God can write straight with crooked lines.

[malkie]

What about the inverse hypothetical? Is this true?

If God never intervened to stop any evil, faith wouldn’t go away because the problem was solved, it just wouldn’t be necessary in the first place.

If God never intervened and was never present, then yes—faith would be pointless. But Paul and Kierkegaard—and more importantly Jesus—describe the concept, and act, differently. The idea is that God doesn’t intervene to control outcomes, but is present within suffering.

I don't think that is a commonly accepted idea. I've certainly never heard it suggested at church, where the message is that, for example, the prayers of the faithful avail much, and people can be healed through their own faith and the faith of others. I'm pretty confident that Mormonism teaches about a god who does intervene to control outcomes, ranging from doing well on an exam to finding lost keys. Another piece of evidence for this view is the Prayer Roll in the temples. So Mormon god is both interventionist and persuadable.

So I'm ignoring Paul, Kierkegaard, and Jesus for the moment, and trying to look only at the logic of a potential interventionist god.

Let's put the two ideas together, but not as hypotheticals:

• God intervene to stop every evil. As a result, faith doesn’t go away because the problem is solved, it just isn’t necessary in the first place.
• God never intervenes to stop any evil. As a result, faith wouldn’t go away because the problem was solved, it just isn’t necessary as there is nothing to have faith in.

The gap between these statements is:

• God intervenes on some occasions to stop some evil. Faith is needed to recognise or account for his occasional intervention.

Sorry - fuzzy brain - help!!
Do these three statements properly represent the two hypotheticals?
Do these three statements form an exhaustive and mutually exclusive set?

For the sake of argument, let's say that a benevolent interventionist god does exist, and that has two believers, "A", and "B". Could there be an occasion when "A" claims that their god did intervene to stop some evil, (has faith that the god did intervene), but "B" does not think that their god intervened in this case, though accepts that the god has intervened in other cases? That is, "B" puts the good outcome down to chance.

An ambivalent "C" discusses the incident with "A" and "B". How can either of them persuade "C" to believe them? Of what value is the belief of "A" and "B" in their common god? Of what value is "A"'s faith in, or "B"'s doubt about, the disputed intervention?

For a different potential intervention, "A" wants result "X", and "B" wants result "Y", which is incompatible with "X". Each prays for the result they want. So this adds the concept of a persuadable god.

"X" occurs, and "A" happily has faith that their god brought it about. "B" believes, once again, that their god did not intervene, and "X" happened by chance. Which of them should "C" believe, and why? Is there reason for "C" to believe that the god favoured "A"'s request over that of "B"?

[I Have Questions]

If God never intervened and was never present, then yes—faith would be pointless. But Paul and Kierkegaard—and more importantly Jesus—describe the concept, and act, differently. The idea is that God doesn’t intervene to control outcomes, but is present within suffering.

I don't think that is a commonly accepted idea. I've certainly never heard it suggested at church, where the message is that, for example, the prayers of the faithful avail much, and people can be healed through their own faith and the faith of others. I'm pretty confident that Mormonism teaches about a god who does intervene to control outcomes, ranging from doing well on an exam to finding lost keys. Another piece of evidence for this view is the Prayer Roll in the temples. So Mormon god is both interventionist and persuadable.

So I'm ignoring Paul, Kierkegaard, and Jesus for the moment, and trying to look only at the logic of a potential interventionist god.

Let's put the two ideas together, but not as hypotheticals:

• God intervene to stop every evil. As a result, faith doesn’t go away because the problem is solved, it just isn’t necessary in the first place.
• God never intervenes to stop any evil. As a result, faith wouldn’t go away because the problem was solved, it just isn’t necessary as there is nothing to have faith in.

The gap between these statements is:

• God intervenes on some occasions to stop some evil. Faith is needed to recognise or account for his occasional intervention.

I think faith is used to account for those times when people can’t explain why God didn’t intervene.

Sorry - fuzzy brain - help!!
Do these three statements properly represent the two hypotheticals?
Do these three statements form an exhaustive and mutually exclusive set?

