A world without evil is better than a world with evil, therefore we don’t live in the best possible world.
That was easy.
It is not logically possible to show such a possibility.
To say it’s not possible for God to create a world having “property X” is to say that God is not omnipotent. It is impossible for it to be impossible for God to create a world without evil.
This is not necessarily true (and it’s why I objected to “minimize evil” as the single criterion of a benevolent God). A barren world without life or much of anything else would be a world without evil, but I, for one, wouldn’t consider it better than the world we have now.
If you could eliminate (or at least decrease) the evil without decreasing the good at the same time, then we don’t live in the best possible world. That may be true, but it isn’t quite so easy to show.
Even if “Property X” is self-contradictory, logically impossible, or nonsensical (like creating the proverbial burrito so hot God can’t eat it)?
A world without evil and with sentient beings might not be possible.
If you had a hundred Gods, would you have evil?
Is there evil in heaven?
Again, what does that kind of logic have to do with anything? If an omnimax god makes it so Bob doesn’t break his leg while a non-omnimax god lets it happen, where’s the conceivable logical paradox in that? People don’t break their legs all the time. And no, the effects on other people don’t matter since the omnimax god can just edit them out; a reality under the control of an omnimax god doesn’t need to be consistent from person to person.
You seem to be confusing “logically” impossible" with “physically possible”.
I just don’t but that. “Logical consistency” has a lot narrower application than you seem to think.
An omnimax god can change history or create different histories for different regions or simply create the universe without one, as needed. Again, you are treating “logically consistent” as something much broader than it is.
Doesn’t matter, an omnimax god can simply create alternate histories for different locales or simulates the effects of such histories as necessary. Logically consistent isn’t the same s physically consistent.
That’s trivially easy to do; scientists can and have run simulations where they changed the laws of physics; the simulated universe failed to implode. For an omnimax god there are in effect no laws of physics, they can by definition be changed or ignored as necessary from moment to moment. Living in a world under an omnipotent is just like living in a simulation, reality is as arbitrary as the being running the simulation feels like making it.
Yes, if we are talking about an omnimax. An omnimax can create new universes in a limitless number of ways by definition, including fully formed and lifeless. Whether the “laws of physics” allow for a lifeless universe doesn’t matter, an omnipotent can simply ignore those.
An omnimax god can just make dead animals poof out of nowhere for the predators. Or just supply all animals with energy and matter as needed so they don’t need to eat.
Not with an omnimax god is involved. An omnimax god can simply make none of those bad things happen by a whim. If an omnimax god wants to prevent killing, he can simply make it impossible; the bullets vanish, the poison gas fails to kill, the knives won’t cut. If an omnimax god doesn’t want someone to be born he can simply will it not to happen.
If an omnimax god exists, then it is possible because if it isn’t god can’t be omnimax himself; such a world means that the “omnibenevolent” part of the omnimax god is itself impossible. If on the other hand omnibenevolence is possible God can simply make all the inhabitants of the world omnibenevolent too.
If you refuse to accept an argument that a change to our world would make it better, you cannot also argue you know that it is best. You can assume it, but not know it.
No, if God is omnibenevolent, and thus this is the best world, no chance can make the world better. If such a change exists, the world is not the best, and god is not omnibenevolent.
If there was some way of comparing worlds for goodness, then you could define a best one - which might or might not have evil at all. But the question is not whether a tri-omni god might exist in some universe, it is whether he exists in our universe. The possibility is not good enough for that.
At this stage I’m not talking about demonstrated evil, just possible evil, and evil greater than the logical minimum. Franklin is saying that the problem of evil is just its existence, not its prevalence, and seems to be implying that once you let a tiny bit in the amount does not matter. An omnibenevolent god cannot co-exist with a world where there is a greater than minimal amount of evil.
I agree that omniscience and omnipotence conflict - but that is not at issue here. Without omnibenevolence, God could, through omniscience, see the full range of possible universes and, by ominipotence, pick the one he wanted. (Being constrained to that choice is where the problem comes in.) But with omnibenevolence he is not able to pick any universe he wants, but is constrained to pick the optimally good one. And if he wished to deviate from this the problem is not whether or not he can foretell this, but that any deviation destroys omnibenevolence.
Yes, accomplishing nothing is always easy.
So, saying that god can’t create a world with square triangles means that god isn’t omnipotent – is that what you mean to say?
Possibly.
No. But I am asserting that you can’t show the two to be different.
Now that’s one I know for a fact: no scientist has ever simulated a universe that is even close to being complete.
