First, it does not have to be limited if we don’t have omnibenevolence, and so as I said another god could be more powerful in that sense. The arguments assume that you can compare greatness directly, they don’t seem to accept a partial ordering in which two gods are not directly comparable. That would allow polytheism, which would be a problem. And if Christians accepted your definition of omnipotence, we’d have a very different experience. It makes no sense to pray for anything, since what will happen will be for the best by definition, and there is no point in trying to change it.
You first. Please rephrase your argument to deliberately avoid rhetorical argument, and focus on logical argument, so I know which parts of your argument are supposed to matter.
Which is to say, my answer to you here was just below the bit you quoted: “Rewrite the damned thing formally.”
No, I don’t have to show that: rather explicitly! If all optimal worlds are inaccessible then that proves that all worlds with omnimax gods in them are inaccessible and thus that we aren’t in a world that has an omnimax god. That’s the entire point the POE makes.
I do frankly admit that I may be misunderstanding how you are using “accessibility”. Based on my brief read of it in the wiki just now, it seems to merely refer to the set of possible worlds that are observationally indisitinguishable from a given world - which is to say, it’s the set of worlds I already referred to as being the ones we are checking for overlap with the set of optimal god-containing ones. Given that, your protest seems absurd; my point is that there is no overlap, so why should I have to point to examples of overlap? That’s your job! So yeah - I may be misunderstanding you. Feel free to correct my ignorance.
Because until then, I will see the issue as being this:
- There are a set of possible worlds P containing all logically possible worlds*.
- M is the set of possible worlds with logically minimized evil. M is a proper subset of P**.
- O is the set of possible worlds with an omnimax god. Due to omnibenevolence, we know O to be a proper subset of P***.
- R is the set of the real world. We know it actually exists; we’ve been there****.
- A is the set of possible worlds that are observationally indistinguishable from R, to the best of the observational ability of those debating*****. That is, A is the complete set of worlds that the arguers can theoretically entertain as possible worlds they are in. A is necessarily larger the less the arguers know about their world. R is a proper subset of A.
That’s the windup, here’s the pitch: the claim made by the POE is that M is disjoint from A. That is, that any possible world that has anything resembling our world in it cannot possible be operating at the logically minimized level of evil. If this claim is true, then R is obviously disjoint from O, given that each is a proper subset of one of the distinct sets.
The main way to argue that M is disjoint from A is to point at examples of worlds with less evil in them than ours that are not logically impossible. Note that we don’t have to actually think of and describe an actual M-world; we merely have to sketch out one that is better than anything in A.
To argue against this, one must make a compelling argument that M and A overlap. Note that they don’t actually have to fully prove this; the degree to which they can cast into doubt the notion that this world has unnecessary evil, to that degree they will have weakened the soundness of the POE.
To counter this, though, the POE usually includes the following lemma: Omnibenevolent God by definition wants a world with no evil, and Omnimax God by definition gets what he wants (except the logically impossible). It seems easy to define (inaccessible from us) worlds with no evil, like the empty universe and/or the god-only universe, so “no evil” is not logically impossible - which means that if God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then he gets what he wants: a world with no evil. Which would prove that any world with any evil is not in M, which would certainly prove that M is disjoint from A.
The argument in the OP counters this subargument…by the approach of baldly asserting it to be wrong. In 8, in your example. Which then allows it the avenue of refuting the POE assumption (M is disjoint from A) by the expedient method of…baldly asserting it to be wrong. In both cases the assertions are completely unsupported - it is not so much that the other arguments have been refuted, as much as rejected. “Just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes,” - rather Monty Pythonian, really.
Notes:
- Necessarily including ours, which necessarily exists - thus P is non-empty.
** M cannot be empty, because P is non-empty. There is either one minimally evil world or a collection of worlds with equal, minimal evil.
