July 3, 2010
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(argument map) The Logical Problem of Evil (updated: version 9)
Intro:
Look out Alvin Plantinga and affiliates. Your reign of sophistry is over (*giggles*). I promised to go back to this, and I meant it. I do eventually get back to things when I'm ready for it (or when I'm not really busy, you know, not being online).
When evaluating whether or not the Christian hypothesis that a good God exists is legitimate, there are many approaches. There are evidential arguments from evil, Biblical arguments from evil, doctrinal arguments from evil, and the ever elusive logical argument from evil which has to be airtight. Christians and intellectually honest atheists (and whomever else is interested in a solid argument) should be concerned with these five questions (and maybe others) when evaluating my argument map:
A: Is my definition of God good enough for this argument?
B: Is my definition of moral perfection good enough for this argument?
C: Have I sufficiently established that at least "one drop" of evil or greater exists?
D: Have I committed any logical fallacies in my reasoning?
E: Have I boxed in all possible objections (even unknown ones) in a perfectly logical way?
It should also be noted that this is an ontological and logical argument from evil that necessarily incorporates the concept of divine simplicity as well.
Notice that all objections are labeled with numbers and letters and it would be greatly appreciated if any interested parties would label their responses or objections appropriately based on the established system. Notation may slide around a bit as the argument map becomes more elaborate and new objections and responses are plugged in. Please point out my spelling errors or if I mess up the numbering system (or if you have a better idea for a numbering system, please present it).
Enjoy (click on the image to embiggen):
Archive:
Outro:
I will be reposting revisions right here!
If successful, I hope to prove that the entire enterprise of investigating and/or defending any theodicy of any kind is a philosophical fool's errand.
Ben
Comments (44)
I have a problem with premise one. I don't know what you mean by "moral." Also, you seem to have a whole host of enthymemes in that premise. Who defines what "moral" is? How does "moral" relate to "evil?" Is any man competent to judge others--(especially including God!)? How does knowledge relate to competency as a judge?
@soccerdadforlife - Didn't I define what moral (at the very least) is in premise 2?
@WAR_ON_ERROR - No, I still don't know what you mean by "moral." What is your basis for thinking that something is evil or good? Can you define good/evil without relying on a biblical understanding? Or do you accept the biblical understanding of good/evil and seek to establish that believing in God is absurd or that the way that the Bible views good/evil is absurd? If you avoid using the biblical definition, then you have the problem of getting others to accept your definition. If you accept it, then you may still not understand the definition, since a lot of exegesis would be involved. I think that the problem is a can of worms.
@soccerdadforlife - It is an internal critique that doesn't rely on external definitions of evil. So it doesn't really matter if "moral realism" is viable in naturalistic terms. Hence, no can of worms.
@WAR_ON_ERROR - I would say that, generally, you are trivializing complex stuff. My reply should give you a hint that your argument is inadequate. Do you want Bryan involved? He always gives helpful feedback, in my experience.
@soccerdadforlife - Yeah, I'd like this as robust as possible. I'm sure Bryan will find every little hole if they are to be found.
Premise 1: Doesn't classical theology define God as goodness itself because He perfectly conforms to His essence (pure actuality)?
Response 5: You seem to be relying heavily on a very narrow definition of the word "perfect." If this is the best possible world then it would still be accurate to say that God is entirely without fault or defect (definition 1a from Merriam-Webster).
Objection 3A is correct in that freewill is the crux of the reason.
In Response 3A, you fail to see the disconnect of God creating beings with their "own" freewill to do evil, and God creating evil. It seems to me like atheists continually stumble over this point. It's as though they aren't capable of truly understanding freewill. And in the case that God does exist, you are convincing yourself that you are able to judge God as not being perfect because you, in your limited knowledge of not understanding God's ways, have made a definitive conclusion that because you don't understand it, therefore God can't be perfect. God has "temporarily" allowed evil to exist. After Judgment Day, it will not ever exist in heaven for the rest of eternity.
I'm too sober and under slept to shift the map over to the right, so I'll just start on the left-hand side for now.
While the response to the classic theology may be to say that we have to give up part of it, that need not be the case. It could be that our interpretation of it is wrong. That is a response I'm sure we've all seen before: i.e., what we consider to be evil actually isn't evil in the eyes of God. Therefore, God remains pure, and it is our perception of evil that is in error. This sort of goes to what SDFL was getting at with "what is morality?" We need to have a clear definition of good and evil.
