luvluv

Apologies all around for my extended absence. The computer I post on was in the shop all last week.

Steven Carr:

No, I think what I've done is admit to the possibility of there being pain in heaven.

Thomas Metcalf:

Not quite. I (through C.S. Lewis) am arguing that your ABILITY to do evil, if you choose to do so, exists because it produces a greater good: free will. The actual evil you do may or may not PRODUCE a greater good, but it is the RESULT of the greater good of free will.

How do you know he hasn't? How do you know there aren't terrible diseases that cause us to suffer even more than any we are currently aware of?

I've asked this question a lot, but I still don't get much of a response. I don't say this to be an a-hole or anything, I'd really like to know. Since I've been here arguing the POE, I've gotten the "Less Pain" argument. It suggests that God's benevolence could be established if there were just less pain on the planet than there is. My question is how much pain is allowable in order to posit the existence of a benevolent God? If God were simply to take away Cancer, would he then be good? Or just AIDS? If we woke up tommorow and some angel had just dropped a cure for the ebola virus on some doctors desk, would that eliminate the POE? Or would you still have a theological problem with the child down the street who was dying of cancer? I don't beleive a world with less pain would satisfy the POE.

Quite so, but we wouldn't have free will. Remember C.S. goes on to explain that by extension we would be prevented from even forming evil thoughts by the spontaneous warping of our grey matter.

I'm not sure I understand this objection. The fact that you cannot kill 1000 innocent people by snapping your fingers is not a limitation on your will it is a limitation on your power. It doesn't have anything to do with free will. You could find a way to kill 1000 people if you really wanted to, you just couldn't do it by snapping your fingers. There has to be some physical limitation on what you can do, or else no one else could co-exist with you. That's what Lewis was trying to say when he said this:

It would not be possible for both you and me to be able to do everything we wanted. There cannot be two omnipotent beings. So some limitations on our abilities are necessary just for continued existence.

Jack the Bodiless:

Not at all, I'm agreeing with C.S. Lewis who was saying that natural law seems to be necessary for the co-existence of free moral agents. If there was going to be a society of free moral entities, then a common environment was necessary, and that common enviromnent carries with it the possibility of suffering.

Firstly I want to clarify again that I am copying down C.S. Lewis's argument, this is not my original work here. Lewis addresses your comment here:

Vorkosigan:

Thanks Vork, I appreciate it.

Marz Black:

Well, I would pick the third option: "He knew, and let it play out because reducing evil was not that high on His list of priorities."

However, I would challenge you to prove that benevolence requires that one values reducing evil over producing freedom.

You have one God who creates nothing but rocks. You have another who creates human beings. Which of these Gods is more benevolent? The one who denies human beings existence, and thus reduced evil, or the one who gave humans the gift of existence, and did not reduce evil.

I don't see how the common definition of benevolence automatically excludes one from allowing the possibility of evil or suffering if it is towards a greater end.

Fair enough. But you seem here to be affirming that at least some suffering is necessary, so again my question to you is precisely how much?

Perhaps you would be rationally justified in rejecting the unknown purpose defense, but you may still be wrong. There is a difference between being rationally justified and being correct.

Automaton:

You're pretty sharp, Automaton. C.S. Lewis actually defended himself on that point. I don't have the book in front of me right now (I'll provide a direct quote tommorow) but C.S. countered this argument through the doctrine of the Trinity. Essentially, he said there is a society inside the Godhead, which allows God to be self-aware. I actually ommitted that because I didn't think anybody would be sharp enough to make the argument, but you proved me wrong. I'll edit that comment into my original post above once I have access to the book.

[ September 24, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

Vorkosigan

I don't see how the common definition of benevolence automatically excludes one from allowing the possibility of evil or suffering if it is towards a greater end.

It doesn't. But so much pain and suffering is obviously unnecessary. Consider an earthquake victim pinned in rubble whose location and existence are unknown to rescuers. What lesson does she learn as she dies slowly over three days, suffering from gangrene in the foot where she is pinned, and dying of thirst, shock and hunger alone in the dark? What end is being served by people dying slowly of painful degenerative diseases? What do they learn? Chronic hunger victims, the blind, those born maimed....what lesson can possibly require a lifetime of impaired function?

luvluv

I think you're missing me here, Vork. You seem to want an explanation that flows from an unfortunate act. What I am trying to tell you is that the explanation itself produces the unfortunate act. There may be no explicit purpose to an individual act of suffering, but that this individual act of suffering is possible is because of the overall purpose of free will.

Nothing good may come out of the suffering of an earthquake victim, but much good might come out of the fact that she lives in a world in which suffering is possible.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by luvluv:

"Not quite. I (through C.S. Lewis) am arguing that your ABILITY to do evil, if you choose to do so, exists because it produces a greater good: free will. The actual evil you do may or may not PRODUCE a greater good, but it is the RESULT of the greater good of free will."

