SimWorld without suffering

[PolyHedral]

We did, it didn't go anywhere.

 

[Blackdog22]

(Couldn’t find the original post to quote from)

Please identify the >suffering cut off point< that you believe would be acceptable....If it is anything above >zero< then someone is going to curse God for allowing it in this world ;-)

Since we are arguing from the perspective of believers I would have to say that Adam and Eve before the fall would be the line, or Heaven. Are you trying to argue that free will and non suffering are impossible while also believing that somehow Heaven exists? Are you honestly limiting God right now to make sense of the nonsensible?

Also, if this world was free of any kind of unnecessary suffering and we still got hurt by stumping our toe(which the Bible says won't happen in you believe in Jesus btw) I seriously doubt anyone would be freaking out. However living for 15 years with Wilsons disease before getting a diagnosis and having your mind, liver, and kidneys literally rot slowly (causing symptoms you couldn't fathom) is definitely worthy of cursing a loving God.

 

[Quagmire]

I think there are levels of unpleasantness that I wouldn't call suffering.

All unpleasantness is suffering. It's part of the most basic definition of the word: Suffering - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For example working out is self inflicted and it is pleasant for some people.

Then either they get something out of the suffering itself (in which case it's still suffering), or they're doing it wrong.

The people who do see working out as suffering usually avoid it,

Not true at all: I would bet if you asked any serious athlete if there were some level of suffering involved in any workout, they would give you a pretty emphatic "yes".

or in other words consider it bad.

Ah! Exactly! In this scenario, the suffering hurts, but it isn't "bad". Evidence right there that suffering, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad. The assigning of good/bad is completely dependent on situation, circumstance, and, more than anything else, human perception.

With alcohol it is self inflicted also.

Like I've mentioned before, in my experience, most of the suffering people go through is self-inflicted. Not all of course, but even when the suffering isn't self-inflicted the element of self-indulgence is almost always there. If you look at practically any situation where there's suffering you'll usually find that someone's self-indulgence played a key role: someone brought up the plight of the Pakistani people. It would be easy to trace their suffering back to the self-indulgence of the people in power on both sides of the conflict.

If we take a step back and decide to view the question on a larger scale, you can still say that, in a sense, even this kind of suffering is self-inflicted: it's suffering mankind is inflicting upon itself.

Since we're talking basically about God's relationship with mankind in general, it would be fair to introduce this perspective into the conversation.

My question here would be why is the restraint from alcohol suffering?

I guess you've never seen someone go through the DT's. Believe me, it isn't pretty.

If you're asking: Why would God cause or allow something positive, like overcoming alcoholism, to be such a negative experience, there are an endless list of possible answers for that, and they're all speculatory.

But we could throw "Why wouldn't He" at that one too.

What I'm saying is: if God gives us an easy way to accomplish something, like practicing a little self-honesty and self-restraint, and we don't utilize it, why should He make the consequences of that easy to deal with too?

Why was that law put in place? Going back to working out if the person working out does consider it suffering then why do we feel that way when working out?

Not sure what you're asking here, but if you're asking why someone would willingly go through the suffering, obviously they consider it worth it.

Before I say anything else, are you asking how suffering is bad? If so I would still have to ask how it is good.

I never said it was good, in and of itself. The point I'm trying to make is, if we take "we don't like it" out of the equation, what criteria are we using to classify it as either good or bad in and of itself.

And if we decide that "we like it or we just don't like it" is good enough a scale to designate something as either good or bad, then, since we're discussing an assumed relationship between humankind and an omnipotent Being, the relationship looks like this: Humankind pointing at God and saying "Unless you do everything I want you to do and don't do anything I don't want you to do, you're a bad person".

Aside from all the ex-girlfriend flashbacks this is giving me, would it be reasonable to expect this sort of relationship between a supposed All-powerful, All-knowing Being and one of the creatures He created?

I see from this post how good things could be accomplished after suffering,

Not after, through. I think that's a distinction that necessary to make.

but no reason why that suffering was necessary or good.

In observable terms, the suffering was necessary to accomplish the ends.

If you aren't trying to say it is good then where would you say suffering stood? Neutral?

Yes. If I were to put it into anything like theological terms I would classify suffering as a tool God uses. Tools only have moral implications in regards to how they're used.

Another question I would ask is If someone is burned alive then why do they feel that pain?

Well, looking at the bigger picture again we could say that the possibility of being burned to death is one of the risks we signed up for when we came up with the ability to create fire.

