Special Pleading and the PoE (Part 3)

[Meow Mix]

There's no rush at all. I am still trying to catch up on older posts I haven't had the time to respond to, so I understand how life doesn't always permit the necessary time to deal with them all in a timely manner.

There could be a week where time doesn't permit to respond much if at all but that doesn't mean I don't intend to respond.

That's how it be sometimes. Doing too much thesis stuff tonight, I'll get to ya tomorrow likely. <3

 

[Meow Mix]

By saying that you haven't given an actual logical reason why God must be required to have such limits.
All you've done is appeal to the intellectual convenience of putting such limits on him (ie. It's something you can understand).

But who is to say that everything that is true is something you'll be capable of understanding?
That is fallacious thinking that puts one's own cognitive abilities on a pedestal and thinks one's abilities to understand something determines whether or not it's true.

Upon what logical basis can you claim that logic must transcend the universe other than an appeal to convenience?

Two important things here.

First, in order for you to argue that there is some other way of being than to be logically self-identical (and its corollaries), you would have to be able to cognize this state of affairs, then reference the state of affairs with communication. But you can't do either of these things: you don't form a cognitive picture of what it is you would be trying to communicate, and then you can't communicate it: so it's a total non-starter. If someone were to say, "God must be self-identical in order to be God," you can't say "not necessarily" because it contains the hidden premise that "Logical self-identity is not incorrigibly real (there are some situations where it does not apply)," which is a premise you could never defend (because you would have to invoke logical self-identity to make the premise).

Since you could never defend the premise, even attempting to suggest it amounts to nonsense of the same sort as talking about slithey toves gimbling in wabes or sets of all sets which do not contain themselves. So understand that the first objection here is that you can't even suggest that there are any situations where logical self-identity doesn't apply self-coherently, and saying "we don't know everything, so maybe it's possible" is a form of suggestion once you specify what you're trying to say is possible. This is what it means to be incorrigible.

God is self-identical to God if God exists, and omnipotence works within the same logical bounds if it is a property: you literally can't even suggest otherwise, or it won't be communication, it will be meaningless nonsense that neither you nor the person being communicated to cognizes.

I'll try to say this another way because it's that important: it is true that we are epistemically finite beings and don't know everything, but despite our epistemic limitations, we can have some tidbits of absolute knowledge: good example being the cogito ergo sum (Schopenhauer notwithstanding, I'll cross that bridge if I need to) but also that part of what it means to exist in any capacity (part of the physical universe or not) is to exist as something, which means to be self-identical (and this carries the corollaries of non-contradiction and excluded middle). You can't even use ignorance to suggest it could be otherwise without employing logical limitation in the very suggestion, so it makes any utterance you make to that attempted effect immediately incoherent. It's not possible, and that's one of the few things humans can know (both that it's not a possible state of affairs, and that it's not possible to even attempt to communicate such a state of affairs as a possibility).

Second, I've already touched on this a little bit above, but the basis on which we know that logic transcends the universe is its very incorrigibility. Attempting to suggest there are ever any situations of any kind that aren't subject to logical limitations immediately self-refutes (so we can't think them, and therefore we can't even communicate them). The first point was more about the communication part. This point is more about the fact that we can't even think these things. Appealing to ignorance doesn't help: I understand that some may want to say "but, we don't know everything. Maybe in some way that we don't know how, self-identity isn't incorrigible." But even that doesn't work for the exact same reasons. No, we don't have to be omniscient to be able to know self-identity is incorrigible, and this is true whether there is a God or not.

If someone refuses to accept that we can know this, they will immediately self-refute, and they won't even be able to communicate their doubt anyway. They would be in grave error.

Without that starting presumption, though, you cannot prove logic is not just an aspect of this universe that a transcendent being is not subject to.

You can’t prove it on a purely logical basis.

Logical limitation isn't proven because it's properly basic: this means it is self-evident and incorrigible. All worldview presuppose it because they must, even theistic worldviews.

That being said, it's easy to demonstrate that logical limitation isn't dependent on the material universe. Let the material universe be called X, and then simply examine ¬X: it would still be the case that ¬X = ¬X, that X v ¬X, and that ¬(X ^ ¬X). If it's true without a material universe, then it easily follows that logical limitation would still be real without a material universe (because it must be: it is ontologically necessary that there is self-identity), and so logical limitation transcends the material universe.

Logical limitation also transcends minds: I'm sure in one of these multiple posts somewhere you were positing that there must be a mind (God's) for logical limitation to be real, but that is not the case: it is real whether or not there are any minds of any kind; you mistake logical limitation for a concept when it is not. You equivocate between thinking about logical limitation (the reference) with the actual states of being limited themselves (the referent). I'll hold off on that for right now because I know it's coming up somewhere further down the line. (Actually it's coming up next, I just looked).

I think you missed the point of what I was arguing because you appear to be talking about things that don't directly correlate with any of my main points. Which were:

1. You cannot claim to know that logic must transcend the universe.

2. You cannot therefore assume god must be bound by the laws of logic.

3. It is impossible for you to posit that abstract ideas like logic, which only come out of a mind and are only understood by minds, can exist prior to the mind of god and have casual power over the mind and actions of god. Abstract ideas don’t exist without a mind and therefore have no casual power. Unless you are positing some mind that existed prior to god and has subjugation over god.

4. By definition, god cannot be omnipotent if he is subject to laws that are over him, which would require a being with a mind over him, which god then has no power over and can’t change. If you insist on putting limits on god's omnipotence in such a way then you don't really believe omnipotence as an attribute can ever exist in anything, so your argument is self-refuting on the basis that you believe one of your premises is impossible.

5. The being that is subjecting god to itself to make god obey the law of logic has more claim of being omnipotent than god, but then you run into an infinite regress of always requiring some being above it to impose the law of logic on it.

The only way you get out of that infinite regress if you can say logic comes out of what the being’s nature is and the imposition of logic on our universe is a reflection of what that being is.

You are equivocating between a reference and a referent. Logic, as a word, is used for both, so I understand the mistake. Logic can be used to refer to the abstractive process we make when we're observing and thinking about logical limitations: we observe that an apple is an apple and not an orange, and we observe that a Euclidean square is not a Euclidean circle at the same time and in the same respect, and so on. This is the reference of logic, where we think about logic and abstract about it. Indeed, there would be no logic of this kind if there were no minds: references are always dependent on some kind of mind.

But the referent of logic is the very fabric of reality itself: logical limitation. In order for a thing to exist or to not exist, reality (mind-independent reality) has limitations. Things that don't exist are limited from being existent, things that do exist are limited to being what they are and not what they are not: this is true whether or not any minds think about that fact. We perform the reference of logic when we do think about that fact, but the fact remains regardless if there were no minds at all, not even God's, because even that would be a form of limitation.

Once again just use this same process: let Y be the existence of any mind, including God's. What happens if ¬Y? If ¬Y were real, it would still be limited: ¬Y = ¬Y after all (so the absence of any minds, including God's, would be exactly that: the absence of any minds, including God's). God doesn't have to be around for logical limitation to be around, and this is incorrigibly true. Logic is transcendental to materiality and minds, it is ontologically necessary, and both of these facts are correct with or without theism. Theists do not have a special access to logic's transcendence, it is transcendent all by itself without any god's help.

