luvluv

wordsmyth, the basic problem with our discourse is that I have provided logical reasons, and you have not responded to any of them in particular, you simply proclaim all of them to be illogical. I'm imploring you to JUST PICK ONE, and explain to me why they are inconsistent or illogical. Here is a list of the propositions I have made (in no particular order):

1) It is not possible to give a being free will and ensure that it's decisions are always morally correct.

2) A GENERALLY stable and fixed environment is necessary for meaningful free human interaction.

b) It is admitted at the outset that occasional exceptions to this rule be made to allow God to reveal Himself to humanity. However, it is essential for moral freedom that this intervention not be constant to the extent that we have no real choice (for example, I have no choice but to provide for my family, because my arms would not work if I chose to spend my money on myself. In such a situation I would actually have no free will)

3) If we admit at the outset that the possibility some suffering is a necessary pre-requisite for human freedom, it is impossible for us to know how much suffering is too much. The term "unecessary" implies that we know precisely how much suffering IS necessary. Since we do not know precisely how much suffering is necessary for meaningful human freedom, we cannot make any conclusions about whether the current amount of suffering is "too much". How much is too much, and how do we know?

4) To have benevolent feelings towards an object IS NOT DIRECTLY REDUCIBLE to wishing that said object does not suffer. Certainly, the wish that the object not suffer is part of my benevolence towards it, but it is not the entirety of my benevolent feelings towards it.

I must make my child suffer, in some respect, to potty train him. Can it be said that I have benevolent feelings about the child, or must I be somehow lacking in goodness if I allow it to suffer for a greater purpose? Similarly, say I take my child to get shots so that it can be free from disease and so it can enter school. Am I now lacking in goodness compared to a parent who did not want it's child to suffer the pain of a needle shot?

Sometimes we must allow suffering BECAUSE we love someone, and know that without temporary suffering it's later suffering will be more acute and more permanent.

5) A corollary to four is, indeed, the unknown purpose defence. If there is suffering which we know goodness will allow (ex: flu shots) then we have no ground for saying that the simple presence of suffering IN ITSELF is evidence against the goodness of God. We must know the end for which we suffer before we can say that the suffering was unecessary.

The fact that we do not, and perhaps cannot, know the purpose of some suffering does not make it arbitrary. The child does not know why it's parent is letting a stranger stick a cold, sharp needle in it's arm, nor could it understand even if the parent were to attempt to explain. But the child's incomprehension does not make the parent lack in goodness.

Here are five of my arguments. Let's just talk about how each of these five either fails or succeeds, okay?

[ September 01, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

Kassiana

luvluv:
...following rules is a good thing.

Kass:
No, it isn't. The Germans followed lots of rules in Nazi Germany. Were they good for following them? The rule about divesting all Jewish people of their property, for example? The rules about how to ship Jewish people off to death camps? The rules about reporting Gypsies to the authorities so they could be killed?

Yes, I'm just picking on this part because it really disturbs me that someone could just say, blindly, that following ANY rules = good. This is obviously not true.

luvluv

Thomas Metcalf:

There is a difference between a person being incapable of a certain action and a certain action being a logical impossibility to said person.

It is logically possible that I could speak Chinese. However, I am currently incapable of speaking chinese.

It is logically possible that the being, McEar, could develop the ability to do something other than scratch it's ear. It may not have the ability to do so, but it is not logically impossible for it to do so.

Omniscience means a being which has all possible knowledge. Nothing, not even omnipotence, could fool omniscience because omniscience, by definition, cannot be fooled.

A being is omnipotent because it can do everything that is logically possible. McEar is not omnipotent, because it cannot do everything that is logically possible. It is logically possible for a being that can scratch it's ear to do other things. Such an action might be beyond the ACTUAL ability of McEar, but not beyond the LOGICAL possibility of McEar.

Philosoft:

Philosoft, I've restated my positions in the thread above. Perhaps you might want to respond to them specifically. So far, I'm the only one in this thread who has staked a position and defended it.

I'm not trying to convince you that God exists (He does, but that's another issue). I'm simply saying that there is no problem of pain: it is not a contradiction for God to be omnipotent and omnibenevolent and yet allow suffering.

MrDarwin:

Firstly, you can address luvluv directly. This terminology is typical of this thread: you folks are tallking over my arguments but none of you are speaking TO them.

