Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by mattbballman:

"That it is logically possible does not make it feasible for God because of the possible stubborness of free will."

My first point in the original post was intended to show that God behaves very strangely with free will, and therefore, that free will should not provide much help to the theist. God limits our free will very carefully, and it's not clear why a little bit more limitation in some areas would lower the total goodness of the world.

"However, how does one address the consequences of replacing Ivan with Ivan*?"

No idea. But the amount of free will in the universe is, prima facie, the same. It's up to the theist to show that something bad would happen if Ivan* existed instead of Ivan, because it's not obvious prima facie at all.

"Moreover, it still does not address how God can guarantee that Ivan* will not also fail to freely enroll at the appointed date."

Because he's defined as such. Ivan* is the person whose character is such that he will choose to take Philosophy 101.

"What guarantee does the atheologian have that by re-writing the laws of physics or perturbing harmful results from the given natural laws maintains the same amount of good that currently exists?"

Again, it just seems intuitively very obvious. There are reasons to believe it would increase the total good, because fewer people would suffer as much. This is a simple consequence of the belief that, ceteris paribus, suffering is bad. The scales are somewhat tipped; now the ball is in the theist's court. All I can see so far is another "maybe": "Maybe if less in the way of harmful results happened, less good would exist," which is far from a "probably."

"So you hit the nail on the head when you suggest that the real issue with respect to gratuitous evil is whether or not God exists."

Indeed. If the theist can show that, probably, God exists, then the evidential arguments from evil are generally weak. Yet I do not think the theist can complete this task. But even if she did, it's not clear why "Probably, God exists" isn't a defeater for the classic example of the inference to "Earth is more than 1,000 years old," for example. Thus, my criticism of the Unknown Purpose Defense is twofold.

"I had hoped that it was clear that Situation L and Situation S are logically possible worlds."

L and S are features of logically possible worlds, not logically possible worlds in themselves. Both could be features of the same logically possible world, unless the theist can derive some contradiction, and I don't think she can.

"Consider an additional possible situation:
(a) Most people freely come to salvation via immense suffering and evil in the world.
If (a) is possibly true (and present demographics given by missiologists indicate that it is by and large true), then what guarantee do we have to think that (a) is feasible in Situation L?"

This is irrelevant. What matters is not whether (a) is true, but whether (a) is a necessary feature of worlds in which S obtains. In fact, (a) is explicitly quite compatible with both S and L, as is a lack of (a). Remember, God can bring about any set of situations that is not internally inconsistent, and there are several ways for S to obtain without (a).

"It is not clear to me that the two can both be actualized by God without trumping free will."

I haven't seen any reason to believe God would prohibit significant human freedom if He brought about S and L. Suppose F is the situation "Humans have significant moral freedom." Now again, I do not see any reason to believe S, L, and F are an inconsistent triad, and the burden of proof is upon the person that asserts that the three are implicitly logically inconsistent.

The only way I can think to argue would be to say that S requires that humans freely choose to be saved, but this is not explicit within S. For God to desire that all humans are saved, and saved by their own will, would require that He not strongly actualize S. Yet this says nothing whatsoever about L.

Remember, in my original post, I outlined a few reasons why prima facie, L would actually help to bring about S. Therefore, the burden of proof has moved to the theist to provide reason to think L would actually hurt S, or to deny my reasons to think L helps S. Even if this burden can be shouldered, the theist must go further and show that S and L are in fact inconsistent, for God can certainly bring about L, and it's not obvious that L requires ~S.

It seems intuitively obvious to most atheists that a person with God's power could produce L while allowing for S and F, and I still haven't seen convincing argumentation to show that L requires a denial of S or F. I suspect that it is impossible to tell a convincing story in which L obtains but the fact that it obtains entails that ~S or ~F obtains, if God is omnipotent.

[ December 14, 2002: Message edited by: Thomas Metcalf ]</p>

Dr. Retard

I haven't followed this closely, but it seems Guthrie is making a big mistake: he's parroting Plantinga's free will defense, which is an attempt to defend the possibility of the co-existence of God and evil. Plantinga defended this possibility from Mackie, who argued that God and evil could not possibly co-exist.

