March 17, 2010

  • (debate) Theodicy versus the Ontological argument.

    Intro:

    The following is my alternate opening statement for debate night the other day. While preparing the Christian side of the "problem of evil" it occurred to me how to construct an even tighter logical argument from evil than any I've seen before.

    Here goes:

    The ontological argument for God's existence allows us to prove a negative when it comes to closing all possible loop holes in regards to evading the logical problem of evil. If God can be defined in order to accommodate any evil of any kind, that God is by definition not the most excellent being the ontological argument seeks to establish. If the ontological argument succeeds, it must succeed in direct proportion to the success of the logical problem of evil.

    Christians admit there is evil in the world. In fact they declare it. They have to or Jesus is out of a job. Hence, this is their internal coherency problem regardless of whether objective moral values exist in a non-theistic world. To pretend otherwise and contrive a problem of evil for atheism is a fatally flawed strategy as a result. Christians HAVE to clean house first. Whatever you do to the definition of God to make him compatible with evil necessarily diminishes his status as a morally perfect agent. It is unavoidable. Christians are often as skilled at finding 10 million unnecessary reasons why they fail to be morally perfect agents as they are at giving their morally perfect God a free pass on the most heinous of moral failings. They obviously know what their own standard ought to be, but then they don't apply it all the way around. Don't get me wrong. I am as supportive of their rights to psychologically abuse themselves as I am completely unable to fail to apply their own standards consistently at the necessary expense of their worldview.

    If for any reason there is a logical reason why an all good God simply must create a situation that entails evil, then by definition that concept of God as a most excellent being is incoherent. Period. It is unremarkably easy to imagine better and the ontological argument by definition doesn't allow that. Heck, even if they don't buy the ontological argument, Christians are still forced to apply the ontological standard as an accurate description of the God they may be arguing for with other reasons.

    Christians would have to argue at the very least (in order to explain the reality we do know of and Biblical doctrine) that God MUST create creatures who have the variety of free will that allows for perverse options (as opposed to say, being freely able to select from all good options like they expect to happen in their afterlife). Not only does this contradict the idea that God is complete in and of himself, not only does this contradict the idea that God has free will and the luxury of not creating anything at all if he has nothing nice to speak into existence, and not only is this a gross failure of imagination to suppose that a morally perfect creation is logically impossible, but by definition one cannot be a most excellent being who is FORCED for any reason to allow evil. That is a handicapped "most excellent being."

    Hence the very nature of the ontological standard, again, by definition precludes it and ANYTHING like it, thus proving the negative and closing all possible loop holes. Even positing the additional existence of an all powerful evil deity that keeps the created world in gridlock between good and evil infringes on the definition of a "most excellent" good deity since obviously he's not so excellent if he can't beat up that guy. So there is no black swan here. Case closed.

    Christians will be unable to simultaneously convince me to give up on what the most obvious definition of what a "most excellent being" would be or what a perfect moral agent would be like, and in addition to this convince me that there may be some unknown escape route from the logical problem of evil. They can't do both and they have to do both.

    For this reason the existence of the Christian God is simply impossible to defend.

    And before anyone accuses me of conveniently defining God out of existence, remember it was the Christians who tried to conveniently define him into existence first. I just took their standards seriously.

    Outro:

    Criticisms?

    Ben

Comments (23)

  • I completely understand your viewpoint as you being an atheist in writing this. I'm not commenting to debate you but just to give the Christian view and the view is something I know you've heard and the view that atheists hate to hear. If God does exist, it's impossible that we as sinful beings with very limited knowledge and wisdom compared to God who has always existed and was able to speak the universe into existence, to then comprehend him and what he does or allows. It's nonsensical to even think for a second that we can do this. It's nothing but pride in our opinion. Christians don't care that atheists won't accept this view. It's what we believe to be true. We accept that God and his ways are not comprehensible. You can call us names for believing this way but it doesn't matter to us. If you're an atheist, than I expect you to believe what you have written here. 

  • Interesting post... Are you familiar with the idea of secondary causes and intentionality? Have you ever read about the doctrine of concurrence? Lastly, are you knowledgeable about Reformed apologetics?

    ~Michael

  • Don't know what to say - not feeling well, feeling maybe there is no God. But didn't want to just lurk. It is a tight argument. Have you read much on mysticism?

