wordsmyth

luvluv,

The Bible is filled with examples of the xian deity doing things that are not logically possible. How about causing the sun to stop in the sky? Causing the Red Sea to part so the Israelites could escape? Spontaneous creation from nothing? Need I go on? Things that are logically impossible for us appear to be easily accomplished by the xian deity.

Just because you choose to ignore any and all reasoning, which is contrary to your dogmatic opinion, does not eliminate the incoherency of your argument.

</strong>

There is an enormous difference between an apologist who is defending Biblical texts and their meaning and you who have no textual evidence to support your philosophical opinions. That is really all it is, just your opinion.

Most anyone would attest that it is logically impossible to create something from nothing… and yet God allegedly did it. There is just one example of God possessing the ability do the logically impossible.

I have shown that the qualities xianity attributes to God are inconsistent with what we see, but rather than addressing my points directly you continue to ignore them or insist that I read a book by your favorite author.

You seem to be completely ignorant of who or what the xian God is. Your own opinions on the nature of God bear only a cursory resemblance to the xian deity.

Why should we assume that? So we can judge people based on your value system? I guess it is your opinion that only those people who made their wealth on their own are good people. Or perhaps you are insinuating that those who made their wealth rather than inheriting it are just intrinsically better people.

How can you KNOW, not believe, but KNOW that God (or Satan for that matter) has not fooled you into believing a thing already?

<strong>2 Thessalonians 2
11</strong> For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie
<strong>12</strong> and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.

Here we have your God causing people to believe a lie for the sole purpose of condemning them for believing that lie. Your “good” deity hard at work.

The fact is, you could not empirically know, so it becomes irrelevant. It also assumes that God could not grant you a quality as good as one that you earned. This would imply that your omnibenevolent deity couldn’t do something as “good” as we could ourselves.

So, you are saying that those who earn their wealth rather than inheriting it are intrinsically better people. How many people choose to earn wealth rather than inherit it? Oh, that’s right… they usually do not have any CHOICE in the matter. Nobody says “I choose to inherit my money rather than earn it”.

Did your deity go to school and earn his knowledge? If so, who was his teacher? If not, then the quality you are espousing would seem irrelevant.

I see no reason to believe that the process has any bearing on the morality of an individual. Can you provide any evidence to support this assertion, or is it just another baseless opinion?

Perhaps I can’t grant that, but why would an omnipotent deity be unable to do so? I think the confusion here is that you are inserting your opinion on what your deity "wants" to do instead of what he "can" do. Two very different things.

It was explained to you what “omni” means, but you must have missed it. Omni does not mean infinite, it means “All”. Nobody has used the term infinite in reference to any of your deity’s alleged attributes AFAIK, so it would seem to be a straw man on your part to continue making the claim that anyone has. Since I have reaffirmed what “omni” means, perhaps this would be a good time to explain what is meant by your deity’s alleged attributes.

Omni = All (adj. the utmost possible.)
Potent = Powerful
Scient (from the word science (sciens in Latin)) = Knowledge
Benevolent = Good; Kind

Therefore, when we put them together we get…

Omnipotent = “All” Powerful
Omniscient = “All” Knowing
Omnibenevolent = “All” Good

K

luvluv:

The main reason I asked for a definition of greater good was to point out that if we can't define it in human terms, then we have no right to call God good or benevolent. Those are both human terms. We see a large portion of the suffering on this earth as bad. Now we could say that there is a good and benevolent God that has a plan to maximize the amount of suffering in the universe. We just don't understand how the plan is good and benevolent. This perverts the definitions of good and benevolent to the point that discussions using them are meaningless. The problem of pain goes away if the attributes of omnibenevolent and all-good are not used to describe God.

I could just as easily describe God as omni-destructive and omnipotent. He utterly destroys absolutely everything. When people point out that things exist and there are things coming into existence, I could reply that we can't know God's plan. There is no problem of existence because things could be created for a greater destruction. Sure, but this makes communication about the properties of God impossible. We can't know if He is omni-destructive, omni-benevolent, all-good, or omni-anything.

