luvluv

Marz Blak:

I'd disagree on a number of levels. First, it is entirely premature for you to ascribe atheism to logic and theism to emotionalism. That is a very common mistake. Quite often atheism is the result of emotionalism and theism the result of intellectual pursuit. Any notions that one side or the other holds the monopoly on intellectual honesty or emotionally-tainted motivations is simply self-flattery. I personally believe that all of our pressupostions are a mixture of our emotional and intellectual drives. I certainly have emotional reasons for being a Christian (it may be more accurate to call them personal, perhaps) but I'd be willing to bet you have emotional reasons for being an atheist. I also, believe it or not, have rational reasons for being a theist, just like you do for being an atheist. There are certain unanswered questions that for me at least make it impossible to as yet reject the God hypothesis. (Why is there something instead of nothing? What caused the big bang? What caused the anthropic coincidences? How did life start on this planet? Can natural selection alone account for all our present speciation? What is consciousness and where does it come from?). These questions for me make God, presently, a rational possibility. I also feel I have personal evidence that God exists. I think your terming it emotional would give the wrong impression. I have good reason to believe that I have communicated with God on several occasions, and that He has communicated with me. I couldn't prove it to you any more conclusively than I could prove to you that I love my mother, but I know both of them are true. You would be more accurate to say that my belief in God is experientially based, not emotionally based.

At any rate, the God hypothesis is no more of an extroidinary claim than many of the claims of naturalism. I have no more reason to believe the outlandish proposition that the universe and life created itself out of nothing than I have to believe in the existence of God. But it seems to me that a person must believe in one of these absurd notions or the other.

I really don't see it as being anything but honesty given:

1) We admit that the possibility of suffering is a necessary pre-requisite to the existence of free moral agents.

2) We do not know that suffering and maximal benevolence are incompatible.

3) We know that suffering can lead to greater ends than non-suffering.

4) We don't know that maximal benevolence would necessarily value non suffering over greater ends it could achieve.

The problem with this whole line of argumentation is that we can't agree on what maximal benevolence would mean. It is the one omnimax term that is almost useless in argumentation since there is a large span of the defitintion on which reasonable people would disagree. What you think makes God not maximally benevolent may not jibe with what I think, and we don't really have any objective agreed upon measure of benevolence to prove who is right.

I've avoided this because it is a conversation ender, but really the POE argument is really useless unless God exists, because unless God exists there is no universal moral standard and it is therefore impossible to even decide what benevolence is.

What I'm trying to say is that, logically, POE and UPD end in a stalemate. It is highly questionable just what maximal benevolence entails, it is entirely arguable that maximal benevolence would be primarily concerned with the reduction of suffering, and it is entirely arguable that there is an unknown purpose. So, basically, the whole argument doesn't have any potential to prove anything, but it could convince people one way or the other on the basis of emotion. I personally believe that you cannot make a logical decision to disbelieve in God on the basis of POE. It may provide some support to some other foundation of your atheism that is logically sound, but if it is your primary reason for rejecting God it is grounded in emotionalism.

Marz Blak

luvluv--

I was all set to go through your last post point-by-point, but I thought a bit more and concluded that it would not serve us any good purpose.

I DO agree entirely with your last two sentences:
"...I personally believe that you cannot make a logical decision to disbelieve in God on the basis of POE. It may provide some support to some other foundation of your atheism that is logically sound, but if it is your primary reason for rejecting God it is grounded in emotionalism...."

I agree that there are both believers and non-believers who arrive where they are through more emotional than rational reasons, as well as those on both sides whose conclusions are more reasoned.

Having said that, though, I *do* happen to believe that one cannot arrive at a position of theism, at least one that makes any *positive attributive claims* about the Creator's personality or motives, without at least some considerable emotionalism coming into play, for the simple reason that for many of the inferential chains supporting such a position (e.g., the Universe exists-->God is benevolent), there simply is no empirical evidence. It is all speculation, past a certain point.

It is in this respect, I would hold, that personal theistic approaches are inherently more imbued with emotionalism than are the sorts of rationalist/empricist approaches underlying my sort of philosophy.

To me, it is as simple as being able to admit what I believe we all know: that there is only so much of reality about which we have information sufficient upon which to make any assertive claims of understanding, and the rest--like it or not--is nothing more than speculation.

In short, theistic philosophies are simply far too much inference on far too little information to be at all persuasive to me. I suspect that there is little more I might say on this matter to you, nor little more on it you might usefully say to me.

[ September 25, 2002: Message edited by: Marz Blak ]</p>

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by luvluv:

"I disagree. I don't see why that should be the case. Further, I think it is logically incompatible for even an omnipotent, benevolent God to give creatures free will and yet guarantee that their usage of that will is always the best possible usage. If the will that has been given them is truly free, they can use it to ends that are not necessarily the best ends. If they can't use their will to do things towards lesser ends, then their will is not free."

No one is saying God can guarantee free creatures always use it correctly. Do you or do you not accept the proposition, "All suffering that exists is necessary for an equal or greater good"?

"No, we don't know that. We don't know that a morally perfect being would eliminate more of the suffering we see on the planet. We don't know what the role of suffering is, or what could come out of it."

If we assume that some of the intense suffering we observe has no morally sufficient purpose, a morally perfect being would prevent more of it.