  • Will go over peoples' heads.  This is your greatest flaw.

    JT

  • @LSP1 - Question: if "God and his ways are not comprehensible", how do you know that your current view of god is anywhere close to being more correct than the ones held by billions of other people around the world?

    @artworkjanalee - Hugs!  It's really ok - life without belief in god is just as amazing as life with belief in god, but with some perks that aren't obvious at first.  For example: http://andrea-thenerd.xanga.com/723237763/no-more-thought-crimes/  And then when you're ready to take that first step, visit me here: http://www.atheistnexus.org/profile/TheNerd  I'm usually messing around in the chat room.  :)
    "Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o, and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have." - Penn Jillette

  • @Andrea_TheNerd - I don't know for sure. Just as for yourself, I can only go on what makes the most sense to me and my own subjective experiences.

  • There is a church of about 150,000 - 400,000 Christians called the Christian Science Church http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science#Evil founded by Mary Baker Eddy, who don't believe evil exists, but rather that it is an illusion.  They don't believe in satan or hell, but they believe in heaven.

    I fully agree that there is a huge contradiction saying that god would be good, but would have to be prayed to in order to fix evil.

    If it were I who were writing or debating (and I tend not do do so on religion), I would simplify the arguments considerably, since the average person would have no clue what you are saying, since it is very complex.  I don't write or debate religion because I've seen people argue about it again and again for 3 hours straight and get nowhere, so for me it's not productive.

    Good luck to you.

  • I'm not sure what the ontological argument is doing in this post; whether or not the ontological argument is sound, the God of traditional monotheism is still defined as being a morally perfect agent.  I did notice that you realized this, but then again you still left all the references to the argument in.  But the ontological argument is simply completely irrelevant to the argument from evil. 

    Christians do not have to argue that God must have created a world like this one; all a Christian needs to defend is that this world is a good one.  A morally perfect agent will always do good things and never do bad things.  Thus, a world which is on the whole a bad one would be a falsification of theism.  I'm open to the sort of argument which uses evil to say that the probability that God exists is extremely diminished because of the nature of the evils in the world.  This post is of course not arguing that, however.

    Your argument contests my definition of what it means to be a morally perfect agent.  You think the definition of a morally perfect agent entails creating the best world possible.  However, I think the analysis that Robert Adams provides on this question is good, and while I'd like to hear criticisms of it, I think that it handles the claim that God must create the best pretty well.

    The text is extremely sketchy in this document, but I suppose that's because it's only supposed to be available on JSTOR.  Anyways, he is Robert Adams' piece "Must God Create the Best?": 

    jatdoll.googlepages.com/MustGodCreatetheBest-Adams.pdf

  • Thanx! I hope Ben is still alive...

  • @LSP1 - Hey Larry,

    I understand what you are trying to say.  If you have to know everything then obviously we can't even hope to make an argument like this.  Fortunately (for my argument), actually knowing everything isn't required for the disproof to work.  A necessarily not-so-excellent being isn't God.  Let's say we allow for the possibility that there's just some metaphysical issue we don't know about that entails God has to allow evil.  Well, that's already part of the argument: "If for any reason there is a logical reason why an all good God simply must create a situation that entails evil, then by definition that concept of God as a most excellent being is incoherent."  So we don't really have to know whatever that might be to see that the God Christians are trying to show exists via the ontological argument, isn't actually all that excellent. 

    @MC_Shann - I couldn't teach a course on those topics, but I do have a practical knowledge of them.  How do you think they might apply in contradiction to my argument?

    @artworkjanalee - Yup, still alive.  Just busy.  Sorry to hear about your rough times.  I hope thinking about these things doesn't make it worse.

    I'm aware of the general concept of mysticism, though I've not had a reason to pursue in depth study of it.  What do you think about it?