*** O might be empty - it’s entirely possible that the existence of an omnimax god might itself cause there to be more evil than would otherwise be logically necessary, in which case God would disappear in a puff of logic - or more accurately, make his last omnipotent act be to retroactively write himself out of existence in the process of making the world truly optimal.
**** For added fun, one can instantly make the POE unassailable by stating that each prior world-state has been a separate possible world (one second ago was one world, one minute ago another, one hour ago a third, on century ago a fourth) - and then pick a bad moment out of history as R. Presuming that nobody argues that the amount of evil in the universe has been constant, R can then be shown to have had no omnimax god by the simple proof that a later time was less bad and thus the worse time had non-minimal evil. And if there was no god then…
***** The set A may or may not be what you mean by the set of accessible worlds.
Because the OP as written doesn’t include 12 as an external note; it’s a line in the argument, which is explicitly stated in the following line as “This is exactly the situation we find ourselves in.” If that’s not what you meant…well, that’s why I’m asking you to rewrite the argument more clearly.
Sorry, I make it a philosophical point to argue with what is posted. If you wish to restate your argument in a more cleaned-up version I will happily argue against that; until then I work with what I see.
That said, I actually suspect that while any particular fallacious rhetorical technique may be attributable to you alone, I am quite confident that Leibniz’ argument does have rhetorical fallacies in it - which are quite possibly the very ones you are demonstration, worded differently. I suspect this because absent the fallacies, there quite literally is no argument to be made here.
Actually, I would not accept the existence of just any world with evil. The existence of some amount of necessary evil in the M-worlds does not imply that A overlaps with M - the worlds in A seem positively chock-full of un-necessary evil. More than you can sweep under a hundred Mysterious Ways!
Yes, yes I know. Question is, what is implied by this? Aside from the fact that 8 can be rejected as an unacceptable premise (if not outright proven false) and the entire argument is unsound anyway, what exactly is proven by this?
Let me give you a hint - if you haven’t proven something true, you haven’t proven the negation false. Maybes don’t cut no ice.
No it doesn’t. Even if you assume that it may be possible that there is a consistent non-zero amount of necessary evil in the M-worlds, does not make it possible for worlds with gratuitious gobs or rather evidently unnecessary evil in them to be M-worlds too.
I’d also like to take this moment to point out that any universe with minimal evil, it should usually be possible to at least theorize a rational reason why it would be allowed. Remember, in the M-worlds, there actually is a reason - and a good one: it would be logically impossible to remove the evil without creating equal or worse evil elsewhere!
There’s not a chance in Hel that that’s the situation on earth, for any normal definition of evil. Especially when you remember that all momentary states of the world must be equally evil.
From pointless pedantry…
…to outright error. G -> ~E doesn’t assert the necessity of G either, as you surely know. But please, keep digging.
I’m pretty confident that there’s an objective reality out there; to Godwinize the thread, let me suggest that perhaps in some cases some people are forced into suboptimal worlds in defiance of their choices. Heck, even solipsistically speaking even if all you clods are illusions whose pain doesn’t matter, my life alone clearly is suboptimal!
And while the notion that possibility equals instantiation runs into certain problems, this does re-raise the point that SimGod can’t even run the suboptimal simulations without losing his omnibenevolent status. Which is okay if he chooses not to run them - but arguably, an omniscient god already has run them all, down to the last excrutiating detail, on the simulator of his own mind. Thus, omnimax god is himself inevitably a well for and repository of infinite evil.
In terms of my set list above, this is the case where O is the empty set, which would play out as described: the only thing for the omnibenevolent omnimax god to do would be to retroactively erase himself from existence. Which he fortunately can do, being omnipotent: he can just de-instantiate his world and reinstantiate to a possible world that is in M (of which at least one must exist, you recall). This world might be the empty one, or whatever - it just wouldn’t have an omnipotent god in it.
Or put another way - there may once have been a God, but he’s dead now. 
Actually, all entities are equally limited in that way. They only do what they end up doing, and they never do what they didn’t do.