Secondly, the child's free will is not being compromised. In the first place, to allow someone the freedom to will something is not the same as allowing someone the power to actualize their will. I might will to jump off a cliff and float up, but gravity will force me down regardless. But in such a situation, my free will was not compromised. With the child, he may wish not to be murdered but his free will has run into conflict with the will of the murderer. His right to live has been violated, his physical person has been violated, but not his free will.

God did not bring suffering into existence. Suffering does not have an independant existence. What God did was bring into existence things which could suffer. Pain does not exist absent an organism which can feel pain. To speak of God creating suffering is a misnomer since an entity called suffering does not independantly exist. Suffering is a possibility inherent in creating finite beings.

No, nothing God does can have unintended consequences. I don't think suffering is an unintended consequence, it is a consequence that was taken into consideration in the act of creation, and deemed to be insufficient as a reason not to create.

Question: Would you rather suffer as you do now or not exist?

Clutch:

My above positions 2-5 address this question. In point of fact, THE MAJORITY OF MY COMMENTS ON THIS THREAD have been about the "so much" pain argument. For goodness sakes, folks, I am addressing these issues and none of you comment. Then you post comments about why some ethereal apologist or theist won't address these questions.

Well, THIS theist and apologist is directly addressing the question and has, for a few pages, been PLEADING for a direct response!

Perhaps this is true of this nebulous apologist you are refering to, however this particular apologist has yet to make a single reference to the doctrine of the fall in order to debate the problem of evil.

Kass:

Kass, there are many ways to answer this question. We were addressing, not whether or not bad people could follow rules, but whether or not OMNIMALEVOLENCE could follow rules. Clearly, your Nazi analogy does not apply, because as bad as the Nazi's were they were clearly were not omnimalevolent. They engaged in co-operation (with each other), discipline, self-restraint and other good tools. A totally evil being would have no capacity for co-operation, rule-following (whose rules, anyway?), or self-restraint, because these are all good qualities. We could not say that such good qualites are consistent with an omnibmalevolent being anymore than we could say that rape could be consistent with an omnibenevolent being.

I never said following ANY rules = good. I said that the capacity to restrain oneself under a set of rules is a good quality. The question was whether or not something that is totally evil would follow rules.

But thank you because this brings out the main reason why an omnimalevolnce could not exist. All evil needs a good thing (existence) to express itself. For omnimalevonce to exist is itself a contradiction, since existence is a good thing. Evil is always a perversion of good. There is no such thing as a self-existent evil. Rape requires the existence of sexuality which is good. Jealousy is a perversion of love which is good. There can be no rape without sexuality, and no jealousy without love, or at least, the existence of something which is good to have.

[ September 01, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

Philosoft

I believe I've already addressed these propositions when you claimed I was playing 'semantic games,' but nevertheless:

<strong>Quoth luvluv:

1) It is not possible to give a being free will and ensure that it's decisions are always morally correct.</strong>

This is the one-dimensional thinking I was referring to before. You are simply looking at the state of the world and saying, "the world behaves in a certain way and God's benevolence must be preserved, so the world is the way it is because it could not be otherwise." I'll ask again. What prevents God from creating a world in which morally incorrect decisions cannot obtain and creating likewise limited moral beings within that world? Why, in your own words, is this a less-desirable scenario? Here's where your "God's character" argument comes in, I presume. Now do you see why my objections to that are relevant?

Mark_Chid

Using Occam's Razor -

If there is no God there is no 'problem of evil' - I will assume the simplest explanation until shown evidence to the contrary.

Kassiana

LL:
I said that the capacity to restrain oneself under a set of rules is a good quality.

Kass:
Only if the rules are GOOD, though. If the rules are bad (e.g. if the one rule is "discriminate against black people, no matter what"), then "restraining" my good impulses to, say, treat black people as fairly as white people, is NOT a good quality.

You completely missed my point. Now do you get it? Many rules are bad. If a bad person follows bad rules, how is that good? Please explain this to me.

ex-preacher

As far as I can tell, luvluv, you have not yet answered my questions from page 6: Who created disease? Is the torturing of innocent children by horrific diseases somehow essential to free will?