    @Zerowing21 - :p

    @Andrea_TheNerd - Thanks for speaking up, dear.  ;)

    @DC - I agree.  This argument definitely needs a non-philosopher-ese intro.  I wrote it in the midst of doing other things, so I haven't gotten around to doing that yet.  You get people that complain that the new atheists attack the bottom of the theological barrel, but on the other hand, when you aim as high as you can go, there's a problem with that, too, isn't there?  Unfortunately if I don't construct the argument in this way, other theists who are skilled in philosophy will take advantage of that in a real debate and I have to be able to communicate to both types of audiences when I'm in front of a varied crowd.  Hopefully with a good intro, and hearing it from my mouth, and seeing how that plays out in the rest of the debate would enable people unfamiliar with this level of things to get on board.  It's a struggle though. I might still fail to communicate properly, but I'll do some more test runs on debate nights to make sure. 

    @StrokeofThought - That's a good point.  The ontological argument doesn't necessarily have to be involved.  I think it does make a good foil though, if I give both arguments a good intro (that doesn't exist currently).  I could be wrong about that, but I'm trying to help put the emphasis on making our definition work, and that's exactly the business of another popular theological argument.  Maybe I'm wrong about how that might play to easily confusable audiences.  The ontological argument in and of itself does kind of throw people.  I will take your objection into further consideration as I do audience tests.

    Does God have to create the most moral possible world?  He's certainly not obligated to me, but he is obligated I would think to his definition.  I would say a "more good than not moral agent" would be very compatible with this state of affairs, but a "most excellent moral agent" wouldn't be.  I'm not sure why theists feel free to "round up" and give full credit. 

    Thanks for bringing that pdf to my attention.  I'll go over it here in a second, and comment again.

    Ben

  • @WAR_ON_ERROR - Hi Ben

    Fortunately (for my argument), actually knowing everything isn't required for the disproof to work.

    We definitely disagree. IMO, it is required because you're making value
    judgments about God based upon limited knowledge and wisdom. You can't
    possibly know God's reasons for what he does and allows. Again, I
    understand your reasoning from an atheistic worldview, but it still
    falls short.

    A necessarily not-so-excellent being isn't God.

    Here again, you're the one making the claim that God is not excellent, but 
    just because you personally make that claim does not mean it is true.

    "If for any reason there is a logical
    reason why an all good God simply must create a situation that entails
    evil, then by definition that concept of God as a most excellent being
    is incoherent."

    Ok, we agree on that, but that in itself defeats some of your other conclusions.

    So we don't really have to know
    whatever that might be to see that the God Christians are trying to
    show exists via the ontological argument, isn't actually all that
    excellent.

    haha - Again, it's you that is saying that he's not that excellent, based
    upon your limited knowledge. This is another one of those arguments
    that can't be won by either side. We're both just making assumptions.

  • I'm glad you are. And thank you for your concern. It's ok, I think about these things all the time anyway. I have begun to study mysticism several times, but not delved very deeply. I am writing a script about an encounter with God in a bar (In the person of an actor/writer friend of mine who looks like the proverbial Italian Devil, good looks, goatee and all LOL) so I will be reading up I think. The actor who wanders in the hole in the wall bar is an atheist (another actor friend who is an atheist). It's a brainchild of all 3 of us. It was originally the God actor's idea and we have hijacked it. I will post the drafts and I would be interested in your and Andrea's comments, Ben.

    Jana

  • I think you make some great points, but overall I don’t think your
    argument really works in demonstrating that there is a logical problem
    of evil.  I’ll try to point out some of the problems I see with it.  But
    first, I don’t really get what the point of your post is.  I think the
    ontological argument (in its non-modal form) is generally seen as one of
    the weaker theistic arguments and can be easily refuted without taking
    into account the problem of evil.  So isn’t your argument, if valid,
    just a more convoluted way of disproving a deeply flawed theistic
    argument?  If instead you think that your argument does not depend on
    the truth of the ontological argument, then I don’t see the need of
    bringing it up.

     “If for any reason there is a logical reason why an all good God simply
    must create a situation that entails evil, then by definition that
    concept of God as a most excellent being is incoherent. Period.”

    I don’t think you provide any evidence that this is the case.  You are
    assuming that it is impossible for a maximally good world to include
    some evil.  It seems logically possible that a world with no evils would
    also have less of certain goods and that those goods may offset those
    evils.

    “but by definition one cannot be a most excellent being who is FORCED
    for any reason to allow evil. That is a handicapped "most excellent
    being."