Kind of like, see how I didn’t put the word ‘banana’ within the following parentheses: (‘orange’)? I no longer have the choice not to go back and say banana - whether or not I’m glad I didn’t. Retroactively nobody has free will. And guess what: proactively you don’t either, if you require it to mean “can do what they don’t end up doing”.
Omnibenevolent god is no less limited than anyone else in this respect: the only ‘difference’ is that the list of actions he will eventually take matches up with a label.
(‘difference’ was in scare quotes, because everyone else has a label too: ‘non-omnibenevolent’. We’re all trapped in the same boat here: omnimax gods, non-omnimax gods, humans, sheep, rocks. Nobody and nothing ever can do what it doesn’t do.)
ETA: though you’re right that there’s no point in praying to an omnibenevolent omniscient god - heck, there’s no point to praying to a non-omnibenevolent omniscient god. And as for polytheisim: two omnimax entities can only coexist in a universe until they disagree about the tiniest thing. At that point, There Can Be Only One: removing the other’s omnipotence is one of the powers of the omnimax entities. Or it isn’t and it’s logically impossible for the two of them to coexist in a possible world. Either way, you canna have multiple omnimax beings of differing minds.
Assuming, as HMHW suggests, that what you have in mind here is the ontological argument, I repeat that I don’t think any proponent of that argument would think omnipotence is meaningully challenged by the “limitation” of benevolence. Of course the argument has other flaws. I just don’t see this as one of them. BTW, this is something of a side issue to the main thread, so maybe we should just let it go with “agree to disagree” for the time being.
If anyone is interested, the Stanford Encyolpedia of Philosophy has an article on Leibniz and the Problem of Evil. I notice he was, in fact, very much concerned with what I call the problem of an interventionist god (the article calls it the underachieving god problem) and argued what we today would call an epistemelogical problem, i.e., our inability to know whether changing the world we see would make things better or worse. I notice also a lot of guesswork by Leibniz about what God can and would do.
One last time, and then I give up. I already said that God having to choose is not a limitation on omnipotence - that not being able to both let the sparrow fall or keep the sparrow up is not a problem. That God created one world, as opposed to others, is also not a problem. What is a problem is the constraint on what God can do before he does it. Choosing one of an infinite number of worlds to instantiate is not a problem for omnipotence. Being forced to choose one out of an infinite number of worlds (the best possible) is.
Omnibenevolence is not a limitation - it’s a descriptor. In a logical argument those look like the same thing because logical arguments are dissertations about the state of the world; however in practice they are not the same thing at all.
Suppose you are standing at the fast food counter and have the option of buying normal fries or curly fries. Suppose you pick the curly fries. At that point you can be described as “a person who bought curly fries”. Is that a limitation on your free will? I’d say no; it’s merely a description.
Now, consider the moment just before you placed your order. At that point, referring to you by the description “a person who is going to buy curly fries” is a true statement. For a moment presume no prescience: assume there’s two guys watching who decide to gamble about the outcome: one says “he’s going to buy straight” and the other says “he’s going to buy curly”. Neither knows whether they’re speaking the truth - yet their statements have truth values nonetheless, because they’re either correct or not.
“Omnibenevolence” is the same sort of descriptor as “he’s going to buy curly fries” - it’s true or it’s false, describing the outcome, but not dictating it. So if it’s true, you end up with a universe with curly fries in it, and if it’s false you end up with a universe without curly fries. Either one is a possible world - however only universes that have curly fries in them are compatible with people matching that descriptor.
Identically, ‘omnibenevolent’ is just a label. Technically, the god could abandon that label at any time: he just has to do something evil. Just like how people who don’t know me well say I’m a good guy, but the minute I set fire to their house they say that I’m no longer worth of the label. So all god has to do to divest himself of the label is cause or allow evil. No problem; he certainly has the capability, being omnipotent. But the minute he does the label “omnibenevolent” no longer describes him. Which might not bother him; why should it? But it would mean that he is no longer omnimax. Sheerly because “omnimax” is just a description anyway.