"The POE is not a logically sound proof (or disproof) because while you may object to the UPD and choose not to be persuaded by it, it does provide a logically sound conclusion that prevents the POE argument from being a logically sound disproof of God. You might choose to believe that there could be no higher purpose to suffering, but you cannot logically exclude the possibility. I say quite often that the problem of pain is an emotional problem and not a logical one."

I'm not attempting to use the POE as a logical disproof of God, nor have I throughout this thread. UPD is inadequate against the evidential problem of evil, and this fact is recognized by a great many professional philosophers of religion. Here are why:

1. If all suffering is necessary for a greater good, there is no reason to prevent suffering because to do so would be to prevent a greater good.
2. If we cannot conclude from "apparently pointless" to "actually pointless" because God might have hidden reasons, this removes our abilities to conclude anything evidentially. Maybe God has a morally justifying reason to prevent us from knowing that the earth is only 100 years old, for example.
3. It's just not very intuitively likely. It doesn't seem probable that a 1-year-old orphan buried in a landslide whom no one ever misses or knows is missing, would serve any greater purpose. The degree and range of suffering in the world simply provides strong evidential reason to doubt God's existence. Many (most?) leading apologists recognize this fact and attempt to offer reasons to believe in God, in an attempt to outweight the considerable evidential weight the POE provides.

Taffy Lewis

It seems that some here are proposing what Richard Dawkins refers to as an "argument from personal incredulity". Dawkins rightly points out that when creationists reason that "since they cannot think of a way natural selection can generate this or that case of adaptive complexity there must not be a way natural selection can generate adaptive complexity" then they are committing a fallacy.

In the case of the argument from gratuitous evil the reasoning of some is parallel : "since I cannot think of a reason why God would permit this or that evil there must not be a reason".

Philosoft

Considering this has nothing to do with Mr. Metcalf's argument whatsoever, your objection is moot.

Taffy Lewis

Thomas Metcalf,

The contention is that we should not choose to prevent suffering because we would thereby prevent some greater good. However, if the greater good is itself the power we have to choose between good and evil then God would be morally justified in allowing us to choose evil.

In other words, the very fact of our choosing evil would be a result of the greater good of our having the ability to choose between good and evil.

Taffy Lewis

Philosoft,

My point is addressed to anyone who believes they can infer :

from

or from:

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by Taffy Lewis:

"In the case of the argument from gratuitous evil the reasoning of some is parallel : 'since I cannot think of a reason why God would permit this or that evil there must not be a reason'."

I don't agree. With apparently gratuitous suffering, we are saying, "There is no apparent morally sufficient reason for this suffering, and we can think of no morally sufficient reason that seems at all likely, therefore, this particular instance probably is gratuitous."

I am awaiting your response to the three points at the end of my previous post. If you deny that we can conclude "Probably gratuitous" from "apparently gratuitous," you must deny that we can conclude similar things, such as "Probably, earth orbits the sun" from "Apparently, earth orbits the sun."

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by Taffy Lewis:

"The contention is that we should not choose to prevent suffering because we would thereby prevent some greater good. However, if the greater good is itself the power we have to choose between good and evil then God would be morally justified in allowing us to choose evil.

"In other words, the very fact of our choosing evil would be a result of the greater good of our having the ability to choose between good and evil." (Emphasis original.)

Yes, God is morally justified in allowing us to choose evil. God has a reason for us to choose evil, in other words. I could accept that. But it still follows that if we choose evil, this evil is morally justified. We can say for every evil decision "Either its existence is morally justified or it isn't"; the former implies that every evil decision I make has no bad effects, so it matters not that I make it, and the latter implies that God does not exist. Which do you choose?

Taffy Lewis

Thomas Metcalf,

I don't see that your representation of the logic avoids the problem. Consider a similar statement by a creationist:

"There is no apparent way a bacterial flagellum could evolve according to evolutionary theory, and we can think of no way it could evolve that seems at all likely, therefore, this particular instance of adaptive complexity probably couldn't evolve." (If you think there is an apparent way the bacterial flagellum could evolve or that biologists can think of a way it could evolve which is "at all likely", then just pick some biochemical system which they have yet to find an apparent way or think of a way it could evolve.)

You also said:

You seem to think that for any occassion in which something is apparent to us or seems to be true to us then we are justified in believing that it is true. But there are everyday examples which undermine this. Suppose I am looking out my back window into my 3 acre backyard. And suppose I reason as follows:

Therefore,

Clearly the epistemic situation doesn't warrant the conclusion.

Another example might include the observations of the activity of a physicist in a lab.

Therefore,

Obviously the conclusion isn't warranted on the basis of what seems apparent.

So we can't always infer that things are some way simply on the basis of how things apparently seem.

But this isn't to deny that we are often in a position to make such a reliable inference. For example, "there is no apparent bottle of water in my refrigerator therefore there is no bottle of water in my refrigerator". This inference seems unobjectionable. However, the crucial difference between this inference and the above inferences is that we have good reason to believe that if a bottle of water were present we would likely see it. But in the case of God's reasons for acting we cannot reasonably claim that "if God has a morally sufficient reason for acting as he does it is likely that we will see it". The only way to avoid this is to claim that:

This doesn't seem very plausible to me.

[ September 28, 2002: Message edited by: Taffy Lewis ]</p>