Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by bd-from-kg :

I would say "after taking inscrutable suffering into account." Most philosophers of religion, with the exceptions of Hasker and van Inwagen, think the probability of theism if gratuitous suffering exists is 0.

I think Plantinga's move is the only one with any hope here, to try to provide warrant for theism that outweighs the problem of evil.

wordsmyth

So, basically what your saying is the term unknown purpose is an oxymoron?

ok, works for me.

bd-from-kg

Thomas Metcalf:

Yes, that’s more accurate. I meant “apparently gratuitous”, which seems to be what you mean by “inscrutable”.

It take it that the move you’re referring to is arguing that there’s sufficient independent warrant for belief in God to overcome the AE? I’d agree that this is the only “available” move, but it doesn’t work very well. (We’ll ignore for now the inconvenient fact that there’s nothing remotely approaching warrant for belief in God even aside from the POE.) If one expects rational people to take the theistic hypothesis seriously, one still has to square it with the existence of inscrutable evil, and here the UPD seems to be the only viable game in town. (You have to block your opponent from making a winning score before you can go on offense.) But once you invoke the UPD, you have to live with the consequences. You can’t just ignore its implications and move on as though nothing had happened.

Which brings us to the main point:

I’d group them roughly as follows:

(1) It empties the theistic hypothesis of all content.

Once you admit that the “real world” has all sorts of features that are flatly incompatible with what one would naturally have expected or predicted from the theistic hypothesis, you’ve pretty much eliminated any reason to accept it. It would be bad enough if the theistic and atheistic hypotheses gave the same predictions about what the world might be expected to look like, but the situation is even worse: they give different predictions, and the real world looks a lot more like what the atheistic hypothesis predicts. True, one can “save the appearances” with the additional hypothesis that there’s an explanation for the discrepancy involving still more things for which there’s no evidence (the UPD), but this is getting ridiculously baroque. (Ockham’s Razor, anyone?) And by offering this hypothesis the theist has given up any hope of being able to either to explain or predict anything whatsoever about the world. The problem is that for any question about which he might venture a prediction, he has to admit that God might have unknown purposes that would cause Him to act in a completely unexpected way, so he has no idea what God would actually do. Similarly, the theistic hypothesis has lost any conceivable explanatory function. For any observation about the world, the theist can always say that it’s the way it is to serve some unknown purpose. The same could have been said if the opposite observation had been made. A hypothesis that can “explain” anything explains nothing.

But a hypothesis that can predict nothing and explain nothing isn’t much of a hypothesis. Nothing counts as evidence for it, and nothing counts as evidence against it. What’s the point? Or as a logical positivist would say, what does such a hypothesis mean?

(2) It makes a mess of morality

One of the features of theism that most believers find most attractive is that it provides one with a “moral compass”: some things are right [wrong] because God says so (or at least we can be sure that they’re right [wrong] because He says so). But God’s supposed moral guidelines are far from complete; to make them usable we have to do a lot of “reading between the lines”. (Examples: The Bible doesn’t outlaw rape, and hasn’t a word to say against slavery. In fact, the rules governing both of these things in the OT look hopelessly inappropriate to modern society. similarly, it says “Thou shalt not murder”, but fails to explain when a killing constitutes murder and when it doesn’t.) This “reading between the lines” necessarily involves trying to divine the purpose of the rules (the “spirit”, as religious people are wont to say) so that we can figure out how to apply them in real life. But if God’s purposes are so unknowable that we cannot explain major, large-scale aspects of the human condition in terms of His known purposes, how can this project be carried out with any hope of success? It’s very likely that the guidelines He has provided are motivated in large part by some of the same unknown purposes which caused him to introduce large-scale seemingly gratuitous suffering, a dismaying level of ignorance even among our wisest heads, appalling selfishness and depravity, a hopelessly inadequate supply of compassion and empathy, etc., into the world. In which case we have no hope of “filling in the blanks” in the divine moral code correctly; we simply have no idea what He’s up to.

