Tyler Durden

Hello everyone, this is my first post. My apologies if i have violated any unwritten rules or the finer tastes of the regulars with such a redundant post, but i wanted to get feedback on this email i received from an engineer who thought he had a response to the age-old Epicurean argument about the problem of evil and the nature of God.

Here goes nothing!

I am already writing a response myself, but feel free to address this as if he is addressing you or your "unbelief."

Thank you in advance!

Tyler Durden

I believe God is both willing and able, but chooses not to prevent evil.

...the tried and true apologetics route- defend the divine attributes of omnipotence and benevolence, and decide whether to ignore the existence of evil, deny its status, or explain it
away.

I believe the reasons for this are His love for us, actually, and our love for Him.

Christian apologetics rule number one: reword what is
obviously evil for us (natural disasters, terminal
diseases, or any other kind of natural evil) to divine
love.

I do not believe God wants robots to love and serve Him, so He gives us the Choice to love and choose Him over anything else. Think of how much more meaningful is the love freely given than the love acquired by default or mandated without option. Preventing evil would blind us to the sheer volume and quality of the love God has for us because we wouldn't know anything different.

This is in stark contradiction with the account of
creation in the book of genesis. God told Adam not to
eat from the tree of knowledge. Then it stands to
reason that He did not want us to “freely choose” but
remain happy robots. True or False?

We would then be robots. Happy robots, maybe, but robots without worry, care, or problem (and thus probably without the gift of mind/self awareness)

How is this inferior? God is omnipotent, and is capable of creating a better universe than this finite, dangerous one. True or False?

We, as humans, have no control whatsoever on our world.

False. It is we, through our limited abilities, who
are masters of the world today, no thanks to the rigged game of God.

We've figured this out to some degree and sometimes even realize it in terms of laws like uncertainty (one cannot prove what will happen next even if an event happens the same way a million times in a row, there is no way to absolutely prove that it will happen exactly the same way again. We can only hypothesize and predict.)

There is no need for certainty when we are capable of achieving approximation. Probability is what we’re limited to, and our scientific progress functions entirely on shades of approximation, not clear and distinct knowledge. So the requirement of absolute
knowledge is a strawperson and needs no further attention.

I believe the one and only thing we have any control over is our Choice about whether to truly love God. Everything else stems from there. Truly, the rest is just details.

False. We did not create this universe, nor did we ask to be born in a 99 percent uninhabitable one. Therefore, the playing field of choosing an incompetent god is not quite free, for it is already
slanted towards the darwinian account of survival.

2) Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
I don't know how widespread this analogy is, or the depth to which it is accurate, but in some ways one can relate evil with heat, or light.

Here comes the platonic account of evil as a “lack” or
“privation.” It's been around for nearly 3000 years.

We as engineers have units (Joules, calories, BTUs, etc.) and calculations and equations all based on heat. Not based on cold. What is "cold"? What are the units of cold? Cold is simply the absence of heat. The same can be thought of with light (photons, lumens, candlepower, etc.). There is no measure of dark except as the absence or fraction of light. We acknowledge the phenomena of cold and dark, but they are not the focus of the measurement/observation - they are results of the absence of heat and light. In the same way, evil is the absence of good (or God).

This platonic account is poetic and beautiful, but
utterly fails to explain away suffering as a result of
evil. Has he ever told the terminally ill this
platonic account for his suffering? “You are not
really suffering, sir, but rather you lack the Good.”

There are some discrepancies in the analogy - for instance, I believe that unlike heat and light which are passive, God and evil are both active forces, capable of causation on their own.

Did this person contradict himself? Is evil a privation of the
good, or is it a metaphysical substance?

Interestingly enough, though, true followers of Jesus can be thought of as heat sources - God in them flows out wherever they go, nourishing themselves and others because it is so powerful. (For more thoughts on the indwelling of Christians by the Spirit of God, let me know and I'll share what I think about that. I just don't know how much you've already heard.)

2000 years of history do not reflect that assertion.
Christians are among the worst people in the world.
So, a membership in the religion has little to nothing
to do with how people turn out. So that's a load of bull.

So, where did evil come from originally? As far as I know and believe, humans are not the only beings under God. I believe there are spirit beings such as angels and demons. Originally, there were only angels, all worshipping God. (Again, I apologize for repetition of things you may have already heard or already know. I'm just trying to set them down - I'm not trying to insult your intelligence.) The angels were also given the Choice to love God or not, but they could Choose only once (whereas we humans Choose every second we're alive - again, ask me later if you want). One among the angels (Lucifer) Chose to want to be as great as God, and (since he wasn't) he was kicked out of Heaven along with 1/3 of the other angels who followed him. These are now the forces of evil.

