feel that either the inclusion or exclusion of human actions would cause problems for the best of all possible worlds (BPW) hypothesis.
You’ve answered that our actions are part of BPW (at least those that have reasonable knock-on effects).
The problem with this is that it means that the holocaust, for example, was not just acceptible, but downright necessary.
Hitler was doing God’s work. Hitler thought that the world would be better with 6 million fewer Jews and God agreed (although god balked at the idea of eradicating jews completely).
And indeed, if I were to go out and rape someone tomorrow, I am doing god’s work too. I should be congratulated.
This is already going quite far away from most religions conception of reality. But is this your position?
I asked about the metric because, to me, it’s obvious that a universe devoid of life has an “evilness” of 0 and is logically consistent.
We could argue that god has a different metric of evilness to what I’m imagining; e.g. “missed potential” or whatever could be a sin, and therefore a lifeless universe is somehow sinful. But I remain confident that for any formal definition of evilness, this universe is not the least evil.
If you wish to maintain that god has a definition of evil in mind where our universe is optimal, then you should try to give that definition. In the meantime, you may as well be talking about god’s “mysterious ways” (and therefore what was the point of invoking BPW?)
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Is there a term for a “trap” question? Not a trick question, as that implies a question that is unfair in some sense, but a question intended to expose an inconsistency or flaw? Leading question seems to have connotations of unfairness too.
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I don’t buy that the best possible world has the least amount of evil. If evil is approaching 0, good is losing qualitative significance. Maybe fighting evil is the best quantitative good, and as evil approaches 0, the potential total of good is reducing as well. Lot’s of things wrong with the basic premise.
Ignoring logic, I think we are in the best possible world now, or one of equally good possible worlds, whether it was created by God, SimGod, or a Hawking book. I don’t know what 12) is trying to say, but I end up with the same conclusion as 13).