Now, regarding omnipotence. There is not a problem with omnipotence being defined within logical limits: it is defined this way out of utter necessity. There is no alternative; there is no higher power than omnipotence within logical limits possible (by the very nature of what "possible" even means). Refer to the top of this response as a refresher that a person can't even make utterances to this effect while cognizing or communicating anything, it's just incoherent to even try.

Thus, as most theologians have agreed, omnipotence is necessarily the capacity to actualize any logically possible state of affairs; this is the maximum possible power.

 

[Meow Mix]

Why do we say math exists without man? Because math continues to be a true description of how the universe operates even if no man is there to observe it.
So in this sense you are only saying that math as an abstract idea exists in relation to what which it describes – the physics of the universe. Math is therefore dependent on the universe to exist or in the absence of the universe dependent on some other concrete thing that operates according to the same mathematical principles.

If you remove the universe and have nothing else then math ceases to exist because there is now nothing that objectively operates according to those principles. Math cannot exist as a disembodied abstract idea if you think math is only objectively independent of man because it comes to us as a description of how the universe works.
Math can only exist as a disembodied abstract idea from the universe if there is a mind to retain the idea in the absence of something for math to describe.

I disagree. Math is really just an extended form of logical limitation. There is a reason why 1 + 1 = 2 and we don't need any apples to count for that to be the case: it's a consequence of logical limitation, which is the fabric of what it means to be real (note I am not saying "material," I am saying "real").

Let us consider an empty reality: that is to say, nothing at all exists, no material universe, no humans, no God. Logical limitation would still necessarily exist (empty reality = empty reality, and not partially full reality, and not empty and partially full reality at the same time and in the same respect after all): what it would mean for an empty reality to be real is that it would be limited: materiality would be limited from existing, humans would be limited from existing, and so on. This is what's meant by logic still existing: there would still be limitation.

Well, another thing that would still exist is the fact that limitation exists, and that this limitation is itself self-identical: whatever fact about minds (not even God's) not existing would be self-identical with that fact whether or not anyone (even God) was there to think about it. But the fact that there would still be a fact (even one!) would mean that mathematics are still a consequence of this: for instance this would be like the null set { } (or ø), the existence of limitation where the only limitations are existential limitations (things being limited from existing, like God or humans or material universe). But if there is a null set, it follows that there is the set containing the null set {ø}. But if there is the set containing the null set, there is a set containing that -- and so on. We have all of mathematics without physical/material things to count because it's just a consequence of what it means to be real, which is to say that it's a consequence of limitation. Of course, it wouldn't be useful for mathematics to exist without a mind to do something with it, but that is beside the point.

Snipping some of your questions further down that are addressed here, I hope you understand.

There are only one of two ways you can say logic transcends the concrete universe.

That is incorrect, since both examples you provided are themselves incorrect (as explained in my most recent responses). A mind of any kind is not required for the transcendence of logic, not even God's. You are equivocating a reference with a referent when you say things like "you cannot rationally invoke an abstract idea as existing independent of a mind..." because I am not talking about logic as an abstract concept (a reference) when I'm making these points, I am talking about logic as a referent (which is limitation, which defines what reality is; it is mind-independent).

The second option is basically what you are advocating for: The problem is you’re doing it in a way that is impossible. You’re trying to say that there is transcendent logic that comes out of the essence of whatever makes up reality prior to the creation of the universe. Ok great, so far you’re in line with Biblical theism. But then you remove the mind that would be necessary to impart logic to the universe, or whatever logical construct you think preceded the universe. And then you try to deify the abstract concept of logic, imbuing it with casual powers. Misconstruing the nature of abstract ideas as that which cannot exist either without a mind or in the absence of something concrete to describe.

I didn't imbue logical limitation with causal powers, I'm not sure where you got that idea. I only said that it is transcendental and min-independent, including from God. God is dependent on logical limitation to even be God if God exists (and for God to exist would only have meaning if that existence is limited: limited to being God instead of a horse, and not a horse and God at the same exact time and same exact respect, etc). This limitation is not a concept, it is real whether or not anyone thinks about it. It's not just an abstraction, so all of your arguments against abstractions are misplaced.

Snipping the rest as it's all responding to this idea that logic as a term only ever refers to an abstraction/concept, which is false.

Also, I'll respond to one more thing from the cut text: I am not saying that logical limitation has causal powers. I am not saying that the material universe exists because logical limitation exists; I am only saying that anything that exists, including God, can only do so if logic is transcendental and mind-independent.

My answer to "how/why does the material universe exist" has always been "I don't know, but arguments saying that it must have been created all don't seem to work."

 

[Meow Mix]

You’re confusing two different concepts it seems.

Saying “omnipotence without limits is not logically possible” is not the same as saying “nothing is being communicated by your statement”.

The only reason you say it’s nonsense is because you don’t believe it’s logically possible.

But that doesn’t mean nothing is being communicated by the argument. Illogical ideas still communicate ideas.

That's completely false. Illogical ideas aren't ideas at all, they produce utterances and sometimes even recognizable words but there is no referent for the reference and no cognizable content to the reference itself. They are just utterances, no different from "sdf8dg^8^68" or "slithey toves." Nothing is communicated, and worse, nothing is thought in the first place. A sound or some text is simply produced, but producing sound or text doesn't mean anything.

If I say, "there is an immovable object and an irresistible force at the same time and in the same respect," I haven't communicated anything, I might as well have talked about gimbling in wabes: I didn't cognize anything when I spoke it, though it's possible to have the illusion of cognizing. The illusion of cognizing is not sufficient for communication or objecting.

You have given arguments for why you think omnipotence without limits is impossible, but there are several problems with your viewpoint:

1. If you are correct, then all you’re concluding is that omnipotence isn’t possible, period. Then you invalidate your own PoE question from the start because you believe one of it’s premises is false. Your definition of omnipotence isn’t actually true omnipotence.

I don't agree with this way of thinking about it. Omnipotence is being defined as the maximum possible power, which is perfectly serviceable (and necessary). To say there is something more than that is to utter noncognitive nonsense; but I have covered this already in recent responses. "All-powerful" is still fulfilled: all possible power there is to have, an omnipotent being has. That's still omnipotence.

All you’ve done is proved you don’t believe in omnipotence as a logical possibility. Which doesn’t necessarily invalidate anything Christians believe according to the Bible because the Biblical view of God doesn’t depend on the belief that God can violate His own nature. If you want to call that not being omnipotent in the absolute sense I suppose you’re welcome to; but it doesn’t change the Biblical fact that God created the universe and holds all power over it, and there is no equal to him, and there is no thing above him that He is subject to.

There are things transcendental to God that God is subject to, which was the point Plantinga was trying to make and I was putting an exclamation mark on. If God has properties at all, then God has a nature; if God has a nature, then that nature is primordially outside of God's control: God is dependent on it, not the other way around. This is the aseity-sovereignty paradox.

