The Best of all Possible Worlds

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@Voyager

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.

No, it wasn’t (or at least, not by me). I merely said that the world in which those people die is on the whole a better world than all the worlds in which they don’t die; there need not be any causal link between their deaths and the goodness of the world for this to be true. (Consider, for instance, two possible worlds: A) Thousands of people die in a horrible earthquake, no mad scientist invents a doomsday device that destroys the whole of creation; B) nobody dies in that earthquake, but a scientist invents the doomsday device and uses it to annihilate the whole of creation. Since we don’t know the criteria for possibility of worlds, it might be that god’s forced to decide between these two alternatives.)

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 you agree with me that there is a best possible world, and there is some evil in this best world (which you seem to do), then I’m not sure how you can say this argument is begging the question – all I assert that you apparently disagree with is that there’s no way for us to tell whether or not we live in this best possible world. This does not in any way assume that we live in the best possible world; it merely recognizes that if we did, our situation would not be observably different from what it is at present.

To me, at this point, the most salient critique has essentially been that for any omnimax being, it is necessarily (by virtue of its omnimaxness) possible to create a world with no evil at all. I’m not sure that this is the case, as there are worlds possessing a certain property that an omnimax being could not create. Let this for instance be the property of containing square triangles. Note that I am not saying it is necessarily impossible for a tri-omni being to create a world without evil; all that is needed for the argument to work is that it is possibly impossible. However, as the impossibility of creating worlds with square triangles shows, there are worlds which have properties that make them impossible to be created; containing no evil may (or may not!) be such a property, hence, an omnimax god isn’t necessarily able to create such a world.

[Czarcasm]

How might this world be worse if sunlight didn’t cause cancer?

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@qpw3141

ETA: Sorry, you actually said that these points are true if we are living in the best of all possible worlds. :smack:

No – they’re true if there is a best possible world, and someone lives in it.

@CalMeacham

That sounds as if God is at the mercy of His Chemistry Set.

No; merely at the mercy of logical possibility.

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.

Every time I say something like that, I do so to point out that the overall argument is immune to any hypothetical of the form ‘if you eliminate evil X, the world would be better’. It’s a bit like a bubble under the wallpaper: push it down here, it pops up somewhere else.

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.

That’s just as unclear to me as it is to you! But the argument does merely require for it to be possible that god can’t create such a universe, i.e. for there not necessarily being a possible world without evil. Think of brachistochrone curves: of course, the shortest time something can take to travel between two points is 0. However, it turns out, that’s just not possible! Thus, we can create an optimal slide by optimising the time it takes to go from one point to another. It’s not an a priori matter whether or not it takes time to go from A to B; similarly, it’s not an a priori matter whether or not there are possible worlds without evil.

[Czarcasm]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

No, it wasn’t (or at least, not by me). I merely said that the world in which those people die is on the whole a better world than all the worlds in which they don’t die; there need not be any causal link between their deaths and the goodness of the world for this to be true. (Consider, for instance, two possible worlds: A) Thousands of people die in a horrible earthquake, no mad scientist invents a doomsday device that destroys the whole of creation; B) nobody dies in that earthquake, but a scientist invents the doomsday device and uses it to annihilate the whole of creation. Since we don’t know the criteria for possibility of worlds, it might be that god’s forced to decide between these two alternatives.

This seems to be proposition that can never be tested. It’s like playing poker with someone who declares that he never loses, but refuses to ever show his cards when the hand is over. No matter what supposition is brought forward that someone believes might make this world a better place, an untestable (and usually highly unlikely) counter-scenario can be brought forth, as shown in your silly “mad scientist/doomsday device” example.

[CalMeacham]

No; merely at the mercy of logical possibility.

THAT is not obvious to me. Most of your objections raised as examples seem to be limitations of the system, and not linked to logic in any way.

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@Mijin

This is already going quite far away from most religions conception of reality. But is this your position?