But I see what you're asking and it's a good question. That level of pain is something that would be hard to speculate on objectively even hypothetically. Thing is, in order to understand whether or not the pain was necessary/unnecessary, pointless or to some purpose, we would have to know a lot of things we don't know: is there's an afterlife? Since, ultimately, there seems to be a principle of balance operating in every other aspect of reality, could we expect (assuming there's a life after this one) that suffering in this life leads to some proportionate pay off in the next? Are we paying for something we did in our last life?

And here's a good one that fits in well with the OP: did we sign up for this?

We don't know. We don't know the the answers to any of these, which means, of course, that any yes-or-no answers that we choose to give would have to be based on some sort of speculation, philosophical or theological. In other words, all just guesses, and you can't apply a guess to something unobservable and call it a fact.

What purpose does it serve? Most people watching and the persons perspective would be that this was a bad thing.

True, but again, in this scenario calling it "bad" is just a way of saying "we don't like it".

I'm not saying anybody should like it, I'm just saying we would have to understand a lot more about Life, the Universe, and Everything in order to make any absolute moral determinations about it.

 

[Blackdog22]

True, but again, in this scenario calling it "bad" is just a way of saying "we don't like it".

I'm not saying anybody should like it, I'm just saying we would have to understand a lot more about Life, the Universe, and Everything in order to make any absolute moral determinations about it.

If we can't judge things based on what we think or feel about them, then how do we judge anything? When I am with my girlfriend I feel good, if I am not allowed to use that feeling to assume a stance of good then I have nothing else to go on. I guess I am asking, why are you taking out the only component we have to judge this on, if you throw out our perception of things as a whole(That we do or don't like something) then you throw out everything we have to judge anything by right? This means that we can never argue anything from a human perspective ever and might as well shut this forum down right? Otherwise our human perspective, that God supposedly gave us, is all we have to go on. From a believers stand point, should I consider that God gave us all faulty perceptions?

 

[Falvlun]

Hey, Meow Mix, sorry about dropping out of the discussion like that. Anyway, I still wanted to address some points from a bunch of pages ago.

Well, how are you defining "benevolence?" I've been using benevolence as the notion of never deliberately causing harm and that the ends don't justify the means.

The definition I was working with was "maximizing the amount of good", but I can see how that runs into problems.

Dictionary.com defines it as
1. desire to do good to others; goodwill; charitableness: to be filled with benevolence toward one's fellow creatures.
2. an act of kindness; a charitable gift.

So, I'm willing to define omnibenevolence as a perfect desire to do good to others.

"Causing no harm" is not necessarily an intrinsic aspect of benevolence.

You also presented some scenarios where brutal harm was inflicted for the "greater good" to demonstrate the unpalatable nature of the "ends justifying the means" stance.

I don't think that the ends always justify the means, but neither do I think that the ends never justify the means. I would think it hard to take the absolute approach to either stance.

 

[Falvlun]

As for your assertion that it is special pleading to claim that it is possible that suffering is consistent with benevolence, I remain unconvinced.

I can describe my concept of a world where physical suffering isn't possible and answer any potential questions about it.

Can you describe a world where leukemia kids is somehow good, where it wouldn't have been better if the leukemia (or all physical suffering) wasn't there in the first place?

I can describe pink unicorns, but that doesn't make them any more probable. I can't really describe quantum mechanics, but that doesn't make it any less real.

The ability to describe something really has no bearing upon its possibility.

Furthermore, I'm assuming that any God being would have vastly more knowledge than I. Do you really find it surprising that God could understand and utilize concepts beyond that of human ability? Our perspective is limited; you are asking me to explain the perspective of a God.

Suffering is NORMALLY linked to evil/bad/undesirable. You're saying it's inexplicably good/desirable (to exist). That's special pleading unless you explain how that could be the case.

Suffering is not always linked to the undesirable, as many people in this thread have pointed out.

But, even if suffering were always considered bad, it's not like humans haven't gotten things wrong before. People used to think that washing themselves was bad.

I understand the definition of special pleading. And I still think it all basically flies out the window when we are talking about an exceptional Being with exceptional powers. All of Its abilities are an exception to the norm.

I have no idea but that isn't what's in question here, nor can I see how it'd be relevant.

This was in response to my question as to how omnipotence actually works. I find it extremely relevant, and your response rather telling.