2. Your conclusion depends on premises you can’t claim are true.
You are depending on the premise that logic transcends not just the universe but also god himself.
But if you can't prove that premise is true then you can't claim god isn't free to do something that would be illogical according to the rules of our universe as we understand them.

This is resolved in recent responses, moving on. Snipping some other stuff that's repeated from recent responses as well.

So we both operate out of the same premise - but only one of us has a reason to believe that premise is true. Which was the point I was making.

We both have the same exact reasons for holding some of the same premises (such as that our cognitive faculties are capable of discerning truth from falsity, or the efficacy of logical limitation): that is because they are self-evident and incorrigible. Theism doesn't grant anything useful regarding this that non-theists don't have. All worldviews must presuppose these things because of their incorrigibility. It's not possible to doubt them, and not possible to ask someone else how they know them because they know them for the same reasons (their incorrigibility).

 

[Meow Mix]

You misunderstand then. I am not referring to the human process of logic but the reality of logic as an existing thing we know exists.
Just as I am not referring to the human process of calculating math but am referring to the reality of math as something we know exists.

Hmm. I'm not sure how we both think the other is equivocating, but having seen your elucidations, your arguments seem to be the ones equivocating between logic the reference and logic the referent, not mine. I have carefully demarcated when I'm referring to which; while you have supposed (incorrectly) that all contexts of logic are conceptual/abstract.

In fact, that same error is made in this post, which I'm snipping since it's already commented on in recent responses.

Therefore, proving that math and logic transcend the creation of everything would logically necessarily prove a theistic transcendent creator with a mind exists. For there is no other logical way we could have a universe governed by math and logic. No matter what you logically try to deduce it will always ultimately logically come back to requiring a mind somewhere at some point.

This just isn't so. Logic can be transcendent without needing a mind to create the material universe. For instance the material universe could be eternal (such as with eternal inflation, fecund universes, brane worlds, any number of possible things). Logic would still be transcendent, and no mind would ever be required for any of it. So this is just false on its face.

The Bible tells us this is what we'd expect to see as well.
Which is that God intended something in his mind and then spoke out his intention (ie. Language. And math is a type of language) to create our universe (Ie. power and action followed his intention as defined by language).
It also says by God's power of action and this same spoken word (which comes out of the intention of Gods mind) that God continues to, on an ongoing basis, uphold the operation of the mathematical laws that govern our universe and the powers that manifest those laws as our physics based reality.

Evidence that math is the product of an unfathomable super-intellect mind is it's unfathomable order and beauty, as reflected in fractals such as the mandelbrot set (just one of many examples one could point to of the uncanny order and beauty that is embedded in math).
As well as it's infinite nature - a nature which the Bible says we would expect of God and His mind. It is something beyond our ability to fully comprehend.

It is not reasonable that we would expect such order to arise by chance. Everything we know about informational language tells us that such language only is the product of a mind.

The ultimate problem with even string theories is that they all presuppose the existence of the same constant and universal language of math.
Who created the language and powered the superstrings to operate the way they do?

You're trying to explain why the universe is governed according to certain fine tuned mathematical arrangements without ever asking where the math language came from in the first place.

The claim that math is beautiful is subjective and even dubious: with its infinite ranges of things, of course we will find beauty in parts of it. But I recommend doing literally anything with linear algebra to see just how ugly it can get, too.

As argued in recent responses, math is necessary because it's an extension of logical limitation (which is necessary). No mind is required for any of this. It'd be necessary with or without any minds, including God's.

 

[Meow Mix]

For my own sanity this is response to #231 (in case I take a break and come back, so I know to start with #232 next).

God giving us the ability to choose that is the only way in which we could be said to have a free will choice to choose relationship with God.

It would be a logical necessity.

It would therefore seem to be most accurate to say that Adam and Eve, while in active union with God, was not capable of any sin but was left with the choice to leave that state - but if they make the choice to break union with God then all other sin becomes possible afterwards.

This is incoherent. Adam and Eve would be capable of making perfect moral decisions but they would make an imperfect moral decision? I don't see how you can reconcile this.

Why should we assume God is not capable of setting up such a scenario? Why should we think it is impossible for God to do such a thing?

That is why Adam and Eve could lead a sinless life in the Garden of Eden but still have the ability to choose to leave that state - and choosing that resulted in every other possible form of evil coming into the world.

It's inferred from your argument that they would not be capable of breaking friendships with one another because they would be perfectly loving just like God, but in the next breath it's being said that despite being perfectly loving, they can choose not to love God (even though you say they can't choose not to love one another)?

Not only is this incoherent in the first place, but it's a bad plan: if there's a nonzero probability that they would choose to break off with God, then given infinite time, it would have eventually happened (and God would have known this per omniscience).

That would be what the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was in the garden of Eden.
As long as they were in union with God, this tree represents the only possible option they had to do something against God’s will - but once they chose to partake of the fruit of that tree then that one sin of rebellion opened the door to every other possible sin becoming possible by disrupting unity with God's character and nature.

This is like leaving a loaded revolver in a toddler's room, I certainly don't see how this adds to God's claimed benevolence. It's still incoherent with the claim that they could (and it's implied, would) make perfect moral decisions, anyway.

One of the most common objections is "why did God put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden in the first place?"
Why not just never give them that option?

I suppose we can set side the question or whether or not God created the tree, as opposed to merely letting them have access to it, because either way it seems we still end up with the same answer:

The fact is that without that tree man would never have had the choice of whether or not they wanted relationship with God of their own free will.

You say that Adam couldn't split up with Eve because he would "perfectly" love her and never break friendship with her. I think you need to clarify exactly what that means, because it is very incoherent that that would be the case for Adam and Eve but not with Adam and God.

That does raise the interesting question of whether or not the equivalent of that tree will always be there or if God would one day remove it after it has served it's purpose.

But that is not a question that is necessary to answer for the original issue of how evil can exist if God is benevolent. It is enough for that purpose to simply establish that God did not create evil and that it is a choice Adam made.


But, for the sake of edification, I can propose some things to consider:

We see in the Bible that angels were capable of rebelling against God as well - so it was not something that was an option only confined just to man on earth.

Will the option always remain but mankind will simply choose never to make that choice again because of what happened as a result of this?

Will God remove the option of disuniting from Him once people have made their free will choice to return back to God? So in that sense God is honoring their choice and solidifying it?

We do see in the Bible the concept that God "hardens the heart" of people to be firmly committed to the evil choice they have already decided to make so they will not deviate from what they really want. At the point He is done tying to strive with them to draw them to choose to do what is right.
Romans 1:18-32, 2 Thessalonians 2:9-12, , Exodus 8:15, Exodus 4:21, Deuteronomy 2:30.
This could be linked with 1 John 5:16-18 as the "sin that leads to death" that should not be prayed about on behalf of someone else.
Or the "unforgiveable sin" in Matthew 12:31-32. Similar to Hebrews 10:26-27.

By God choosing to not continue to put His Spirit upon man to try to get them to come into agreement with Him, He could effectively be solidifying their choice for evil by leaving them. Rather than it necessarily being something He puts upon them against their will. It could be more like simply leaving them to their will and no longer trying to get them to come around.

