Adrian Selby

"God could be a big fat evil bastard and yet he could still be God. "

How is this an acceptable definition of God in huge numbers of christians' eyes?

Philip Osborne

"How is this an acceptable definition of God in huge numbers of christians' eyes?"

This is correct. An omniscient, omnipotent being which is not morally perfect is simply not God; it is merely an omniscient, omnipotent being which is not acknowledged as a being worthy of worship by any religion. A God who is not good is as a conceptual matter not God. As a theist, I have to admit that atheism is perfectly consistent with the idea that a powerful cosmic being exists but has no religious or spiritual significance.

-Philip

TerryTryon

If I may, I'd like to make a few comments on the lottery fallacy.

Imagine a huge stadium filled with people. There is a prize of several million dollars. A coin is tossed repeatedly. The goal is to anticipate the next throw of the coin. Each person has an electronic device to register a guess as to the outcome of the toss. With each toss, about half of the participants would be eliminated from the game. Eventually, there would be one person who would walk away with the prize. (In order for this to happen, there has to be one added rule. If everybody guesses right or if everybody guesses wrong, that throw is invalid.)

Now suppose the game is played to the end, and one person walks away with the prize. If you ask that person how he won, I feel certain that he will have a precise "reason" for how he came to guess so many times correctly. Even though every aspect of the game was set up to highlight the random aspect of winning, human psychology will force a superstitious explanation on the turn of events for the winner.

Suppose the fellow wore a blue shirt while everyone else in the game had worn red shirts. Once again, human psychology would force a superstitious explanation on the losers who would immediately declare the game had been fixed in favor of the blue shirted fellow.

This natural superstitious bent of the human mind is why Las Vegas and Monte Carlo prosper.

Another example: Suppose a tornado hits a house. The parents both survive, but their infant is blown out away from the debris and cannot be found. The parents began to pray for the safe recovery of their child, and several hours later the child is found essentially unharmed in a freshly plowed field several hundred yards from the wrecked house.

Anybody who tried to convince those parents that the event was not a miraculous intercession on their behalf by the diety to whom they had prayed would be rebuffed and scorned. It would be quite impossible to convince the parents that other than a miracle occurred.

On the other hand, if a delicate figurine of no particular value had made the same trip--also undamaged--but no prayers had been offered, the interpretation of the event would be "amazing" not "miraculous."

It may be true that 80 to 90 percent of the people of the world have no problem with the theological problems discussed here, but that only shows how few people are willing to think beyond the natural human tendency to form supersitious beliefs in the face of great risk and unpredictable outcomes.

If logical fallacies were not so insidious, everyone would think logically and discussions such as this would be superfluous.

EvilTeuf

Is this the anti-ontological argument?

Kantian

ICB
You seem to be hell-bent on witnessing your beliefs, rather than engage in a conversation with me and answer (or at least pretend to), the points I have raised in my most recent post. If that is what you want to do, to preach, then this is not the right forum. <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum&f=47" target="_blank">Rants, Raving, preaching and etcetera</a> is down the hall.
Yes, but irrelevant. Is this an admittance that your Theodicy is purposeful, "clearly understood" and "makes sense?" Or that some theodicies do not make sense? And are we to submit to your authority on which goes and which doesn't?
Amen! By the way, which One True Theology would that be?
Have you read Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling? <a href="http://allfreeessays.com/student/free/Teleological_Suspension_of_the_Ethical.shtml" target="_blank">The concept of the teleological suspension of the ethical</a> revisited?
That is a feeble analogy. Stalin was a dictator, not an omnipotent, omniscient being, who transformed communism into totalitarianism and he was not deified as something divine or immortal, nor did he invoke miracles or impregnate virgins. The common properties between Stalin and God are so low, ergo, your analogy fails.
If God is not omni-benevolent, then he is not worthy of being an object of worship. If I can conceive of a being morally superior to God, then you are positing an inferior God who is not deserving of adulation in the least.
The funny thing about morality is that a person may cite God as a sanction for his or her own tastes in ethics, and that leads to differences of opinion on certain matters of right and wrong.
Is the word 'holocaust' in the bible? The original Hebraic bible?
However, the implied analogy fails once you are talking about an infinite being that puts off justice until the afterlife, and theologians rush to the rescue with contorted theodicies explaining away God's responsibilities, whereas the soldier is fully aware of the consequences of a proper training.
Could you elaborate on what exactly is the "judgment process" and which theologians you refer to?
Presumptuous of you, isn't it? How would you know that I am not in the Peace Corps, doing exactly what that medical student A is doing? The person who does charity work isn't necessarily a good Christian. He could be something else, a wiccan, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Muslim, an atheist, and etcetera. Being a Christian does not equate to a moral person. In fact, there never were any Christians except for the one who died on the cross.
What makes you think that behaving similar to the medical student A absolves you of all potential divine punishment?
~Transcendental Idealist~

[ August 11, 2002: Message edited by: Immanuel Kant ]</p>

Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

Red herring...as I need not to.


At this point we are not arguing about subjective feelings of what we do/don't think are 'special' or 'wonderous' attributes of the universe.