It is true that premise 2 does inform us that, at least with regard to God creating man, we are supposed to be refrain from "impurity," but that still leaves the concept of "good" (pure) nebulous. That passage also needs to be taken in context. It may not be itself a moral maxim so much as a statement about conduct of people. So the maxim is that people should avoid impurity. This is characteristically different than a statement that is making a metaphysical claim about the nature of moral reality (i.e., that there isn't evil in the world or shouldn't be). Musterion brings up a good point in that God may be all good, but that does not require it to avoid putting evil in the world. As she says, the evil in the world can find its source in man, in which case the argument from evil needs to attack the crux of that issue: why does God allow his creation to be evil? This is where apologetics steps in to address that to have freewill requires allowing us to make errors, to be impure, to fail, etc. In permitting that we can learn, grow, love and be independent of just being made to be good. Otherwise, the moral maxim that we should avoid impurity wouldn't make sense if we were designed to be pure. We wouldn't even have a morality; we wouldn't be autonomous!
Of course, this would still leave open the interpretation where God condemns you for your failures that he permitted you to do in the first place. That is where I find the argument from evil most significant: how can one receive an eternal punishment for a human mistake? So even if we admit, for the sake of argument, that the Bible is correctly interpreting morality and human creation, then we still face the problem whenever anyone interprets the issues regarding punishment and hell, etc., because such an interpretation is so far repugnant that it demands we refuse God. It isn't going to be a logical argument since it is contradictory, but who the hell would submit to a God that says "here, I'll leave it up to you to do this right, make you so that you are designed to fail, and if you don't self-correct I'm going to make you suffer for eternity!" Yeah, fuck you God. That is about the only response a rational human being can have! Of course, not everyone interprets it that way. Usually fundamentalists make this interpretation. I don't think it is as widespread, but who knows what the reality of those proportions are (but fundamentalists are a minority; them with Catholics make up the simple majority, roughly).
So the argument from evil is not an attack on the fact that evil exists and it is incompatible with God existing. The argument most telling is the one that attacks specifically how God relates to there being evil in the world--namely, a God that demands an infinite punishment for a finite crime should not be a God to which anyone wants to submit. Those that do under those interpretations must have something wrong with their moral compass. Upon other interpretations God can coexist just fine with evil in the world. Those qualitative differences between interpretations must be recognized so that we know which parameters lead to which paltry versions of God.
@soccerdadforlife - I'm subscribed so I do get updates, and if it has to do with logic or ethics of course I'll get there eventually. I've been busy lately. I couldn't actually read the picture from my phone very well at all, which is why I had to wait to get on the computer to see. I don't do that much anymore lol
I'm still unconvinced that there is a valid logical argument from evil.
Why must a Christian accept premise 2? How do you show that it is impossible that there could be some greater good which could only be achieved by permitting some amount of evil?
Why should a Christian accept your definition of moral perfection? Couldn’t someone morally perfect still choose to prevent a murder if she only had time to either prevent the murder or stop a shoplifter? She would have allowed a preventable evil, but was constrained in such a way that she needed to allow the small evil in order to prevent a greater evil and bring about the best possible outcome. You can define moral perfection as either always making the perfect moral choice, or as bringing about an outcome without any evil. Since we typically evaluate moral agents by whether they always make the morally best decision, the former seems like a better definition. In that case, God could still be perfectly good without “grading on a curve”.
In Response 1B_2 it seems like you’re just saying that the universe intuitively seems morally ambivalent to you. Many Christians intuitively see God’s love exemplified in all parts of the world. For it to be a valid logical argument from evil, you need to prove your point, not just beat Christians over the head with your intuitions.
The argument hinges on an equivocation in the word 'evil'. Christians don't think there is actually anything that is evil. What I mean by that, is that there is nothing in the creative order which isn't morally justified for God to have permitted or actively created.
Of course, Christians talk about things as being evil or not evil because that is how it seems from our perspective. If a man kills his father - who led a good life - to receive his inheritance, he has done an evil thing. But if that man is eventually led through a story of redemption, the question becomes, is the world in which that story happens one worth actualizing? With some details to be filled in, I would say it is one worth actualizing. It has a deep moral worth to it, one in which the man made a wrong decision and then redeemed himself once he realized his wrongdoing.
So the narrow instance of the man killing his father is an evil instance. But is the whole story an evil one? One a person would be wrong to actualize? I don't think so. That's why we don't think there's anything which is in the ultimate sense 'evil' - from God's perspective, when all the features of the world are filled out, the world is one which it is good to have.