    First, I don’t think Christians would describe it as God being forced to
    do anything.  I think they would say that God’s nature is good, so he
    always does good.  Second, would you also say that something cannot be a
    most excellent being if it cannot make 1+1=3?  Why should a Christian
    be any more concerned that God is forced to allow some evil to bring
    about the best possible world than that God is forced to make 1+1=2?

    You seem to be assuming that conceivability is a good guide to
    possibility- that if you can conceive of a world like ours with more
    good and less evil, it must be possible.  I don’t know of any reason to
    assume that conceivability is a good guide to possibility, and there are
    some reasons why you might want to reject it.  For example, if it is a
    reliable guide, then our ability to conceive of a necessarily existing
    god would mean that such a god is possible, which implies that it would
    exist in one possible world and therefore in all possible worlds (via
    Plantinga’s modal argument).  But if you reject that conceivability is a
    good guide to possibility, then the existence of some evil in this
    world does not immediately disprove the existence of a maximally good
    God.

    As long as it is logically possible that God could have some mysterious
    reasons for allowing the evils that he does, the logical argument from
    evil fails.  I know it seems like an incredibly bad response, but
    appeals to mystery aren’t always unreasonable.  For example, the way in
    which our minds arose from a material world is still pretty mysterious
    to me, but I don’t think that proves that they could not have arisen
    from such a world.

    I liked what you said about free will, but I thought you could have
    expressed some of your points a little more clearly.  I think it’s
    reasonable to say that God has free will even if he always chooses
    good.  By nature, he always wants to choose the good and always acts in
    accordance with his nature.  It’s not like there is some outside force
    making him choose good, he does so freely.  Since God is maximally
    great, then there cannot be some greater type of free will which God is
    lacking.  But if this is the case, then humans that by nature never
    wished to choose evil would also still be maximally free and the free
    will defense would fail.

  • Actually, a theist would probably want to assume that conceivability is a guide to possibility, even if an imperfect one.  Otherwise, omnipotence would become pretty meaningless because any given conceivable action could turn out to be impossible for God to do, and knowing that God is omnipotent would still provide no evidence that God is able to do any given action (even those which are easy for humans).  Of course, you could then construct an evidential argument from evil, by saying that there are all these evils which God could almost certainly get rid of if he wanted to.

  • "...why an all good God simply must create .."

    What if He chose to create a world where a Fall was possible?  Immediately I think of 3 possibilities:

    1)  He wanted to demonstrate/exercise His mercy & grace.  In this sense he "needed" sinners to rescue, in order to show His mercy & grace.

    2)  We needed to experience suffering to understand His goodness.  We would take His goodness for granted and never really understand it unless we had been separated from Him for a while.  Thus, a man who has never been thirsty might value water little, but a man who knew the misery of dehydration and had been in the pangs close to death, might never take water for granted again, but give thanks for it constantly.

    3)  Note: this one is admittedly somewhat unsettling and is fraught with many moral complexities, I am not actually asserting it, merely suggesting that it is a logical possibility.  If I wanted to assert it then I would have to step very carefully b/c my words could easily be twisted.  I'll speak somewhat loosely, to make it easier to explain. 

    God orchestrates a greater good through allowing and overcoming evil. God has not approved of evil per se, but has allowed it to happen, and takes advantage of it to achieve an even greater good than could be achieved without any evil.  Pretend that God and Satan were having an orchid growing contest.  Satan sterilises some soil tosses in seeds and grows lovely little orchids.  Satan decides to cheat and sows weed seeds in God's flats.  At first we see the weeds crowding out God's sorry little orchid patch.  We barely see God's orchids.  It looks like Satan will be the clear winner.  But then God pulls up a number of the weeds and throws them in His compost bin, where they are transformed into a fine rich mix that God sprinkles on top of His flats.  His orchids now grow even stronger and better and are unsurpassed.  For a brief moment, God was behind and Satan was winning.  But by the agreed upon contest deadline, Satan's orchids are weak and have grown too top heavy and just fall over.  But God's orchids will have grown strong, tall, and flowered magnificently. So, if you were on God's side, would you really fault Him for letting Satan sneak in the weed seeds?  Would you fault Him for letting things look out of control for a while?  Or would you recognise that God knew what He was doing, even if you weren't sure how things would end up? 

  • Littleprofessor, I don’t think your three suggestions for why God might allow the fall really work.  Unless divine morality means something totally different than our morality, in which case calling God good loses all meaning, I don’t think there is any good justification for God allowing the fall.