That doesn't seem very benevolent for a being for whom patience literally would have no meaning (being omnipotent and omniscient). This seems like just dropping the omnibenevolence premise.

Could the reverse also be true? If someone chooses to love Truth, could God honor that choice for eternity by putting His Spirit upon them to such a degree, or in such a way, without any limits or caveats, so that it becomes impossible for someone to ever exercise a will contrary to God's?

I don't know what "putting His Spirit upon them" means. I know what it means to try to convince someone of something, is it like that? Making a convincing argument?

You could also say that if God's Spirit were upon someone in such a way, and they were people who were already lovers of Truth, then they would never have motivation to want to leave it because they were simply getting more of what they always wanted.

If it's possible to do whatever that makes people not want to leave and therefore suffer, why not do this from the start? Not that I'm granting any of this "leaving = suffering" stuff is coherent just yet, that is all still extremely open to debate, I assume I just haven't gotten down to it yet.

Could it be as simple as saying that after seeing what happened to Adam that the option would always be there but no one would ever want to take it
?

If so then God would be culpable for it happening to Adam: if it's possible that knowledge of it would prevent someone from choosing it (whatever "it" is), then God could pre-emptively impart that knowledge perfectly in a person so that they perfectly understand what would happen.

 

[Meow Mix]

This is a response to #232 (again, in case I take a break and come back so I know where to pick up from again).

I am all for answering honest questions and exegeting the Biblical meaning of terms - but I reject the premise upon which you are asking those questions. We must first deal with the wrong premise you are operating from.

The fundamental error behind your post is that you claim the following things:
1. That my argument is saying nothing.
2. That my argument requires more detailed definitions before it can say anything.
3. That my argument is circular reasoning without more detailed definitions.

The fatal flaw with your argument is that you only try to prove these points by way of making analogies and then attacking the analogies you create - but that's a strawman fallacy because your analogies don't accurately represent what I have argued.

Attacking analogies is an invitation. The usefulness of analogy is to draw similarities between things: it is often the most useful to elucidate where an analogy is dissimilar. In this spirit, please know that I'm not setting up and taking down strawmen, I'm trying to tease out what it is about this or that situation that's different from the analogy being drawn, because often that would be the relevant thing that saves a thing from the attack that takes down the analogy (the thing that's under contention).

This is the same fault you made when you tried to claim in a previous post that my argument was saying nothing by creating a nonsense statement as an analogy and then attacking your analogy instead of dealing directly with exposing any supposed faults in my argument by directly quoting it and using specific logical reasonings against it.

What I said in response to that applies here as well: You need to quote what I actually said and give specific logical reasons why what I said is in error. Not simply assert it is in error and then creating strawman analogies to attack instead of attacking my post directly.

If you want to be able to make the claim that I have used any kind of circular reasoning then the onus is on you to quote my actual arguments and specifically point to where the fallacy has supposedly occurred.

If you want to claim that my argument is logically saying nothing of substance, you need to quote it and give a specific reason why it fails to do so.

If you want to claim that it is necessary for me to give more detail about any term in order for my argument to make sense, then you need to explain specifically and logically why my argument can't stand without more definition.

I did in my post, but I will scroll up to look at it again.

For instance, I said:
"God is often ascribed properties that sound similar to properties that we humans experience, but it often soon becomes clear that the theist means something completely different. For instance, I know what "love" is. I love my dad, I love my friends, I have felt romantic love, I love you as a fellow human being (indeed, even just as a fellow sentient and sapient being, I'm not human-centric), and so on.

But what does it mean to be a "source of love?" Clearly this is supposed to mean something other than what humans do when they impart love to one another by way of showing affection, or thinking about someone with a smile, or anything like this. But it isn't really clear to me exactly what."

So, you have claimed that God is "the source of life" and that God is "the source of love." I have explained throughout that post why you can't expect me to just know what that means, because you are obviously using "being the source of something" and "life" and "love" in different ways than we normally mean them when we say them.

It is necessary for you to elucidate what you mean by these three things to successfully communicate something to me.

Let me take you back to my argument in a very simplified form so you can see why it stands as is:

Premise 1: Death and evil exist in the world.
Premise 2: God's nature is life and love.
Premise 3: Death is the opposite of life and evil is the opposite of love.
Conclusion: Death and evil exist in the world when God's nature is removed from something.

The argument is valid and not circular by definition.
The argument communicates a real conclusion of a causal relationship between two events.

You have not articulated a specific reason why any of these definitions need to be defined more precisely than they already have in this thread in order for this argument to be valid.

The reason is this: we need to understand what the terms mean for the argument to accomplish anything. Observe:

Premise 1: Unie and trupple exist in the world.
Premise 2: God has something to do with qwert and slan.
Premise 3: Unie is the opposite of qwert and trupple is the opposite of slan.
Conclusion: Unie and trupple exist in the world when God does some unknown thing.

Now what would we make of this argument? It doesn't seem to be saying much until we know several things:

1) What is unie?
2) What is trupple?
3) What is qwert?
4) What is slan?
5) What is qwert and slan's relationship with God as seen in premise 2?
6) What is this unknown thing that God supposedly can do that the argument hinges on?

These are equivalent to:

1) What is death? Obviously this means something other than what we normally refer to as death, which is all due to the laws of physics and how a thing can stop seeking homeostasis, responding to stimuli, things like this.
2) What is evil?
3) What is life? Obviously this means something other than what we normally refer to as life, which is a list of characteristics like seeking homeostasis, responding to stimuli, often capable of reproduction, some list of characteristics like this. So what does it mean in this context, since these are all related to the laws of physics?
4) What is love? Again, this obviously seems to be some novel context of the word, different from what we mean when we normally say it to each other. So what is it?
5) What does it mean for "life and love" to be God's nature? Does this mean God has the property of being alive, and God has the property of feeling love towards others?
6) What does it mean for God to "remove His nature" from something? I can't even imagine questions to ask here because this is so incomprehensible.

Now, perhaps these questions have cognizable answers, in which case, we will have to see. But if they don't, then the argument is not sound, it's not even coherent. So I will agree that before calling it incoherent, I should ask the clarifying questions first: that might have been a little bit of an assumption on my part because this isn't my first rodeo (I have seen people try to elucidate what stuff like this means before unsuccessfully, but we will see). So, I apologize for the assumption. We'll see what you make of those 6 clarifications.

It's not as complicated as you are trying to make it out to be.
I'll make this even more simple though: You already have your own definition of death and evil, right? Just take your definition and ask what the opposite of that is. Then tell me if you have any logical problem with the conclusion at that point and specifically why. You probably won't - because it's almost inconceivable that your definition of death and evil is not consistent enough with mine that it would fundamentally change the point of my conclusion.

I could make some kind of argument out of my definitions, but it would have to take a different form: because "life" and "death" for instance are related to the laws of physics. Saying "God's nature is life" would still make absolutely no sense. That's like saying "God has properties such that some things seek homeostasis (and blah blah, include the list of attributes that we use to determine if something is alive here)." That would be incoherent nonsense.

So if I tried to reformulate the argument, maybe it would be, "God creates the conditions under which life can develop; God can withdraw those conditions such that life dies (is no longer able to achieve homeostasis, so on and so forth)." And that would make sense, but it wouldn't be very benevolent, don't you think?

