MrDarwin

Well, I would suggest that a benevolent God would at least tell us clearly idea why suffering is either (1) necessary or (2) good. The reasons for suffering are certainly not clear to me, nor do they seem to be clear to most Christians, who continue to believe in a benevolent God in spite of the truly horrendous things that happen in the world he/she/it created.

DarkDruid

Oh, no! Not that!

Jack the Bodiless

luvluV:

Ultimately, all attempts to resolve the Problem of Evil/Suffering involve conceding either that God is not omnipotent, or God is not omnibenevolent.

Yours is no different.

No, it is NOT benevolent to allow suffering in the name of freedom. Benevolent parents do NOT allow their children to play in traffic.

No truly benevolent entity can justify or tolerate inaction in the face of suffering. If this compromises "freedom", then so be it.

Earlier I raised the possibility of a malevolent God. Your objection was that a malevolent God would intervene. Exactly the same argument applies to a benevolent one. You are now arguing for a God who is benevolent except for a very strict code of non-intervention, so overwhelming as to make God utterly powerless to prevent Ebola and suchlike from evolving. This is a very big caveat to God's benevolence.

I can just as easily propose a God who is omnimalevolent EXCEPT for the desire not to "cheat". I don't see why this is a more farfetched concept than your own. Let's assume there are multiple Universes and multiple omnimalevolent Gods. They are competing to see who is the "baddest" of them all: who can create the greatest suffering. Being omnipotent, they can create unlimited suffering by intervening, but the art of it is to create a Universe with physical characteristics perfectly configured to maximize suffering with no further effort. This impresses the other Gods.

In any case, God has an unlimited capacity to inflict direct suffering in the Anti-Heaven in which everyone suffers for eternity after death. There, the gloves are off.

luvluv

wordsmyth:

Pick one and ask me a question about it.

I don't quite understand how you can say this. Free will as an answer to the problem of pain is a long-standing Christian philosophical response. There is a lot of textual support for it in the Bible, though none explicit. Nevertheless, the Trinity is never mentioned in the Bible at all, do you doubt that it is part of the Christian tradition?

Beyond that, suppose I am the only person ever in the history of the world to raise the free will response. The fact that I alone hold to this does not make it untrue, the only issue is whether or not the response answers the objection. A God who values free will is a sufficient answer to the problem of pain. It doesn't matter if such a God was ever mentioned in connection to Christianity at all. If such a God is CONCEIVABLE, and noncontradictory, then there is no problem of pain. So your appeal to textual support is totally unwarranted. I need only posit an omnibenevolent, omnipotent God who values free will.

Again, if you are under the impression that the free will response is my own personal philosophy then you are not well-read on this issue. This is a very old position of Christianity.

You must not have read through the entire thread, because I explicitly answered that question several times:

Choice naturally implies the ability to choose between two or more options. For the choice to be real, each of these options must have consequences. Some consequences are better than others. A person may choose a consequence that is not as good as some other possible consequence. The person who chooses the lesser consequence will suffer relative to a better choice that he could have made. Therefore, the possibility of suffering is necessary for free will.

Philosoft:

I was saying to wordsmyth, it simply doesn't matter. If ANY omnibenevolent and omnipotent God can be conceived of that would allow suffering, then there is no problem of pain REGARDLESS OF WHETHER OR NOT SUCH A GOD HAS EVER BEEN POSITED BY AN EXISTENT RELILGION.

It is a non-contradictory answer to the question, and it is a logical answer to the question, whether we have good knowledge that such a God exists or not.

You ask how can a good God allow suffering, I answer because of certain aspects of his character, and then you say how do we know God has the characteristics. It doesn't matter. If it is possible that He does have these characteristics, and these characteristics are not contradictory either to his omnibenevolence or omnipotence, then there is no problem of pain.

You are again twisting my words around to fit your pre-conceived notion of what my argument is. I did not say that suffering serves "some general purpose" I said that it serves the specific purpose of meaningful human freedom.

Yes I'm pretty sure infants go to heaven, and I've explained how that process could work compatible with free will AND given Biblical support to it earlier in this thread. I wouldn't mind so much re-answering the same questions over and over again in this discussion if any of my questions would be answered JUST ONCE.

k:

I'll have to stop you there. Benevolence is not ignoring transgressions. By that definition, all attempts to remedy evil are themselves evil. There should be no prisons, and we should just look the other way at rapists, child molesters, and the like. I think there is a significant problem with your definition of benevolence.