For the sake of argument, let's say that a benevolent interventionist god does exist, and that has two believers, "A", and "B". Could there be an occasion when "A" claims that their god did intervene to stop some evil, (has faith that the god did intervene), but "B" does not think that their god intervened in this case, though accepts that the god has intervened in other cases? That is, "B" puts the good outcome down to chance.

An ambivalent "C" discusses the incident with "A" and "B". How can either of them persuade "C" to believe them? Of what value is the belief of "A" and "B" in their common god? Of what value is "A"'s faith in, or "B"'s doubt about, the disputed intervention?

For a different potential intervention, "A" wants result "X", and "B" wants result "Y", which is incompatible with "X". Each prays for the result they want. So this adds the concept of a persuadable god.

"X" occurs, and "A" happily has faith that their god brought it about. "B" believes, once again, that their god did not intervene, and "X" happened by chance. Which of them should "C" believe, and why? Is there reason for "C" to believe that the god favoured "A"'s request over that of "B"?

The biggest issue here is that there is no identifiable or reliable pattern that can be identified as God intervening. All there is are seemingly random and retrospective accounts by people who want to believe God intervened. We are in Texas Sharpshooter land. People can also find faith by gaslighting themselves - see Holland’s “wrong road” as an example.

The bottom line is that if there is a God, and if He intervenes, he does so in a way that is indistinguishable from an existence subject to random chance and in which a supernatural deity does not intervene at all, and in which prayer seems to play no material part in determining the outcome. Except as a mechanism for self gaslighting and making oneself feel better about bad things, or as an excuse for not doing something more tangible to help. Praying to the Sun God, or Zeus, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster can work equally as reliably and as well as prayer to the Christian version of God. And equally as well as consulting a Magic 8 Ball. The determining factor is your own ability to convince yourself of something that isn’t true.

[Limnor]

I don't think that is a commonly accepted idea. I've certainly never heard it suggested at church, where the message is that, for example, the prayers of the faithful avail much, and people can be healed through their own faith and the faith of others. I'm pretty confident that Mormonism teaches about a god who does intervene to control outcomes, ranging from doing well on an exam to finding lost keys.

I agree that Mormon practice assumes an interventionist and persuadable God, but I’d want to explore what “the prayers of the righteous avail much” does and means. James does say that, but what he doesn’t do is turn “prayer avails much” into a means to explain why certain things happen the way they do. His concentrates on endurance and trust under affliction, and not on defining what was a result of God’s direct intervention. I think if prayer were meant to be transactional to that degree, we would see explanations for conflicting or unanswered prayers, and taken on the whole as described throughout the Bible, that non-explanation seems deliberate.

In Jesus’ own life, unanswered prayers aren’t considered faith failures—Gethsemane being the obvious example. In that case, “ask and receive” seems to be about trust in God through affliction and not a promise that prayer will deliver desired outcomes. Outside this understanding, His own unanswered prayers and refusal to perform signs on demand become very hard to explain.

I think IHQ’s point is true, “faith is used to account for those times when people can’t explain why God didn’t intervene,” I’d add that might be a mistaken view of what faith is and does, and that once you enter “Texas Sharpshooter” land it might be time to reconsider what faith means to you.

[Gadianton]

You “need” faith because ultimate commitments (to theism, naturalism, moral realism, etc.) always outrun strictly demonstrative evidence, so trust/faith is unavoidable for everyone, believer or not. Faith is not invented to explain evil away, but is the stance of trusting God’s goodness while freely choosing the good in a world where evil really is possible and often devastating.

If God were to constantly intervene in human affairs and make everything 'right'...then, yes, there would be no need for faith. But what kind of world would that be?

That's because you're taking the world as it is as the goal, and sure, in a world like this one, the idea of "faith" makes a certain amount of sense. But you're basically repeating what I said about "faith" being a solution in search of a problem. We're obviously not going to get answers to most of our questions any time soon, and so making our ignorance a feature is a great marketing tool for building trust in those the marketing department answers to, who claim to have answers to some degree. The "answers" are pretty much letdowns that any half-decent fiction writer could come up with. Not worth 10% of my income, if it's worth it for you, more power to you.

