Mikal

This is my first post so try and go easy on me. I am a philosophy major at a CA state university. In an early Philo class they explained the POE and it seemed to be acknowledged as something that hasnt been proven false. There was no mention of plantinga or rowe?

I came across this message board yesturday and saw these names and immeditaley started researching. I came across some extremely veague and extremely complex versions but i do not think that i grasp the concepts that make the POE a contradiction. I dont see why other premises needed to be added.

This has turned my world upside down in the last 24 hours. Yesturday, i felt extremely confindent in position of being an agnostic and now my main argument seem to be false?
Can someone please state in a easy to follow way the so called contradiction please?
Thanks,
-mike against the world

Wiploc

Why do I think you're a troll?

crc

Bumble Bee Tuna

1. God is allegedly Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnibenevolent
2. Through Omniscience, God knows how to prevent evil
3. Through Omnibenevolence, God wants to prevent evil
4. Through Omnipotence, God has the power to prevent evil
5. Evil still exists.

That's it in a nut shell.

-B

Jobar

Well, you need to be more specific here. Just what points are causing you difficulty? In the classical formulation, if God does not wish us to suffer, he either can not prevent it, or does not know about it. That means he is not omnipotent, or omniscient. And if He does wish us to suffer, that means He is not omnibenevolent.

I've seen lots of squirming and dodging and begging of the question, but no apology I've ever seen gets an omnimax God off this particular hook.

bd-from-kg

Mikal:

Please try to be a little clearer. What does it mean to say that a problem "hasn't been proven false" ?

And why do you take the fact that something "seemed to be acknowledged" in one introductory philosophy class to be evidence of anything at all?

It's not a contradiction, any more than the fact that a husband takes off for Mexico with his girl friend in bloody clothes the night his wife is stabbed to death contradicts his claim that he was shocked and grief-stricken when he found her there in the bedroom. It just makes the claim implausible. The POE is an evidentiary argument.

Why do you need an argument to justify being an agnostic? All that you're saying is that you don't know. Since when was an argument required to justify a claim of ignorance? The theists are making a positive claim that there is a being wholly unlike any of which we have any direct experience. It's up to them to provide the proof. In the meantime all that you need to do is sit back and wait for them to present the kind of extraordinary evidence that would be needed to justify such an extraordinary claim.

As to how the POE argument "works", there are several threads about it going already, and there are a number of articles about it in the II library. Do your homework, then get back to us if you still have questions.

Grizzly

The only way out of this problem is by redefining evil. I have seen people on other boards try to get out of this by saying that we don't know the mind of God, so how could we decide what is really evil. These arguments boil down to "Things that happen to us are God's will, and therefore are good for us, even if it doesn't appear to be so". I, of course, do not buy into these arguments.

Wiploc

If there were someone who wanted to prevent suffering, and who could prevent suffering, then we wouldn't have suffering. Since there is suffering, no such person exists. That's a logical proof, not an evidentiary argument.

For those who think there is some flaw in the logical proof, there is a backup position, the "evidential PoE," but that doesn't mean that the PoE isn't first and foremost a logical proof.
crc

bd-from-kg

wiploc:

This is not a proof, it's a fallacious argument. The key premise is:

(1) If X wants S to obtain and is able to bring about a state of affairs in which S obtains, he will bring about such a state of affairs.

But this entails:

(2) If X wants S and T to obtain and is able to bring about a state of affairs in which S obtains but T doesn't, he will bring about this state of affairs.

But (2) is manifestly false (in fact it leads quickly to a contradiction), so by the law of contrapositives (1) is false.

This is the basis of the "unknown purposes defense", and in particular the popular version of it called the "free will defense".

Selsaral

Me either, and my first objection would be to bring up the GoE. Doesn't the bible specifically say Adam and Eve gained knowledge of good and evil in the GOE, and that's why god is punishing all humanity? So either this argument is flat out wrong, or it is correct and god punishes us for gaining knowledge we didn't actually gain.

SanDiegoAtheist

For very good reason of course. It stands to reason that if someone does something APPARENTLY evil to me, which is actually for my own good, that person has a moral obligation to explain to me WHY it is for my own good. This, of course, is especially true in the case of a Xian God, since my eternal welfare is to be based upon how I perceive the Xian God.

Apparent evil, unless EXPLAINED away as not actually evil, is, in truth, to the perceiver, the exact same thing as ACTUAL EVIL.

In the case of a being with freewill, who has the ability to reject or accept God based on that freewill (according to Xianity), it should be readily apparent to God that such apparent evil would be a major hindrance to God's stated desired purpose of redeeming mankind. God, being God, should be able to explain this apparent evil, yet does not.

Ergo, contradiction. Either God is not omnipotent (and can't prevent evil), he is not omniscient (he can't predict evil), or he is not omnibenevolent (otherwise he should desire to explain away the apparent evil that his omnimax attributes would not allow to exist as ACTUAL evil, and being both omniscient and omnipotent, should have no problem doing so...even to beings with 'limited' comprehension).

Cheers,

The San Diego Atheist