And why is it good to have despite all the the things that go on that we (humans) call evil? Because all of the virtues there are, the entire kinds of lives we live with their risk and moral and spiritual intensity, and all the stories and poetry that have ever been written - these flourish because of the evil that is in the world. If we didn't live in the atmosphere in which we live, with all of the bad things that happen, a serious amount of value in the world would be irrevocably lost. We wouldn't be able to help one another, be responsible for one another, or love in any significant sense at all. I think it takes a lot of very hard thinking to wonder whether we would really want to throw all that away.
So Christians don't think there actually is any evil. So God fulfills the second premise: he has avoided all evil. I would say bad things happen: the world is a conflation of bad-making properties and good-making properties. But the bad-making properties are outweighed in all cases by the good-making properties, and nothing actually evil will have happened.
@soccerdadforlife -@Jayman777 - @musterion99 - @bryangoodrich - @Inquiring Infidel - @StrokeofThought - Thanks for all the feedback. I've updated the argument map accordingly.
@WAR_ON_ERROR - Your response to me in 3B_1 doesn't seem to make sense as a reply to what I said. It seems to be a red herring. That would be like saying if a father had a son who murdered somebody, the father is responsible for the freewill actions of his son.
In Objection 3B_2 (you forgot to put my name in that one), your response is moot in my opinion. You say it presupposes God. Well of course it does. The whole map does. The answer to your other question, in which "you" presuppose God, is that yes, if you're a bible believing Christian, you accept anything God does, knowing that you don't have the infinite knowledge and wisdom that he has. For an atheist, it doesn't matter because they don't believe God exists in the first place.
Your response in 3B_3, again makes no sense to me because you are presupposing and judging God as being imperfect, when that is just according to your own conclusions and cannot be substantiated. You then appeal to response 5A_1 where it appears that you refuse to accept the possibility that God can be without error, instead of acknowledging that it's possible you're wrong and he can be without error in spite of your own perceptions of believing he has error.
You then try to use the analogy of a straight line in comparison to God. To me, that fails. We can understand what a straight line is, but we cannot understand what an infinite being that spoke the universe into existence is. You then say that "it's not accurate to say that if a perfectly good God existed he would be without fault or defect because apparently Christians have to conclude that faults and defects are logically necessary." I already covered this when I said - "You fail to see the disconnect of God creating beings with their "own" freewill to do evil, and God creating evil."
@WAR_ON_ERROR - You may want to add an Objection 0DB such that:
Christians or non-Christians claiming something "evil" does not necessarily imply it is actually evil in the eyes of God.
We clearly have a discord between what is actually the case and what is perceived to be the case. Of course we have to question whether we know something is evil, but that is a fundamental paradox: we don't know. Agnostics and many Christians are willing to accept this ignorance, while still believing in God (or not). To claim something actually is the case is tantamount to claiming to have knowledge of the case. Anyone that claims as much puts themselves into a very difficult position because then they need to justify how it is the case that such perceived things are, in fact, evil. The fundamental question arises: how do you know God perceives that as evil?
I just get reminded of something Joe Rogan said ("Talking Monkeys in Space")
"Maybe God made a monkey that doesn't like to think it's a monkey and lies a lot."
Sure, some people think God gives them insight, and they'll claim to know something of the mind of God. They're probably full of shit. They can believe it all they want, but it isn't knowledge, nor warrants such a status. If it isn't knowledge, no one can claim it to be how God perceives his creation. Therefore, the response that what Christians claim is evil is what God perceives as evil does not follow.
Response 0A: Objection 0A equates classical theology with the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) perspective. From this perspective, it is not true that everything perfectly conforms to its essence. Goodness is defined. More importantly, God's existence is certain if A-T metaphysics are true. In other words, the problem of evil is not a problem. This form of classical theology has to be attacked at its metaphysical roots.
Response 5A_1: My objection did not require a new word for perfection to be created. It relied on the very first definition from Merriam-Webster. I am assuming that you think the problem of evil disproves the existence of a morally perfect God. If this is the case then you must show that this is not the best possible world, for if this is the best possible world then God is without fault or defect.
Response 5A_1A: You falsely assume that the theistic response does not still view God as perfectly moral. We do view God as perfectly moral but realize that the best possible world may contain necessary evils. By way of an imperfect analogy, it's as if you are saying a person is not morally perfect because he killed someone in self-defense while the theist is saying that the person could still be morally perfect because killing in self-defense is justified (a necessary evil).
@WAR_ON_ERROR -
Your response is that if what I said is true, there's nothing to punish on judgment day.