But when I choose to do evil, the fact that I am actually doing the evil must be the best way for things to be -- otherwise, God wouldn't allow it. If I choose to do evil, God can either allow me or stop me, and God will choose what is best. You can claim it would be even better if I didn't choose to do any evil in the first place, but the more evil that my choice in the first place produces, the more good will balance it out.

"How do you know he hasn't? How do you know there aren't terrible diseases that cause us to suffer even more than any we are currently aware of?"

I don't. But God could still reduce suffering to a greater degree.

"I've asked this question a lot, but I still don't get much of a response. I don't say this to be an a-hole or anything, I'd really like to know. Since I've been here arguing the POE, I've gotten the "Less Pain" argument. It suggests that God's benevolence could be established if there were just less pain on the planet than there is. My question is how much pain is allowable in order to posit the existence of a benevolent God? If God were simply to take away Cancer, would he then be good? Or just AIDS? If we woke up tommorow and some angel had just dropped a cure for the ebola virus on some doctors desk, would that eliminate the POE? Or would you still have a theological problem with the child down the street who was dying of cancer? I don't beleive a world with less pain would satisfy the POE."

This is a fairly common response. My own counter-response is that we don't need to know what the minimum amount of suffering is to know that the amount of suffering in the world today could be much less. All we need to know is that a morally perfect being would prevent more suffering than is being prevented. We can say what disconfirms some proposition without having to say what confirms it.

"I'm not sure I understand this objection. The fact that you cannot kill 1000 innocent people by snapping your fingers is not a limitation on your will it is a limitation on your power. It doesn't have anything to do with free will. You could find a way to kill 1000 people if you really wanted to, you just couldn't do it by snapping your fingers. There has to be some physical limitation on what you can do, or else no one else could co-exist with you."

I agree that there must be some limitation on our power. So God should just limit our power, and let us have our evil thoughts. That's the point of my objection here.

Marz Blak

The last part of that statement certainly less arguable than the first, as far as I can see. But the entire argument assumes that "a world in which suffering is possible" must necessarily be a world in which apparently random, gratuitous suffering, not apparently necessary to allow for free will, exists as well.

As I believe has been argued to you before in other threads, this necessity does not square with your presupposition of a God who is maximally benevolent, based on what we can understand about suffering as it exists in the world, unless one presupposes some 'greater good' that we cannot fathom.

(I do seem to recall an argument about the necessity for a certain degree of constancy in physical laws, etc., so that God couldn't just for example have a boulder's mass magically change to near zero just before it fell on someone's head. But I think you will agree that, apart from what it might say about God's benevolence and where he placed gratuitous suffering among His priorities, and the associated implications thereof, surely this sort of argument has nothing whatsoever to say about some other sorts of events which engender gratuitous suffering, e.g., painful birth defects, wasting diseases, people being trapped to die long, slow, miserable deaths in earthquakes, never to be found, etc.)

Therefore, the argument devolves into yet another version of the UPD, which is, of course, question-begging in a number of ways.

BTW, welcome back. As has been expressed earlier in the thread, I have missed your calm, reasoned approach to these matters, much as I disagree with you.

[Added later:]
You present this as a binary choice, with no possibilities between, which I believe you must if you are at all to attempt to make the case you do. I do not think, however, that you have come close to making the case you must in this instance: that is, that the choice is purely binary as you posit.

That is to say, again, why could there not be a God who created humans with free will, but put them in a world much less prone to engendering gratuitous suffering than the world in which we live?

[ September 24, 2002: Message edited by: Marz Blak ]</p>

Vorkosigan

I think you're missing me here, Vork. You seem to want an explanation that flows from an unfortunate act. What I am trying to tell you is that the explanation itself produces the unfortunate act.

I reject that on both moral and pragmatic grounds.

There may be no explicit purpose to an individual act of suffering, but that this individual act of suffering is possible is because of the overall purpose of free will.

But Luv, it seems to me you've created a Euthyphro-type dilemma for yourself. It seems you believe that it is impossible to create a world where people have free choice but no suffering. So god is bound by some bizarre logic of suffering greater than himself...or god chooses for people to suffer.

Marz Blak

Vorkosigan:

As usual, a much more elegant statement of the argument's weakness than I was able to formulate.

<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

M.

[ September 25, 2002: Message edited by: Marz Blak ]</p>

luvluv

Thomas Metcalf:

I disagree. I don't see why that should be the case. Further, I think it is logically incompatible for even an omnipotent, benevolent God to give creatures free will and yet guarantee that their usage of that will is always the best possible usage. If the will that has been given them is truly free, they can use it to ends that are not necessarily the best ends. If they can't use their will to do things towards lesser ends, then their will is not free.