There are no conditions I can think of under which it would make sense to say God is some property, so saying "God is life" or "God is love" has no equivalent I can even attempt to say something with. That needs an explanation altogether.

As for "love," I've already explained in the post your response was responding to how it's clear that you mean something different than "God is loving," as in God has the property of feeling love towards you or me the same way I might feel love towards you as a fellow sapient and sentient being. It's obvious that you mean something different than that. So I think the best approach is for you to clarify rather than for me to try to insert words I already know the definitions for, because itf it were that easy, I wouldn't have found the theodicy non-cognitive in the first place.

The reason is because my point never depended on the precise definitions of these terms. The nuances of what we mean by these terms don't actually alter the conclusion I am making - which is that these things you don't like are the absence of God rather than being something created by God.

The exact definition of what the stuff you don't like is, and what the stuff you like is, doesn't fundamentally change the argument I was making that what you don't like is probably the absence of God rather than something created by God.

No differences in our definition of death or life is likely to change that fundamental conclusion. Therefore, the exact definitions aren't relevant unless you can give a legitimate reason why our definitions could potentially be so off-base that it invalidates my conclusion.

If there is a legitimate logical problem at that point, then you have logical grounds to claim I logically must define the terms more precisely in order to avoid some kind of logical problem.

Probably the biggest things you need to explain are points 5 and 6; but I still think it will be important to clarify points 1-4 as well.

 

[Meow Mix]

This brings up an issue that drives a sword right through the heart of your entire original argument.
It renders all other major and minor arguments you have identified irrelevant in comparison.

It is an issue I mentioned more than once in this thread but which interestingly you did not pull out as a major or minor issue to be discussed.
I was actually planning to make a post focusing on this one issue after responding to your other posts precisely because I think it is the fundamental issue above all else. But given the nature of what you have argued here, I think we are left with no choice but to cut strait to this issue right now:

Your entire argument hinges on the assumption that suffering (however you define it) is not consistent with benevolence (however you define good vs evil).
But no specific definitions of these terms are likely to even be necessary to show why your argument is logically impossible and therefore invalid.

Because to say something is good vs evil is to place an objective moral value judgement on an action.
But you do not logically have the ability to place such an objective moral value judgement on the creator of the universe.
Therefore, the definition of good vs evil becomes logically irrelevant if you can't first establish why you think you have have the capability to place an objective value judgement of good vs evil on God's actions.

This doesn't track for a couple of reasons. One is that the PoE doesn't make a moral judgment about whether suffering is good or bad, just that its existence is incongruent with omnibenevolence.

Omnibenevolence would generally be understood to mean that a being doesn't cause gratuitous or preventable suffering in other beings: their sapience is considered by the benevolent being, this is what their benevolence qua benevolence means.

To say that suffering is incongruent with benevolence is like saying "If a being doesn't like painful things to happen to other beings then we shouldn't see other beings in a lot of pain." (Pain is merely introspected here, we do not have to call it "evil" or have to define "evil" here at all).

No moral evaluation about whether pain is "good" or "bad" is made: it's about what God likes or wants. If God doesn't like other beings in pain (is benevolent), then we probably shouldn't expect to see other beings in pain. This doesn't even technically require moral realism to be true (God could have the property of not liking other beings being in pain without it being a moral truth that God should feel that way). The Problem would still be there with or without moral realism.

Placing an objective value judgement on something requires first an objective moral standard.

Under nontheism or atheism, no possibility for an objective moral standard exists. Therefore nothing can be judged as good or evil.

This is why I've stated the PoE is just an unfortunate historical name for a class of problems. If you like I can call my version the Problem of Suffering (though I feel this is unnecessary, because usually it's understood that the PoE is just a historic name). There are many versions of PoE, some in terms of evil, some in terms of suffering, I'm pretty sure there are others in other terms still. I do not need to define "good" or "evil" as I don't think those are useful terms other than when we are making statements about or moral preferences (e.g. I think it is evil to punch babies, but I do not think there is a moral truth about this, whatever such a thing would be).

Why? Two reasons:

1. Morality by definition is a statement of how things are suppose to be as opposed to how things are. But there can be no statement of how things are suppose to be unless there was a mind who created the universe with an intent about how it is suppose to be. Without a creator with a mind everything just is the way it is and it's not suppose to be any particular way.

While not relevant to the PoE, that's the way I think things are, indeed.

2. Objectivity by definition means something continues to be true regardless of what any person thinks/feels about it and no matter how many people feel/think that way.

Without a creator with a mind you have no intent behind creation, therefore no morality.

Without that mind being responsible for creating the universe, you have no objective source to appeal to for how things are suppose to be as opposed to how they currently are.

Moral non-cognitivists can still have opinions, as I clearly do. I think we all have values that inform our moral preferences, and furthermore that doxastic voluntarism is false (we don't consciously choose our values). So I value things like empathy, preventing suffering, human dignity, and so on; and I can't change that fact just by willing myself to or thinking about it hard enough. (Not to go too far down the rabbit hole but yes, I recognize we do belief revision with our values and our values can change for multiple reasons: but not because we consciously will them to).

So we will all have values that lead to moral preferences. Luckily, as a social species with a shared evolutionary history, a lot of us share some values with a lot of heavy overlap: property is nearly universally respected, life is nearly universally respected, empathy is nearly universally present in some shape or form, etc. That doesn't make them moral truths, it's just a brute fact that they happen to be common (and I think we should be glad for this fact, and preserve this fact by doing our part in whatever the nurture part of the nature/nurture process that goes into value formation where we can).

So we can stop right there and say on that basis alone your PoE question as given is invalid from the start. Unless you can resolve the issue of where you are getting your objective morality from.

It's not a problem. I don't have to believe in moral realism to get the PoE off the ground. For the reasons given above (the PoE can actually work without moral realism simply as a benevolence vs. suffering incongruence; that makes no hard moral judgment on whether suffering is good or bad), but also because I can simply adopt the audience's premises to make a reductio ad absurdum. All that matters is they believe the premises, not whether or not I do, for the point to be made. (Lastly, it is also the case that even outside of moral realism, all that matters is that an arguer and a listener share values in some cases for instance).

But let's go further than that.
I can take your PoE question and turn it around on you by taking your presumption that objective morailty exists (which is implied by the mere fact that you presume to be able to judge what is benevolent and what is not) and using that to prove logically that not only that God must exist but that He must have almost all of the attributes we see in the Bible - purely on logical grounds, without the need to appeal to Scripture.

There may be a misunderstanding that I missed before: "benevolence" doesn't assume moral realism exists. It is an attitude towards something, regardless of the reason for that attitude. You are benevolent if you care about others suffering: you can care about others suffering whether or not there's a moral truth about that (it could just be a happenstance that you care about it for a simple example).

If God cares about blue M&M's (in that God doesn't like them), it doesn't matter why God doesn't like them for it to be incongruent with the observation that there are many blue M&M's. So if God doesn't like suffering (this is to say, "If God is benevolent"), then it follows regardless of why that it's incongruent with the observation of large amounts of suffering. We don't need to bring in moral realism at all if we don't care to, it still gets off the ground.