It goes back to my original point: You assume that God could rewrite the physical laws to reduce physical suffering based purely upon the definition of omnipotence. You don't know how physical laws can be rewritten, but you know that they can because an omnipotent being is doing it.

Similarly, I don't know how suffering is benevolent, but since an omnibenevolent being is causing it, I know that it is.

 

[Quagmire]

If we can't judge things based on what we think or feel about them, then how do we judge anything?

I depends on what we're talking about: if we're trying to decide what toppings we want on our pizza, then "I like/dislike" is a perfectly viable set of criteria.

If we're talking about something with a broader scope, basically anything that involves or effects someone else, then "I like/dislike" wont cut it. This, IMO, is especially true when we're trying to make determinations about the character or quality of another entity:

"I like peperoni, therefore, peperoni is good. I don't like anchovies, therefore anchovies are bad" is a perfectly acceptable statement and sentiment and there wouldn't be any reason to defend it or look any further into the matter.

On the other hand, something like: " I don't like people with red hair. Red headed people bug me and are therefore bad" would require a bit more scrutiny and demand a bit more explaining. In this scenario, it would fall to the person making the statement to demonstrate how exactly---aside from his own personal dislike---we're to determine anything about the quality or character of red-headed people in general based solely on the fact that they have red hair.

Since, so far, all we have to make any kind of a determination about the nature of suffering is "we don't like it", and since we're trying to use the fact of suffering to make determinations about someone's character, we still need to establish why suffering is "bad" apart from our personal aversion to it.

When I am with my girlfriend I feel good, if I am not allowed to use that feeling to assume a stance of good then I have nothing else to go on. I guess I am asking, why are you taking out the only component we have to judge this on,

Even in this scenario, in that it involves another person, you would still need to go beyond "I like this" in order to call the relationship a "good" thing. Number 1, she would have to feel the same way (I'm not trying to imply that she doesn't, just demonstrating that the way you feel about it is only one variable in the equation). Even then, the relationship would ultimately have to be a good thing for both people involved; there are plenty of relationships based on a mutual sense of feeling good that are ultimately destructive to both parties.

if you throw out our perception of things as a whole(That we do or don't like something) then you throw out everything we have to judge anything by right?

No, there's a whole spectrum of other considerations. Most of them revolve around our ability to think forward and to take other people into consideration in our evaluations:

An alcoholic likes drinking.

An alcoholic that has the capacity to think forward will see that he's destroying himself and acknowledge his drinking as a bad thing even though he likes drinking.

An alcoholic that can think forward and has the capacity to take other people's feelings and welfare into consideration will be able to see that his drinking is negatively effecting those around him and has the potential to cause untold damage in their lives as well as his own. Obviously, while he's considering all this, he can see that his drinking is a bad thing.

This means that we can never argue anything from a human perspective ever and might as well shut this forum down right?

You seem to be under the impression that I'm somehow calling for some sort of moratorium on expressing feelings or taking them into consideration while trying to evaluate life or any aspect thereof.

*(from earlier in the post)*

why are you taking out the only component we have to judge this on,

I'm not, I'm just trying to show you that it isn't the only component we have and that, by itself, it isn't an adequate determiner of quality in all cases.

Just want to point out: you seem to be thinking in exclusive extremes quite a bit. What I mean is, when I originally asked why suffering was bad, you took that to be synonymous with "I think suffering is good".

Now, while I'm saying human emotion isn't enough to go on while making character/quality judgments about another entity, you seem to think I'm implying that emotion itself is somehow "bad".

I'm not saying it's bad, I'm saying that by itself it's inadequate for making the determinations the PoE claims to be making.

The only reason I'm trying to get people in this thread to put emotion aside for a moment and look at suffering objectively is to show that they're evaluating the implications of the fact of suffering based solely on emotion. And if that's the case, given that the fact of suffering is the hub of the whole argument, then the PoE isn't a logical proposition, it's an emotional one.

In order for the PoE to qualify as a logical argument, someone would still have to demonstrate an objective reason for classifying suffering as "evil".

Otherwise our human perspective, that God supposedly gave us, is all we have to go on. From a believers stand point, should I consider that God gave us all faulty perceptions?

The fact that we have limited perception isn't just a theological assertion.

 

[Blackdog22]

I will have to think on this Quagmire. Also, I do tend to go to the next likely case in my mind. Like hearing if it isn't good then it is bad, without necessarily considering the idea of neutral. I don't always do this, but with things like good and bad I will sometimes make a guess until I get more information.