Beyond that, in fairness to myself I am going to confine this discussion (at least my responses to it) to the problem of pain in our own reality. Perhaps there is no such thing as hell, but there is still an omnibenevolent, omnipotent God who allows suffering on earth. If you want to start a discussion about how to resolve a good God with Hell on another thread, I'll be willing to join you. But it is hard enough to defend just the POE on earth here without the discussion going off into several different tangents. I actually anticipated this digression, and I said earlier I do not hold orthodox views on Hell. I am an annhiliationist, which is the belief that the souls that do not enter heaven are destroyed. They simply cease to be. We can get into that on another thread if you want, but I won't respond to it here.

Again, I refer you to the Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis which explains why a stable environment is necessary to human freedom. And a stable environment is one in which accidents can happen. Physical matter often becomes arranged in ways that are inconvienient to humans. Birth defects are most often the results of an incorrect arrangement of genetic information. How can God guarantee a 100% success rate at arranging genetic information any more than he can guarantee that an apple that falls off a tree will never hit someone on the head? That these things occasionally happen is consistent with the laws of physics, and NO MATTER HOW THE LAWS ARE MADE, there can never be the consistency required for free, meaningful action unless they are non-discriminatory. That is to say, unless they are, generally speaking, exception-less. A law that says that no physical matter will ever arrange itself in such a way as to cause a human to suffer is not an objective law at all, it is a law which would rearrange itself around every human decision. No one would be able to commit suicide, or to hit another person. These are moral decisions that a person would be prohibited from making, and thus they would lack in moral freedom in such a universe.

Beyond that, I ask again how is a world without disease a sufficient problem of pain? In such a world, children would still get run over by cars, and they would still get kidnapped, raped, and murdered. Again, how would just the absence of disease solve the problem of pain? If you say because the suffering would be less, I ask, (FOR AT THE LEAST THE THIRD TIME, AND i'M STILL AWAITING A RESPONSE!), what is the amount of pain that is allowable for us to posit an omnibenevolent omnipotent God? How do you know that there is not a lot of pain that we are not already restrained from? How would the lack of diseases convince us that God is good if we never knew what a disease was or that we were being spared from them?

So I'll ask again, in case anyone wants to get around to answering, if you admit that some suffering is necessary, how much is necessary and at what point does it become superflous?

Philosoft:

It's possible that He is telling you, and, apart from whether or not it's true, you just don't LIKE the answers.

Jack the Bodiless:

Well, your statement assumes the equality of entities.

Are you saying that a benevolent being has to stop all the suffering that it is capable of stopping?

Are you saying that a benevolent being, who has the power, has to stop people from inflicting suffering upon themselves, EVEN IF SAID PEOPLE DO NOT WANT THEIR SUFFERING ENDED?

Are you saying that a benevolent being can help someone avoid suffering AGAINST THEIR WILL, and still be benevolent?

Would a good God, for instance, use force to stop you from smoking? But if he forced you to do something against your will, which is a bad action, how can He be good?

Again, referring back to the equality of entities, God is such that He can, if He wished, stopped all evil from happening ever. However, if He did so, none of us would have a meaningful existence or meaningful freedom. God could intervene and push every one of our adverse decisions and actions out of existence. He could force us to decide not to use pornography, not to eat after midnight, not to smoke, he could float us over a rock in the road so we wouldn't stub our toe, but in such a universe we would be little more than God's puppets. Moral freedom would be impossible because God's intervention would eliminate all evil and effectively eliminate our free will.

I have not "made an exception" and allowed that God desires free will. I have shown you that using power to control others is a bad thing, REGARDLESS OF IT'S INTENT, and therefore is an action LOGICALLY INCOMPATIBLE with omnibenevolence. An omnibenevolent being cannot use force to control, because using force to control is not benevolent.

Look Jack, this is very simple. Even if such a crazy multiverse of omnimalevolent and omnipotent Gods existed (ignoring the very good argument that there could not be more than one omnipotent being) then such beings would cheat. They would not follow the rules of any kind because following rules is a good thing. Restraint of any kind is totally inconsistent with omnimalevolence. Omnimalevolence would use force to overwhelm all of us, because it would have no rules nor qualms nor restraints.