This is not correct either. Satan was free of sin in the beginning, and had a ‘spirit nature,’ not a ‘sinful nature.’ So Satan had free will. This person's inconsistent theology cannot deny free will as the source of original sin, otherwise God will retain the problem of evil by default. The ability to sin requires a free will, not a tempter. If that is what he thinks, then ask him who was Satan’s tempter? It was his own free will that lured him into the sin of pride.

Furthermore, not all evil stems from free choice. Some acts of suffering has nothing to do whether one accepts God or not, and some people are unable of making the choice- such as newborn babies, those in different cultures where the concept of God is
nonexistent.

I believe in the beginning, the world and we humans were perfect - walking in unhindered communion with God in His creation. Evil took dominion of this world when Man Chose other than God. Now, this world is no longer perfect and evil rules when God allows it because we Choose it. God still does and always will have power over evil, but while the world exists He
will not override our Choices. I believe there will come a time when this world will end, and evil will be utterly crushed.

The eschatological argument is easily defeated by the Disneyland argument: the father, promising his children he will take them to Disneyland in spring, has a full license to sexually molest them throughout winter. God does not have the moral right to allow such evil to run unchecked on his watch, just because of a promise that he will clean up the mess at some point in the future.

At that point, our Choices will all be made and everything will be decided, but that's a whole other topic.

Christianity has been living in its final days since the day of the apostle John had visions on that island.

I've been trying to apply the engineering mind God has
given me to the idea of both God and evil existing, yet being unable to abide each other and both being able to affect us. This is what I've come up with so far: I'm not sure I know enough physics to back up what's come to me so far, but that area of thought is pretty much still speculation at this point anyway (string theory, other dimensions, etc). Right now I'm working on the idea of God and evil being outside of what our limited human experience perceives as "space", "time", "the universe", and "reality".

Then he has done away with all possible means of defining God and evil if they are “outside” of our human experience. If he means literally outside, then he has contradicted himself with the assertion that it is not a spatial location, nor a temporal position.

This is why I despise apologetics- their inability to really analyze what they are saying, and the constant violation of the principle of significance- anything bereft of empirical worth (lacking in spatial or temporal properties) is a byproduct of the reasoning faculties, and should be condemned as the logic of illusion. The positing of an entity beyond human ken is tantamount to denying all means of possible understanding.

It would then be simple to suppose that God exists, acts, and perceives in a realm that we would see as the continuous present from our perspective because we exist, act, and perceive in a manner that depends on space, time, the universe, and what is real to us.

A God that is independent of our finite perspective is as meaningful and significant as the invisible pink collie Lassie who intervenes occasionally whenever we are not following its incoherent yet doglike doctrines.

To God, our entire experience would be perceived as the eternal "now". Evil could exist in a completely separate realm and still be completely separate from God. Suppose the realm of what we as humans experience is overlapped/influenced by the other two. Since the God realm is separate from the human experience realm and the human experience realm's dependency on space/time/etc., God can be said to be omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, etc. in our point of view, which is all we have.

Does he know what the definition of ‘omnipresence’ is?

So how can the God realm (and evil realm, for that matter) affect the human experience realm? Perhaps "overlap" isn't quite the right word, since God and evil must be separate by definition.

These sentences are analytically incompatible:
God is omnipotent
“ “ omniscient
“ “ omnibenevolent
Evil exists.
So it is incumbent on the apologist to deny the status of evil or find a way to remove the apparent contradiction while upholding the first 3 sentences. And like clockwork, the ungainly and unwieldy metaphysical explanation of reality is introduced.

The way this may work might be related to the idea that we humans are spirit-flesh amphibians. Yeah. No, really. I believe that we are amphibians in that we are part spiritual (soul, mind, anything immaterial) and part fleshly/mortal/material (our bodies).

A lot of assertions and very little reason to accept such ugly dichotomies. Ask him why is this necessary to repeat the mistakes of the past 2000 years by dividing the human being into privileged and inferior components, without using the following reasons. The division of the human being into a hierarchy of values leads to repression of what is human, such as mental
castrations like Christian morality.

As far as I know, the world is strictly material and has no spiritual aspect in and of itself. That is the reason that evil has dominion over the world - evil is spiritually far inferior to God, and God has for a period of time allowed evil to rule the world because
of Man's Choice.

How can it be due to man’s choice if Evil existed long before man?

Evil tries to influence us through mortal/material channels and appeals to our material self (since our material self is part of the world) to try to get us to make a spiritual Choice. We respond to God (and evil) with our spiritual self because that is the self that is given the Choice. From there, our material self follows the direction of the path Chosen by us, always trying to pull us toward it's own regardless of the path we actually Choose. Fortunately, I believe that in the spiritual realm there (for the time being) will always be the opportunity to Choose God and remain pure, uncorrupted, and untouchable by evil. However, since we are still bonded and attached to our material self (our body) we are bound to fall from Choosing God into Choosing other than God. It is up to us to acknowledge that we have Chosen other than God (our condition of separation from God = condition of sin) and consciously Choose God again. It is the hope of every true follower of Jesus to be someday free of the cycle of sin and therefore be incorruptible and walking in unhindered communion with God forever. That's Heaven - better than our limited imaginations can conceive based on the imperfection around us.

