That makes sense to me. But the argument is largely independent from the parameter used for the optimisation, so it should work just as well that way.
By the way, I recall somebody bringing up the omnimalevolent god, for whom the problem of good can be solved in an equivalent way. That’s absolutely correct, however, recall what the Leibnizian argument is meant to show: positing an omnimax god, the problem of evil is brought up to show its inconsistency. Leibniz best of all possible worlds scenario is a response to this problem, which shows that the existence of evil and gods omnimaxness are in fact compatible.
The same can be done for the omnimalevolent-omnimax god: if you posit this type of god, nobody can use the existence of good to disprove him, since you can construct a ‘worst of all possible worlds’ argument. The thing is just, nobody generally proposes an omnimalevolent god.
Leibniz argument is not meant to demonstrate the existence of an omnimax god; it is merely made to defend this notion, at which one would have arrived previously through whatever means, against the problem of evil.
Well you say “again”, but nontrivial complexity is a new requirement, and one that I can’t see the basis for.
In fact inevitably, when discussing theology, philosophy or just performing thought experiments, we choose the simplest realities we can. It’s rather loading the deck to say “No, you must choose inconceivably complex realities”.
OK, scratch the ‘nontrivial complexity’. I can’t conceive of an empty world, and I’m pretty sure you can’t either. Thinking about nothing has its problems, as I remarked in the other thread. And what world could you imagine? One in which an atom exists? Them little buggers are fiendishly complicated. Or just a few quarks? How good at nonperturbative QCD are you?
In short, I remain unconvinced that anybody can imagine a knowably logically consistent world.
Besides, as Thudlow Boink has pointed out, maximising good would perhaps be a preferable method in this case; surely, in an empty world, there’s no goodness, either.
Something at which it fails miserably, since an omnimax god wouldn’t be stuck with all the limitations being used to justify evil in this scenario. It wouldn’t be limited by physics or by biology or have to create the universe and let it run without intervention. All the arguments for the “best of all possible worlds” scenario in this thread involve postulating a god that’s nowhere near “omnimax”.
:rolleyes: As opposed to the people who simply end up permanently insane. A wonderful benefit they got from their suffering. You aren’t even talking about the same order of magnitude of suffering I am; people suffering to that degree aren’t going to be feeling compassion towards others or struggling to achieve anything, they’ll be incapacitated and overwhelmed by the agony and trauma. I recall reading of an old woman living in Israel who survived the concentration camps; she’s been screaming for all those years since then, but has been silent for most of them because she destroyed her own voice from the constant screams. How did she benefit from her experience?
OK, consider a world W with some property P. Can, in your opinion, god always create a world such that it has property P for every possible P? Even if P is ‘has square triangles’ or ‘possesses true contradictions’? If he can, then he can also make it true that while omnimaxness is incompatible with the presence of evil, both are true, since he is not bound to logic -> there is no problem of evil.
Now if he can’t, then there are obviously properties P such that god can’t create a world that has such a property. A priori, every property may have this characteristic; this means, so may P = ‘has no evil’. So if it’s true that an omnimax god is nevertheless bound by logic, he may be incapable of creating a world in which there is no evil; if that isn’t the case, however, then it is impossible to reason logically about him, which means that the problem of evil doesn’t get started in the first place.
What does logic have to do with it? It would be trivially easy for an omnimax god to make the world far, far better without violating logical constancy. Makes acts of evil impossible; there you’ve done it. Or on a lesser scale simply handwave away disease and injury; if that makes the population too large, just make the world bigger as the population grows. An omnimax god doesn’t need to worry about physical limits, and I don’t see it can be remotely argued that we are anywhere near the best logically possible world. It’s hard enough to argue that this is the best possible world for a limited god that starts the universe and lets it run; the idea that it’s the best for a god that could just poof a world into being is flat out wrong. The existence of moral progress alone demonstrates that; it could have simply made us in our progressed state at the beginning.
And no, you can’t say that maybe “well, maybe suffering X was necessary to achieve Y”; nothing is “necessary” for an omnipotent to achieve anything. It just wills it to happen, and that’s that. If an omnibenevolent omnipotent wanted us to be a particular way it wouldn’t torture us into the proper shape, it would simply make it so. That’s the thing about slapping all those “omnis” on your god; once you do that you can’t excuse his actions or lack thereof by appealing to limitations you’ve already defined him as not having.