Agents are still responsible for their evil actions even if on the whole it is a good thing that the world exists. A man killing his father can fit into a world that is worth having. But if the son doesn't repent, he is still morally culpable for his actions, and should be punished.
But the fact that there is an evil agent in the world is irrelevant if the world on the whole is a good one. A narrow instance of evil is only an objection to God's existence if it entails that the whole set of features that comprise the world would make for a world that God would morally unjustified in creating. I don't think narrow instances of evil do entail this, given the kinds of arguments I gave above about why narrow instances of evil allow good things which we would otherwise not be able to have.
So you are missing a link from narrow instances of evil (there being evil agents who perform certain evil actions) to your conclusion that the world is one God would be unjustified in creating.
@musterion99 - Updated.
@bryangoodrich - I've clarified some of the language to make it clear I'm addressing mainstream Christian conceptions of God. Obviously this argument does mean to address all possible conceptions of divinity.
@Jayman777 - Before I update the argument map on your first point, from the A-T perspective, what is an example of something that does not conform to its own essence?
@StrokeofThought - Updated.
In general, to everyone, I've done a lot of work re-working the map to not be redundant and to make it more explicit at every step of the way. Hopefully I've succeeded. It is an interesting challenge (to me at least) to make it all work coherently together. Thanks for participating!
Ben
@WAR_ON_ERROR - Well, now that I've worked my way over to the right-hand side of the map, I do have something to say about response 3B_1A on responsible parenting. It seems a bit out of place to impose upon God our traditional values of good parenting, because to achieve that generalized maxim that "if we could make our children behave perfectly moral, then we are obligated to make them behave perfectly moral" may require that we erase their freewill. So then we are faced with a decision: to have freewill or not, and God will take care of the rest. Clearly freewill is presupposed to have a great significance; so to have freewill requires allowing human failure to occur. How God handles that (say, Floods or Apocalypse) is still questionable and suspect, but the fact still remains: we are in no position to impose a moral maxim on God's parenting.
This all also brings up a policy issue: should God be an interventionist? Atheists seem to criticize God a lot about what he's not doing when there is suffering in the world--as if it is his responsibility to prevent suffering. Who says God is supposed to intervene? Certainly he is supposed to have the power to, and by not intervening does not mean he is too weak, lax or apathetic. It still is a fundamental challenge: is he supposed to intervene? I rarely ever see anyone justify why God is morally obligated to prevent anything, other than some loose statement about "suffering exists, God is all loving, and any caring person would prevent suffering if they could." Well, says who? That is wholly unrealistic, regardless of one's capabilities. For one, the evils we face, the suffering we incur, and the tragedy of life is what makes life worth living. If we lived in a paradise without worry or fear, we'd be some mindless dumb animals growing fat on our apathy to do anything. No one struggles to achieve greatness if greatness is handed over to them on a golden platter. Maybe God knows enough that a more hands off approach is better for humanity in the long run, even if he intervenes occasionally or in small ways, if at all. I mean, if he did it right, he wouldn't have to do a damn thing! Tragedy may be built into it. Life sucks (or, as Buddha says, life is suffering), and maybe that is a good thing after all.
@bryangoodrich - Updated.
Good work, sir.
JT
@WAR_ON_ERROR - What is obscene about needing supervillains so we can appreciate superheros? Just consider the counterfactual: what if there were no villains? A superhero would be superfluous if not even existent as a superhero. What is a moral world without sin? It wouldn't be morally perfect; it would be morally neutral! That, I fear, is where this morality argument seems to lead, but I fail to see how a morally neutral world would be a morally perfect world. So you cannot have good without evil, and if God's creation is to be good, then there must be evil. Otherwise, there's just creation with neither.
@WAR_ON_ERROR - I believe 3B_1A is another red herring in reply to my comment. What you described as perfect will is not freewill but actually limited will. If we have true freewill, we must be free to choose evil.
In 3B_2A you say you are just evaluating. Ok, well so am I. I'm responding to your evaluation with my evaluation.
@WAR_ON_ERROR - If I drew a straight line on a piece of paper it would not perfectly conform to the essence of a line.
"It may be worth it to you and me, but "on balance" concepts are not concepts of moral perfection by their very nature and hence cannot justify a morally perfect God."
For any action that an agent might perform the action is either morally justified, morally neutral, or morally unjustified. There aren't any other options. A morally perfect agent is one that performs no morally unjustified actions.
What makes an action morally justified? There exist certain good-making properties in the world, such as an instance of something being a kept promise, something being pleasurable, something being an increase of a virtue, when something issues respect another agents deserves, and so on. Wherever these properties occur they tend to make the action that would instantiate them morally justified.