Now, Drange doesn't deny the possibility claim. He is pressing an evidential argument from evil, which doesn't seek to show anything about the compossibility of God and evil. So what does Guthrie's Plantinga echo have to do with Drange's argument?

mattbballman

Dear Metcaf,

Your statement, "it's not clear why a little bit more limitation in some areas would lower the total goodness of the world" is exactly what you have to prove. Merely appealing to possible worlds in no wise addresses this. The example of Ivan in Guthrie's essay notes (1) if Ivan were in situation S then, possibly, he would enroll in Phi 101, and (3) under no circumstances will Ivan [freely] enroll in Phi 101 (the numbers '1' and '3' are taken directly from my essay, '2' is not in dispute here). You have to show how we get to deny (3) from (1) since (1) is where you have chosen to stake your camp.
And this inappropriate shifting of the burden of proof is still a feature of your response. You write, "It's up to the theist to show that something bad would happen if Ivan* existed instead of Ivan." But the theist isn't making the claim to know that we could feasibly have a better world than the present one, the atheist is! The person who wants to object to theism by appealing to the truth of some proposition must prove why the proposition is true. This is a "You can't prove Ivan* is not feasible; therefore, Ivan* is feasible" argument. Appealing to an argumentum ad ignorantiam is surely no manner of such proof. And I have also noticed a discernible lack of dealing with the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, of which (3) above is an example. So long as such counterfactuals are possible, then suggesting reconstructions of possible worlds is surely inscrutible if not impossible.

In order to avoid excessive repetition of my remarks :-), I'll leave it to you to wrestle with these points from his essay.

[ December 14, 2002: Message edited by: mattbballman ]</p>

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by mattbballman:

"Your statement, 'it's not clear why a little bit more limitation in some areas would lower the total goodness of the world' is exactly what you have to prove."

Ah, well, to prove that statement, I need only appeal to my introspective awareness of what I understand or don't understand. The burden of proof is upon anyone who asserts that to limit our free will in some areas would lower the total goodness in the world. I have not yet seen enough argumentation to confirm that.

"You have to show how we get to deny (3) from (1) since (1) is where you have chosen to stake your camp."

We must have a misunderstanding somewhere. I'm not trying to deny (3) or to affirm (1).

"But the theist isn't making the claim to know that we could feasibly have a better world than the present one, the atheist is!"

And it's pretty obvious. As far as we know, there are logically possible worlds with less badness. I'm prepared to assert that the burden of proof is upon anyone who asserts an implicit contradiction between features of putatively possible worlds. In other words, Ivan* is feasible until proven infeasible, just because it seems intuitively appealing that God is able to create Ivan* and that Ivan* would satisfy God's purposes as well as Ivan -- as far as we know. I'm not asserting anything here other than that, as far as we can tell, Ivan* is just as feasible as Ivan.

As I see it, there are really two major points left. First. I haven't seen any reason to think that the increased limitation on our free will in the way I have suggested will lower the goodness in the world. Second. I haven't seen any reason to think that Ivan* would not accomplish God's purposes the way Ivan would, or that either is less feasible than the other.

mattbballman

Mr. Metcaf,

First, I want to commend you on your thoughtful responses. Not too many posts that I receive from critics on the problem of evil are as level-headed as yours. That minds such as yours are out there should be an encouraging opportunity for advancing atheist-theist discourse. I can only speak for Christianity, but many lay-Christians have failed to appreciate the roles of reasoning and critical thinking that, I think, would be fruitful in such studies toward the advancement of truth -- wherever it may lead.

(i) With respect to the statement, "The burden of proof is upon anyone who asserts that to limit our free will in some areas would lower the total goodness in the world," I have to say that no theist has to prove this because the theist is not making this claim. The theist is only claiming that this scenario is possible, and it is quite clear that it is. And in order to evade this possibility, you would have to show that it is necessarily true that God cannot have a morally sufficient reason for retaining the level of free will in the actual world. An ambitious undertaking indeed! For it is possible that all worlds where God tempers free will are worlds where more people end up revolting against God. The burden of proof needs to be appropriately acknowledged since the atheist or atheologian wants to establish that by altering the present circumstances of the actual world then God can feasibly create a world with the same good in it but with lesser evil. And because there is a discernible lack of any support for this claim, no theist is under the warrant to adopt it as veridical.

(ii) Your statement that "Ivan* is feasible until proven infeasible, just because it seems intuitively appealing that God is able to create Ivan* and that Ivan* would satisfy God's purposes as well as Ivan" is mistaken because, at the risk of being a broken record, you cannot conclude that because Ivan* is possible that, therefore, Ivan* is feasible. And making the possible world of Ivan* a feasible world until disproven is the argumentum ad ignorantiam I already noted. It doesn't win by default.