Not quite. See, as I already told Czarcasm in the other thread, as far as you know, both your actions and inactions are compatible with gods plan – if you choose the rape option, then yes, your actions will be part of the best possible world; however, the same is true if you neglect to take this path. What this means, in effect, is that you are completely free in your actions; that the godly plan does not affect them at all.

Besides, if god has heaped guilt upon himself by allowing Hitler to happen, remember that he would have heaped greater guilt upon himself by creating a different world, which would have been unavoidably more evil if this is actually the best possible one.

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.

That depends, as Cal Meacham has already pointed out, not creating life might be, in god’s view, an unspeakably evil thing to do.

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.

The problem is that to assert this, you ought to be able to survey the totality of all possible worlds. Which I think I’m not out of line in declaring you can’t.

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?)

God’s ‘mysterious ways’ are not problematic at all, metaphysically speaking, if we’re talking about known unknowns due to the limitations of our frog’s eye view of the world. Only as a cop out, when positing them to, for instance, assert that we are not able to know something we ought to be able to know, does the argument become fallacious. We do not know all possible worlds, but it’s entirely conceivable that god does; that actions based on this knowledge are mysterious to us is just the logical consequence.

<off-topic>
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.
</off-topic>

Socratic question?

[Chronos]

One might also point out that out capability for measuring good and evil falls far below God’s. We can only judge worldly, temporal things, but if there’s a perpetual afterlife, then matters of this world fade into irrelevance. No matter how much suffering someone might endure in this world, it’s nothing to the joy that awaits in the next. So one might, for instance, imagine that God optimized the world for the greatest possible number of people to go to Heaven, and we mortals have only a very limited understanding of precisely who ends up going to Heaven, why, and how.

[Steve_MB]

@Voyager

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.

Geological activity (which necessarily produces the occasional earthquake) seems to be essential to maintaining a habitable planet in the long run. (We are assuming a creator who starts things off and lets them run by physical laws without further intervention.)

That doesn’t solve the general problem, though, as there are many evils in the world which lack such a necessity justification (e.g. centipedes, spiders, scorpions, etc could fill their ecological role just fine without any of them having venom dangerous to humans).

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@CalMeacham

No; merely at the mercy of logical possibility.

THAT is not obvious to me. Most of your objections raised as examples seem to be limitations of the system, and not linked to logic in any way.

Not really sure how to make this any more clear. Sure, there might be a less evil, possible world, but equally well, there might not. This ‘there might not’ is all the argument needs to work; pointing out ‘there might be’, no matter in what context, then doesn’t challenge it. If there might not be a better possible world, those living in the best possible world would find themselves in the same situation as we do, hence, we may live in the best possible world.

[John_DiFool]

Two things, both quasi-Buddhist:

1. Suffering ultimately comes from the separate-self sense, and as long as conscious beings take the separate-self sense as real (vs. it being an illusion), you’ll have suffering-it’s unavoidable.

2. While suffering is unavoidable, our attitude towards it can change, lessening or even eliminating its impact; perhaps these alluded-to techniques can involve realizing the illusionary nature of the separate-self.

Thus a Heaven which is a collection of separate selves ultimately can become a Hell, no matter how outwardly pleasant, but even a Heaven which contains just one Self can also end up becoming a sort of Hell as well, leading that singular Self to consciously decide to split itself up into many (again).

[begbert2]

I modified your assertions slightly for logical clarity. I do not believe I changed their meaning. Alterations underlined for visbility.

1. SimGod can start the simulation, and let it run through till the end. (He’s omnipotent.)
2. SimGod knows what’s good and what’s evil; alternatively, he defines it.
3. SimGod can keep a running total of evil.
4. When the simulation has concluded, it has a certain amount of evil associated with it.
5. SimGod wants the total amount of evil to be as small as possible. (He’s omnibenevolent.)
6. SimGod can run the simulation again, and again, until all possibilities have played out.
7. Among all these possibilities, one, which will be known as world A, will have the least amount of evil.*
8. This amount may not be 0.
9. SimGod can choose the one with the least amount of evil (world A) as the ‘actual’ history of the world.
10. The denizens of world A may find themselves in the presence of some evil.
11. For any given act of evil, they can ask the question: ‘Without this act of evil, wouldn’t the world be a better one?’
12. The answer to this question would always be no, as the resulting alternative world would always be either worse, or impossible.
13. This is exactly the situation we find ourselves in.