Oppositely, there are also bad-making properties. These include things like something tending to cause pain, the breaking of a promise, disrespecting an agent, and so on. Wherever one of these properties occur they tend to make an action morally unjustified.
There are lots of both kinds of properties, and then of course there are also morally neutral properties. For instance, that the car you are considering buying is a green one makes no moral difference to the situation. And so on for lots of other obviously morally neutral properties.
When there is an action we are considering doing that will instantiate both good-making and bad-making properties, it becomes an action for us to contemplate morally. Is it a morally justified action? Many famous ethical scenarios are predicated upon such combinations of good-making and bad-making properties, such as the one in which a train is headed for five people, and it is up to you to switch its direction so it will only kill one. There are good-making properties and bad-making properties to weigh and consider, and the fact that both of them are a part of the action sometimes makes the answer unclear.
So the question is, are there any actions which include bad-making properties which are good/morally justified to do? Yes, there are. It is good to study for a test, even though it will cause you stress. It is good to give blood, even though it makes you lose blood and there are risks associated with it. It is good to fight in just wars. It is good to go to the dentist. It is good to lie to save someone's life (in many cases, at least). It is good to fight off a would-be rapist. And so on, and so on, and so on.
So whether or not there is something which is - in itself - a bad-making property in the world does not matter. Why? Because God did not just actualize that instance of the world, he actualized the whole world. That is the action under evaluation. That action is one, like all others, which is either morally justified, morally neutral, or morally unjustified. In order to have an argument which impugns God's moral perfection, your conclusion must be that it was morally unjustifed. To do this, you have pointed to instances of evil, and also to the fact that some agents in the end will be judged as totally corrupt. However, this doesn't get you close to your conclusion. Why? Because there are a lot of other properties in the world which you have left out which make the world one which God was morally justified in creating.
Now, if there are any bad-making properties in the world that are unnecessary for the existence of some good-making property, then God is morally culpable for allowing it when he didn't need to. The problem is that it seems bad-making properties are so inextricable from the achievement of certain good-making properties, that they have to be in the world if we are going to have those good things. And many of those good things seem very worth having, as mentioned above.
So I think God's action of creating the world is analagous to many of the moral decisions we have to make; good-making and bad-making properties coincide all the time. And there are some actions with bad-making properties that are morally justified. As long as that's the case, you don't have an argument. The mere fact of a bad-making property occurring in the world gives you nothing, since there are counterexamples to the proposition, "Any agent A who performs an action T that brings about about any bad-making property P is necessarily a morally flawed agent in that respect." I can bring about P and still have done nothing wrong.
So to get to the conclusion that God is morally unjustified in having created this world, you need to either argue the bad-making properties in the world outweigh the good (the evidential argument from evil), or argue that there are bad-making properties instantiated which lead to no good thing at all (a claim I am nearly certain no human has the warrant to make). As it is, there has been no good argument given that God is not morally perfect, given the way the world is.
@Zerowing21 - Thanks!
@bryangoodrich - Updated.
@musterion99 - Updated.
@Jayman777 - Well I would say that the material instance of a line is precisely what it is in the way that it is to the extent that it is until it isn't that way any more. I don't buy into "abstract entities" but I don't think that debate infringes on this one. Or rather my materialistic perspective isn't relevant. Presumably, God as a perfect himself, like a perfect line in terms of Platonic Realism, should actually be literally perfect morally which plays into debating Premise 2. I'm fine with the map how it is, currently, since what you've asserted in Objection 0A appears circular and without content. God is what God is, but shouldn't there be some details in there? Like what moral perfection practically amounts to? Feel free to take things in whatever direction.
@StrokeofThought - Updated.
Response 3B_1A_1B_1 - When Christians are speaking of freewill, the context is to be able to choose between good and evil and loving or disobeying God, not choosing how tall we are. You say our options are limited in terms of good and bad. You and I are free to lie, steal, commit fornication or adultery, to get drunk, kill someone, etc, And even if they were/are limited, God would have the sovereign choice to do that.