The possibility of counterfactuals still remains unaddressed and is crucial to the problem of the compossible states of Situations L and S for the broadly logical possibility of Situation L+S does not corroborate the feasibility of Situation L+S.

It is for these reasons that the problem of evil is either not adequately proven or that it is ineffective as an argument for the non-existence of God. Since the atheologian is proposing that the inductive/probabalistic argument from evil is successful because Situation L is feasible for God then it is incumbent upon the claimant to provide reasons why this is so. In the absence of any good reasons to think Situation L is feasible then I think it is quite clear where that leaves the inductive problem of evil.

matt

Steven Carr

No, the theist has to disprove it, as it is he that is claiming that there is a freewill defense.

Saying it is a possibility, and only a possibility is as illogical as me claiming that there is no problem of legs.

Should I believe that people generally have one leg?

I can see lots of people with two legs.

But it is *possible* in some logical posisble worlds that the people with two legs I have seen, had a false leg, and that most people only have one leg. (quite possible, after all I have only seen a minority of people in this world)

But you wrote 'For the theist, this solution merely needs to be possible and does not even have to be true.'


So I don't even have to claim that is is true that the only two legged people I have seen had false legs, to refute your silly belief that people have two legs!


People would laugh if I claimed that because I have shown a *possiblility*, a-leggists were wrong, when claiming that because they could see two legs, people really do have two legs.


So atheists who claim that because they can see a lot of suffering, there is no God who hates suffering, should not be deterred because it is *possible* to think up a scenario in which this is compatible. The theist needs to show that this possibility is actuality.

And Guthrie himself came up with God creating an Ivan who had free will, and who, under all circumstances freely chose not to do action X. So Guthrie cannot complain if atheists say God can create an Ivan, who had free will, and who under all circumstances, would freely choose not to do evil.

And it is Christian dogma that God has created beings who have free will and who have never chosen evil, so Christians cannot say that it is not feasible for God to do that.

[ December 17, 2002: Message edited by: Steven Carr ]

[ December 17, 2002: Message edited by: Steven Carr ]</p>

Clutch

It is always useful to ask, of any particular Christian response to the Argument from Evil, whether it has anything specific to do with the actual world. If a response would work just as well no matter how degenerate and suffering-laden the world had turned out, then it is surely an empty response justifying nothing about God with respect to the actual suffering that obtains.

Silent Dave

I'm not sure I follow your reasoning, Clutch. Could you explain what you mean?


Dave

Clutch

Sorry, Dave, that was a bit cryptic.

Consider this response, which has been floated by a variety of "respected" philosophers of religion: "Look, there is no maximization of good this side of heaven. No matter how good the world was, we could still ask, Why isn't it better? There is no possible finite, temporal world in which this worry would not arise, and God's omnipotence does not extend to doing the impossible. So the fact that we have this concern doesn't impugn God's goodness."

Or consider the classic appeal to ignorance: "Sure, it seems like there's more suffering than there needs to be, even for any punitive or redemptive purposes. But that's just how things seem to us -- and we're not God. We don't know what God knows, and hence we are not positioned to critique the decisions of a being who, if he exists, is by definition in possession of all the information."

Both of these responses, and a variety of others, could be offered with exactly the same force in a situation where the world contains massively greater suffering, and radically less enjoyment, than the world actually has. Indeed, it does not look like there is any lower bound on the overall goodness of a world such that these claims would explicitly fail to apply. They do not justify the actual extent of suffering, because they are vacuous. They would justify any extent of suffering whatever.

That the existence of the Christian god is, by these responses, consistent with absolutely any degree of suffering, however, is surely a reductio of omnibenevolence. These lines of argument seem to cash out as convoluted ways of saying, "Suck it up."

[ December 17, 2002: Message edited by: Clutch ]</p>

Jamie_L

I think what Clutch is getting at is that if the apologist just argues in general that it's possible this much suffering is needed to achieve God's greater good, that arguement could apply to any world, even a world in which everyone suffers excrutiating pain from birth until death and where raping children is the norm and not the exception, etc. Such an arguement does not specifically address the issue of how much suffering exists in the actual world.

Such arguements also work to discourage any notion of attempting to alleviate the suffering of others. If this world cannot have less suffering without interfering with God's greater good, then when you try to produce less suffering, you will be opposing that greater good. This exact level of suffering is here by God, by design, to achieve the greater good.

Jamie