    1.  This would be just like someone demonstrating their bravery and compassion by pushing someone else off a boat so they could jump into the water and save them from drowning.  This seems pretty clearly immoral.  And what God does (if he exists) is far worse than making someone wet.  I’ll avoid getting into detail, but there are some people who were killed as children after lives of unimaginable suffering.

    2. To me someone who would purposefully deny someone else water almost to the point of death just so that person would appreciate water more seems like the complete opposite of omnibenevolent.  But perhaps, as Ben pointed out in the debate, God allows the evil of rape so that we will be able to appreciate all the times that we're not being raped.

    Also, if we need to experience the suffering of this world in order to appreciate God's goodness, what about all those embryos that die before being capable of suffering (both those that were aborted and those that die naturally)?  Would they be denied entrance to heaven through no fault of their own?  If not, why is the suffering phase necessary for everyone else?

    3. I think it is important that you distinguish between allowing something evil to happen and doing it yourself.  Otherwise you would be saying that it’s moral to do evil as long as you compensate someone for it afterward.  Raping and torturing someone is immoral, even if you compensate for it by giving the person an infinite reward.  Even if overall more good than evil was done, the act of raping that person does not become moral.

    But I think in the end, you can’t let God off the hook for whatever Satan does.  God chose to create him, knowing everything he would do, and chose to give him so much power over our world.  God could even have created Satan and merely limited the scope of his free will.  Just like we have free will even though we can’t choose to make the sun disappear no matter how much we want it to, Satan could still have free will even if his powers were limited to the divine realm and he could not influence affairs here on earth.  God allowing Satan to do great evils would be a little like the U.S. turning over all their nuclear weapons and launch equipment to Al Qaeda, knowing that they would use them to kill millions of innocent people.  In fact, it would be worse, since at least the U.S. government did not intentionally create Al Qaeda.

    As David Bazan eloquently put it in his excellent song When We Fell (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsfekYfNCsk):

    When you set the table
    When you chose the scale
    Did you write a riddle that you knew they would fail
    Did you make them tremble
    So they would tell the tale
    Did you push us when we fell?

  • 1) Do you mean that God must create a best possible world?

    2) Do you mean that there is in fact "a best possible world"?

    3) Do you mean that God cannot will to create a specific being (A) rather than another specific being (B) if the existence conditions of A include (priorly) evil conditions? That is, do you mean to say that B would be intrinsically better than A if B's existence conditions required no evil prior-effects, even though A, not B, is what God actually wills?

    Best,

  • This is obviously the usual problem of evil used against a good and omnipotent god.
    But like I have said before, one cannot prove or disprove god through pure logic
    because it always leads to contradictions. For instance take the case of
    whether god can create a rock so heavy that he cannot lift. He can and cannot
    and that in itself is a logical contradiction. 

    Remember deus he aeternal et transcen-dent i.e. out of time and
    existence. What is out of time and existence does not go by the laws of
    existence, e.g. time, logic, power, space, etc. One of the first attributes of
    a being is time and space whether it is a priori or objective. If
    god is not influenced by time and space then he cannot have existence and if we
    take ex-sistere in its original meaning as "being out of its
    place" or its essence then we have made god into a being. When does
    such a thing happen? Only when man becomes oblivious of god. No one has talked
    about this forgetting better than Nietzsche. See, I truly believe that
    Nietzsche is the least understood thinker because for years philosophers have
    tried to analyze his works logically which is impossible. 

    Remembering he was a philologist and had a great knowledge of languages, we
    have to be very careful when reading his writings. What happens in the parable
    of the mad man? The mad man runs into the market place declaring the dead of
    god. He is scared and hopeless at first showing the first stage of nihilism
    which is pessimism. What happens to a non-existent when it dies? It exists.
    How do we know Nietzsche meant this? He says "Riechen wir noch
    nichts von der göttlichen Verwesung? - auch Götter verwesen!" Now
    the keyword here is verwesen for this word is the EXACT opposite of its English
    translation "decompose". Ver-wesen has the same exact meaning
    as ex-sistere though not
    etymologically related. It literally means to “lose essence” or if you want to
    be even more exact it means to “lose the dwelling place”. Whereas, the word
    decompose means “to lose being a composite and hence, become one again” for
    when something decomposes it goes back to nature, loses its individuality and
    becomes one with nature again. So the actual translation of what he states
    would be “Do we still smell nothing of a godly existence, i.e., god being out of
    its essence? Gods too can exist i.e. lose their essence.”