So, summation: the label “omnibenevolent” is no more a limitation on behavior than that guy betting on you limits you to picking curly fries. It’s just a statement about your future actions: it’s true or it’s false. Which way it goes is up to you.
That is interesting - thank you.
In reading this, it occured to me to assemble bits of the article together to wonder if Leibniz wouldn’t have argued that the Oklahoma City bombing was allowed to happen because it amused the observing angels and aliens; that is, suffering in our world is offset and trumped by the pleasure it brings to the television viewing audience. Who enjoy that sort of thing because they are evil, which God can’t really do anything about because that’s just the kind of person you get when you create people. That, or creating only other omnibenevolent people would result in an unvaried and boring universe, which is for some reason objectively inferior.
My answer to this Leibniz strawman(?) would be, “If God can’t create other omnibenevolent people then he’s not omnipotent, and if he prioritizes variety over benevolence (particularly to the extent of making humans into chewtoys for other races) I reject that he’s omnibenevolent.”
The later point is worth a second note: once can very easily “solve” the POE by saying “human suffering doesn’t matter”. Doing this allows one to say that Vesuvius was a good thing because God liked the pretty red fire explosions, and the people getting burned to death didn’t matter. Or that all of human existence is but an unimportant sidenote to the real purpose of the universe: the sex lives of earthworms. However any attempt to dismiss the POE by redefining evil like this fails because any attempt to redefine evil is a redefinition of omnibenevolence as well - which your viewing audience need not accept. Yes, a god that cares about nothing except that Harry Potter eventually be written is not disproven by the POE - but only because you’ve redefined “good” and “evil” to the point of incomprehensibility.
I see the root of the problem now - your description has been helpful. Omnibenevolence, in your view, is just a description of the state of god once he more or less randomly creates the best of all possible worlds. In my view - and I think in the view of most who actually believe in this stuff, omnibenevolence is an inherent characteristic of God. Certainly omnipotence is; by most definitions of the Western God, he is inherently the greatest there is, and thus must be omnipotent.
if for some odd reason “curly fries buyer” was an inherent part of the person’s personality, and his girlfriend would leave him if it wasn’t, which is unacceptable, then he’d be constrained as to what he could buy. He could buy regular fries, but then he wouldn’t be a curly fries buyer and wouldn’t have a girlfriend. Lame extension, but the example doesn’t really match the problem.
Now, there are tags for god, such as hairy thunderer or cosmic muffin, or deity who flooded the Earth. These are not inherent characteristics of God, they are descriptors, so discovering that God didn’t flood the earth changes little. But if God is defined as the entity which is omnimax, which he is in the proofs I alluded to, then omnibenevolence is very different in principle from causing a flood. If the God you are describing does not have this principle, like Zeus, then demonstrating that he is not omniebenevolent causes very few problems.
Who said that the creation of the world needed to be random? A god could simply prefer good, and choose it of his own volition.
Keep in mind, I reject the notion of libertarian free will as being nonsensical. All volitional beings with even a hint of a modicum of a shadow of an iota of sanity are functionally deterministic (or actually deterministic), necessarily, or they would not behave in a manner consistent enough to merit being described as having a mind.
So, given that, what does it mean to “be omnibenevolent”? To me it means that you of your own volition always prefer to choose the action leading to a minimization of evil. A person who wants to do evil but is unable to is not omnibenevolent, right? It’s a statement of intent.
And this intent will consistently manifest in action, so omnibenevolence can be assigned based on actions as well, as a post-facto label. Which explicitly is the approach implemented in the POE: we are judging the tree by its fruits. Certainly any entity that does not act in an omnibenevolent manner does not have omnibenevolent feelings, preferences, or intent.