Living in a simulation means that god’s omnipotence is limited to that which is simulatable.
I do not argue that I know this one is best. I don’t know how to make this more explicit than I already have.
But if a tri-omni god exists in some universe in which there also is evil, then this suffices to show that omnimaxness and the existence of evil isn’t incompatible.
Absolutely true. But how do you assess the minimum amount of evil from a world which may or may not contain either the minimum, maximum, or every amount of evil in between?
So, in this case, omniscient god sees every possible world, omnipotent god picks any of these to make actual, and omnibenevolent god picks the one that minimises evil for the inhabitants. I don’t see the conflict?
But then the argument falls apart, because you haven’t proved the conclusion you wanted to: instead you would have proven the conclusion “If the least-evil world has >0 evil, then it is not yet disproven that we’re in the optimal world.”
You can’t gloss over this - you simply and demonstrably have not proven what you set out to prove (which I might add, is still something you already knew).
Especially since the notion that an omnipotent god would be capable of creating a universe without evil isn’t logically inconsistent. Just because an omnipotent god can’t make 7=9 doesn’t mean he is incapaple of doing anything - only logically impossible things are impossible. So when somebody says “if god wanted a universe without evil, that’s the way it would be”, you can’t just say “an omnipotent god can’t do the logically impossible” and consider yourself done. You’ve omitted the critical step of demonstrating that evil is logically necessary.
And I don’t believe for one nanosecond that evil is logically necessary in every possible universe. For starters, I can prove it isn’t - with a universe containing a huge amount of complexity even! Step 1: Consider a universe containing only the omnibenevolent god…
So. Either you prove that evil is logically necessary, or you cannot say that you have proven that we might be in the best possible universe.
Stop right there. You say that the whole point of the leibnitz argument is to prove that in the best possible world there might be evil? Then you are explicitly, overtly, and egregiously assuming your conclusion. All you proved was “If the least-evil world has >0 evil, then it is not yet disproven that we’re in the optimal world”!
Wow, you and Leibniz blatantly have nothing.
NO IT ISN’T. As I rather laboriously explained, that’s not how logic works.
In logic, only positive assertions matter. Leibniz’ argument shows absolutely nothing - and that’s looking at it optomistically. (Pessimistically he also proves that IF god isn’t such a weak-ass pansy that he can’t stop evil, that his argument fallaciously-arrived-at conclusion is wrong, in addition to being vacuous.)
Let’s be very, very clear. Leibniz’s argument shows only that he has not yet proven that we are in the best possible world. It shows nothing more. Here is another argument that shows exactly the same thing, with the exact same logical strength:
Premise: (no premises).
Conclusion: it is not yet disproven that we’re in the optimal world.
Logically speaking, this argument is exactly as good as the Leibniz argument. (Actually it’s sort of better, as it didn’t force itself through the hoop of admitting that evil might not be necessary at all.) Succinctly, Leibniz is literally proving nothing; he’s just gussying up that nothing with a lot of pretty words to make is seem rhetorically compelling to people who don’t understand how things are proved.
Okay, now onto somehing I haven’t said before:
You and Leibniz have a difficult road ahead of you. The only way to prove that an omnimax god and a universe containing evil are logically compatible is to prove that there are no possible logical arguments demonstrating that they are incompatible. (That’s what ‘logically compatible’ means.) That is to say, you have to prove the conclusion you were assuming.
One way to prove this sort of thing is to actually find a real, existent omnimax God, and show him coexisting with a universe with evil in it. We’re half there: we have the universe. Now all you have to do is prove the existence of the God. (And prove he’s omnimax.)
Failing that, though, you have a problem - you have to prove a negative. Specifically, that there are no possible arguments disproving an omnimax god allowing evil. Which, given that whole ‘omnibenevolence’ thing, is kind of like trying to prove that there are no black swans while standing at the Black Swan Zoo.
I challenge you to prove that an omnipotent, omniscient god couldn’t think of a way to make this universe a better place.
Policemen reduce the level of evil in the world. It doesn’t require the logically impossible.
And every theology that suggests standards or codes of behavior that people should follow (like Christianity) is explicitly asserting that people can influence the level of evil in the world without breaking the laws of logic in doing so.
Not really. One of the several dozen things you and Leibniz are hoping is that his own argument proves that we don’t merely live in “one of the worlds A - Z” - or at least it would if Leibniz were intellectually honest (which is demonstrably not the case).
Remember 9?