On the redhead thing though, one thing I thought of was, that if everyone considers redheads bad, even redheads themselves, would it be worthy of being called bad? What I mean is that suffering by means of fire would be considered bad by most everyone as I said before. If there is a global agreement on the issue can it still be considered the opposite in your opinion?

 

[Meow Mix]

So, I'm willing to define omnibenevolence as a perfect desire to do good to others.

"Causing no harm" is not necessarily an intrinsic aspect of benevolence.

You also presented some scenarios where brutal harm was inflicted for the "greater good" to demonstrate the unpalatable nature of the "ends justifying the means" stance.

I don't think that the ends always justify the means, but neither do I think that the ends never justify the means. I would think it hard to take the absolute approach to either stance.

However, causing harm without purpose is definitely not benevolent. The default position given a set of observations is one of neutral skepticism: there is no purpose apparent in the existence of suffering. If you're claiming that there is one, or even possibly is one, the onus of proof falls squarely onto you. If you can't justify the assertion but say it's possible anyway then you're guilty of special pleading. More on this below.

As for your assertion that it is special pleading to claim that it is possible that suffering is consistent with benevolence, I remain unconvinced.

It certainly is if justification isn't offered. What justification do you have that suffering can be consistent with benevolence, particularly in the face of the fact that most suffering-causing actions are certainly NOT benevolent? You are advocating that something breaks the norm in an unknowable way. That's a classic, textbook example of special pleading fallacy. It's literally so much "by the book" that it could be used as a paramount example of special pleading because it fits the definition so exactly.

I can describe pink unicorns, but that doesn't make them any more probable. I can't really describe quantum mechanics, but that doesn't make it any less real.

The ability to describe something really has no bearing upon its possibility.[/quote]

The ability to justify a possibility does have bearing on its rationality, though. If you can't justify the possibility of something, yet you claim that it's possible inexplicably anyway, that is special pleading. That is fallacious.

Furthermore, I'm assuming that any God being would have vastly more knowledge than I. Do you really find it surprising that God could understand and utilize concepts beyond that of human ability? Our perspective is limited; you are asking me to explain the perspective of a God.

Not really, I'm just asking you to justify a claim you've made. If you agree that the claim is outside of your scope to make then you shouldn't have made it in the first place, because to make a claim outside of your scope is fallacious -- in this case, it's the fallacy of special pleading.

I get the argument that God would know more than us, but to turn around and claim that God can do something ostensibly contradictory in an inexplicable way without justification is special pleading. Yes, the statement that God can do things that we haven't figured out is justifiable... but any statements that get more specific than that require justification. This is one of those circumstances.

Suffering is not always linked to the undesirable, as many people in this thread have pointed out.

But, even if suffering were always considered bad, it's not like humans haven't gotten things wrong before. People used to think that washing themselves was bad.

That doesn't really work because suffering is a qualia, it's a direct experience... people believing that washing themselves was bad was based on a form of [incorrect] "reasoning," not on a direct qualia. There is no doubt that suffering is negative, unpleasant, bad.

I understand the definition of special pleading. And I still think it all basically flies out the window when we are talking about an exceptional Being with exceptional powers. All of Its abilities are an exception to the norm.

No, even an omnipotent/omniscient being cannot violate logic. It seems illogical to suggest that one can be benevolent while deliberately causing suffering. Therefore it's special pleading to suggest that God can be benevolent while torturing without justification that the torture is for some necessary purpose.

It goes back to my original point: You assume that God could rewrite the physical laws to reduce physical suffering based purely upon the definition of omnipotence. You don't know how physical laws can be rewritten, but you know that they can because an omnipotent being is doing it.

Similarly, I don't know how suffering is benevolent, but since an omnibenevolent being is causing it, I know that it is.

This is because in the PoE omnipotence is granted for the sake of argument, and it's granted within logical parameters. What you're suggesting flirts with being illogical by saying something contradictory and out of the norm without justification.

The point of the PoE is that even if we grant omnipotence/omniscience/omnibenevolence for the sake of the believer we encounter a contradiction. Your point just adds another premise "for the sake of argument," but it turns the whole argument into "for the sake of argument," which makes it nothing at all.

Demonstration:

1) God is omnipotent
2) God is omniscient
3) God is omnibenevolent
4) Suffering exists

Normally here we encounter the contradiction, but you suggest adding another premise:

5) But God is omnibenevolent, so suffering must have a reason

Anyone can outright reject this new premise because there's no justification. We grant (1) and (2) and (3) for the sake of argument because they're definitional... but (5) isn't just definitional. Does that make sense? We can reject it as unsupported because it requires support, whereas the definitions don't necessarily.