First, minor notes:
2 is half-false; omnibenevolence disallows SimGod from defining good and evil.
6 is false; omnibenevolent SimGod cannot actually run any suboptimal scenarios. However, being omniscient he doesn’t actually have to do so; he can choose the optimimal world ex nihilo, making 9 true anyway.

Now, major notes:

11 and 12 don’t follow from 10. In 8 and 10, there may be evil in the optimal world A. Which means, explicitly, there might not be. 11 and 12, however, unqualifiedly assert that there is evil in the world A, which is not proven anywhere, making 11 and 12 unsupported by the statements that precede them. Thus the argument is logically fallacious.

Okay, let’s pretend for a moment that you actually said (changes bolded):
8b) This amount is not 0.
10b) The denizens of world Ab will find themselves in the presence of some evil.

First I’ll note that 8b is an assumption that I do not accept, and thus I would declare the resulting b argument unsound. But let’s pretend that I accept it for the sake of argument, allowing us to look at the other flaw in your logic, which is that you’re leaping from the general to the specific. A fact which can be pointed out by asking - what exactly does 13 mean? What does it show?

I say it shows literally nothing - except that we are not in the best possible world if 8b is false (which I actually think is the case, omnipotence being what it is).

Consider the worst possible world, Z.
10Zb) The denizens of world Z will find themselves in the presence of some evil.
11Z) For any given act of evil, they can ask the question: ‘Without this act of evil, wouldn’t the world be a better one?’
12Z) The answer to this question would always be no, as the resulting alternative world would always be either worse, or impossible.
13Z) This is exactly the situation we find ourselves in.

Note that 12Z is obviously false; Z is not the optimal world so things can indeed get better. But the people in Z don’t know that. And neither do the people in Ab. So, the people in Ab and Z are both in exactly the same situation we find ourselves in: we see some evil, period. That’s as much informatiuon as your argument gives the people in the worlds to work with, and it’s exactly what your argument shows: that we are in one of the worlds in the set A through Z (inclusive). Which we already knew axiomatically. The argument shows nothing.

Consider the equivalent argument:
1-10p) You have a set of pool balls, numbered 1 through 15.
11p) If you were looking at the largest-number pool ball you would see that it has a number less than 20.
12p) The answer to this question would be no, because 15 < 20.
13p) We have a randomly selected pool ball, and its number is less than 20.
(unstated conclusion 14)p: Because we know our pool ball is <20, it might be the 15-ball.
(unstated premise 15p): You’re also not allowed to do any other thinking on the matter, lest it show that the ball with the 6 printed on it is not the 15-ball.
In real life, it’s trivially easy to imagine alternate worlds that would be better. Here is but one example that took like ten seconds to think up: suppose everyone in the entire world behaved like Jesus. All christians would say that WWJD is an approach for making the world a better place. Some people don’t do WWJD, so the world is provably suboptimal, to all Christians. Thus we provably are not in world A, or even world Ab.

Another is, SimGod is omnipotent, foo! There’s way this world is the best he could do, by definition, unless it is exactly what he wants. By definition. Which would necessarily mean that if I blow up a maternity ward, he liked that outcome better than if I had a heart attack or was hit by a bus or changed my mind. Which means that he thinks dead babies is the best possible outcome - better than having the mothers never successfully conceive.

This is absurd, of course. Though it would be handy if I wanted to justify literally every heinous idea that it crossed my mind to do. Everything I do I by definition good!