I'm snipping a lot of stuff that is sort of a rehash of this same misunderstanding in the interest of space (I hope you know that I'm still reading and digesting these things and don't feel as though I'm ignoring you, I assure you I am not).

3. Your premise of omniscience refutes your own claim. Because it is impossible for you to ever claim to have enough knowledge of a situation to understand why any action God takes is not the most perfectly good option available.

This is the big one that this entire series was about in the first place, so I am pretty lost on where I last commented about this. I'm pretty sure it's further down in your responses or hasn't been responded to yet. I will wait and see. But otherwise I can get back into why appealing to our ignorance doesn't help (or why we would be irrational to do so).

The burden of proof you bear for proving any action an omniscient being takes is immoral is simply beyond any person's cognitive capability to ever meet. It is a logical impossibile for you to ever be in a position of making such a determination.

We form reasonable, rational beliefs while lacking omniscience all the time. Furthermore, the appeal to ignorance leads to an epistemic trap that's unreasonable to uphold: again, I'll wait until I see your responses on that stuff.

 

[Meow Mix]

@Rise

Should we take these to the One on One section and split subjects up so they each have their own thread there?

 

[Rise]

@Rise

Should we take these to the One on One section and split subjects up so they each have their own thread there?

I just got back from camping for about a week. I was going to pick up where I left off.

I don't think most of this could be atomized into separate threads because what bought them up was their relationship to answering the original question posed, or as the case may be showing how the original question cannot be valid as posed.

 

[Rise]

Regarding special pleading and the PoE.

Now, part of me just wants to link the three posts about this topic that started all of this (titled "Special Pleading and the Problem of Evil, Special Pleading and the PoE (Part 2), and Special Pleading and the PoE (Part 3), and finally there's a corollary post with a Bayesian argument regarding one of the posts).

However I will save us both a lot of time and just state what I think is important because you will likely cut right to the heart of that matter, and the thing I want to talk about is the most difficult to elucidate (it is the subject of the first post in the series).

I submit that it's possible to fall into an epistemic trap whereby ignorance is used as an excuse to believe something we normally wouldn't believe in other contexts and such that no evidence is sufficient to get us out of the epistemic trap. I furthermore submit that this is a form of special pleading, because the only appeal that is made is an appeal to the very ignorance that gets us into the trap in the first place. I will try to explain more.

Have you ever seen Mars Attacks? There's a scene in particular where the Martians (who have constantly employed feigned friendship as a means to kill people when their guard is down) are running around with a translator that comically says, "Do not run. We are your friends" while they're blasting people with disintegrator rays.

Now, arguably the Martians are smarter than humans: surely at least humans are more ignorant than the Martians (who have better technology, visibly larger brains, etc).

Now we might have a Martian-sympathizer human who makes the following theodicy: "The Martians are our friends. They say so. Just because we perceive their actions as being malevolent doesn't mean that they are malevolent. In fact, we have good reason to think that they actually have a benevolent reason for doing what they're doing: we just can't understand it because they're smarter than us."

Day after day, more cities fall. More people are killed. The Martians move on to more and more cruel methods of murder, such as disgusting weapons that cause untold amounts of pain before finally killing the victim. Still, our Martian-theodicist insists, "They have a benevolent reason for this, they say so. We aren't smart enough to know what it is, who are we to question it? It's logically possible that they have good reasons, so your argument that their actions are malevolent isn't reasonable. First you'd have to show there's a logical impossibility that their reasons aren't benevolent."

Continents fall, so on and so forth, finally everybody is extinct, blah blah.

Now, can you see the problem? Once our theodicist fell into this epistemic trap, nothing could ever have convinced him within the confines of the trap that he was wrong. This is because he appealed to ignorance: "we don't know that they're malevolent because their reasons might be benevolent for reasons we don't understand."

Is the martian theodicist's position reasonable? Is the person saying the Martians appear to be malevolent reasonable?

This is why it's so sticky: technically the martian theodicist is right: it might be logically possible that the martians have unknowable reasons which make their actions benevolent, technically they're right that we can't know that's not the case!

The fundamental problem with that argument is that it's assuming you can appeal to your own belief about what is moral and use that to override the claims of the martians even though they have vastly superior brainpower.

But you can't assume that is the case because you can't make any claim about whether or nor what they are doing is right or wrong without first having an objective moral standard to appeal to.

Who is to say it's wrong to kill off all humanity and replace it with martians?
Maybe from their perspective they have a good reason. How are you going to tell them their perspective is objectively morally wrong?

There are people today who think killing of 95% of the human population would be morally good thing. People like Bill Gates think the ideal situation would be no humans on earth. How are they any different from the martians who want to wipe out humanity for what they think is a good reason? How can you tell them they are wrong for wanting to do this?

We can't even begin to talk about how we assess the morality of god's actions without first establishing why you think you have an objective moral standard which can be used to judge god against.

But I wouldn't call their theodicy a reasonable one to uphold, and I submit that it's not reasonable to take precisely because of the inescapable nature of it: it's a trap. A reasonable person would not put themselves in an epistemic position that it's literally impossible to be evidenced out of.

The problem with your position here is that it is an appeal to preference and convenience rather than logic.

It's still logically true to say that God's omniscience makes it literally impossible for you to ever assume you are in a position to know enough about why God did something in order to judge it.

You might find this an undesirable position to be in but that doesn't change the logical conclusion we must necessarily reach.

At the same time, the person saying the Martians' actions is evidence of malevolence also seems prima facie reasonable.

It seems that way according to you.
It may be most people would share your view.
But not every human alive today would even say it's bad. They would welcome the extermination of most, if not all, of humanity.

So how do you resolve this disagreement and prove objectively that the later people are wrong?

If you don't even have an objective moral basis for telling other humans that they are wrong to exterminate humanity then you certainly don't have any basis for telling martians it's wrong.

 

[Rise]

Regarding special pleading and the PoE.

So almost paradoxically, while the Martian-theodicist isn't technically wrong about their claim, they have fallen into an epistemic trap that they can't escape from: which seems like an unreasonable epistemic place to be. While the skeptic (of the Martians' claimed benevolence) seems prima facie to be the one with the reasonable position.

...

Furthermore, we can construct a parody of the same trap: for equally unknowable reasons, it's possible that all the perceived benevolence God does is actually malevolent for reasons we don't understand: who are we to say it isn't*? Once we fall into this trap, we can equally never be convinced otherwise: God could heal people and we might still be convinced it's actually malevolent for reasons beyond our understanding.

In addition to what I have already said, I should also point out that the martian analogy fails to be a valid analogy to God on a critical point:

God defines what is objective morality by the act of being the creator of everything and having an intention about how things are suppose to be when He created it.

You'll never be in a position to tell the creator that things aren't suppose to be this way. He is the one who decided how they are suppose to be so by definition He is the one who created objective morality through the intention of the act of His creation.

Your opinion about his intentions can never change the fact that his intention has already been sown into creation.

Martians didn't create the universe, and never could be responsible for creating the universe, so they are not able to lay any claim to their opinions being more morally right than humans just because they are smarter.