So, if we can't define the greater good that requires suffering that appears needless on earth, how can we say God is all-good? How do we know He is not omni-destructive, omni-hungry, omni-scared, omni-malicious, omni-petty, or omni-ignorant?

Speaking to your chemo example. If I had the omnipotent power to cure someone's cancer painlessly and I still put them through chemotherapy, I would say that that was malicious. Without omnipotence, it's not malicious.

As I alluded to earlier, I define suffering as bad because humans generally consider suffering to be bad. When we speak of benevolence we can mean the lessening of suffering. We never mean increasing suffering simply for the sake of suffering. And I'll state again, if God needs all of this suffering to complete His all-good plan, it certainly must be evil for us to eliminate any of that suffering. Should we get rid of anaesthetics? Should we stop trying to help the needy? Should we stop trying to rid the world of horrible diseases?

I will address the points about a consistent external world and free will in your other thread. But it might take a while. I haven't read any of it yet.

bd-from-kg

luvluv:

In this post and the one following I want to address your comments about free will. (Some of my arguments have naturally been anticipated by other posters, but there’s a good bit of new stuff.)

1. Free will and divine intervention

Even if free will were infinitely more important than such things as happiness and suffering, this would still not explain why God would allow certain very common kinds of things to happen.

The first problem is that free will can be used to deprive others of free will. Thus, if God has such a touching respect for Smith’s free will that He allow Smith to kidnap and torture young girls, why is He completely unconcerned about the free will of the young girls while they are tied up and subjected to these atrocities? Surely if maximizing free will is the objective, God would want to intervene when doing so would increase the net amount of free will enormously, or (if He has some principled objection to intervening) He would arrange things in the first place so that one person’s free will cannot be used to deprive others of it.

Examples of this kind could be multiplied indefinitely. It’s extremely common for actions that adversely affect others to limit their freedom of choice. Killing people is the ultimate in limiting a person’s choices, so why, if He is so concerned about free will, does God allow it? When someone holds a gun to your head and tells you to do something or get blown to bits, isn’t this limiting your free will just a teeny bit? Why doesn’t God seem to care about such situations? It’s no good to say that it’s because He respects the free will of the guy with the gun unless you can explain why He doesn’t respect yours at least equally.

An obvious answer is that limiting one’s options isn’t really infringing on one’s free will; one is still free to choose from the remaining options. But the problem with that is that it destroys the original argument. If limiting one’s options doesn’t infringe on one’s free will, then restricting Smith’s options to ones that do not involve kidnapping young girls would not be infringing on his free will either.

The second problem is that free will can be used to corrupt children. Thus Fagin is considered to a villain because he taught young boys who were too young to be responsible for their actions, or to understand what was being done to them, to become pickpockets. In Pretty Baby a girl was raised in a brothel, trained to be a prostitute, and “sold” to the highest bidder when she reached the age of twelve. Things of this sort really happen. Now most people would say that regardless of whether free will is an “intrinsic good”, virtue certainly is. And so when free will is used to corrupt children, this is unequivocally a bad thing. It can’t be justified on the grounds that it is necessary for the sake of some ultimate good.


2. The nature of free will

Your argument is based on large part on the idea that God must allow all sorts of horrible things as the price of bestowing the priceless gift of free will. But this argument depends on a rather strange conception of free will. The idea seems to be that it a person is unable to do anything at all, his free will is thereby infringed. For example, if God were to make it psychologically impossible for Smith to kidnap dozens of young girls, abuse them sexually and torture them mercilessly, etc., He would be infringing on Smith’s free will, and therefore He cannot do it because it would be contrary to His goodness.