The silly Lamarckian account of hereditary sin is painfully apparent. The imperfection is entirely of God’s creation, choice, since he is blessed or cursed with Divine Foreknowledge. In his divine omniscience, He has foreseen all of this needless suffering and has engaged in the enterprise of playing games with the immaterial souls of his creation with his alternate personality, Satan.

"O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from
the body of this death?" -Paul's letter to the Romans, chapter 7 verse 24. Check out the entirety of chapter 7 if you feel like it. The first part is to me a cultural illustration of the fact that law binds in life and not in death, and from there it pretty closely deals with what I was trying to talk about. Depending on the translation, it can get a little confusing - I made sense of it from study notes in my Bible. You can borrow it if you want.

Curious...Why did he choose the Pauline account of Christianity as opposed to Jesus’?

Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
To me, God is both willing and able to prevent evil, and although not always doing so, is yet still loving. As such, I call Him God because He's so much farther above my thoughts that I don't even pretend to be able to explain Him in His true sense.

With that confession of skepticism, then how does he manage to believe in his limited account above any other, that it is correct?

I believe everything falls into place once we Choose Him. I sure don't know how or why or when God's Will transpires (perhaps because I'm limited to "time", "space", "the world", etc.?), but then again, how am I, a creation, ever going to know the thoughts of my Creator?

Easy. Our ‘creator’ is a reflection of our teleological beliefs. So, all our attempts at reconciling the divine with the human ends in creating religious texts and inventing insipid attempts at
apologetics to further the confusion.

How does a baby know the thoughts of his parents?

By growing up. The adult will comprehend his parents, akin to how the formerly religious person understand the true meaning of his childhood beliefs.

Add an order of magnitude of orders of magnitude, multiply by a billion, raise it to a trillion, then add infinity and you're not even close to how much above our thoughts God is, in my opinion.

Yet this doesn’t help his case in the least- how does he manage to privilege his explanation above any other thoughts of “god?”

I apologize for the essay format, but that's my style when dealing with important things - methodical. Let me know what you think. Feel free to take your time.I certainly did.

Eh. Redundant. All appeals to the free will defense to solve the problem of evil opens a new can of worms- the problem of divine foreknowledge. God’s decision to create man with free will is tantamount to the programmer who introduces an element of random behavior in his robots in order to give them the illusion of choice, either to obey his programming or not. Yet the programmer is responsible for the robots if they go on a rampage, and God isn’t for our behavior. Nice illogic.

Silent Dave

You know, it's interesting that the whole free will thing wasn't really a part of mainstream Christian apologetics, until Plantinga published his version of the free will defense back in, I believe, the sixties. And the interesting thing about Plantinga's FWD is, he didn't necessarily believe it himself. He was merely putting forth a suggestion for how the logical dilemma put forth by the Epicurian argument could be solved, thus negating the logical validity of the argument. Christian apologists picked up on it very quickly indeed, because the PoE was such a haunting problem for them, and it worked so well that, even though the Epicurian argument has been replaced by much better evidential arguments, contemporary apologists join the contemporary debate by offering obsolete responses to obsolete arguments. That's how happy the whole apologetics industry was to have something, anything, to latch onto. That's why Plantinga has so much prestige today, and -- "Reformed Epistemology" notwithstanding -- that will ultimately be his legacy: the ship was sinking, so he built them a leaking lifeboat.


Dave

Jobar

Welcome, Tyler- quite a good point-by-point deconstruction of what is really a run-of-the-mill free-will defense. Let me offer a much shorter one-

Why can an omnipotent God not allow free will and simultaneously disallow evil? Isn't that how things are supposed to be in Heaven?

Look for some of the posts in this forum by Thomas Metcalf, our free-will defense expert.

Tyler Durden

Hello dave. Does Plantigna's defense address the problem of Divine ForeKnowledge?

Theli

"Look, god has sent this giant kill-rock to show us his love!" Reverend pointing at a meteor heading for earth.
--Simpsons


It's typical, all hell might be breaking loose but people would still believe god loves us. Never underestimate the power of denial.

Tyler Durden

Thank you for your concise question that reduced my entire deconstruction to a couple of sentences.

Which thread should i look into? THey're all enormous!

Theli

Didn't god also create the concepts of good, evil and free will? Then he must have deliberately made them incompatible.

Tyler Durden

That's why i always thought Nietzsche was correct in this aphorism: ' "Good and Evil are the prejudices of God" -- said the Snake.'

Bloop

Three Problems with the Free Will Defense


Seven More Problems with the Free Will Defense

My FWD...for what it's worth.

An Amended FWD...I hope:^D

Somewhat related:
Maximal Perfection and Libertarian Free Will

There is enough reading in there to put together a book