More like:
Person 2: “How do you know it shouldn’t be there?”
This is just special pleading. trying to say that logic doesn’t apply to God doesn’t stop omnimaximality from being logically inconsistent with the POE, it just tries to argue that God is allowed to be illogical, which is lame in the extreme, and shuts down any possibility of coherent discussion.
For an omnimax God, yes this statement is logically impossible.
He doesn’t have to - he can just imagine a world changed from ours in one particular, just as in various optimization techniques like Genetic Algorithms, where you do not create totally new solutions, but slightly modify existing ones and test them for being better than the old one.
Please show how making the world a bit better is logically impossible.
I think the problem with your argument is that you have a hidden argument, which I will try to simplify.
- There is a god, who is omni-max.
- This implies that our world is best.
- Claims that our world can be improved can be rejected since they conflict with point 2. God cannot change things in the world because they would lead to a non-optimal world, which conflicts with omnibenevolence, which is logically impossible because it violates the omnimax axiom (1).
But it is quite clear that this god is not omnipotent by any useful meaning of the term, since if he is bound by omnibenevolence, and is omniscient, he can, as you have shown, find the best of all possible universes and actualize it. This is clearly not a universe he designed, since it is bound by being optimal, and he is forced, by omnibenevolence, to actualize it and then not interfere - except as required to keep it optimal, killing off the random baby or two. In this view God has no more freedom of action than a particle under motion. Omnipotence becomes a joke, God has no free will, and is limited to acting according to the script dictated to him by the requirements of the optimal world.
I don’t know if you are willing to consider this very constrained God omnimax or not, but it would be a stretch for most people.
Right. It doesn’t. That’s what I said. But a god not bound by logic can create a world in which A ^ !A is true, (which then explodes, except if god doesn’t want it to), and hence, in which both ‘god is omnimax’ and ‘evil exists’ is true even if ‘if god is omnimax, evil doesn’t exist’ is true as well.
Only in a very different and boring universe. Forget about free will and people - so long as there are predators and prey, there will be a basic conflict that cannot be resolved without one side or the other suffering. But the constrained God argument I just made works just as well if the optimal universe has no evil versus it having a minimal amount.
This is gibberish. It’s incoherent special pleading which does not allow for discussion. It amounts to “because I said so.”
As long as you agree that an omnimax God is inconsistent with the POE, you’ve pretty much already conceded your king. The rest is just your own personal (and rather contorted) way of dealing with the implications (I was going to say “rationalizing the implications,” but that would not be accurate since it amounts to denying the validity of reason itself), and that has nothing to do with the rest of us or with the actual debate.
You test them, right. Because, per Rice’s theorem, it’s impossible to decide algorithmically whether or not it’s going to be better in any way other than running it. For worlds, it may be even worse: just think of the (popularised version) of the butterfly effect: change a small detail, and you change the whole in a generally unpredictable manner.
Yet again, I don’t say that it will, but I say that it might. For any given change you introduce.
I have repeatedly stated that Leibniz’ argument is not intended to show that our world is the best one. I merely shows that it is possible that this is the case.
These claims can, in general, be rejected because it seems impossible to actually prove that any improvement suggested has the desired effect. And again, if it isn’t necessarily the case that our world would be better if god were omnimax, then there is no problem of evil; hence, if it is possible that our world would look pretty much the way it does with god being omnimax, there is no problem of evil. This is really the key point I seem to be unable to get across. It’s the same thing Franklin said in the quote above. It really doesn’t seem to be difficult to me at all, yet so far, it hasn’t even been acknowledged by anyone. It’s really just this – in order to show propositions logically compatible, it suffices to show that a possible set of circumstances exist in which they are simultaneously valid. That’s what Leibniz does with the best of all possible worlds construction.
That is just the conflict between omniscience and omnipotence – i.e. can god do something he didn’t know he would --, which I fully accept as demolishing the notion of an omnimax god. It doesn’t have anything to do with the attack on omnimaxness provided by the problem of evil, however.
I don’t (except in the case where logic is not able to make any statements about the nature of god in which, as you note, all rational discussion amounts to gibberish; in that case, I don’t know).
I assert it. It is unnecessary suffering.
Heck, I’ll even pick an example. Menstrual cramps. Some women have them, some don’t. Some women only have them some of the time, or only before they have children, or only before a certain age, or only after a certain age. Why is it necessary that anyone have them? They are common, non-fatal, non-predictive of fertility, etc. In short, menstrual cramps are useless, pointless, unnecessary suffering.
Which is it going to be? God is bound by rules that only affect some women, or mysterious ways, mysterious ways?
Oh, come on. You could construct about a million hypotheticals in which Jane’s menstrual cramps save all of civilisation as we know it, while Cathy’s lack thereof prevents the next Hitler from being born. All of them will be extremely, highly, ridiculously implausible. But possible.
Riiiight. So do it. And remember, it isn’t just Jane and Cathy, it’s all women.