Going back to God = perfect good, perfect foreknowledge, all powerful, etc., that God couldn't have made a world with "free will" and harmony and all that is absurd for the fact that heaven will be a place of harmony and peace and presumably we all have free will there. Your argument is that this world is what it is, therefore all the bad stuff must be a feature because you want to believe in God.

[sock puppet]

You “need” faith because ultimate commitments (to theism, naturalism, moral realism, etc.) always outrun strictly demonstrative evidence, so trust/faith is unavoidable for everyone, believer or not. Faith is not invented to explain evil away, but is the stance of trusting God’s goodness while freely choosing the good in a world where evil really is possible and often devastating.

If God were to constantly intervene in human affairs and make everything 'right'...then, yes, there would be no need for faith. But what kind of world would that be?

The gaps for trust to extrapolate are, in commitments to theism, naturalism, moral realism, etc., much narrower as they are not as wide as the gaps that religionists claim faith in "God" must fill. Science--i.e., knowledge--has kept shrinking those gaps and will continue to do so. The more ignorant mankind as a whole was, the more gaps that a "God" was needed to help span them in human understanding. As those gaps have been shrinking, "God" has become less and less useful--sort of like the Brittish monarchy.

[Limnor]

So I'm ignoring Paul, Kierkegaard, and Jesus for the moment, and trying to look only at the logic of a potential interventionist god.

-snip-

Do these three statements properly represent the two hypotheticals?
Do these three statements form an exhaustive and mutually exclusive set?

-snip-

"X" occurs, and "A" happily has faith that their god brought it about. "B" believes, once again, that their god did not intervene, and "X" happened by chance. Which of them should "C" believe, and why? Is there reason for "C" to believe that the god favoured "A"'s request over that of "B"?

Malkie I wanted to respond to let you know that I’m tracking your argument and believe I understand it.

I think your three statements do form an exhaustive and mutually exclusive set. But that set is based on an assumption that faith’s role is to account for God’s intervention in outcomes. I think prior to that assumption there is a question about what faith is supposed to do.

Your argument, under that modeled assumption, is solid, from my perspective. Specifically, I’d say that yes, A and B can both be sincere believers in the same God, disagree about whether an intervention occurred in a specific instance, but have no meaningful way to resolve that disagreement. From C’s point of view, there’s no reason to believe A’s explanation of intervention over B’s explanation of chance, because both interpretations could work given the circumstance. That means faith, in this model, can’t work as a tool to determine intervention or non-intervention. It can’t persuade C, arbitrate between A and B, or explain why X occurred rather than Y.

In the competing prayer case, the problem is even more difficult because there’s no independent way to decide between them, and really, the explanatory value becomes private and retrospective.

[Gadianton]

I’ve appreciated the question, gad, and I don’t think I’d have ever picked up Plantinga if not for this discussion.
One of the most interesting insights from Plantinga is that he never moves to say, “now God is morally justified” but, I think like in the answer to Job, Plantinga would say “we are not entitled to demand a deductive explanation.”

Leibniz is first to frame God in terms of possible worlds. God stood outside of everything, imagined all possible worlds, and brought into reality the maximal good world. Sounds like something God would do, right? Plantinga's version leaves your jaw hanging. First, you have to understand that metaphysics takes possibility very seriously. It's logically possible pigs fly even if not physically possible. It's not possible 2+2=5. Kripke clarifies what possibly and necessity actually mean in terms of worlds. Possibly means it occurs in some worlds, necessarily means it occurs in all possible worlds. 2+2=4 is necessary simply because it's true in all possible worlds. For God to be necessary, God must also exist in all possible worlds.

Just like it's possible that pigs fly, it's possible that Peter, James, and John get out their knives, jump in their pickup trucks in the meridian of time and hunt down every last Christian and kill them. They could have done the crucifixion themselves. Here's the rub: in that possible world, God exists just as he does in every other possible world. If not, he's not necessary. And free will ensures no limits to conceivable human action. My example here is the G-rated version of the kind of evil that is fully compatible with God, existing in a possible worlds somewhere. This puts Plantinga in a bind.