@WAR_ON_ERROR - Interesting response with the straight line. I think a more telling geometric example is the fact that what constitutes a straight line? We take for granted that a straight line looks something like
_________________________________
but that isn't necessarily the case at all. In hyperbolic geometry, for instance, a straight line exhibits different properties being that it is hyperbolic! We cannot view a straight line in a vacuum no more than we can view goodness in a vacuum. Goodness needs to be assessed systematically, and part of that system is whether or not the "shape" of the moral fabric on which goodness resides varies. Now I was not trying to suggest goodness without sin is not goodness for the lack of sin (see below). What I was getting at was that goodness without sin may not be goodness at all. A world in which the moral fabric by its very nature excludes any evil by design is a world with a fundamentally different "shape." So while we may think of goodness as we perceive in a world full of evil like we think of straight lines in Eucliean geometry, a world that must not contain evil may be itself a world where a straight line is unfamiliar to our perception, just like a straight line appears odd to us in elliptic or hyperbolic geometry even though it exhibits the same properties of "straight line-ness."
Now, we can also consider this from another perspective. Goodness depends heavily on an interpretation. This is implicit in what I said above, but more expressive in terms of how we perceive goodness. There is a qualitative and significant difference between choosing a good A from the choice set {A, B} than choosing good A from the choice set {A, B, C}. This has been experimentally and logically proven (see Ariely's work in "Predictably Irrational" and Sen's work in "Choice, Measure and Welfare," respectively). The reason should be apparent, we're engaging in two entirely different situations. It is even more telling when we consider the example (by Sen) where a person chooses to starve themselves for religious fasting and another person is starved because of famine. One has a choice to starve or not, the other can only starve.
Why I bring this up is to question what is good without evil? A deeper discussion of what exactly this valuational activity is regarding our assignment of "good" to anything can be found at the coTIT (link). When we value something as good we are making a choice (tacitly or not) regarding how we interpret the world relating to us such that we ascribe a certain value. This choice assignment falls under the same conditions as those in the choice examples above, and any choice instance. When we make choices there is implicitly a valuational activity going on, and depending on whether or not other values are available changes that valuational activity.
So "good" in a world without evil is fundamentally different from the standpoint of the valuational agent than is "good" in a world where there is "evil." The result is similar to that above, but they differ with respect to the orientation of values. The former was an issue of the value "landscape" itself, and the latter is about the valuational activity in any landscape. Of course the two are related, but they have the same disparity when evil is excluded. It is not a lack of sin that is the problem here. It is the orientation to which goodness exists at all when the world does not have evil. The fact is, even with sin we still have these issues because we can always concern ourselves with the valuational activity or with this sort of "ontology of moral values." The significance of removing sin so that good can flourish is to presume how valuation occurs in a world with that ontology. It is precisely the point that we don't know what such a world would be like, nor can be compare it to what we perceive here.
So in a technical sense it boils down to this:
To require that an appropriate world of God's creation requires that evil be eradicated by design is to make an implicit comparison between this supposedly required world W and the world we live in W*, when the fact is that such a declaration presupposes that they commensurable. It would be nice to be in a position to say that W is better than W* or vice versa, but we may be in a position where such a relation does not exist. It also begs the question that good is semantically the same between W and W* when, per the above two considerations, it is very much a changed concept and value.
and I'm not using chrome anymore! wtf
@musterion99 - @bryangoodrich - Updated.
@bryangoodrich - What's Chrome doing wrong?
@WAR_ON_ERROR -
Ben,
You cannot become a morally flawed agent by doing something that is morally justified. There are morally justified actions that include bad things in them. I believe creating this world to be one such action.
Response 3B_1A_1B_2 - We're starting to go in circles. You're conclusion according to your own limited knowledge is that God would limit us to only good options. My reply is the same I've been giving. You're not understanding exactly what freewill entails. We have to have options of choosing evil. And God allowing us those options in no way makes him responsible for our own freewill choices, just as a father is not responsible for the freewill actions of his son if he commits murder.
@StrokeofThought - Updated.
@musterion99 - At least we know exactly where we disagree.
@WAR_ON_ERROR - Chrome butchered my last comment: e.g., the spacing.
Your map is becoming huge! In programming there is something called modularization. If you have a program for making a meal, say, it would have in its main function the most general small set of steps like:
cutVegetables()
seasonMean()
boilWater()
... etc.
Then in those individual functions we would have the details of how to perform those tasks which would then also call upon further methods to achieve their tasks. Functionally the program would run by just substituting those details all into the main function, but it would become so big and cumbersome as to be impossible to manage.
I feel your map is turning this way quickly! I think what might help in future advancements is some sort of categorization (similar to modularization). How to muster that creativity I don't know, but to make the map more readable you may need to start grouping things or splitting things off into clusters of some sort, maybe even making multiple maps to address multiple issues.