Ditch the girlfriend. What if for some odd reason “curly fries buyer” was just an inherent part of the person’s personality? He could buy regular fries, but… well, but nothing. He could buy regular fries. But the thing is, he doesn’t want to.
I think the example matches the problem well enough, if you don’t add a SuperGirlfriend making God her bitch. The term Omnibenevolence describes preferences and intent. And if having preferences rob a person of volition, if they constrain a person, then everyone is constrained about everything. Which isn’t really how we use the term.
Seriously - what do you imagine free will to be? What sort of thought process counts as making a choice? Are you allowed to have a thought process and still be making a choice? Is it possible to make a choice at all?
Based on what you’re saying, the answer is NO. Any knowledge, preferences, personality, feelings, thoughts, or sentience you might have instantly constrains your actions, because you are not insane, and robs you of all volition. If this wasn’t he case, then god could choose good of his own volition, consistently, and retain his volition, choice, and omnipotence.
I think that discovering that God is a muffin would change a lot. It would positively bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate Christianity; the deterioration would be nearly complete.
As labels and characteristics go, omnibenevolence is no more special than any other. If somebody insists their god caused a flood, and there was no flood, then the god they describe doesn’t exist. If the god is described as living on mount olympus, and there is no mount olympus, then the god doesn’t exist either. Any time a god is positively asserted as having been or done something that it didn’t do or can’t be, that god is proven not to exist.
Obviously if you don’t claim the god has a specific property, then the lack of that property means nothing. But that’s not because the property is more specialer than other properties; it’s because the lack of the property isn’t inconsistent with the claims about the god. Which is an entirely different situation.
Continuing my reading, I’ve bumped into two interesting articles on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Logical Problem of Evil and The Evidential Problem of Evil. Notably, the last section of the former (10.B) makes very much the same argument about benevolence limiting omnipotence which Voyager has been arguing here. I don’t find the development persuasive, but it does show he’s not the only one to float the idea. Another thing I notice is that Leibniz’s epistemological objection (although not cited in either article, which survey more recent treatments) turns out to be more relevent to the evidential argument than the logical one. Which, if you think about it, makes sense. But that’s not how HMHW has presented it to date. Of course, when Leibniz wrote, the distinction had not yet arisen. I will say, BTW, that I’ve never had much truck with the logical argument that God doesn’t exist.
And, again, I see much in both articles, especially the latter, which points to God-as-interventionist vs. God-as-creator as the nub of the Problem of Suffering. God-as-creator could be omnimax and do nothing more than bring the universe into being at the Big Bang. It’s only when we explore how and whether he interacts with his creation that the Problem of Suffering arises.
Right - Voyager is grappling with the free will problem. And honestly I haven’t helped matters by failing to immediately recognize that fact and answer it on those lines, a fact for which I apologize to everyone in this thread and the greater universe (excluding Cleveland). I will rectify this now.
The question is, basically, whether god can have free will and be omnibenevolent simultaneously, with the implication being that if he does not have free will, his omnipotence is compromised. It should also be noted that the comparison of free will levels is against gods and entities that are not omnibenevolent, who seem to be axiomatically presumed to have a sufficient level of free will.
In other words, the thesis is that if god has a preference for good that dictates how he behaves, then he lacks free will that he might otherwise have. This explicitly demonstrates a belief that having preferences, opinions, and thoughts are an abrogation of free will - that free will is supposed to be totally unconstrained, even by one’s internal mental state. Because if there is not a way to be free unconstrained by one’s mental processes, then the non-omnibenevolent gods would have no more free will than the omnibenevolent gods, which is counter to the thesis that non-omnibenevolent gods are more free/omnipotent than omnibenevolent ones.
Free will independent of one’s own preferences, opinions, and thoughts is known as libertarian free will. Not to mince words: it doesn’t exist. It’s an functionally incoherent concept. And if it doesn’t exist, then there is no difference in the level of volition or free will between omnibenevolent gods and anybody else. Which in turn opens the door for omnibenevolent gods to be as omnipotent as they want, assuming that any beings of any kind have any potency at all.