What we're acknowledging is that God isn't just "barely compatible" with evil, where Goldilocks dips her toes in to find the world with just enough evil to make a swim worthwhile, but God is fully compatible with any and all evil of the most outrageous proportions. In contrast, Leibniz can imagine a world where Peter, James, and John go rogue, but this only need be compatible with God if God actualizes it. And so Plantinga has a vested interest in NOT trying to explain evil, because it would be an epic explanation. Just as bad is the problem of selection criteria, Leibniz is intuitive because the selection criteria is maximal good. Why did God choose one world over another for Plantinga? Sure, you could say it was maximal goodness, if that even means anything if God is necessary in any world just the same as any other. It would also seem to sneak in predestination. He has a convoluted argument for saying why not pick a possible world where everyone freely chooses good -- it's all based on avoiding predestination, so he must run from anything that looks like he's rigging the system. It's back to "mystery of God" as to why this world. So there's a price to getting the deductive problem off the table.

[Limnor]

Yes I’ve been less than satisfied with the “I don’t know” response (even if it’s true). Like: Okay… so God and horror aren’t logically inconsistent. So why am I still uneasy? What does it mean that God was compatible with Auschwitz, historically and in reality, not just in the abstract?

I’m also suspicious of any model that justifies the use of suffering as a necessary part of a design. Although I’d have to carve out the one exception, the suffering of Christ as propitiation.

I’m not sure where this falls in theological and philosophical tradition, but I’m somewhere around: 1) Suffering is not a design feature, but it clearly exists as a horrible reality within creation; 2) Faith sustains a person within suffering; 3) God does not require suffering for the system to function; and 4) The cross is God entering suffering, not designing it.

I’ll have to read Leibniz—I read all of Plantinga’s Free Will Defense and skimmed the Warrant books, and have been slowly absorbing Kierkegaard. What do you recommend from Leibniz?

[Philo Sofee]

You “need” faith because ultimate commitments (to theism, naturalism, moral realism, etc.) always outrun strictly demonstrative evidence, so trust/faith is unavoidable for everyone, believer or not. Faith is not invented to explain evil away, but is the stance of trusting God’s goodness while freely choosing the good in a world where evil really is possible and often devastating.

If God were to constantly intervene in human affairs and make everything 'right'...then, yes, there would be no need for faith. But what kind of world would that be?

The gaps for trust to extrapolate are, in commitments to theism, naturalism, moral realism, etc., much narrower as they are not as wide as the gaps that religionists claim faith in "God" must fill. Science--i.e., knowledge--has kept shrinking those gaps and will continue to do so. The more ignorant mankind as a whole was, the more gaps that a "God" was needed to help span them in human understanding. As those gaps have been shrinking, "God" has become less and less useful--sort of like the Brittish monarchy.

And Trump cabinet.......

[huckelberry]

You “need” faith because ultimate commitments (to theism, naturalism, moral realism, etc.) always outrun strictly demonstrative evidence, so trust/faith is unavoidable for everyone, believer or not. Faith is not invented to explain evil away, but is the stance of trusting God’s goodness while freely choosing the good in a world where evil really is possible and often devastating.

If God were to constantly intervene in human affairs and make everything 'right'...then, yes, there would be no need for faith. But what kind of world would that be?

The gaps for trust to extrapolate are, in commitments to theism, naturalism, moral realism, etc., much narrower as they are not as wide as the gaps that religionists claim faith in "God" must fill. Science--i.e., knowledge--has kept shrinking those gaps and will continue to do so. The more ignorant mankind as a whole was, the more gaps that a "God" was needed to help span them in human understanding. As those gaps have been shrinking, "God" has become less and less useful--sort of like the British monarchy.

In my relationship with faith I am not aware of any gaps God is asked to fill. I do not think gaps are a normal crutch for faith. As people tried to support a literal Genesis against growing science understanding, science resisters pointed to what they thought were gaps, such as the once famous but now faded missing link in human evolution.

I have no interest in a literal inerrant Genesis so lack interest in gaps. I applaud the growth of science, the elimination of gaps clarifies the order and sense of creation.