Who's left?

[_EAllusion]

Hey, I was wondering something. Say you have a rape victim. Elohim has to allow this suffering to happen because he can't interfere with free will. But why does Elohim prefer the free will of the rapist over the free will of the victim? By failing to intervene and/or setting up the world such that this victim gets raped, isn't he interfering with the victim's free will to not get raped? When Elohim allows this to happen, he allows the rapist the free will to hurt someone, but deprives the victim of the free will not to be hurt.

Oh, but sometimes Elohim intervenes and prevents or rescues someone from the rape, right? So is Elohim arbitrary, or are there some of his beloved children who just need to get raped for their souls to grow? The latter necessarily means that Elohim in fact wants some of his children to be raped for their own good. And since Jesus commanded us to be perfect like our Heavenly Father is perfect, I should allow my own children to get hurt so that they will grow, right?

You could've turned up this criticism to 11. Let's quote a much younger EA doing just that:


Suppose I assert that I'm a morally perfect being. You invite me over to your house. The second I open up the door I shout "Now Suffer. Muwhahahaha!" As if by magic, you fall to the ground in unimaginable agony.

As you are writhing in pain, you can think that it is logically possible that a demon or Satan might be obscuring your sense of reality, but would you? Should you? Or, if you like, you could argue that my purposes, in my infinite moral wisdom, are simply beyond your ken. However, it would seem to me that your belief in my morality should be tied to its correspondence with your observations of reality. Granted we understand your belief is only provisional to your observations, but given what is known, I think it is fair to say this provides solid evidence against EA the morally perfect being existing.

Plus, simply resorting to radical skepticism in our ability to discern if our observations of reality and moral ideas are consistent with claims about a God should leave the Christian shrugging his shoulders when it comes to making any moral judgment.

Either we have access to the moral principles to judge benevolence (moral goodness) or we don't. If we do, then we can judge God's actions based on whether they are in accordance with the principles of morality. You can say that God isn't subject to the principles of morality, or that she is subject to some moral principles, but those are beyond our understanding. God has more moral depth than we can know. But what you have done then is reduced the claim "God is good" down to gibberish. What does it mean to say that God follows morality that is in principle unknowable to us when its clear she violates what is known to us? Saying God does the right thing, but we don't know what the right thing is no different practically than saying whatever God does is good because God does it. If we are going to say "God is benevolent" that statement is going to have to generate some expectations for us if it is to be meaningful at all.

So if you want to say a god exists with certain properties, God's ways must be knowable to us, at least to some extent. We must be able to say, for example, that it's generally wrong to allow a person who's dying anyway to suffer horribly if one can prevent it with no risk or effort, and that therefore if God does so routinely, in almost every case where she could have prevented it, she has almost certainly acted wrongly in some of those cases, unless we have good reason to think not preventing it served some greater good. If not, what exactly do we know about morality then? Why the special pleading to make God-theory inductively unique compared to other theories, like EA-theory? Similarly, if it seems transparently clear, according to our human notions of justice, that it is unjust to punish someone infinitely for a finite offense, especially under circumstances where it cannot serve to rehabilitate the offender, where his punishment cannot possibly serve as an example or deterrent to others, and where he cannot possibly have made an informed choice, we must be able to say that it really is unjust, or else admit that we have no idea what justice means when speaking about God.

You have to be able to show that the way God operates is at least plausibly the way we might expect an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being to operate. You can't deflect objections of this sort by simply observing we don't know how God would do things, a.k.a. the ways of God are mysterious. If God-theory cannot inform our expectations of how reality is supposed to look like, then you've reduced God to a shot in the dark.

A Christian must argue that God would in fact do things one way rather than another in some cases because his religion entails that's what he did. Thus, it's no good to say merely that we don't know for sure that God would not commit massive genocide, you must argue that this is just the sort of thing that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God would do. And since God is the ultimate good, anytime you breath a moral motivation into God, you are making a case to breath that moral motivation into yourself.

There are points in a faith that present moral difficulties for the believer. A variety of responses are often offered to help resolve these difficulties. Yet, I wonder if they always fully connect with the idea of God as a moral example we should follow.