But this conception of free will is logically incoherent. It is impossible that everyone should be psychologically able to do anything at all at any time. In order to act at all, people must have desires, preferences, motives, ends. These things by definition will often impel people to do one thing rather than another. For instance, I am not able, at least in the absence of extreme coercion, to kidnap a young girl, sexually abuse her, etc. My brain synapses are arranged in such a way as to make such actions impossible without violating the laws of physics. Or if you prefer, my mental makeup – my desires and preferences – are such as to make it psychologically impossible. And even if this isn’t strictly true, it seems to me that it could be impossible without any infringement of my free will. (After all, I want it to be impossible!) And if so, Smith could also have free will without being able to do any of these things. If God had simply not endowed him with any traits that might lead to a desire to commit such atrocities, how would this have infringed on his free will?

Similarly, there are billions of people who would be absolutely incapable of issuing the order to exterminate millions of innocent Jews. Is their free will infringed by having a psychological makeup that makes such an idea abhorrent to them? Of course not. If Hitler had been similarly incapable of issuing such an order, his free will would not have been impaired in the least.

In short, this conception of free will is simply absurd. Obviously it is not necessary to desire everything, in order to have free will. And obviously God has arranged things in such a way that we are in fact absolutely unwilling to do all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. So this conception of free will – the only version that could justify or explain God’s failure to prevent all sorts of atrocities, or simply to arrange things so that they cannot happen – does not stand up to serious scrutiny.

Note: As for your argument that God cannot intervene more than very, very rarely in this world without interfering with moral responsibility, this is almost too preposterous to take seriously. Just the sam, I will reply to it eventually on the thread you started on the subject. In the meantime, it should be kept in mind that everything that I’ve said that God could do in this section could easily be done (or at least could have been done) without “interfering” in human affairs at all – for example, by creating people with different natures and characters.

3. The desirability of free will.

At this point we need to ask: what kind of free will is desirable? And to answer this, we have to consider why free will is desirable.

Evidently free will is not desirable merely because we desire it, or because it makes us happy, because what we desire and what makes us happy are irrelevant:

No, free will is not desirable because we desire it, or because it makes us happy. However, you have now given two entirely different reasons as to why it’s desirable. In this post I’ll consider one of them. The second, more recent entry will be discussed in my next post.

Free will and learning.

Your first answer to the question of what makes free will desirable is as follows:

Now the first questions that occur to one here are: (1) What is the nature of this “measurable goodness,” and (2) What makes you think that it exists?

As to the nature of this supposed goodness, does it consist in the fact that you learned how to do the thing in question, or in the fact that you are in a different final state as a result of having learned it? And if the latter, does the relevant difference consist solely in the fact the you remember learning it or does it consist in part in the nature and quality of the knowledge obtained?

If the relevant difference lies in the nature and quality of the knowledge obtained, the argument is clearly unsound. God could give you knowledge of this exact same nature and quality without your having to go to the trouble of learning it.

If the relevant difference consists in the fact that you learned to do it, or in your remembering having done so, we have arrived at question (2). Why, and in what way, is process of learning (as opposed to the result) “good in itself”? Or, if it isn’t, in what way is the state of having a memory of having gone through this process superior to the state of not having this memory? Would learning the thing in question be of no value if you later forgot having learned it but still remembered the thing learned? If the process of learning is not “good in itself,” it is very hard to see how remembering having gone through this process could be good in itself.

As for me, I have no idea why going through the process of learning something should be considered “good in itself”. I would be perfectly happy to have attained a thorough knowledge of calculus, for example, without having had to expend the time and effort required to learn it. Similarly, I would have been overjoyed to find that I suddenly had acquired the skill of driving a car expertly without having to go through the tedious (and somewhat dangerous) process of learning how.

To be sure, some learning is fun and rewarding, such as much of the time I spent learning to play the piano. But this is quite a different thing from saying that it was desirable in itself. It was desirable because it was fun and rewarding, not because it was learning.