9) SimGod can choose the one with the least amount of evil as the ‘actual’ history of the world.
At this point, we know that the omnipotent god WILL choose the one with the least amount of evil as the ‘actual’ history of the world, because SimGod is omnibenevolent. Remember omnibenevolence?
If one scrapes off a little of the intellectual dishonesty, the argument is actually of the form:
1-9: Prove that only World A exists, and we are in it.
10: Assume your conclusion that World A includes evil.
11-13: conclude that since we are in World A, we must be in one of the worlds in the set of worlds A-Z.
(unstated conclusion 14): pretend that being in one of the worlds A-Z is somehow useful to say.
Note that generalizing from A to A-Z is a legal logic step. Generally speaking it’s useful if you have a statement saying something useful about all the items in the larger set. In this case, though, it’s just being used as an overtly intellectually dishonest rhetorical device.
So yeah - in World A, there cannot be unnecessary evil (assuming there’s any evil at all). If there’s any unnecessary evil in the world, that contradicts the proven fact we’d have to be in world A if the premises were true - which proves that one of the premises is false. Specifically the one that there’s an omnimax god around.
Leibniz proved the ball is15 - unless the premises are false. If the ball is actually a 6, I believe Leibniz just disproved the existence of God.
Leibniz’s argument is sound - its conclusion can be proven to be true without the argument. The Leibniz argument is shit, the reasoning in it is shit, and the intellectual honesty is competely non-existent - but the thing is still sound.
The thing is, the fact it is sound proves nothing, because it is nowhere near that easy to prove a negative.
“We don’t necessarily not live in the best possible world” DOES NOT REFUTE “We necessarily don’t live in the best possible world”
Consider the situation:
“(based on only the fact that it’s in the set “1-15” and deliberately and conspicuously ignoring everything else and screaming “mysterious ways”), it’s not impossible that this 6-ball is the 15-ball.”
Does that refute “the 6-ball is necessarily not the 15-ball?”
Of course he’s malevolent, if he’s omnimax and omniscient.
But he’s not omnimalevolent.
So, if you have a world populated by only Gods, you can still have evil?
How?
Heaven still has evil, despite heaven being promulgated as the absence of suffering and pain and death and all of that?
How?
And even if heaven is only slightly better than what we have, seeing as it’s all undeathy and all that, isn’t it less evil? And if it exists, isn’t it possible for it to exist? Or if a world populated only by Gods is at all less evil, since obviously God can’t die or be injured or do wrong, isn’t that less evil? Or is your defense of the omnimax God going to do away with all the reasons people believe in an omnimax God in the first place?
I can’t believe I wrote this. I clearly let myself get overexcited.
Of course it’s not sound - it’s logically fallacious. It assumes its conclusion and then slyly shuffles the antecedent of the conditional under the rug. You really can’t get more fallacious than that; it commits both a rhetorical and a structural fallacy simultaneously.
The conclusion is true though. (Including the question-begging variant). It can be derived from no premises whatsoever; all the extra crap in argument is useless fluff and could be safely disregarded, and if it was all removed, the argument would be sound. But if you don’t first clean out the crap it isn’t sound, because it isn’t valid, because even errors that don’t effect the outcome are still errors.
Sure it is. If a single person can be good, then they all can be good. If they can’t be good, then it’s only God that stops them from being able to be good.
And why do there have to be sentient beings anyway?
Plus, how does that explain natural evil (i.e. childhood leukemia or the earthquake in Haiti)?
To continue catalogueing my errors, Leibniz did not actually prove that only World A exists when he said 9. He would have proved it at that point were he not a completely dishonest sack of shit, but he carefully restrained himself from stepping over that line, even though he was leaning over it so far that his nose was nearly touching the ground.
So he didn’t actually disprove the existence of God if there’s unnecessary evil in the world - but only because he was unnecessarily evil himself.
:smack:
For your last sentence, not at all. Whether or not a no evil world is possible, we are nowhere near a minimal evil world, so a claim of an omnibenevolent god is absurd, and can be made only by defining our world as maximally good as a postulate.
Why sentient beings? To eliminate the moon - not much evil there until we show up.
Also, to avoid considering if the various nasty beasties that so outraged Darwin are evil or not. Animals did not evolve to minimize the suffering of their prey. That well might be more evidence of this not being the best of all possible worlds.
Consider man A and man B both attracted to woman C (and neither liking group marriage.) How are we going to resolve this situation without pain? Sure, by God playing the big Yente in the sky, but wouldn’t the minimization of choice not be a problem? And there is always dying. Sentience involved the recognition of death, and suffering the death of others is an evil (unless we all go together when we go, of course.)