The one who created the universe is the only one who can logically impart objective morality onto it.
If there was no creator then there could never be objective morality.

So nothing god did could be malevolent by definition, because the definition of objective morality is when a created being willfully violates what it's intended purpose was.

God can't be found in violation of his intended purpose unless he was created by something or someone else.

Only created beings can be in violation of their intended purpose because, lacking the power to create themselves, they cannot recreate themselves with a new purpose and intention.

Which is why you can't even claim to demand god must abide by the original intent and purpose he gave something because as the one who decided it's intent and purpose by the act of creation he is perfectly capable of exercise that power of creation again to change the intent and purpose of something.

Now, from a Biblical perspective this isn't an issue because God doesn't change and can't contradict Himself. But from a philosophical perspective even if we assumed god could violate his own nature and change we still wouldn't have logical grounds for accusing such a god of being malevolent for the reasons I gave.

Now, I am not a professional philosopher. I'm self-taught. There may be better ways to describe this conundrum I'm trying to describe. But at the end of the day, I think I just have to ask my opponent if they think it's reasonable to fall into an epistemic trap they literally can't be convinced out of by evidence. If they agree that's not a great place to be, then they can't use the theodicy with any urgent insistence.

...

Now obviously I'm not posing this parody seriously: I do not think either epistemic trap is one that we want to fall into because of their very nature of being inescapable. I don't know if there is a philosophical term for such traps, but there it is, I have tried to describe my argument about what I mean.

You describe it as a trap only because it's a place you don't want to be.
But that doesn't mean there's a logical necessity for us to not be in that place.

You might not like being in a position of never being able to judge God's actions as evil, by lack of your omniscience, but your desire to be able to judge God doesn't mean you have logical grounds to be able to do so.

(* -- "But God doesn't/can't lie" doesn't work unless we somehow establish that independently of God simply saying so, because if God is malevolent for reasons we can't understand, obviously God could and would lie about that!

Your conclusion comes out of a misunderstanding of where objective morality must logically flow from.

Objective morality must logically and necessarily be embedded in the act of creation itself. Because all acts of creation by a mind carry with it intention. And intention implies purpose and "how things are suppose to be".

When God creates something he assigns how it is suppose to behave based on the intention he had when he created it. Because it's impossible to have any mind based act of creation without some level of intention behind it. Intention is the very definitional difference between what makes something the created output of a mind as oppose to just random noise.

That is why if our universe was not created by a mind then objective morality has never and can never exist.

But if our universe was created by a mind then it's impossible for objective morality to not be embedded in the act of creation itself as part of the intention behind that creation.

So it becomes impossible to accuse God of malevolence.

If you were to suggest that a god could create according to an intention, but then lie to his creation about that intention, would seem to suggest that god designed the creation to be lied to about their intention, which would then make that part of this god's intention and therefore part of the fabric of "how things are suppose to be" and therefore not objectively immoral by definition. On top of the fact that this god, as creator, can always choose to change intention by recreating things anyway.

That isn't an issue for the Bible. But philosophically you are still left not being able to judge the creator of the universe on the basis of morality no matter what stipulations you try to put on their character and actions.

In fact, per omnipotence, God could cause us to hold false beliefs that we believe to be true, and things like this! If we allow God to do unknowable things in unknowable ways in our argument, anything goes!)

That only highlights the logical absurdity of even posing your original question to begin with.

It is logically true that an omnipotent being could do such a thing, which only further erodes any confidence you have in your own ability to judge what is right or wrong about such a god's actions.

This goes back to what I originally said about why the PoE question doesn't even make sense outside of the context of it being a challenge to God as seen in the Bible.

The question can't even begin to be broached unless you start with certain assumed Biblical limitations on God. Ie: Unchanging and not able to lie or contradict Himself

But the same Bible that gives you the character attributes of God that allow you to consider the question is also the same Bible that gives you the answer to the question.

So I think you're now making the case for me that the PoE question as a purely philosophical question, outside the framework of the Bible, isn't even coherent as a question.

That's why you try to put limits on omnipotence to make it a coherent question - but the problem is your limits are purely arbitrary with no reason for why we should have to assume those limits exist. From a purely philosophical perspective you really have no reason not to simply assume omnipotence can't exist when you run into philosophical difficulties with assessing it's consequences. The only reason you persist in trying to put limits on omnipotence, in order to assess it, is because there are religions that believe in omnipotence as a real thing. Which is why the question has no relevance outside of the religious context.

But even then the problem is your limits on omnipotence are arbitrary based on your philosophical presuppositions. It's not a necessary logical conclusion that such limitations must exist on omnipotence.

I put limits on omnipotence by assuming the Bible is accurate revelation about the nature of God. It is a presupposition I recognize and am upfront about.

I think the issue with your limits on omnipotence is that you aren't recognizing the presuppositional nature of your position but are instead treating it as a proven logical necessity.

 

[Meow Mix]

@Rise to be clear, before I respond, it sounds as though you assert Divine Command Theory is true? This seems to be the source of some disagreement: I reject that a creator’s command is deontological, so any response I make to these last two posts is pretty much going to have to be about DCT if so.

 

[Rise]

@Rise to be clear, before I respond, it sounds as though you assert Divine Command Theory is true? This seems to be the source of some disagreement: I reject that a creator’s command is deontological, so any response I make to these last two posts is pretty much going to have to be about DCT if so.

I am not arguing based on divine command theory as I understand it to be defined. But it might depend on how you define "divine command theory"
My understanding is that divine command theory says something is moral just because God commands it and that morality is defined by God's commands as duties.

I think the problem with that argument is not that it's untrue but that it is a theologically based argument that starts from Biblical presumptions I don't assume the opposing interlocutor will accept.

Therefore, the argument I am making for objective morality and it's source is based on purely logical and philosophical grounds that should be in common with the non-biblical interlocutor.

The basis for what I have said is:
1. Clearly defining what objective morality is.
2. Logically identifying the only place where that could come from.

I can try to summarize again to make clear why this is an argument based on common philosophical and logical grounds:
-The definition of morality has to break down essentially to saying how things are suppose to be instead of how things are.
-Objectivity is defined as that which is true regardless of what people think about it.
-Nothing is truly good or evil without an objective moral standard.
-We cannot talk about what is truly good or evil without identifying an objective moral standard.
-The only source there could possibly be for an objective moral standard is something independent of humanity which can declare how things are suppose to be.
-Only a mind can impart intention to something and therefore declare how it is suppose to be.
-This independent mind cannot just be an alien as it has no more claim to be able to say what the objective purpose or all creation is than we do. Even if we assumed aliens created mankind and earth, they could not create the universe itself so either the aliens are still subject to a higher created purpose and morality (and therefore ultimately don't get to declare what is moral for humanity) or no true objective morality for the universe exists.
-The act of creating something by a mind automatically and necessarily imparts purpose to that creation by the intention of the mind that created it. No creation can exist without a mind and intention, by definition, because otherwise it's not a creation but is just random assemblies.
-There is no other way that purpose and intention could be imparted to the world unless a mind was responsible for it's creation.
-If a mind was responsible for the creation of the world, then purpose would be automatically imparted to it by the act of intentional creation itself. It is unavoidable and logically necessary.
-This mind would have to itself be necessarily uncreated, otherwise whatever super mind above it would impart purpose to the mind and therefore be the true source of objective morality. Resulting in an impossible infinite regress of always needing some higher mind to create the mind in question.
-This mind would also have to have no peers with equal ability to create universes otherwise this being’s definition of how things are suppose to be doesn’t reflect objective moral truth but merely subjective preference.
-Therefore, the mere existing of objective morality as a fact of reality would necessitate us concluding there is an uncreated being with a mind who intended to create the universe and had the power to do so, who has no one else above him or preceding him and no other beside him.