(3) It’s self-defeating

The worst problem for the UPD is that eliminates any reason to think that we know anything whatever about God or about morality – or for that matter, about God’s plan (if any) for our salvation. If God has unknown purposes such that we can’t grasp His reasons for doing all sorts of things that seem to be radically contrary to the interests of human beings, what justification do we have for believing that His purposes as a whole have much of anything to do with the welfare of humans? Perhaps He created humans for purposes that we know nothing of. In which case, how can we guess whether anything He has (supposedly) told us is true? He might have good and sufficient reasons to have lied to us about pretty much everything. The whole Jesus thing might be an elaborate hoax. The whole business about Heaven and Hell might be a fabrication invented for the purpose of inducing some of us to act in ways that He desires for reasons we can’t begin to fathom.

But God wouldn’t deceive us, you say? Well, how do you know that? Because willful deception is wrong? But how do you know that? Because God told you? Fool! God might have had good and sufficient reasons for telling us falsely that lying is wrong. Or perhaps lying is wrong for us , but it’s OK for God. In fact, it would be strange indeed if lying were always wrong for God, since it’s not even always wrong for us. His lying to us might be an exception to the principle that lying is wrong, just as lying to a Nazi about the whereabouts of a Jew is an exception for us. Since God has purposes unknown to us, how could we know whether this is true? How can we even estimate the probability that it’s true?

Finally we come to God’s basic attributes: omnipotence, omniscience, etc. How do we know that He has these properties? Well, the only possible answer that a theist can give is that He’s given us reason to believe that He has them. (We surely couldn’t have any other source for this information.) But again, God (or the being that theists take to be God) might have been deceiving us for reasons that we know nothing of. In which case He isn’t God at all, if by “God” one means a being with these attributes.

So the UPD in the end entails radical skepticism about all sorts of things, including the very existence of God.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by bd-from-kg :

Hm. I'm not so sure about this one. I could score ten runs in the first inning, and things would look pretty grim for my opponent, but if she scores eleven runs some time in the next eight innings, I lose. As soon as we move toward a non-deductive argument (or a deductive argument that attempts to establish a probability), we're open to the possibility that there will be strong enough evidence to outweigh the fact of inscrutable evil.

Of course, I don't think theistic belief has warrant, or at least, that we're in an epistemic position to decide that it does.

That's a good way to put it. I usually just say that 100% of all suffering has been necessary for a greater good, if theism + UPD is true, and we have no way of deciding for any instance of suffering (or impending suffering) what its purpose will be or whether it's necessary. So, unless every greater good was that humans had the chance to intervene, we stand a very good chance of precluding a greater good when we attempt to intervene.

In fact, I think it's easier than this. Remember, "God might have a greater purpose" requires "God might exist." And if we can through "maybes" at a problem like that, we can just say "Maybe a Powerful Deceiver exists." So it's self-defeating in a very immediate way.

bd-from-kg

Thomas Metcalf:

Yes, but not all games are like that. For example, in Quidditch, if a Seeker catches the Snitch the game is over. If his team is then ahead, it wins; there’s no chance for the other team to “come back”. [Hey, we don’t have to be completely serious here, do we?]

Similarly, in a debate there are sometimes “winning moves” such that, if they succeed, the game is over. The “baseline” AE is one such. If the theist has no answer, the argument is decisive. So he has to make some move to “block” it.

Well, that’s pretty much what I was saying in (3). (In fact, the “Powerful Deceiver” might be God Himself, since deceiving may, for all we know, be compatible with God’s omnibenevolence. For a theist, the UPD opens Pandora’s Box.) Anyway, is a really short proof the desideratum? I prefer to wreak as much havoc as possible in the opposing position before landing the knockout punch. It has a better chance of having a lasting effect by forcing the other guy to think through the implications of his position.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by bd-from-kg :

This is an interesting conclusion. I agree that the "crude" EAE is such that if it's not blocked, atheism wins. But I think you have to admit that it does not achieve deductive certainty. I mean, we can do the G. E. Moore shift here if we have enough magical sensus divinitatis epistemic warrant here. Here's the crude EAE:

(1) If God exists, gratuitous evil does not exist.
(2) Gratuitous evil probably exists. (Empirical fact.)
(3) Therefore, God probably does not exist.