It doesn't successfully harm the PoE for that reason: it's special pleading. It's fallacious. Fallacies never harm any logical argument at all, because they "aren't" anything at all.

 

[Gloone]

If we can't judge things based on what we think or feel about them, then how do we judge anything? ...

What if you have poor judgment. Do you still think you should be one to judge?

 

[Quagmire]

Because causing unpleasantness is malevolent unless there is a purpose for the unpleasantness.

If you say there is a purpose for suffering,

And I said this where?

... it's up to you to justify that assertion otherwise you're arguing with special pleading -- and fallacies aren't "responses" to anything; they're fallacies.

Oh for craps sake.

You were the one who brought up the idea of some purpose behind suffering, not me. And for some unknown reason, you seemed to be bringing it up solely for the sake of suggesting that I was opposed to it. All I said was that I wasn't opposed to the idea and, since you seemed to want to proceed from that angle, that if there were a purpose that God was trying to achieve through suffering, unless we somehow establish that suffering is inherently bad, how is His use of it an indication of malevolence? ie., why should He use something else? (other than the fact that we'd rather he used...I don't know...big fluffy pillows or something).

You were the one who brought up the whole justification concept.

I was the one who suggested that trying to appeal to the justification concept was inappropriate for the purposes of this topic.

It's bad enough that up til now you've been repeatedly holding me responsible for things I didn't say, asking me to defend points I haven't made, and assigning me beliefs that aren't actually mine.

Are you going to start holding me responsible for things that you bring up now too?

I don't have to as I explained before.

And I refuted your explanation. Sorry, Meow Mix, but in a debate you actually have to defend and establish the validity of your points in order for them to be operative. Just stating something and ignoring any refutations doesn't give you the right to re-introduce any of these points as if they were a settled matter later in the debate.

If one of the premises is that God would not cause suffering unnecessarily,

Still need to establish why exactly.

and suffering exists,

Check.

and there is no justification

That hasn't been established. Look: if you disagreed when I told you that introducing the whole topic of justification---for or against--- was inappropriate and unnecessary for the sake of this discussion, you should have said so.

Or are you saying that If you say there is a purpose for suffering,it's up to you to justify that assertion otherwise you're arguing with special pleading

I see: if someone is in favor of the higher purpose concept, bringing it up in a debate is special pleading, but if you're opposed to the concept, ie., if you're denying any higher purpose (which is equally unprovable), bringing it up is just fine? How's that work?

 

[Meow Mix]

I see: if someone is in favor of the higher purpose concept, bringing it up in a debate is special pleading, but if you're opposed to the concept, ie., if you're denying any higher purpose (which is equally unprovable), bringing it up is just fine? How's that work?

I haven't said that there isn't, I have said that there's no justification for the assertion that there is [some purpose]. The default position is neutral skepticism: since a purpose isn't apparent, it's up to someone who's making the positive claim that there is a purpose to justify it. Saying there "might be" doesn't accomplish anything. Saying there is requires justification. Without justification, it's special pleading.

Saying there "might be" doesn't defeat the PoE.

I don't get what your objection is unless you think the onus of proof is somehow on the skeptic of the positive claim. If you think that it is, then we should be debating the onus of proof to get that figured out first, because that's certainly not the case.

Edit: A bit I clipped but shouldn't have because it's important:

I said, "If one of the premises is that God would not cause suffering unnecessarily..."

You replied:

Still need to establish why exactly.

No, I don't, because it's a premise held by the target audience. If you disagree that God wouldn't cause suffering unnecessarily, you are not one of the target audience of the PoE.

 

[Willamena]

No, I don't, because it's a premise held by the target audience. If you disagree that God wouldn't cause suffering unnecessarily, you are not one of the target audience of the PoE.

Does logic have a target audience?

 

[Meow Mix]

Does logic have a target audience?

Logical arguments do, particularly those like the PoE that only apply to those who hold the premises as true.

 

[Quagmire]

I will have to think on this Quagmire. Also, I do tend to go to the next likely case in my mind. Like hearing if it isn't good then it is bad, without necessarily considering the idea of neutral. I don't always do this, but with things like good and bad I will sometimes make a guess until I get more information.

On the redhead thing though, one thing I thought of was, that if everyone considers redheads bad, even redheads themselves, would it be worthy of being called bad?