I don't see how it contradicts God's omnipotence or benevolence that we misuse our free will.

No, we don't know that. We don't know that a morally perfect being would eliminate more of the suffering we see on the planet. We don't know what the role of suffering is, or what could come out of it.

The POE is not a logically sound proof (or disproof) because while you may object to the UPD and choose not to be persuaded by it, it does provide a logically sound conclusion that prevents the POE argument from being a logically sound disproof of God. You might choose to believe that there could be no higher purpose to suffering, but you cannot logically exclude the possibility. I say quite often that the problem of pain is an emotional problem and not a logical one.

C.S. Lewis, for example, was fond of saying that pain was God's megaphone to awaken a slumbering world. If you've read the opening passage of the Screwtape Letters, you'll find an example of how complacency, comfort, and ease is often the main obstacle which prevents humankind from considering tougher moral and eternal questions. So long as everything's going our way, so long as there is nothing difficult to contemplate, most of us go merrily about our way giving no deeper consideration to any transcendant issues. It is possible that pain, misfortune, and death force the issue. It forces us for a split second to face God as a real possibility, and even if this is done in anger, it is still better than us never considering him at all.

This may or may not be the unknown purpose of pain, but such a scenario is not logically contradictory. And while certainly God could use other means to remind us of His presence, we are not in a position to say those other means would yield better results because we simply have no way of knowing that.

The bottom line in all of my POE arguments is not necessarily to convince you guys to believe that God is all good. That's a decision you have to make for yourself, God is not going to make that decision logically compulsive. But I am trying to tell you that as a logical proof, the POE is unsound.

Fine, but we wouldn't have a meaningful free will.

Marz Blak:

I don't think it matters whether we can fathom them or not. As an honest logician, we would have to admit that we cannot logically exclude the possibility of such a greater good, and therefore the POE cannot lead us to any logically sound conclusion about the existence of God.

If you are saying that, from an emotional standpoint, the suffering you see compels you to decide there is no God, I really can't argue against that.

But if you are saying that the suffering you see is logical proof that God doesn't exist, I think that's entirely premature.

That's not the point I was trying to make. If we use suffering as the naked indicator of the benevolence of God, so that a world in which there is less suffering is better evidence of benevolence than a world in which there was more suffering, you would have to say that the ultimately benevolent God was one who never created anything but rocks. I'm trying to get you to consider the scale on which you weigh benevolence, and ask yourself why suffering is the only measure on it.

I know that there are many in betweens, but I'm asking you a question so that I can get a better handle on your notion of benevolence. Given the two options, a God who creates nothing but rocks, and a God who created human beings the way they are now, which God would be more benevolent? I'm trying to get at what I consider the absurdity of the notion that suffering is the only criteria by which we can measure benevolence.

Vorkosigan:

I don't follow you. If you are suggesting that God is bound only to logical possibilities, then I agree with you. Omnipotence does not include the ability to make square circles or men with controlled free will.

Marz Blak

Quoth luvluv:
I will certainly agree with you that the UPD is by no means logically unsound. Far from it. I think, however, that this is where our preconceptions come into play.

You see the existence of an good and all-powerful God as a reasonable presupposition, and therefore, the UPD resonates with you. I, on the other hand, see any presupposition of a personal deity, particularly a putatively omnimax one, as an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence. Is this difference in presuppositions rationally or emotionally based? I would say it is rational on my part, and emotional on yours. I would argue that the very decision to presuppose a personal, benevolent Creator is an emotional, unduly optimistic one, given what we can observe; it seems, indeed, to be part of that whole 'faith' thing you theists talk about.

I realize we may disagree on this point interminably.

As to the argument itself, though: even assuming an omnipotent Creator, which I hope you will at least concede is arguable, then, based on what we can see of the universe, I think you would also concede that attributing anything approaching maximal benevolence to Him is also at least arguable.

Hence, the UPD to me is unsound not logically but, rather, procedurally--it exists as an argument only because it allows one to start with two arguable premises (1. that of the existence of a Creator and 2. that said Creator is entirely benevolent) and work his way backwards to justify them, as it were.

This, to me, emotion aside, seems like nothing more or less than poor argumentation.

luvluv, again:
I would disagree. I am, as I am sure you know by now , no logician. But it seems to me that because the the UPD is indeed based on an arguable premise, Problem of Evil/Pain arguments, in attacking the probability that that premise is valid, are entirely appropriate to counter it.

[edited to tidy up a bit ]

[ September 25, 2002: Message edited by: Marz Blak ]</p>

Philosoft

Did not Thomas just address this the post before last? Is this not what his "snap my fingers and kill 1000 people" example, that you agreed was an acceptable limitation on human power, was entirely about?

[ September 25, 2002: Message edited by: Philosoft ]</p>