As for the responses, 1B in particular, I don't see how it forces God to be not perfectly good. The point is that his creation does not have to be perfectly good. The challenge is this, can God create a world in which freewill flourishes without evil? If God is all powerful, he should be able to do it. But in doing so, it may very well nullify the very character of "freewill" and "good" so as not to be truly freewill and good. To achieve that, God may be able to make the comparison that we cannot, that world W* is better than W, from my previous notation, and therefore W* is good where W fails. It is a qualitative choice to make the world in this way, but because he made that choice does not imply anything about what God was capable of doing or indicate what he must do, unless we feel we are in a better position to see which of these metaphysical options is best when they may very well be incommensurable (to our limited comprehension).
@WAR_ON_ERROR - True
@bryangoodrich - But in doing so, it may very well nullify the
very character of "freewill" and "good" so as not to be truly freewill
and good. To achieve that, God may be able to make the comparison that
we cannot, that world W* is better than W, from my previous notation,
and therefore W* is good where W fails. It is a qualitative choice to
make the world in this way, but because he made that choice does not
imply anything about what God was capable of doing or indicate what he
must do, unless we feel we are in a better position to see which of
these metaphysical options is best when they may very well be
incommensurable (to our limited comprehension).
Exactly what I believe but have said in much simpler terms. Good articulation
@WAR_ON_ERROR -
It doesn't do any good to respond to my attack on your premise by referring back to the premise itself. Let's go back to the principle you seem to support:
Principle of Moral Fault:
Any agent A who performs an action T that brings about about any bad-making property P is necessarily a morally flawed agent in that respect.
Let's say I am on some train tracks on a high bridge over a river with some friends, when suddenly we see a train coming. There is too little time to run to land on the other side, so the only option is to jump. But I can see a friend that is clearly petrified and won't respond to my shouts to jump. So I grab them and jump off the bridge, and we land in the water down below where we are significantly hurt, but not dead.
(I use this example, by the way, because it is a real one - it happened a few months ago in Florida, only the girls didn't make it out alive, which people have speculated is because they were too paralyzed with fear to move.)
Now, am I a morally flawed agent? I made my friend suffer the injuries off a high fall of a bridge. The fact of their injuries and pain were instantiated because of me and my action. Because of what I did, and your principle, you are beholden to call me a morally flawed agent because of what I did.
The problem is that I did nothing wrong, and it's quite obvious I did nothing wrong. No one else would think my action was any sort of moral blight on me as an agent. I saved someone's life; how could that worsen my moral status?
The upshot is that the principle is false, and thus premise 2 has no justification. You need that principle to be true for the premise to work.
@WAR_ON_ERROR -
Well I would say that the material instance of a line is precisely what it is in the way that it is to the extent that it is until it isn't that way any more.
There's no disagreement on that point but I'm saying that the line does not perfectly instantiate "lineness" (it is not a perfect line).
I don't buy into "abstract entities" but I don't think that debate infringes on this one.
Aristotle and Aquinas did not believe in a realm of forms like Plato.
Or rather my materialistic perspective isn't relevant.
If you are speaking with someone from the A-T perspective it is relevant. First, they will not find your disproof of God convincing. Second, they will be able to prove that God exists. Ultimately, these two points rest on their metaphysics. You can't adopt their metaphysics for the sake of argument because then you would have to admit that God exists. The only option I see is to show that their metaphysics are wrong. If you could successfully do that then you could move on to the logical problem of evil.
Presumably, God as a perfect himself, like a perfect line in terms of Platonic Realism, should actually be literally perfect morally which plays into debating Premise 2.
God's essence is pure actuality. If, somehow, God existed but was not pure actuality then he would not be goodness itself.
God is what God is, but shouldn't there be some details in there?
There is detail there. First, God's essence is pure actuality. Second, God perfectly conforms to his essence.
Like what moral perfection practically amounts to?
It amounts to perfectly conforming to one's essence.
Feel free to take things in whatever direction.
At this time I'm not in a position to take things much further. I was only introduced to Thomism about six months ago. But it highlights a general problem with the logical problem of evil: it depends that you and your opponent have the exact same beliefs concerning morality and perfection.
@bryangoodrich - I think I have an idea for how to simplify the organization of the map, but that'll be on hold for a few days at least. Hopefully, for now, repeated points will be made known by me directing people to that place on the map, rather than people being familiar with the map in its entirety.
Also, I've slightly reworded Response 3B_1A_1C_1_1B to be more clear (I hope).
@StrokeofThought - I pointed you back to Premise 2 in conjunction with another response (3B_1) to show the connection there. Though I think Response 5A_2 clarifies well, so I've substituted that in place of pointing to Premise 2.