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

The free will defense is bullshit for two different reasons.

1. Free will is, in itself, a logically nonsensical notion and can’t exist.
2. Even if “free will” were possible (which it isn’t), an omnimax God has the option of creating only people who will only freely choose good.
   I would also add that there is an inherent presumption in the free will defnse that free will is somehow morally necessary or is a sine qua non for creation. Just for the record, it is not. Free will has no moral value at all. If free will causes evil, then it’s evil to allow it.

[Mijin]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

What this means, in effect, is that you are completely free in your actions; that the godly plan does not affect them at all.

Well, it means that I can honestly say to god that the universe would have been worse had I not raped. I could argue also that god used me, and the victim, as a means to an end.

The problem is that to assert this, you ought to be able to survey the totality of all possible worlds. Which I think I’m not out of line in declaring you can’t.

This reasoning is incorrect, and it’s critical to this debate that you appreciate why:

To assert that our universe is not the optimal one for Evilness, all I need to do is conceive of a single logically-consistent reality with less Evilness.

I’m confident that I can do this for any non-tautological property that you formally define.

Meanwhile we have no definition of “evilness” and we may as well say pain exists because “God works in mysterious ways”.

Socratic question?

Thanks

[begbert2]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

2. Even if “free will” were possible (which it isn’t), an omnimax God has the option of creating only people who will only freely choose good.

In fact, here’s a spiffy little argument:

1. If an omnibenevolent god with free will exists that proves axiomatically that omnibenevolent-style free will is possible

2. No omnibenevolent god would create beings with non-omnibenevolent-style free will if they could be created with omnibenevolent-style free will instead, due to the axiomatically increased probability of non-omnibenevolent beings making the world an unnecessarily worse place through the exercise of their non-omnibenevolent-style free will.

3. From 1 and 2, if an omnibenevolent god with free will existed, we have omnibenevolent-style free will.

4. From 3, if any humans are not omnibenevolent, no omnibenevolent god exists.

By provable definition, all humans are as good as God is, and God is as bad as the worst human. (Unless he’s sufficiently far from omnipotent that he couldn’t do demonstrably possible things. Or unless he doesn’t exist at all.)

[RitterSport]

@Chronos

One might also point out that out capability for measuring good and evil falls far below God’s. We can only judge worldly, temporal things, but if there’s a perpetual afterlife, then matters of this world fade into irrelevance. No matter how much suffering someone might endure in this world, it’s nothing to the joy that awaits in the next. So one might, for instance, imagine that God optimized the world for the greatest possible number of people to go to Heaven, and we mortals have only a very limited understanding of precisely who ends up going to Heaven, why, and how.

The problem here is then you’re proposing a “better” world – the afterlife. Therefore, the universe we’re in is not the optimal, least evil, most good world – the afterlife is better.

I think that undermines the OP. In fact, someone with the outlook described in the OP must not believe in an afterlife.

[Blut_Aus_Nord]

Free will doesn’t exist? Explain.

[Voyager]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

@Voyager

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.

No, it wasn’t (or at least, not by me). I merely said that the world in which those people die is on the whole a better world than all the worlds in which they don’t die; there need not be any causal link between their deaths and the goodness of the world for this to be true. (Consider, for instance, two possible worlds: A) Thousands of people die in a horrible earthquake, no mad scientist invents a doomsday device that destroys the whole of creation; B) nobody dies in that earthquake, but a scientist invents the doomsday device and uses it to annihilate the whole of creation. Since we don’t know the criteria for possibility of worlds, it might be that god’s forced to decide between these two alternatives.)

Then, as has been stated before, God is not omnipotent. We’d have to understand why a world in which 999 people die instead of 1,000, or 998, or whatever, is not possible. We’d have to understand why this evil scientist couldn’t be hit by lightning or have a convenient heart attack instead.