If one wants to argue that there is libertarian free will, I wish them luck, becuase they have a hard row to hoe.
Which one? The POE? Or the one that Voyager is floating? Or some other?
Isn’t this like saying that an omnibenevolent person can point their car at a children’s playground and step on the gas, so long as he doesn’t touch the steering wheel afterwards to deliberately steer towards (or away from) specific children?
The universe is either fully deterministic or not. (Or god can choose). If the universe is deterministic, then prior to touching off the big bang God already knows the suffering this act of his will create. If it’s nondeterministic, then God is still aware of the substantial risk that his creation will take a turn to the south. In the first case he could in theory start a perpetually suffering-free world, but otherwise in either case he would be required to intervene - by his own personality - assuming he’s actually omnibenevolent.
I’m of two minds about free will, and certainly do not support libertarian free will, which seems to go against lots of physical evidence. However, there seems to be room between that and pure determinism. I can see the argument for determinism for physical beings, since our thought processes involve the interaction of physical entities controlled by more or less deterministic natural laws. I can see the argument that free will would involve a nonphysical “soul” standing outside of the brain and making decisions, and that is something I certainly don’t accept.
But a God is a non-physical entity, and thus this argument against free will would not hold. For Gods then, ignoring omnibenevolence, we have two cases:
- The God’s actions are totally determined.
- The God’s actions are not totally determined, if not totally free.
If 1, what does the determination? We have lots of answers to this question for humans. Could a God whose actions are totally determined be considered omnipotent? Humans who say, cannot fly through fear, feel less powerful in this respect than those who do.
The free will argument, by the way, is an excellent way of dealing with the choice argument. Someone without free will can easily convince himself he is choosing to act as he does, but this is incorrect. A God constrained by omnibenevolence might convince himself he is choosing freely, but is equally incorrect.
If all Gods are in category 1, I think it is safe to say they are not Gods at all. Any God in category 2 is greater than a god in category 1 (if such a god exists.) But omnibenevolence takes a category 2 god and moves him to category 1.
Anyway, if you wish to say all gods are in category 1, I’m not going to argue - since we’d be counting angels on the head of an invisible pin. This means there are no gods - which is what all of us still in this discussion believe anyway.
While one can make a physical argument against libertarian/semi-libertarian free will, I personally don’t. After all in most debates where one cares about determinism in free will one is arguing against people who believe in souls, making physical arguments for determinism next to useless.
Instead of that, I prefer a different argument against libertarian free will - one I will hereby and (until I forget) dub the “complexity” argument. The long and short of it is, I believe that complex results necessitate a suitably complex mechanism to underly them: you can’t store the entirety of a person’s memory in something with only one state. And if your ‘atomic’ thing has lots and lots of different states, then it must have some mechanism for switching between them.
So. Any decision-making apparatus that even vaguely approaches the ability to replicate human awareness will necessarily be very, very complex. (Heck, the ability to encode concepts like “bed” and “table” alone is itself extraordinarily complex.) This necessitates that it have a lot of ‘moving parts’ - methods for shuttling data from on place to another, in and out of storage, to categorize the data, to correlate it with relevant factors, to assign importances and weights to different factors, to deduce possible outcomes, to compare the outcomes for merit, and finally select one. This is mind-bogglingly complex and would require processes with millions or billions of individual atomic steps and ‘moving parts’ to carry the process through to completion and track the progress of it along the way.
And any mind that even vaguely approaches human intellect and decision-making capability would have to have this. Whether it’s made of brain cells, soul stuff, or lime-flavored jello, it doesn’t matter: the complexity of the results require a complex process to yield them, taking place somewhere underneath the hood. No matter if it’s a brain or soul doing the thinking. Or even if the process partially involved both working together - to the degree that the soul is ‘carrying the load’ of deciding, it must be comparably complex, sufficiently to carry out the tasks assigned to it.