It is possible that a good God exists, it is possible that a good God doesn't exist, but an omnimalevolent God is simply not logically possible. Please do not characterize this as me "making an exception". Desiring the free will of others is not an exception for omnibenevolence. It is consistent with omnibenevolence such that a being without this desire would cease to be omnibelevolent. Similarly, the desire to dominate against anothers will is consistent with omnimalevolence. A being which did not dominate against another's will would cease to be omnimalevolent.

[ August 30, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

K

luvluv:

Fair enough - let's restrict this to pain in this life. You said that pain is necessary for free will so that there can be a difference between correct choices and incorrect ones. But, as others have pointed out, there are many pains that come even when we have not chosen. People are injured and killed all the time because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If you claim that it was their free will to be in that place at that time, I would assert that when someone makes a decision without the slightest possibility of knowing that that decision could place them in harm's way, an omnipotent-omnibenevolent god couldn't possibly hold them responsible for making a bad decision. How would sparing someone from such a cruel fate possibly interfere with free will?

And if free will is just the decision between a result that causes less pain and one that causes more, shouldn't God just give us the ability to accurately all the pain each of our decisions would cause so that we can make an informed free will decision. How would knowing the consequences of our actions lessen our free will? This would allow us to make every decision an informed decision. It would also eliminate senseless suffering caused by people being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

luvluv

I've gone over why I think a consistent environment is necessary for free will.

Folks, I'm PLEADING WITH YOU, go to your local bookstore and pick up C.S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain. Read the second and third chapters about omnipotence and omnibenevolence. Then come back and ask me what you will. I can't believe that every other thread on this board is about the POE, and yet people steadfastly refuse to read this book. There isn't anyone on this forum more than 5 miles from a copy, and it costs a whopping 7 dollars (at least my copy did). If you really want to know the answers to your questions, they are pretty easy to obtain.

K, I'm referring you spefically to this book because it answers your question so well. At any rate, for the most part, we do know the consequences of our actions, or at least we know the risks. We know everytime we get in a car that there is a possibility that we will have an accident. I don't think that it is necessary for omnibenevolence to inform us DEFINITELY as to whether or not we will have an accident THIS TIME. God can still be good and omnipotent and not do this, and you can still have free will and not know everything that is going to happen. But I would argue that you are forwarned in that you do know the risks to the majority of the activities you participate in, and you even know the relative probabilities for many of those activities (like flying a plane or getting in a car wreck, for which explicit probabilities exist. And even children are usually well aware of the risks involved with playing in the street, etc.)

K

luvluv:

I'll check out the book. I'll be very disappointed if it doesn't address the following aspects of the discussion above:

1. If we use our free will to make every decision correctly, will we never experience pain and suffering?

2. If 1. is not true, then how could pain possibly be the result of our free will?

3. Since free will is not possible without suffering (including random acts of violence with little if any warning), does heaven have both or neither.

MrDarwin

The reason I bring this up is because although Christians seem to believe that (1) infants have souls, and (2) infants who die will be saved, it doesn't necessarily follow that (3) a newborn infant has any kind of free will, or had any choice in its own salvation. What choices is an infant capable of making? Yet if this infant's soul is admitted directly to heaven, that kind of blows the whole free will issue out of the water.

If you've already addressed this, then please accept my apologies and direct me to the relevant postings.

But it also raises a second sticky issue: the surest way for a parent to ensure that his children are saved is to murder them at birth. Surely they are better off saved than unsaved? And surely heaven is a better place for any soul to be than here on earth? (There might be some concern for the parent's own salvation, but he or she can always repent and be saved later, right?)

luvluv

Yes, you will, for at least two reasons:

1) Other people in the world who also have free will may decide to inflict pain and suffering on you.

2) The laws of the material universe are objective, and they may cause you pain and suffering regardless of your decisions. (for example, a tree branch may fall on your head)

You're misunderstanding me. Pain is an unavoidable consequence of living in a world where free will is possible. It is not always the result of our free will. Sometimes it is the fault of the abuse of free will of others, sometimes it is the fault of living in a world governed by objective physical laws. (the dreaded tree branch).

We're again getting away from earth, but in my opinion heaven has both, but of a different quality. Start a thread about heaven and hell and we'll go into it more fully.

Vibr8gKiwi

Self sacrifice to save others is one of the biggest concepts in Christianity. So wouldn't a parent that sacrifices their own salvation to save their child (by killing it), be doing something like what Jesus did? Sure it's twisted, but then so is the whole god sacrificing himself to himself to appease his blood-requirement so he could forgive us for how he made us stuff.