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 you agree with me that there is a best possible world, and there is some evil in this best world (which you seem to do), then I’m not sure how you can say this argument is begging the question – all I assert that you apparently disagree with is that there’s no way for us to tell whether or not we live in this best possible world. This does not in any way assume that we live in the best possible world; it merely recognizes that if we did, our situation would not be observably different from what it is at present.

There is no way to prove this, since we don’t have access to the consequences of someone not dying, but this being the best possible world seems extremely implausible I agreed that there would be some evil, but I also said that evil would be minimized, so if we come up with a possible scenario where evil can decrease in our world we have provided evidence against this being the best one.

[Der_Trihs]

If this is the best possible world that God can make, then I’d argue that the best possible world period would be none at all, it’s all an exercise in unnecessary suffering.

And the “simulation god” idea fails because a benevolent simulation god would just stick with the simulation, over which it would logically have much more control, than a natural universe over which it is apparently powerless.

@Triskadecamus

If the world exists so that mortal beings can exist, and become immortal it makes the balance of good and evil somewhat different.

It makes it worse, since he could have just started with the immortals. I also find it bizarre that you think someone who spends their life in agony and insane is somehow better for ending up reborn as an insane immortal, never having known anything but suffering. I’m sure they’ll be so very thankful. :rolleyes:

@TriPolar

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.

If good is just valuable for opposing evil, then it isn’t “good” in any useful sense. Morality isn’t a form of gladiatorial combat, it exists to make the world better for everyone.

@Chronos

One might also point out that out capability for measuring good and evil falls far below God’s.

Wrong, we’re the ones doing the suffering. And a benevolent god wouldn’t have created the world if this is the best it can do; he appears to have no sense of compassion for his creations. In my opinion we are clearly if anything morally superior to any God there might be.

@Chronos

We can only judge worldly, temporal things, but if there’s a perpetual afterlife, then matters of this world fade into irrelevance. No matter how much suffering someone might endure in this world, it’s nothing to the joy that awaits in the next.

Nonsense. Horrible suffering is still horrible no matter how long a life you have ahead of you. And to repeat my previous example, you have people who have been driven insane, and who have never known anything but suffering. Given the levels of suffering in the world, your argument boils down to a claim that when we die God brainwashes our souls into adoring slaves, which isn’t “good” by any worthwhile standard.

And as said, if the afterlife is so great then just make us there.

@John_DiFool

Two things, both quasi-Buddhist:

1. Suffering ultimately comes from the separate-self sense, and as long as conscious beings take the separate-self sense as real (vs. it being an illusion), you’ll have suffering-it’s unavoidable.

Simply not true, suffering has nothing to do with being a separate being. And on top of that we really are separate beings, it’s not an illusion.

@Chakra Nadmara

Free will doesn’t exist? Explain.

It’s a meaningless, logically incoherent concept. Unless you go with “compatibilist free will”, which is just determinism with the words “free will” tacked on.

[Voyager]

@Steve_MB

Geological activity (which necessarily produces the occasional earthquake) seems to be essential to maintaining a habitable planet in the long run. (We are assuming a creator who starts things off and lets them run by physical laws without further intervention.)

That doesn’t solve the general problem, though, as there are many evils in the world which lack such a necessity justification (e.g. centipedes, spiders, scorpions, etc could fill their ecological role just fine without any of them having venom dangerous to humans).

That type of God is not omnibenevolent and omnipotent, since such a god could easily create a world where the crust does not move, or where the stresses along fault lines are resolved slowly and quietly. But your example works also.

As an example of what omnibenevolence would look like, in the excellent “George of the Jungle” movie a porter falls off a bridge over a giant canyon. In the next scene he is back in camp with a band-aid, as the narrator explains that in this movie no one dies, they just get big boo-boos. Now that’s a God I could deal with.

[Voyager]

@TriPolar

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.

This is indeed one of the arguments for the existence of evil, but you can define a new minimum evil which takes this point into account. Where we are now, would the elimination of a single evil act reduce the appreciation of good more? Seems unlikely.