Not if all the judgment is based on is some sort of universal aesthetic/emotional revulsion to red hair. In that case, it would merely be revolting. Calling it "bad" in the moral sense would still require some kind of logical justification. Granted, being born with red hair in that scenario would be bad luck, finding yourself in the position of having to be around red haired people constantly (considering the universal revulsion) would be a bad break, dyeing your hair red just for the sake of making people uncomfortable would be bad manners and an indication of a bad character, but to label the red headed people themselves bad in the moral sense based strictly on the consensus that red hair is revolting would still be unfair unless you could demonstrate some correlation between being red headed and other undesirable character traits.

What I mean is that suffering by means of fire would be considered bad by most everyone as I said before. If there is a global agreement on the issue can it still be considered the opposite in your opinion?

If bad is merely being used as a synonym for undesirable due to the fact that it's painful and destructive then no, it couldn't be argued against. But there are no moral implications in that scenario. If someone were to try and argue that the event itself was due to malevolence on someone's part, or was caused by some moral imperfection in the victim themselves, that would need to be proven.

Until the question of morality enters in, the event itself can't be classified as "evil" or even the result of evil, it's merely unpleasant, undesirable, or tragic. All morally neutral terms.

 

[Quagmire]

I haven't said that there isn't, I have said that there's no justification for the assertion that there is [some purpose]. The default position is neutral skepticism: since a purpose isn't apparent, it's up to someone who's making the positive claim that there is a purpose to justify it. Saying there "might be" doesn't accomplish anything. Saying there is requires justification. Without justification, it's special pleading.

Good thing I didn't do that then, huh? Or are you going to go on implying that I did just to keep the spotlight off the fact that haven't successfully addressed my main point yet?

Saying there "might be" doesn't defeat the PoE.

Did anybody in this thread even suggest that it might? Really, I'm curious. I haven't read all the posts in here yet so as far as I know you may actually have a reason for addressing all this, although I'm still stumped as to why you're addressing it to me.

I don't get what your objection is

My objection is that you keep addressing points I haven't made and dancing around or ignoring the ones I have made. Can you understand how that might be annoying?

unless you think the onus of proof is somehow on the skeptic of the positive claim.

*bangs head against wall, hard. Stops when he realizes this is probably what the Meow Mix had in mind*

If you think that it is, then we should be debating the onus of proof to get that figured out first, because that's certainly not the case.

No, we should drop the whole justification issue like I suggested when it first came up and get back to the #^$$^!#&^!!! topic.

I was just pointing out that if you restrict it's use on one side, you can't allow it on the other. Since I never attempted to use it in the first place and asked you not to, for the sake of this debate I'm on neither side.

Edit: A bit I clipped but shouldn't have because it's important:

I said, "If one of the premises is that God would not cause suffering unnecessarily..."

You replied:



No, I don't, because it's a premise held by the target audience. If you disagree that God wouldn't cause suffering unnecessarily, you are not one of the target audience of the PoE.

The target audience? What? People who already agree with you?

I'm trying to show you that the premise itself is flawed. There's no reason to accept that "if" as a given in the first place.

Unless or until we establish that suffering, in and of itself, is "bad", an indication of evil on someone's part, it doesn't matter one bit if it's necessary or not.

Now if you had a "target audience" in mind you should have mentioned that in your OP. You could have saved me a bunch of frustration.

 

[Quagmire]

Does logic have a target audience?

Yeah, but it's usually a moving target.

 

[Willamena]

Logical arguments do, particularly those like the PoE that only apply to those who hold the premises as true.

Is there a distinction between logical arguments and logic?

I'm not disagreeing, but I seem to recall you saying that logic is out in the world and not a product of thought. If that so --if logic is objectively real --then wouldn't its target audience, like truth's, be everyone?

 

[Quagmire]

Logical arguments do, particularly those like the PoE that only apply to those who hold the premises as true.

You introduced the PoE as a supplement to your OP. Unless this thread itself was intended to address a target audience exclusively, you can't use this.

 

[Blackdog22]

If bad is merely being used as a synonym for undesirable due to the fact that it's painful and destructive then no, it couldn't be argued against.

Just so I am completely clear. You don't consider pain and destruction an evil act? Any pain and any destruction is in no way evil? The whole of all known pain and all known destruction, none of it can be considered evil?

Also, I believe the premise behinds Meows entire post was directed at and focused around the POE. How wasn't it?