For example, in response to the problem of God allowing moral evil, a typical response is to note that God desires us to have free will. While this response is problematic, the easiest route is to ignore it and move onto evils not caused by agents. However, what we can take from this response is that God, in his hierarchy of values, thinks its more important for a murderer to be able to exercise his desire to kill someone than a victim to have their negative desire not to be killed protected. The positive will to act is more important than the negative will not to be acted upon. (Notice in both cases the good is conveniently defined by what allows for Gods non-action.)

Yet it runs deeper than this. Our desires are not all within our range to act upon. Our will is naturally limited. For instance, after reading one of Pents posts, you might want to make him spontaneously combust. Sadly, this isn't within the abilities we are allowed to have. We can desire to act in some way without having the ability to do so. So, there is only a specific set of options we can act on, chosen by God. God is the author of those possiblities. This means, not only is our free will to act upon our murderous desires allowed within certain limitations, it is specifically allowed. It was selected to be in the actionable range, along with our potential inclination for it.

To take a second example, if a little girl walks off a pier and drowns, some wonder why a benevolent God would allow this to happen. One response is to say God does not wish to interfere with free will. God, if he were to stop this in all cases, would harm our range of choices, which is undesirable. The loss of choice to walk off piers and die is worse than the temporary but terrible suffering caused by this happening. Now God couldve designed the world or little girls in such a way that theyd never walk of piers and never consider it within their actionable range, or it wouldn't result in as much pre-death suffering, but he didn't. God wants that option to exist. Not only that, but God values a little girls free will to walk off a pier and drown more highly than protecting her fragile life.

Again, we do not share the ethics of this stand-alone free will defense. When we see a girl about to walk off a pier, we attempt to stop her. If we were to become more like this FWD God, it would be our duty to let the girl walk off and die, thus favoring the greater moral good of preserving her free will. You might say perhaps God seeks us to be the ones to stop little girls from falling off piers. It is our act to prevent this from happening that is the greater good. First, it's not clear why the oppurtunity to prevent suffering allows for more good than no potential suffering at all. We didn't rejoice the advent of the AIDS epidemic because of the greater moral good of having the chance to cure it. However, if this were the case, then girls would rarely if ever manage to fall off piers and drown. Wed stop them, and in instances where God knows we could not stop them, hed do it. He could even mask it in such a way so as to appear to be a "normal" person doing it. Near drownings might be common, but drownings would be more rare to nonexistent. (You don't need to see what happens in the event of drowning to have knowledge of what will. Not only that, but the distribution of this sort of suffering is not evenly placed in a way that suggests it acting as a uniform example.) What this means, if you find this situation undesirable, is more is needed to explaining Gods moral system perhaps soul-making theodicy, perhaps something else. However, the fact that breathing the same moral motivation into you fails should be a sign that it is inadequate for apologizing for Gods non-action as well. Its a test of what is satisfactory in a response if you are to be consistent. Referencing unknown purposes, in this case, will not do.

Unknown purposes are incompatible with explanation. It demonstrates the fundamental incapability of the offered defenses to answer the problem. (Why would you need to inovke unknown reasons if the known ones were satisfactory?) It renders them incomplete at best, outright false at worst. But heres the key. If you have to invoke the unknown purposes to defend God, you are saying you don't know how to make a judgment about how God would do things. He truly is beyond your ken.

Pause for a moment. Think about this, as I return to my previous theme. You need to know how God goes about doing things, at least to some extent, to know that he does some things in one way, such as not lying, rather than another, such as lying. Any defense arguing we don't understand Gods purposes also deflects any positive claim that we do. God might lie to you for the greater good, because the greater good is something you fundamentally just don't understand. The believer better hope they understand how God does things and why they are moral, because otherwise, they scarcely know how to act moral, with respect to their theistic belief. You are no better off thinking God will send you to hell for disbelief or belief in him (See Eaism). How can you know, if Gods purposes are so inscrutable? There's no way to tell without an external marker of what benevolence is along with experience allowing us to say God has that property. If reality itself is so untrustworthy, that you have to invoke global skepticism by pretending entities unknown to you are obscuring your sense of it when it does not conform to your religious expectations, then what you really have done is taken off your ability to reason with your experience to come to any conclusion, but the one that favors your religious belief.

[_EAllusion]

Even if you find that adequate (which I don't) it completely fails to address the presence in the world of evil that is not the consequence of human choice. And there is a lot of it about.