Well, great! So, can you show that the thus obtained world is logically consistent? Alternatively, does the fact that I can say that god could just make triangles square mean he can?
Logical consistency is; if it isn’t, god’s also not susceptible to the reasoning used to arrive at the problem of evil in the first place.
Bottom line is, for every narrative or hypothetical you can construct to exhibit a ‘better’ world, one can construct another narrative in which the world ends up actually being worse. This may be ridiculously implausible, but it’s always possible.
The point is though, we have no a priori reason to rule out the possibility of such realities.
If I postulate a universe that is an empty void, there is no reason to suppose that it is impossible other than as an ad hoc defence of your theory.
Let me make your argument simpler for you. Why not just say that our universe is the only logically consistent one? This would be an absurd premise, but it’s the one you’re moving towards.
If you wish to postulate that an empty void is logically inconsistent, then say so (note: I never said anything about “nothing”). As a reminder, remember that “reality” is not restricted to universes with laws of physics like ours. An omnimax god is not constrained in this way.
Nevertheless, go ahead and define “good”. I’m sure people will be queueing up with hypothetical realities with greater “good” than our own.
Exactly! Which, of course, entails that we can’t a priori rule out the possibility that they might not be possible. That’s just what the argument needs.
And similarly, there is no reason to assume that it is possible; this is the defence of Leibniz’ argument.
Actually, I find the idea that the universe is the way it is because it could not be any other way both logically and aesthetically immensely compelling; and in a sense, that’s where the notion of a ‘theory of everything’ leads us: if it is unique, i.e. if there is only one consistent theory capable of giving rise to reality, then there is only one logically possible universe (though it might be more appropriately considered a ‘multiverse’ containing our universe only as a small part). If it is not unique, then there exists another theory that could equally well lead to a consistent reality; then, however, the question remains why our universe obeys this theory rather than the other one, and this question can’t be answered by our putative TOE – hence, it can’t be a TOE after all!
If there is no definition of good, or more to the point, no definition of evil, then there is no problem of evil; since you can’t well point to the fact that the world could contain less evil (or more good) if you can’t define what ‘evil’ is in the first place.
By the way, this “minimal evil” argument is complete hogwash. An omnimax God cannot be bound by limitations and needs to means to achieve an end. What is the end goal of all this? Whatever it is, God only has to will it and make it so.
And it’s an absurd defence. It’s like the “no true scotsman” fallacy, only it doesn’t even bother to state how a given example falls short.
And remember, we’re not talking about alternate histories here.
For example: Is a universe that is identical to ours, except that everyone has a nose made of glass, logically consistent?
The answer is surely yes, since god doesn’t need to evolve this situation or rewrite history.
God can just puff into existence a universe just like the current state of ours, with our memories and records as they are, but our noses substituted with glass.
Once again though remember God can create any reality at all. We aren’t just talking about tweaking parameters here.
You can’t mix M-theory with what a god can do. God could create a world of magic and wonder, and physics be damned. The only limitation (if there is any limitation), is it should be self-consistent.
Well sure, I can have a go at that.
e.g. Suffering. Plainly God has not chosen the universe with the least suffering. This is essentially how I interpret the POE.
e.g. Alternatively, sinning, defined as times that the 10 commandments have been broken. This universe is not the one with the least sinning.
Fairness, happiness, aesthetics, complexity…whatever property, it’s pretty clear that this universe is sub-optimal.
I’ll use myself as an example. I married someone who was disabled and going to die early. I did that on purpose even though I knew it would cause me pain, and when he did die early, I got exactly what I bargained for. No, I wouldn’t have traded it for a world in which I didn’t marry him, but I would have traded it for a world in which he wasn’t sick and dying.
You’re placing the “wouldn’t trade it” at the wrong spot. Given what we have–incurable illness, pain, suffering–we can’t exempt ourselves from horrible choices.
But there is no way that a just, good, God created a family like my husband’s where when he lived to be 47 he had made it longer than any member of his father’s family. That is not what I would have chosen, given any option in the whole damned world.