@Jayman777 - I still don't see how perfectly conforming to actuality makes a meaningful definition of "good." Do you have a link to a good article that might help elucidate whatever metaphysics may need to be addressed? Most of what you've said is too vague to be helpful. I'm not sure either of us are doing justice to whatever the A-T position specifically entails.
@bryangoodrich - "What is obscene about needing supervillains so we can appreciate superheros? Just consider the counterfactual: what if there were no villains? A superhero would be superfluous if not even existent as a superhero. What is a moral world without sin? It wouldn't be morally perfect; it would be morally neutral! That, I fear, is where this morality argument seems to lead, but I fail to see how a morally neutral world would be a morally perfect world. So you cannot have good without evil, and if God's creation is to be good, then there must be evil. Otherwise, there's just creation with neither. "
Perhaps there is creation with both. It's a polarizing paradox, absolute good, absolute evil, yet one defines the other, God, Satan. From our human perspective we have seen both good and evil and prefer the good over the evil not realizing that evil is necessary for good to exist. Our tendency then is to take it to it's logical extreme in both directions and use it as a divining rod we call morality. But the framework of our morality is biased to always prefer the yang over the yin, and I think that is why we have a paradox on our hands. Both good and evil are necessary as ontological beings, which is why I dismiss not only the idea of God as defined by theists, but the moral argument we see going on here from philosophy. It's heavily biased and laden with definition designed to prefer one over the other, or good over evil. Evil is just as necessary as good, it's just not preferable to humans.
This argument requires and answer to why absolute good, which is assumed to be the creator, can exist if there is evil, or why evil exists if an absolutely good creator created it, and attempts apologetics to answer the question. I think the question is wrong. There is simply good and evil. The universe which accidentally spawn humans has, and had, no concern for either. Man has invented morality as a way to avoid evil in a universe where the entire subject is relative and not important to anyone but humans. However you tailor make morality, good and evil as we define it will always be around. So explaining why it's necessary to have an absolutely good being and an absolutely evil being won't do much in the long run to address our plight. I prefer to think in terms of Taoism and accept both, because it is useless to resist it or to explain it.
You have sufficiently (so far as I can tell for now) defined several terms of the argument. However, I did not see a definition for evil anywhere.
Allow me to suggest my definition for evil - undeserved human suffering.
You are probably wondering what difference this could possibly make. Let me show you...The doctrines of Hell and Total Depravity suggest that all humans are born DESERVING absolute, unrelenting, infinite suffering. Therefore, there couldn't be any UNDESERVED human suffering after the original sin of Adam and Eve.Moreover, since the garden of Eden was absolute bliss, there was not any human suffering before Adam and Eve sinned.
Thus, there has never been any UNDESERVED human suffering (a.k.a. evil).
However, if you instead want to argue concerning moral evil then we need to alter our definition. Moreover, since the basis of the moral argument from evil is God's absolute goodness, then we can simply define moral evil as - that which is inconsistent with God's goodness.
Obviously there are plenty of examples from experience of things that are inconsistent with God's goodness. However, does God's goodness obligate Him to prevent such things from happening? I think not. Is that not up to God's preference? Can not God choose to suspend His judgement according to His own mercy and will? It would be a shaky argument that suggests that God's goodness requires the prevention of anything inconsistent with His goodness.
I feel that most atheists stand on shaky ground concerning the logical problem of evil. This is mostly due to the the equivocation involved when atheists shift between the two definitions of 'evil' in the middle of an argument. I have heard too many atheists suggest that God is obligated to prevent moral evil because of the human suffering that is caused by that evil. This is the fallacy of equivocation.
Anyway, these are my thoughts.Patrick
Wow...there's a lot of work put into this already. What I don't see in here is the idea that the usual conception of God as omnipotent is suspect. In other words, theodicy typically gets hung up on that God is good and all-powerful. But what if, in order to create anything free, God necessarily is limited in his power? I'm thinking something along the lines of this book.
I'm seeing a lot of refutation of calvinist fundamentalism here (where evil really isn't evil and God controls everything...blech), but I'm not seeing much about Openness theories of God. There are Christians that believe that previous conceptions of omnipotence or omniscience are not compatible with the idea of a good God, or even (to strike a conservative note) that they are compatible with the scriptures.
Or does diminishing those two omnis mean we've left the discussion. In other words, we're not looking for Christians or theodicies that agree with you that God can't be tri-omni (which is, admittedly, a smaller number).