Now, the shift:

(1) If God exists, gratuitous evil does not exist.
(2') God probably exists. (Via sensus divinitatis.)
(3') Therefore, gratuitous evil probably does not exist.

And the crude EAE is answered without having to block it per se.

Actually, no, I don't think so.

I should take this opportunity to ask you: I'm writing a paper, and one of the things I say is the following. Let (D) be the defense "Maybe God has a good reason for all the suffering in the world, and this 'maybe' is enough to deny [the premise in question]." I'm going to say the only way I can think of to justify something like (D) is with (M), "If there is an epistemic possibility that some proposition is true, we have good reason to reject any proposition inconsistent with it." And then I'm going to say that (M) is ultimately self-defeating. Do you think that works? I'm particularly concerned with saying that (M) is the only way to justify (D).

theophilus

False premise, false conclusion

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by theophilus :

You're not even propounding the UPD anymore, but that's irrelevant. Show us how the case of God is similar. We know in the analogy what the greater good is. So what's the greater good that God couldn't accomplish without actualizing a world in which poor people suffer from disease and natural disasters much more than rich people?

Dr Rick

You apparently think you do; could you enlighten us as to that purpose and where the Bible is "quite clear" about it?

That there is so much suffering suggests that the omni-god is, while not impossible, highly improbable. That's the distinction that the inductive PoE makes with regards to necessary and unneccesary evil.

If all the evil in the world is necessary, then people in Afghanistan sure seem to "need" a lot more suffering then those in Beverly Hills. Why is that?

The theist.

An omnimax physician?

Only if the physician has other alternatives, like say, and omnimax god would.

bd-from-kg

Thomas Metcalf :

Not quite “crude” enough. In its simplest form the AE is:

(1) If God is perfectly good, He cannot have created evil.
(2) But God created everything.
(3) Therefore there is no evil.
(4) But manifestly there is evil. RAA.

The only possible answers to this argument are:

(A) There isn’t really any evil in spite of appearances;
(B) There is evil, but it’s an integral part of a greater good;
(C) There is evil, but God allows it to come into existence for the sake of a greater good.

The only version of (C) that seems intelligible is the Free Will Defense (FWD), which is a subject for another day. (Any other version would probably be another UPD.) (A) and (C) both imply that reality is ultimately radically different from the way it appears: the evil that we see certainly appears to be real, and it doesn’t appear to be part of any greater good. So the only way either of these moves can make sense is if God has purposes unknown to us.

Thus it seems to me that the FWD and the UPD are the only viable options for the theist. And even if we ignore the fact that the FWD is ultimately untenable in its entirely (because the kind of free will it requires is logically incoherent), it doesn’t seem capable of explaining all of the evil that seems to exist.

The reason this version of the AE has to be blocked, of course, is that it’s not evidential; it’s deductive. If valid, it establishes the conclusion with certainty. This cannot be overcome merely by citing contrary evidence. Of course the argument can be blocked, but the available blocking moves have unfortunate consequences for the theist.

This doesn’t look right to me. Probably (M) is self-defeating, but in any case it’s absurd. To see the real logical structure of the original argument, suppose that you take the position that psychic powers do not exist and someone produces what appears on its face to be a demonstration that he has psychic powers. You then defend your position with (D'): “Maybe there’s some other explanation for this phenomenon, and this ‘maybe’ is enough to deny [the premise that the demonstration in question is really a manifestation of psychic powers].” Clearly the mere epistemic possibility that psychic powers do not exist is not enough to justify rejecting the premise. But if you have very strong evidence that psychic powers don’t exist, you are justified in rejecting the premise. In fact, this sort of thing is done all the time. For example, a competent physicist has such strong warrant for believing that perpetual motion machines are impossible that he is justified in ignoring a missive from a crackpot who claims to have invented one.