It’s actually insulting to claim that those of us who wouldn’t have chosen differently would actually prefer that our lives be traumatized and our loved ones killed–and that’s what you are saying. So stop saying it.
Ok, this is officially the last time I’ll deal with this argument. God’s omnipotence is bound by logic; if it isn’t, he isn’t susceptible to the reasoning employed to arrive at the problem of evil in the first place. If you maintain that there’s a logical problem with god both being omnimax and evil existing, you must in the first place maintain that logic applies to god.
No, it really isn’t. Have you read the Franklin quote above? This is all I maintain: to show that a set of premises is mutually consistent, all that is needed is a possible scenario in which they all hold.
Of course we are! How else would you tally up total evilness if not by taking into account the whole of history? That was explicit in the OP.
Can he do that in a logically consistent manner? For instance, we live in a relativistic universe; hence, the ‘current state’ only has local meaning. To an observer on Andromeda, the current state would be something very different – it might, for instance, be a state in our causal past, or even future. So, if the universe were created last Thursday, from the point of view of an Andromedan, it wouldn’t exist yet, at least in part, which seems like an obviously inconsistent world.
You know, I wish I could go back and re-formulate this argument in terms of the worst possible world as an argument showing that it’s possible for god to be malevolent. I have a hunch that a lot of the people vehemently disagreeing right now would have had far less of a problem accepting that argument…
I just can’t figure out how this entire argument differs in any way from “God works in mysterious ways” and “God has to obey rules.” In other words, the exact old arguments against the PoE in the first place.
Because the ‘mysterious ways’ aren’t troubling, and actually are a sensible answer in this case: it’s like when you were little, your parents told you not to eat too much candy, even though it tastes good. This might seem very mysterious, however, it isn’t actually, since your parents merely had access to superior knowledge telling them that too much candy isn’t good. It’s the same way with a god able to in some way (perhaps through simulation, as stipulated in the OP) survey the totality of possible world-histories: sure that seems mysterious to us, but it’s actually pretty simple. Mysterious ways are, as a putative explanation, only troubling when used to hand-wave away a logical inconsistency, i.e. when they are used to ‘invalidate’ a conclusion arrived at rationally.
And as I argued already, the formulation of the problem assumes the constraints on god’s omnimaxness; it then doesn’t seem fair if the answer isn’t allowed to.
You’ve misunderstood me here. I’m pointing out that we are not talking about alternate histories for this universe / reality.
We’re talking about alternate realities, in the most abstract sense.
But yes, of course we must consider the histories of these realities.
It is a logically consistent manner.
“Physics be damned” remember? It’s logically consistent, it just doesn’t include consistent physics, which is not the same thing.
I did. A universe devoid of life would have zero suffering.
(such a universe would not be better from our POV but that’s irrelevant right now)
I just find it funny that you can’t see that’s exactly what you’re doing.
Person 1: “There shouldn’t be [X evil thing].”
Person 2: “But it needs to be there! Without that, greater evil will happen! It’s true! Don’t ask me how, but it’s true! It’s in the definition!”
This is exactly the mysterious ways argument. I don’t know how it’s true, but I take it on faith that it’s true because I take it on faith that God is just/powerful/beyond my comprehension/on the right track/doing it all for my benefit/benevolent/spiffy/taller than average.
Oh, and the formation of the problem observes constraints on God’s omnimaxness through the existence of evil. If God exists, there is a constraint on the omnimaxness because evil exists. Your argument is that it’s true the omnimaxness is constrained, but that’s okay. Which is exactly, EXACTLY the mysterious ways/God is bound solution.
We’re not getting ahead here, are we? That a universe with inconsistent physics is logically consistent is an assertion for which the burden of proof lies squarely with you. I agree that it may well be the case that it is so, but equally well, it may not. If I would just up and declare that a universe with square triangles is logically consistent, you’d ask me for proof, wouldn’t you? Well, a priori, the situation is not different for any other property a world might have (other than, of course, observed ones).
That’s not a consistent universe. There is only one possible way of creating a universe, and this leads necessarily to the emergence of life. Is this impossible?