I mean just posit a single true repercussion of the fact of menstrual cramps that could change the world. Something. Anything. While keeping in mind that some women have them, there are varying degrees, they are not standard and not constant, etc. Show your work.
Ok, so let’s see a defense that doesn’t simply try to deny that God is subject to logic.
If I were to do that, what next? Would you have me show how scoliosis leads to a better world? Short penises? Dandruff? This is not were the burden of proof lies. If you assert that a given change to the world leads to a better one, it is in your place to prove it. Otherwise, while it is possible that it does, it’s equally possible that it doesn’t. (And as for the menstrual cramps, it is for some women a reason to take contraception; since Mary took contraception because of her menstrual cramps, Hitler2, who would have killed billions of people, was never born. Unfortunately, the introduction of menstrual cramps was the only way this could be achieved.)
Try this one.
Good gravy.
That’s the only way for God to make it happen, and you are still going to argue with a straight face that God is omnipotent.
Why not, I dunno, MAKE MARY STERILE?
I continue to be astounded that you can’t see how you’re hamstringing God then claiming he’s omnipotent. You are admitting the PoE is incompatible with omnimax, then denying you’re admitting it.
Look, that Mary example was purposefully ridiculous, you know, like the inclusion of dandruff in the list of evils to rid this world of… (I was completely serious about the small penises, though. Those things cause wars!)
The key thing is that it is possible that it doesn’t nerf god’s omnipotence any more than requiring him to conform to the laws of logic does. It’s possible.
(Or, perhaps in other words, Mary’s sterility would have precluded her from giving birth to Richard McHero, who in the 29th century saves the world from destruction by short penises.)
The laws of logic are A=A. The laws of logic are not “Suffering is required” or “In order to get a good-ish outcome I have to do horrible things to billions of people.”
If any one of us can create a small, closed system that includes life but doesn’t include, say, serial killers and AIDS, we have successfully created a world that is less evil than that one we live in. The rest is just a matter of scale.
God doesn’t have to force humans to invent birth control. God can make someone sterile, can make a specific embryo abort, can change Hitler into Bob Ross with his happy little clouds, etc. If God exists and is omnipotent, the only reason Hitler existed is that God wanted him to exist. That is all the PoE says. If God exists and is omnipotent, Hitler existed because God wanted it that way. If he couldn’t stop it, he’s not omnipotent. If he couldn’t make that one sperm fail to fertilize that one egg, he’s not omnipotent. If he couldn’t make Hitler want to give all Jews cake and nice new shoes, he’s not omnipotent.
If he could but didn’t choose to, he wanted it that way.
Even in your ridiculous example, you are saying that God, who is omnipotent, went the long way around because… he wanted it that way. Mysterious ways again.
You’re not treading new ground here. It’s just the same thing again. You have to cripple God (thus destroying omnipotence) or justify his desire for suffering (thus destroying omnibenevolence) or say that he somehow just didn’t know (thus destroying omniscience).
That one’s already been refuted. It conflicts with omnipotence.
I’ll be gone again soon (and I shudder to think of the responses that await me when I log on again), so I’ll try one last ditch attempt at clearing up what seems to be, at this point, the central confusion surrounding the issue. And that is, that in order for the argument to work, I don’t have to show that we do, in fact, live in the best possible world. I don’t even have to show that we are likely to live in the best possible world, or even just that it is very plausible that we do. I just have to show it possible, or not impossible (the two carry equal logical weight, but are treated differently in every day speech). It could even be that the possibility that we do live in the best possible world is precisely 0, the same way that getting all heads in infinitely many coin throws has a likelihood of 0. Nevertheless, it’s possible.
So if it is among the set of possibilities for us to live within the best possible world, the argument goes through. Why’s that so? Well, the problem of evil posits a categorical stance: if there is evil, god can’t be omnimax. This is precisely analogous to: since the probability of getting either heads or tails is 1/2, there can’t be no infinite string of heads. But, even though it’s infinitesimally unlikely, it is in fact possible to have an infinite string of heads only; there is no selection rule that for a string of heads greater than n, at least one tails must occur. Hence, the assertion that it is impossible is false.
To show that the categorical assertion that if god is omnimax, there can’t be any evil is false I merely have to show that there is the faintest possibility for there to be evil even though god is omnimax. This is what the Leibnizian construction accomplishes: if it is possible for some property P, that god can’t create a world having that property (for instance, let P be ‘contains true contradictions’), then it is possible for every property P that god can’t create a world having this property. This is open to disproof, of course: exhibit a world having property P, and it must be possible for god to create it. But barring this disproof, it may be the case that for P = ‘contains no evil’, it is impossible for god to create such a world. Hence, the best possible world may contain some evil. Hence, the denizens of this world find themselves in the same position we do. Hence, we may live in this world. Thus, the problem of evil is refuted.
Anyway, I recognise by now that this probably won’t convince anybody, as it contains nothing new; which is a shame, as the argument itself is, to my mind, of striking simplicity and considerable import, and simply quite beautiful.
Be that as it may, Who wants to be a Millionaire? is on.