Vorkosigan

You mean....reduced the level evil needs to reach in order to be considered necessary, so that if good people worked together, they could reduce that necessary to Zero?

ManM

"4) God does not act to prevent evil"

God died on the cross to conquer death. How is this not God acting to prevent the evil of eternal nonexistence?

Echo

I don't understand this. Eternal nonexistence is evil? And, prior to Jesus' death there was eternal nonexistence? This seems to suggest that for the first tens of thousands of years of human existence, people who died then suffered the "evil of nonexistence" without any intervention on God's behalf; and then only two thousand years ago did God step in to eliminate this "evil of nonexistence."

If that is intervening to prevent evil, it seems a little late for the millions of people who lived before Jesus.

ManM

Echo,
Nonexistence does not even contain the potential for good. I think it is safe to say that is a bad thing.

God did not intervene to eliminate the "evil of nonexistence". He eliminated the evil of eternal nonexistence.

Hobbs

Nonexistence does not contain the potential for evil, either. How can it be either a good or a bad thing? It is nothing.

Or, do you think that, say, the nonexistence of polio would be a bad thing? Would the nonexistence of Hitler have been a bad thing? Or do you just mean that you don't want not to exist? And the universe should care because ... ?

[ August 19, 2002: Message edited by: Hobbs ]</p>

tergiversant

This implicit premise should be quite obvious, "God acts morally." A being which is morally perfect is one which always acts (or refrains from action) in a perfectly moral manner, by definition. As I have pointed out, this objection does not invalidate the argument, at best it falsifies the first premise by denying that God acts in a manner which we may rightly call morally exemplary. In any event, people certainly have it in their power to refrain from preventing evil just as God does. If (3) were modified to read "People should act as God does insofar as it is within their power" then the conclusion of the argument would follow. I think the first premise is incoherent on other grounds as well, but I hear it quite often asserted by theists of various stripes. Perhaps you are not one of them. If this is so, they should for the sake of logical consistency refrain from talking about God as good and righteous and perfect. I would be interested in hearing how moral reasons may be said to apply to one moral agent alone. Perhaps this could be done, but it would make nonsense of the claim that God is morally perfect of morally exemplary. The general problem of evil does not take into account the theological claim that God is to be morally emulated. The entailments of this claim may be considered in a refutation to the UPD.

[ August 19, 2002: Message edited by: tergiversant ]</p>

tergiversant

Many people have died on crosses. You have not given us any good reason to believe that one of them was a god.

As to conquering death, last I checked, people are still dying.

It would seem then that your claim that God has in fact prevented some particular "evil" is lacking on both counts.

ManM

Hobbs,
I define evil as the absence of good. The nonexistence of evil is good only if good is left in its place. When we talk about nonexistence in general, there is no good at all.

And so while nonexistence is technically amoral, I am inclined to view it as opposing the good.

tergiversant,
I don't have to give you a good reason in order to falsify your argument in this thread. You made a theological argument, and so I gave you a theological answer. You claimed that God does not prevent evil.

1) Eternal nonexistence is evil.
2) God prevented eternal nonexistence.
3) God prevented evil.

I have good reason to believe in #1. Point #2 is a matter of Christian doctrine. Point #3 follows.

You object to #2 because you think it is false. That means you omitted a premise in your original argument. You need to add "God did not die on the cross to grant us eternal life" or something along those lines. As originally written, your argument is falsified. If you add in the hidden premise, I suspect you will lose much of your target audience.

Echo

I still don't get this first premise. You say eternal nonexistence is evil, but there are many potential persons who could have come into existence had a different sperm fertilized my mother's egg. These potential persons remain eternally nonexistent. I don't see how it makes sense to say that this situation is evil.

And are you saying that Jesus' death prevented this eternal nonexistence from occuring in the first place or did his death reverse a situation that was already occuring? In other words, what was happening to all the people who lived and died in the tens of thousands of years before Jesus?

ManM

Echo,
I am not talking about specific people or potentialities, but humanity as a whole. Jesus's death prevented the scenario of eternal nonexistence from occuring. That is the 'good news' of the Christian message.

The same thing that will happen to us when we die.