But even more important and relevant is the question of what kind of free will is needed to “learn how to do something on your own and of your own volition”. First, it seems clear that the desirability of doing something “of one’s own volition” comes from the fact that one gets to choose to do what one wants rather than what someone else wants for you. Thus, I learned to play the piano because I wanted to, not because Mother or Dad insisted that I take lessons. But this sense of doing something “on one’s own” does not require “free will” in the “metaphysical” or “libertarian” sense; it is perfectly consistent with determinism. I enjoyed it because I love music and love producing it myself. But I did not choose to love music, or to love producing it; these were either innate traits or were produced at a very early age by environmental influences interacting with traits that were innate.

In any case, it’s very hard to see how this kind of free will is incompatible with a world in which no one desires to exterminate Jews or kidnap young girls, or do any of the other horrible things that people in fact do. God could easily endow us with the requisite traits without endowing us with racial hatred or perverted sexual desires, or with any traits that might lead to such things. So even if the kind of free will required to enable people to learn how to do something on their own and of their own volition is desirable, this gets us exactly nowhere in explaining why the world contains Hitlers and kidnappers.

In other words, nothing of this sort can explain why, in addition to being endowed with free will, we have also been endowed with traits (desires, goals, etc.) that lead to its being used for awful ends. How would being endowed only with entirely benign, altruistic traits be incompatible with any of the supposed benefits of having free will? This would not make us slaves or mindless robots. There would be plenty of scope for meaningful choices. But there would be no possibility of choosing to torture or exterminate people.

Thus all in all, your attempt to use free will to reconcile God’s goodness with the existence of so much evil in this world has so far been a complete failure. In my next post I’ll look at the argument that free will is necessary to allow us to “freely choose God”, and in the process consider the nature of free will a bit more deeply.

bd-from-kg

luvluv:

Now I want to discuss your latest proposed justification for God's endowing us with free will in spite of the obvious massive negative consequences:

Now I would certainly not want to deny that there is a kind of freedom, or free will, which is desirable, or that God would want us to choose freely to accept Him in that sense of freedom. But, as we shall see, having freedom in this sense does not entail that God must accept the existence of massive amounts of evil, or any evil at all for that matter, in this world.

But first it should be noted that your analogy with marriage suggests that the beneficiary of our having free will so that we can accept God “freely” is not us, but God himself. But this is absurd. God is perfect; nothing that we can do can possibly add to His perfection. His welfare cannot depend on what any other being does. So the idea that God wants us to be free so that He can have the satisfaction of knowing that we accepted Him freely is a nonstarter.

Besides, if the reason that God endows us with free will (with the massive evil and human suffering that this entails) is that it benefits Him (for example, because it pleases Him to have creatures accept Him freely), then His reasons are selfish. He is not acting in our interests, but in His own. This is hardly what I mean by “benevolence”. If God’s giving us free will is to be construed as “benevolent”, it must be in our interest.

But it’s very difficult to see how it can benefit us. To see this, consider what “choosing freely” has to mean in order for this argument to go through.

Suppose that Susie loves strawberry milkshakes and hates chocolate ones, to the point where she cannot even conceive of choosing a chocolate milkshake over a strawberry one. If offered a choice between the two, she will certainly choose the strawberry. (Note: It doesn’t matter whether you believe this is possible in this world. It is clearly logically possible, and that’s all that matters here.) Let’s also imagine that Susie has a twin sister Sally, who likes strawberry milkshakes just as much as Susie, but nevertheless has a 1% chance of choosing chocolate.

Now the first question here is this: When Susie chooses strawberry, is she choosing freely?

If one wants to use “free will” to reconcile God’s supposed goodness with the observed evil in the world, one must answer this question in the negative. The reason is simple. If free will is compatible with a 100% probability of making particular choices, then it is compatible with a complete absence of “wrong” or “bad” choices. In particular, God could endow us with free will so that we could accept Him freely while also giving us natures such that we were certain to do so. The same is true of all less important “bad” choices that we could make along the way; God could simply see to it that we always freely chose to make the right choices instead.