You want to use the flu shot as an analogy of God using pain for our good. Who created the flu? Do you know that the influenza epidemic of 1918 killed more people than World War 1? Did you know that many opposed (and still oppose) flu shots as wrong because they interfere with God's marvelous workings of nature?

wordsmyth

I see the basic problem of this discourse is that you have NOT provided a single logical reason for any of your assertions and my stating such is in fact a response to all of them rather than a single one. I would have picked one if I thought it had less validity than any other, but they all lack any reasoning.

You have not demonstrated why this is true. Free will is the ability to make choices, but those choices need not ever have any moral implications. This goes back to your assertion that pain and suffering are necessary for humans to have free will; an assertion that you have yet to back up with any sound reasoning.

I would ask that you go into more detail on your meaning of “GENERALLY stable and fixed environment”. It seems to me that you are using an ad hoc apologetic to defend your assertion. On the one hand you claim that Yahweh gave us free will and will not interfere with our decisions, yet you are attempting to leave the door open a crack to defend the areas in the Bible in which Yahweh clearly intervened to act against human free will (i.e. the Flood, the Exodus, etc.)

There is that crack in the door and as I’ve already pointed out this is an ad hoc apologetic. Either Yahweh values free will enough to just leave us alone to make our own decisions or he does not value our free will as evidenced by his frequent interfering in human affairs throughout the bible.

Free will and moral freedom are considerably different. In Eden before the fall, Man had free will, but lacked moral freedom until they ate of the fruit. In fact, the whole fall of Man seems to indicate that it was eating the fruit that gave Man moral freedom (e.g. knowing good and evil) and that Yahweh would have preferred Man not to be morally free as evidenced by his decree that they should not eat the fruit. So, even if the possibility of eating the fruit and obtaining moral freedom had not been a possibility, free will would have remained. Choices can have either good or bad outcomes without being morally good or morally evil and I think you are confusing the two.

Here is the heart of the problem right here. You believe that at least some suffering is a necessary pre-requisite of free will, yet have provided no reasoning to support this assertion. There are countless ways in which free will can exist without pain and suffering as I have pointed out in previous posts.

</strong>

Here you are horrendously confusing what it means to be benevolent with what it would mean to be OMNI-benevolent. Yes, if we take the OMNI out of Yahweh’s omnibenevolent attribute, then your argument would begin to show some merit. Are you willing to accept Yahweh as generally benevolent, but not OMNI-benevolent?

Your analogy fails because you are comparing the manner in which you would perform these things with the manner in which an OMNI-potent and OMNI-benevolent deity would. Obviously no parent would willfully make their child suffer if they possessed the ability to reach exactly the same outcome without suffering. Why give a child a flu shot with a needle if it were possible to simply put some equally effective inoculation into their ice-cream?

I’m not sure what you are implying by more acute and more permanent. Hell?

Again you are mistaking goodness with omni-goodness. Suffering IN ITSELF is NOT (yes I said NOT) evidence against the alleged goodness of God, but it is evidence against his alleged OMNI-goodness and/or OMNI-potence.

Again, your analogy fails because the parent, while generally (and hopefully) good is NOT omni-good nor omni-potent.

It fails from the beginning and unfortunately it is your third premise that kills the whole thing. It assumes that pain and suffering are necessary for free will to exist yet you have not provided any sound reasoning for that assumption. I think the heart of the problem is your failure to make a distinction between benevolence and OMNI-benevolence. As I said above, if you are willing to concede that Yahweh is potentially benevolent, but not OMNI-benevolent, your argument would begin to hold some merit.

wade-w

Expressing something is not the same as providing a reason. It is mere assertion, and utterly unconcinving. And simply because you can concieve of such a contradictory god does not lessen the contradiction.

I have carefully read all of your posts on this thread, and can find no arguments from you that do not boil down to assertion or begging the question.

Another problem I have with the idea of an omibenevolent god in christianity is the doctrine of salvation. I cannot see how you can possibly reconcile the two.

"God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. It says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three attributes at the same time, have I got a deal for you! Cash only, and small bills please."
-- R. A. Heinlein

[ September 02, 2002: Message edited by: wadew ]</p>

Jack the Bodiless

luvluv:

It appears that you are attempting to use diametrically opposed arguments to support your position:
Ergo, making somebody suffer against their will IS compatible with benevolence.
Ergo, making somebody suffer against their will is NOT compatible with benevolence.