So. Processes. Every process is, rather obviously, composed of steps. Any of these steps may in theory be partially or entirely nondeterministic (random) - but to the degree they’re not they’re not, they’re deterministic. (Axiomatically.) I maintain that because our minds are not suffused with a surfeit of crippling bugs and glitches, there can’t be that much wobbling of the moving parts. But whether there is or not, the process is still either deterministic or not to some degree or another. There’s no third option: there’s not deterministic, random, and other. There’s just determined or nondetermined.
Again, this is regardless of what the medium or substrate is that’s doing the thinking. Regardless of whether it’s material or not. None of that matters: the mere fact that choices are being made requires that some organized process is being carried out to arrive at the decisions made. And that process, like all processess, is to some degree determined by the inputs and prior state of the decision-making apparatus, and to the degree it’s not determined there is only randomity: undetermined noise. And there’s no room in the middle for libertarian free will, for any entity. Physical or not.
Category2 is a fiction; everything is in category 1. From gods to humans to earthworms to computers to waterfalls to rocks. All of it.
But the thing is, you’re wrong when you say that “Someone without free will can easily convince himself he is choosing to act as he does, but this is incorrect.” The english word “choice” has a meaning, which includes it being something that people do all the time. Pathetic little deterministic people. The fact that the choice differs only in degree from how a chess program chooses its next move is no nevermind: it’s still a choice.
Of course, you can assert otherwise; you can say that noone has any choice, noone has any will, and noone has any power to do anything, no ‘potence’. But rather than seeing that as a disproof of anyone’s existence, I’m just going to see that as you using the terms “choice” and “imnopotence” wrong.
This seems an excellent argument against the existence of souls. While states may be a condition of physical matter (with nonphysical entities having an infinite number of nearly indistinguishable states) information processing is inherently binary, so you are still stuck with them. So, I’ll stick with physical stuff.
My personal view is that what seems like free will to our conscious mind is actually mostly predetermined by our unconscious mind, and while not nondeterministic that has a good bit of fuzziness and complexity, enough to make what we do decide effectively impossible to determine in advance. Our conscious mind also influences our unconscious mind through the processing of information. Thus, though we may or may not actually have free will, what we do have is an effective simulation of free will, subject to constraints of body chemistry, genetics, and our environment. So it is not a very interesting argument for me, kind of like the existence of the deistic god who never interferes.
The English word choice assumes that there is free will. If there is not, we don’t have any more choice in our next action than what the hands James Bond gets in “Casino Royale.”
And I’m not proving the nonexistence of anything. If you are right and there is no category 2 (and remember I explicitly allowed this case) then there could be entities which we now call gods but which are really pathetic captives of whatever determines their actions, as captive as we are. If we meet one we can laugh at it, and say “Kill me or give me stuff or torture me - whatever you will do has been predetermined a long time ago.” It solves the omnipotence vs omniscience paradox also. Works for me.
I don’t think that the concept of choice encompasses free will.
I have a choice when I have a set of options presented to me, and their relative utility is not vastly separated*, and I make a conscious decision.
The concept makes no claim about how my decision links with the rest of the universe.
I think it’s important to recognise this, because so many free will debates assume that either one believes in free will (whatever that means), or they believe our choices are fake and our thought processes are an illusion.
I believe in neither – my thought processes are really how I make my decision. It’s just that my brain, like my body, is an integrated part of the universe.
- If you’re wondering where this requirement came from, I added it myself. But it doesn’t change the argument to remove it.
Removing it would simply mean that situations like being told at gunpoint to do some harmless thing would technically count as a “choice”.
But that’s fine: it is a choice. No-one said all choices are equally difficult, or that all choices have similar numbers of options.