Thus the “free will” that you’re talking about must be of such a nature that there is a nonzero probability that a person could choose either of two or more alternatives. This is the version of free will (so-called "metaphysical" or "libertarian" free will) which, I will argue, is of no benefit to anyone and is not desirable in any way. It is also a rather bizarre concept which has nothing to do with what people ordinarily mean when they say that someone is “choosing freely”.

For example, as I pointed out, you are committed to saying that Susie is not choosing “freely” in the scenario above. But in what meaningful sense is Sally’s choice more “free” than Susie’s? Susie is not being coerced in any way. She chooses strawberry because she prefers strawberry. If she preferred chocolate, she could choose it, but she doesn’t like chocolate, so she doesn’t. How is this not a free choice? Are you seriously going to maintain that Susie is a “robot” because she always chooses what she prefers? Sally, on the other hand, has the misfortune of having a mental quirk that causes her to occasionally choose what she does not prefer. (Strictly speaking this is impossible, since a person cannot literally choose what she does not prefer over what she does. But we can postulate that Sally occasionally prefers chocolate for a fleeting instant while she makes the choice, but immediately regrets it.)

But even if we insist (as the apologist must) that Susie is not choosing freely, he still must deal with the second question: How is Sally better off than Susie? Every once in a while Sally chooses chocolate, even though (except for those fleeting instants) she hates chocolate with a passion. Sally has to go through life in constant uncertainty as to whether she is going to choose what she prefers or what she hates, whereas Susie can be confident that she will always choose what she prefers.

Thus it’s not at all clear what the advantage of having free will (in this sense) is supposed to be. It seems to me that Susie, who doesn’t have it, is better off in every way for not having it. Why would anyone want to be like Sally rather than Susie?

Matters do not improve when the choice involved is more significant than a choice between strawberry and chocolate. For example, suppose that Tom is so virtuous that if he sees a child drowning in a nearby river, he is certain to immediately risk his own life by swimming out to save him, whereas his twin brother Tim, who is ordinarily just as virtuous as Tom but has the same mental quirk as Sally, has a 1% chance of staying on dry land. Once again we must ask whether it makes sense to say that Tom is not choosing freely to risk his life to save the child, and therefore is not morally responsible for his act and thus not deserving of praise, whereas Tim is deserving of praise because his mind occasionally goes into a weird state in which he chooses not to attempt the rescue. In what way exactly is Tim more virtuous, or more worthy of praise, than Tom? Why should his possession of a mental quirk that occasionally causes him to act contrary to his fundamentally virtuous nature make him more deserving of praise that a twin brother who doesn’t have this quirk?

And once again it is not at all clear how Tim’s possession of “free will” is desirable, either to him or to anyone else. To be sure, it could conceivably save his life someday, but the price is very high: even though Tim prizes virtue above all else, he finds that occasionally he chooses the less virtuous path for no intelligible reason, even though he intended to make the virtuous choice just beforehand and regrets not having done so immediately afterward. Who in his right mind would rather be Tim than Tom? Who would prefer that Tom become like Tim rather than that Tim become like Tom? Who in his right mind would really praise Tim but refuse to praise Tom, for displaying the very same virtuous character? In short, it seems completely implausible to say that Tom does not have free will whereas Tim does, and even more implausible to say that Tim is better off than Tom, or more worthy of admiration and praise, for having it.

Now let’s suppose that Tom and Tim have a younger brother Terence, who does the “wrong” things exactly as often as Tim, but does so because he has persistent (rather than fleeting) “sinful” desires or preferences that neither Tom nor Tim have. Is Terence more free than Tim? Is he more worthy of praise than either Tom or Tim? If not, how does he benefit exactly from having these sinful desires? How does society benefit? Is there anything whatsoever that would make Terence preferable or superior in any way to Tom or Tim? Would you rather be Terence than either Tom or Tim?