You're oversimplifying his argument. Plantinga argues that all of the evil in the world not caused by human choice can be caused by the acausally freely willed actions of invisible demons. "Ahahahahaha!" you might say, but remember we're talking about what is logically possible, not what is likely to be the case.

[_Kevin Graham]

[_Darth J]

...Abrahamic God is logically impossible.

For what it is worth, I think Plantinga's argument against the logical problem of evil is good, as do most people who think about such things, and the MI article misplaces its criticism of it by conflating the type of problem of evil it is answering. Bare logical possibility is such a low bar to meet; however, and I think the evidential argument has a great deal of force.

Yes, but Plantinga is not an LDS General Authority, and mentalgymnast has assured us that Mormonism and/or the LDS Church has some unique insights into and solutions for the problem of evil that nobody else has thought of.

[_EAllusion]

I think I'm going to break out the second objection to UPD - that using it results in general moral skepticism - since I invoke it in that post I quoted.

Hey MG,

Suppose it is discovered that I am a serial rapist. You want to condemn me for being immoral in my actions.

I reply, "No MG, you cannot do that. In fact, I didn't do anything wrong at all. For you see, I am a morally perfect being. You must agree that if I was a morally perfect being, it would be reasonable to think I might have moral reasons for doing things you have not comprehended. To say there was no good reason for me to commit all those rapes rests on the assumption that if there were a good reason for me to rape, you would know it. But if I were morally perfect, it would be absurd to assume that. Therefore, you cannot say I did anything wrong. If you say I am not morally perfect, I must point out that you would have no way of knowing if I am or not given that what constitutes moral perfection is beyond your understanding."

What's wrong with this reply?

[_Chap]

Even if you find that adequate (which I don't) it completely fails to address the presence in the world of evil that is not the consequence of human choice. And there is a lot of it about.

You're oversimplifying his argument. Plantinga argues that all of the evil in the world not caused by human choice can be caused by the acausally freely willed actions of invisible demons. "Ahahahahaha!" you might say, but remember we're talking about what is logically possible, not what is likely to be the case.

I am not willing to work very hard to write out a reductio ad absurdum of that proposition in full. But it seems to demand that everything that we normally take to be objective reality, and every coherent feature of matter, time and space, should in fact be subject to the personal whim of invisible conscious beings who control everything around us. Otherwise some bad things would have to happen as they do just because of the way the universe was created.

But of what do these demons consist? Are they made of some kind of special demon substance that miraculously dispenses them, in turn, from the capricious interventions of some higher-level bunch of demons, who can at will play games with whatever substrate the lower-level demons subsist in? If so, they must be subject to non-willed evil, and that will be the fault of the creator. Or do these demons, unlike us, subsist in a world that the creator has succeeded in making run according to reliable laws without having to let unwilled evil into it? In that case, why .... (etc.)

And so on up the chain infinitely ...

[_EAllusion]

But it seems to demand that everything that we normally take to be objective reality, and every coherent feature of matter, time and space, should in fact be subject to the personal whim of invisible conscious beings who control everything around us.

The logical argument from evil is about whether evil is logically compatibility with the existence of God as described by classical theism. Plantinga doesn't have to propose plausible scenarios to defeat it. He has to propose a scenario that is merely logically possible where observed evils are logically compatible with God existing. All logically possible requires is a conceivable world where the rules of logic, like the law of noncontradiction, are not violated. You want to argue invisible demons are laughably implausible, but that does not matter at all. This is not the evidential argument from evil, where one merely argues that the observation of evils make the existence of God less likely. Plantinga uses the unknown purposes defense to respond to that. His free will defense is aimed at the logical problem.

I think the temptation some atheists have when reading his full argument is to assert that his victory is insignificant. But I think that's unfair when prior to him offering it it was very common for atheogians to believe and argue that God's proposed traits were literally logically incompatible with the existence of evil. His response reshaped the landscape of phil of religion towards the evidential problem.

I think libertarian free will is incoherent. I used to think this is where his argument is most vulnerable, but subsequent reading left me convinced that you don't actually need LFW to make the kind of case he is making. The key to understanding his argument is that there are possible worlds that even an omnipotent being can not actualize and a world with morally free creatures producing only moral good is such a world. Since it is possible, not necessarily true, that a world with morally free creatures (in the libertarian sense or not) is more morally desirable than only moral good being produced, it is not the case that God's existence is logically incompatible with the existence of evils in the world.