Benevolence limiting omnipotence. I understand Voyager’s argument and agree it’s technically correct. As I’ve said several times, though, I don’t think it’s important. Meaning, I don’t think anyone who cares about omnipotence (especially Christians) would care about the limitation. As the saying goes, it’s a feature, not a bug.
Logical proofs of God’s nonexistence. begbert2 asks which ones I don’t accept. The answer is all of them. I’ve never seen one I thought meaningfully challenges faith. OTOH, I’ve never seen a logical proof of God’s existence that goes through either. IOW, logic can’t answer the question. One either uses evidence or relies on faith. As a materialist, I’m in the former camp.
Creation vs. intervention. I’ve posited that creation at the Big Bang doesn’t contradict omnimax, though failure to intervene does (in an evidential sense). begbert2 asks, in effect, well couldn’t God have done the Big Bang in a way that avoided the Problem of Suffering. Not in any way I can see. To simplify enormously, BB just has a bunch of stuff coming into being and expanding. How life evolved on Earth is independent of the opening conditions, which at most predict the creation of the planet. (BTW, since I’m a materialist, I think evolution is the actual explanation of the Problem of Suffering, at least the human part of it.) So we have to look to whether and how God intervenes to decide whether he exists and/or is worthy of worship.
Free will. I’m not going to get into this in detail here, as it’s not germaine to the thread (nor do I have the time for a separate one). I will point out though, that if one assumes axiomatically that everything is either determined or random, then determinism is true. I don’t accept the assumption. If there’s a third category, call it volition (a product, presumably, of evolution), then something else may be true. Which isn’t to suggest LFW is valid either. My own theory, which I term soft or psychological compatibilism, is that we have a meaningful ability to make choices, but that ability is influenced and constrained by various things, including personality and life experience. As I said, I don’t want to get into this here, but I do want to mention it’s a debatable issue.
Sorry I was absent for a while, but something’s come up, and I probably won’t be able to spend much more time on the giant time-sink this whole thing has become. So, just a few notes:
begbert2, we’re probably not gonna reconcile our differences. By now, your main point of contention seems to be point 8, the assertion that the minimum amount of evil logically possible may not be equal to zero. I don’t see this as a controversial assertion at all – after all, since there are some worlds god can’t create – those having a certain property, such as ‘contains square circles’ --, it directly follows that for any given world – and for any given property --, it may be the case that god can’t create such a world; this includes, of course, ‘contains no evil’. To show this wrong – rather than just flat-out deny it --, one would have to show that there exist logically possible worlds that contain no evil, which is where I think the burden of proof lies; to my mind, this burden is one that can’t be met, since we know of precisely one logically consistent world – ours --, which definitely does include evil. For any other world, no amount of pure reasoning alone can in principle show it logically possible, any more than it can show that the sun will rise tomorrow. And it is entirely possible that our world might be the only consistent one – which, of course, is equivalent to the assertion that there might be no logically consistent world with zero evil.
Anyway, this is probably all I can come up with; I don’t expect it to convince anybody, but neither do I see any great utility in dragging out this argument any longer.
Perhaps, by way of an example, let’s go with Königsberg: could god make Königsberg such that its citizens don’t have to cross one bridge twice if they want to cross all seven? And the answer, of course, is ‘no’. Sure, he could add a bridge, or change some other fact of the problem, but then, it wouldn’t any longer be Königsberg, in a sense. So let ‘Königsberg’ stand for ‘logically possible world’ and ‘crossing no bridge twice’ stand for ‘containing no evil’, and it seems to me to be distinctly possible that god can’t make both. He can’t have his cake and eat it any more than any of us, in the end.
…because it requires proving a negative: the absence of a contradiction.
Interesting that you assume that our universe is logically consistent.
Based on what? We don’t normally make empirical claims from a priori logical reasoning (this is part of the problem with the ontological proof of god).
I don’t blame you for doing this though: logical consistency should be the default position. Which is why the rest of your argument seems like an ad hoc defence to me.