Whether of not we have free will actually, we are unable to predict our actions and the actions of others, so we have a simulation of free will at worst. The world would be worse off if we didn’t have even that, and once we do have that there will be conflict, conflict which cannot be resolved to make everyone happy, and thus we will have some level of evil.
Why?
I don’t have a simulation of free will and I feel fine.
You have no choice but to say that.
First, Dio requires zero evil, I don’t. Second, we don’t need to define the world with minimal evil, just show that our world isn’t it. And we’ve been through that movie before. That there is a possible omnibenevolent God I don’t dispute (though not an omnimax one.) We don’t care - he is in charge of some other universe. He can’t exist in ours because, if he did, he wouldn’t have actualized our world.
So, in this case, omniscient god sees every possible world, omnipotent god picks any of these to make actual, and omnibenevolent god picks the one that minimises evil for the inhabitants. I don’t see the conflict?
[/QUOTE]
Crap, the edit time ran out when I was extending my response - proving that this is not a world with minimal evil. 
I assume these are three aspects of one god. Omnipotent god cannot pick any world, just the optimally good one. He rubber stamps the choice of the omnibenevolent god from the menu of worlds presented by the omniscient god. Plus, he cannot change anything about the world he is forced to pick, since that would make it not optimally good. (Well, nothing important anyway.)
I’m fine with not requiring god to do a logically impossible thing, like create a four-sided triangle. The problem here is that the omnimax god id logically impossible by his nature - which pretty much wraps it up for him.
Since you buy that for the first two omnis, I wonder why you have a problem with the third.
No, I have proven that there may exist a minimally evil world with evil > 0, and that we may live in it. That is what the argument intends to prove.
No, but it does mean that there are some things an omnipotent god can’t do, as you agree. That is all the argument needs.
I only have to prove the negation of ‘evil is not logically necessary’, which is ‘evil is logically possible’.
You can believe that without consequences for the argument.
Well, for any pantheist in a Spinozan sense, such a universe isn’t possible, so you’d have to demonstrate that it is.
Spare me the theatralics. The point of every argument is to prove its conclusion; this does not amount to assuming it.
That’s a downright bizarre statement. What makes you say that?
Logically speaking, that’s not an argument.
This is simply false, see Franklin above. To show that a set of premises are compatible, all that is needed is to show that it is possible that they are.
This is a bit of a tangent, but that’s not per se impossible, or even difficult. In fact, it’s done in mathematics all the time. Think, for instance, of Fermat’s last theorem, that there are no integers a, b, c such that a[sup]n[/sup] + b[sup]n[/sup] = c[sup]n[/sup] for any n > 2. It’s a negative assertion – an assertion of nonexistence – and it was proven by Andrew Wiles in 1994. It is impossible to empirically prove certain negative assertions, like for instance ‘there are no black swans’. But that doesn’t have anything to do with the present discussion.
For any given argument, it’s possible to refute it. Does that mean that any given argument is wrong?
I don’t have to prove could not; I only have to prove might not.
Leibniz’ intellectual honest isn’t really in debate here. And again, proving that we live in one of the worlds A-Z suffices. I’m really not sure were the disconnect lies. ‘There is possibly evil’ is the equivalent of ‘there is not necessarily no evil’ which is the negation of ‘there is necessarily no evil’, which is the problem of evil.
No. Merely that world A may exist, and we may be in it.
.
It may include evil, which is the conclusion of 1-9.
Really, all that you’re saying revolves around the misunderstanding that you believe I would have to show that we live in world A which includes evil, while it’s actually the case that I have to show that it is possible that we live in world A which (possibly!) includes evil.
If you wish to show that our universe is not minimally evil, you would have to show that a given change you introduce to get rid of a certain amount of evil does not, in a butterfly effect-like manner, have consequences somewhere down the road that lead to it ending up worse – which you can’t, in general, any more than you can solve the halting problem.
Sorry, I can’t let this count. Now if you’d cited the minimum wait time between searches as an example of unnecessary evil…
No, he can pick any world. He wouldn’t be omnibenevolent if he picked any other one, but there’s no necessity for him to be.
Yes, it’s a logical impossibility for him to change anything about the world and have it still be optimal, as it is a logical impossibility for him to both pick any world and be omnibenevolent.
I do consider an omnimax god to be inconsistent. However, I do not agree that the problem of evil establishes this.