Now let’s return to your “marriage” analogy. Instead of supposing that I have only one woman available to propose to, suppose that I have three. Mary loves me absolutely; she adores me with all her heart; all of her thoughts are centered on the hope that I will ask her to marry me. If I do ask, she is certain to accept joyously. Her twin sister Margaret loves me every bit as much as Mary, but has Sally’s mental quirk, and as a result, there is a 1% chance (as there is with all her decisions) that she will refuse me, even though she would regret doing so immediately. Finally, Mary and Margaret have a younger sister Midge, who also has a 1% chance of rejecting me, but for a different reason: she doesn’t love me quite so wholeheartedly. There are a few things about me that she absolutely detests, and every once in while her negative feelings about me outweigh her love for me.

Now, which one of these do you think I’ll propose to? Shall I reject Mary on the grounds that her wholehearted acceptance of me makes her a “robot” unworthy of being chosen? And if so, shall I prefer Margaret, who at least loves me as much as Mary, or Midge, who detests some of my qualities even though she’ll probably accept anyway? Are these really serious questions? Does anyone have any doubt as to what my order of preference will be, or what they would do in my place? Why would anyone in his right mind prefer Margaret to Mary, or Midge to either of them?

And yet, if you want this analogy to “work”, you must say that if I were perfectly rational I would prefer Midge to Margaret and Margaret to Mary. Margaret to Mary, because Mary does not have free will, and thus would not be choosing me freely. And Midge to Margaret, because ... well, I have no idea why anyone one would prefer Midge to Margaret, but we must presume that this would be rational, because God has created billions of Midges and virtually no Margarets. So he must prefer Midges to Margarets, and this implies that it is rational to prefer Midges to Margarets.

As for the notion that Mary isn’t “real” because she doesn’t “really” have a choice: I’m sorry, but this is ridiculous. Is Susie not “real” because she really, really prefers strawberry to chocolate? Is Mary not “real” because she loves me and only me? Is any woman who loves a man so much that she would agree to marry him without a moment’s hesitation a “robot” unworthy of marriage?

It seems clear to me that Susie, Tom, and Mary are choosing freely in the only sense that matters: their choices are based on their own fundamental preferences, values, and desires, and not on what someone else wants or on a passing whim. The notion that choices based on fleeting desires, or on random factors bearing no relationship to the agent’s nature and character, are “free” in any meaningful sense, is a foolish and dangerous fancy. If God wants us to choose Him, He wants us to do so because it is the choice consistent with our fundamental, deepest natures. This is what it means to make a truly free choice. And to make us capable of such a free choice, God need not endow us with wicked or sinful desires, excessive pride, or any of the other things that can produce evil in this world; He need only endow us with desires that tend inevitably to make us love God.

[ September 13, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

Marz Blak

bd-

Being a relative newcomer to this forum, I had seen references to libertarian free will and wondered about the concept. I hadn't yet gotten around to researching it, though. Your post serves as a lucent primer on the concept. Thank you.

bd-from-kg

Marz Blak:
Thanks for the compliment. Glad to be of help. However, I had not intended to elucidate the concept of libertarian free will when I wrote it (I assume that luvluv is familiar with it), and as a result I may have left you with a false impression in one respect.

All advocates of libertarian free will (LWF) say that in order for an action to be be "chosen freely" in the LFW sense, it must be uncaused in the sense that the agent could (in a sense which has never been made clear, at least to me) have done otherwise, even given the entire history of the world (including the exact state of the agent) up to some critical point at which the "die was cast" by some intentional act on the agent's part. (I believe that this whole notion is unintelligible, but that's another matter.)

However, many LFW advocates claim that it is perfectly consistent to say that an act was freely chosen in the LFW sense and that there was zero probability that the agent would have chosen otherwise. (Again, I find this idea unintelligible). But as I pointed out, this position cannot be taken consistently by someone who is trying to use LFW to reconcile God's goodness with the observed evil in the world because if it were true, it would be possible for God to arrange things so that everyone always chooses freely to "do the right thing". So we could have our cake and eat it too: free will and no evil. (That's not to say that there would be no suffering [that's another story] but that there would be no sin.)