[_Fence Sitter]

I don't really understand the arguments that EA and Darth are making, but since I feel good about what they are saying they must be correct.


by the way, threads like these are why this board is worthwhile.

(Another emotional response I can't explain but know to be true.)

[_Chap]

But it seems to demand that everything that we normally take to be objective reality, and every coherent feature of matter, time and space, should in fact be subject to the personal whim of invisible conscious beings who control everything around us.

The logical argument from evil is about whether evil is logically compatibility with the existence of God as described by classical theism. Plantinga doesn't have to propose plausible scenarios to defeat it. He has to propose a scenario that is merely logically possible where observed evils are logically compatible with God existing. All logically possible requires is a conceivable world where the rules of logic, like the law of noncontradiction, are not violated. You want to argue invisible demons are laughably implausible, but that does not matter at all. ...

I may not have phrased my argument with great care, but I certainly intended more than mere mockery of Plantinga. My intention was to point to the fact that the demons themselves matter too: if they suffer unwilled evil due to the way their demon-level of existence in the universe is constituted, then God is liable for that.

The only way out for God is for the demons' level of existence, like ours, to be subject in every respect to the willed actions of a higher level of demons, who are (by similar arguments) themselves subject to the willed actions of a level of demons higher still, who ...

and Plantinga seems to be forced into an infinite regress. Demonstrating such a regress is normally taken as a fairly serious attack on a position, is it not?

[_EAllusion]

I may not have phrased my argument with great care, but I certainly intended more than mere mockery of Plantinga. My intention was to point to the fact that the demons themselves matter too: if they suffer unwilled evil due to the way their demon-level of existence in the universe is constituted, then God is liable for that.

The only way out for God is for the demons' level of existence, like ours, to be subject in every respect to the willed actions of a higher level of demons, who are (by similar arguments) themselves subject to the willed actions of a level of demons higher still, who ...

and Plantinga seems to be forced into an infinite regress. Demonstrating such a regress is normally taken as a fairly serious attack on a position, is it not?

You're missing it. The argument is that the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God is logically incompatible with the existence of evils. Evils exist, therefore God does not. Plantinga attacks this argument by arguing that even an omnipotent God cannot create a world where beings have moral freedom and evils necessarily do not exist. So if moral freedom is more morally desirable than a world in which only moral good exists, which is logically possible, then the logical incompatibility argument falls. Your reply, the natural one, is to say that not all evils in our world are caused by the actions of agents. What about natural disasters? Plantinga responds, well it is logically possible spiritual agents, demons if you will, cause those. Everything bad not attributable to observable agents, in theory, could be caused by them. This doesn't have to be likely. It just has to be possible because it is aimed at the assertion that the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God is logically incompatible with the existence of evils.

Your retort shows that you are aren't quite getting it. You don't need an infinite regress of demons. Demons can cause each other's misfortune. What you need is a logically possible way to attribute all evils to moral freedom. The demon argument suffices for that. Is it implausible? And how, so it would suck as a reply to the probability based version of the argument.

The probability based version of the argument goes:

(1) Probably, there exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
(2) An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

[Therefore, probably]

(3) There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.

Premise 2 is essentially unassailable, so the defense against this argument is to find some way to reject the first premise.

Using Plantinga's argument you'd have to demonstrate that 1) moral freedom that exists is, in fact, more morally desirable than the prevention of suffering that exists such that it justifies it and 2) the demons that cause all natural disasters that lead to suffering probably exist. Both those are dubious, so it's not something you should argue. Plantinga doesn't. He instead opts for the argument MG keeps defaulting to, which is that we do not have reason to believe we would know the justifying reasons for intense suffering if they existed so we cannot conclude they do not exist anymore than I can conclude there is no life anywhere else in the universe. In other words, what we observe is inscrutable suffering - suffering for which we can't figure out the point. The argument infers from this that gratuitous suffering likely exists - suffering for which there is no point. The unknown purposes defense says this induction is illicit because we shouldn't expect to know the point if it exists.

As for the objections to this: see above.