We are making a concise mathematical claim about how much confidence we should have in the hypothesis 'A blue player (life-friendly universe) was selected at random'.


The thrust of the argument has nothing to do with what you or I subjective think is 'special'.

Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

Thomas Metcalf

"Suppose that what makes a possible world great is having the greatest surplus of good over evil. Are you then suggesting that there is such a thing as too much of a surplus of good over evil?"

First, I'm not sure this case is adequately analogous. For we don't really know what "good" means in this context; I'm usually content to say it means "the degree of the satisfaction of God's desires," and that God's desires are, ceteris paribus, aims that will produce happiness in humans. But for there to be too much of a surplus, i.e. for there to be too much good, seems self-contradictory -- by definition, if s1 is greater than s2, s1 has more greatness and does not have too much greatness.

More importantly, I think this question demonstrates why we need not ask for a "best of all possible worlds." All my original transcendental argument required was that gratuitous evil is always at a minimum. Therefore, the putative "best of all possible worlds" I request would better be simply a world without gratuitous evil. In this respect, there would be no such thing as too much of a surplus of good over evil, because goodness would have no logical maximum. Yet, it seems far more plausible that gratuitous evil would have a logical minimum: zero.

"A side note: I could be wrong, but I don't think '-' is normally used as a negation sign. I've normally seen ~ or ¬. At any rate, yes, I agree, since it seems to be a conceptual truth."

You're right; it's unconventional. It's just the way the textbook I used symbolized it, and it's a little neater or faster than the tilde or ell. Now, even if there is an actual infinity of propositions about the universe, it does seem correct that each of these propositions would therefore be better, worse, or the same as its negation, no?

"First, most theists hold that no gratuitous evil exists in the actual world (there is evil, but none of it is gratuitous), so on this view, there is no need to hold that there is no such thing as the minimum possible amount of such evil. Secondly, it is not immediately obvious"

Good so far. There is, then, a minimum possible amount of gratuitous evil.

"that God's paramount desire is to minimize gratuitous evil; if it were, then God would not actualize anything other than Himself. Minimizing gratuitous evil is thus only a means to achieve God's purpose."

Well, for humans to exist (rather than just God) would produce some evil, but then this evil would not be gratuitous. So I think we can still say that one of God's purposes is to minimize gratuitous evil. Perhaps that is not God's paramount desire, but a morally perfect being minimizes gratuitous evil nonetheless. (Is it possible that some gratuitous evil exists necessarily?)

"My question is this: Do you think that the S5 axiom of modal logic (Mp =&gt; LMp) is true?"

I assume that sentence is equivalent to &lt;&gt;p =&gt; []&lt;&gt;p. I can't fit my brain around nested modal operators, and I haven't yet taken Modal, but I would appreciate some help. So I can't answer your question yet.

Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

TooBad,
Now you are changing your analogy!

Whereas in your first analogy each class had a 1 in 100 billion chance of winning...now it's vastly different.

For class 'Mr. Bloggs' the probability of winning is 1 in 100 billion. However, for class 'Not Mr. Bloggs' the probability is now 99,999,999,999 in 100,000,000,000...almost 1!


If class 'Mr. Blogs' wins...we can *certainly* reject the hypothesis that it happened by chance.

Thank you for conceding the point.

Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

TooBad

Nothing has changed. Each set of numbers has an equal probability of winning, regardless of the class (red or blue) to which it belongs.
<strong> But Mr Bloggs did win last week. If you can claim with *certainty* that his big win was more than a chance event, I think you should inform the authorities immediately.

Philip Osborne

"But for there to be too much of a surplus, i.e. for there to be too much good, seems self-contradictory -- by definition, if s1 is greater than s2, s1 has more greatness and does not have too much greatness."

The question I asked was if there is such a thing as "too much greatness" in the first place; if there is not, then we have no need to add the second clause to the definition. I think that most theists would answer this question in the negative.

"Now, even if there is an actual infinity of propositions about the universe, it does seem correct that each of these propositions would therefore be better, worse, or the same as its negation, no?"

I would agree with this statement, but I have to admit that I can't possibly see how this leads to there being a best possible world.

"Well, for humans to exist (rather than just God) would produce some evil, but then this evil would not be gratuitous. So I think we can still say that one of God's purposes is to minimize gratuitous evil. Perhaps that is not God's paramount desire, but a morally perfect being minimizes gratuitous evil nonetheless. (Is it possible that some gratuitous evil exists necessarily?)"

You are probably correct in this sense. A gratuitous evil that is the necessary consequence of some greater good is by definition not gratuitous. So a sound theodicy must, at bare minimum, show that there is no reason more reason to think that some evil is gratuitous than to think that none of it is.

"I assume that sentence is equivalent to &lt;&gt;p =&gt; []&lt;&gt;p. I can't fit my brain around nested modal operators, and I haven't yet taken Modal, but I would appreciate some help. So I can't answer your question yet."

That's correct. S5 says, "If p is possible, it is necessarily true that p is possible." Actually, I haven't taken Modal logic either, but I ran across "L" and "M" while skimming through the modal logic entry in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy.

Sincerely,

Philip