  • Marry me.

    JT

  • I don't see any response to this, so I'm reposting it: 

    1) Do you mean that God must create a best possible world?

    2) Do you mean that there is in fact "a best possible world"?

    3) Do you mean that God cannot will to create a specific being (A) rather than another specific being (B) if the existence conditions of A include (priorly) evil conditions? That is, do you mean to say that B would be intrinsically better than A if B's existence conditions required no evil prior-effects, even though A, not B, is what God actually wills?

    Best,

  • @rocketagent - Yeah, sorry, I haven't gotten back to the second round of comments on this post.  I've been meaning to finish the argument map I started on this first, but I'm tied up with other projects.  

  • @rocketagent - 

    A.  Yes, God must create the best possible world (or at least one from the set of all best possible worlds) if he wishes to maintain the title of "perfect moral agent." 

    B.  Yes, I mean there is a best possible world (or a set of best possible worlds, which could be infinite in number).

    C.  Yes.  The real question is, why God would want to will A if it entailed evil prior effects?  God's perfect moral nature would preclude that desire.  He has the option to do absolutely nothing or he doesn't have free will.  Humans, as moral agents are condemned to the fires of hell for all eternity if they have even a slight moral blemish in thought, word, and deed.  Hence, Christians are stuck having to argue for lower standards for God to get their worldview to work.

    Ben

  • Your answer to A. depends on your answer to B., so B. is the crux. I consider your acceptance of a "best of all possible worlds" (BPW) in B. to be a profound and outmoded Leibnizian confusion, so I also reject your implications from A.

    Describe the BPW for me, please. Presumably you mean a world with no moral defect or physical discomfort in it. How many entities would be in that world? Let's say the quantity is BPW:x. Now suppose I live in BPW, become mystically apprised of its contents (BPW:x), and then imagine a world with one more entity in it (BPW'1) as even more befitting the Creator's perfect goodness. Would not a greater amount of participation (even by one entity, i.e., BPW:x'1) in moral perfection be better, and therefore would not BPW'1 be better than BPW? Rinse and repeat.

    You also confuse many things in your answer to C. When a human sins, he is the principal agent (Ap) of that evil, whereas God's creation of that person (Ap) does not make Him the principal agent of Ap's evil, since, by definition, the evil done by Ap IS DONE BY Ap. Imagine a carpenter is setting up a wall and his drill bit snaps inside a piece of wood (on a knot or something). The drill bit "sinned," analogically speaking––it failed to conform to its proper nature and the will of its Maker. By your logic we could say the drill maker (or the carpenter) snapped inside the wood, too, since you seem to want to compress a higher agent into the very agency of the lower. But that is plainly absurd and therefore so is your reply in C. In willing to create me, God committed no evil, though He did freely will to permit the evil conditions of my ancestry to achieve the good He sees in my participating in His being.  This does not mean God "committed evil so good may result," since He did not commit the evil any more than the carpenter snapped inside the wood or set poorly in the factory when his future drill bit was fabricated.

    Certainly the most fundamental error in your argument here is that God's creatorhood is essential to His being, which no classical theist has ever maintained and, indeed, nearly all have vehemently denied. Insofar as God's being is what it is essentially apart from the perceived defects or benefits of His creation, that perceptibly deplorable creation in no way impinges on God's perfect nature. Your argument is somewhat like saying God essentially speaks English, since He actually created people who speak English, but in fact God only contingently "has" English, since English relates to God only in a world in which English actually exists, an actuality up to Him ab initio. At a higher, more classical level, you are basically arguing along lines that would say God is temporal because His creation is, which is a shabby argument. Since you are so full of gumption, I would like to see you demonstrate that God is temporal because creation is: if you can't, then your argument here fails in the same measure, for you are effectively arguing that God is imperfect because creation is. The bottom line is, you are arguing that God is imperfect because creation is less than Him, but in fact this is just a poor inference from the dogma that creation is not God.

    Best,

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