Therefore, objective morality is part of the very act of creation itself as an expression of the intention of the creator when he created it. There is no other logical way we can arrive at an objective morality for our world.

There is no need with such an argument to postulate a post-creation giving of commands or to assess why those commands would be moral. Biblically we can say they would be moral and why they would be. But we don’t need to argue for the existence of moral duties via divine command in order to logically/philosophically demonstrate that objective morality, if it is accepted to exist, must necessarily come from the creator of the universe as it can not come from any other source and still be objective morality by definition.

We are logically required to assume the creator has already decided "how things are suppose to be" when he created the world. Because he could not by definition engage in an act of creation without first having some kind of intention as to the purpose for his creation. Therefore, the standard of objective morality was set at the moment of creation and did not need to be decided on later post-creation.

 

[Meow Mix]

The fundamental problem with that argument is that it's assuming you can appeal to your own belief about what is moral and use that to override the claims of the martians even though they have vastly superior brainpower.

Okay, this is going to be a long response over such a short sentence, so... sorry about that.

I think that we can still draw reasonable conclusions: we are finite beings that are forced to draw conclusions from incomplete epistemic circles all the time. When we do science, we're doing the best with what we have: just so with nearly everything else. Precisely because of these limitations, we need to be aware of epistemic traps that are impossible to evidence ourselves out of once we fall into them. Let me give another example.

Consider a case similar to David Berkowitz (a serial killer named Son of Sam who, the story went, took his orders to murder people from what he believed to be a spirit possessing his dog). Let's say we have a serial killer that takes orders from a voice claiming to be God, just to get a closer analogy to the point here. Let's call our dude Jack for brevity.

Now, Jack affirms propositions such as
(1) God exists
(2) God is omnipotent
(3) God is omniscient
(4) God is omnibenevolent

So far so good for most people. Jack also affirms a consequence of these propositions that
(5) It's possible for God to communicate with me privately if God wanted to

I think most people would still grant this without controversy. However, what happens if Jack starts hearing a voice that tells him to kill? He's now adopted a proposition that many people would find controversial (okay a set of them):
(6) God is actually speaking to me
(7) God wants me to kill Susan next door

Now, here's part of my point: why is (6) controversial, let alone (7)? After all, as you point out, we don't know everything: who are we to say God can't do as He pleases, and perhaps speak to Jack. Is it reasonable for us to say that (6) is probably false? I think it is reasonable, and I suspect that you do too (we will see what you say). But how can this be so when we are finite beings with finite epistemic bubbles and there is so much we don't know, and God (given the other premises) really could be doing (6)?

I could launch into a series of explanations for why it's reasonable to doubt (6) is true, but I'm sure you can imagine them so I will not have to be so explicit unless you make me: it isn't parsimonious for instance to bring God into the picture when when an alternative explanation is
(6') Jack is experiencing a hallucination

(Supported by premises that humans sometimes hallucinate, etc.)

Now, if you agree that we can be reasonable in doubting the truth of (6), then I think you are on track to seeing why we can be reasonable in doubting that apparent malevolence by a more intelligent being is really, somehow, secretly benevolent. We can be reasonable in the absence of all information because we're forced to, it's routine for us to have to do this. N'est-ce pas? And it's reasonable for many of the same reasons: believing there is a secret reason that an apparent thing, even a blatantly apparent thing, really isn't that thing (say, that apparent malevolence is somehow inexplicably benevolence) isn't very parsimonious.

So, I haven't been arguing that we can know in an absolute sense that apparent malevolence isn't secretly benevolence when performed by a more intelligent being: I have been arguing that it's reasonable to doubt that it is.

Moving on.

Let's talk about (7), where Jack believes God has told him to kill Susan next door. At first, Jack finds this to be incongruent with (4), that God is benevolent. But Jack has an idea!

(8) God, being smarter than Jack, has an unknowable reason for commanding Susan's death that is in congruence with (4)

But isn't this a problem? Can't Jack make any infinite number of premises in the same style of (8) that justify literally anything? Once Jack shunts away responsibility for reasonably assessing the situation ("God might have a reason I can't know"), Jack could literally form any premise of this form. Nothing could ever convince Jack, once he's accepted a premise with the same form as (8), that premise (4) might be false: nothing could ever convince him.

This is the epistemic trap. So, knowing that (8)-style premises are literally inescapable, is it reasonable to form an (8)-style premise in the first place if we know we can never get out of it once we adopt it? I don't think that it is: I think this is some form of meta-epistemic argument about the styles of premises we should adopt or more aptly avoid adopting because of their inescapability.

In fact, we can build any kind of trap like this that we like. Given these premises:
(9) An unie exists
(10) Unies are omnipotent
(11) Unies are omniscient
(12) It is the nature of unies to abhor blue M&M's and to seek their destruction and removal from planet Earth

We might look around us at planet Earth and see a lot of evidence that is incongruent with (12). We might reasonably doubt that the collection of premises (9)-(12) possibly describes reality given the contradiction. But wait! We can make an (8)-style premise and fall into an epistemic trap if we like:

(13) Unies, being omnipotent and omniscient, could have an unknowable reason for allowing the blue M&M's we see on Earth to exist for right now that's in congruence with (12)

We're saved, right? As long as we make something smarter than us in the premises, we can literally make any kind of (8)-style premise to say anything we want, anything we can imagine, and we can never escape from it no matter what the evidence is after we've adopted it!

Is this epistemologically sane to do? Is it reasonable? I don't think that it is. I think that we have to make this kind of meta-epistemic analysis to understand that there are some kinds of premises that are traps that we should not adopt. Furthermore, I think that we have to realize that we can and do make reasonable beliefs about things for which we are not omniscient: such as doubting Jack is actually hearing the voice of God in the face of the evidence that Jack may just be hallucinating -- or doubting that all the suffering God would be culpable for (like physical suffering) is really somehow benevolent when it's normally malevolent to cause suffering when there are alternatives.

I will respond to the rest soon, or another time, depending on when I'm going to bed here.

Edit: I wanted to put it like this. When confronted with something smarter than us in the premises, it feels like we have two options when we find an apparent contradiction with the premises and the world that we see:

a) We form a reasonable belief even though we're not omniscient based on what we do know, like when we reasonably doubt Jack is hearing the voice of God telling him to murder. (I would also argue: like if we doubt all the physical suffering in the world really has some secret benevolent explanation).

b) We form a premise (8)-style trap and just let ourselves fall into it, even though we know that we can form any kind of (8)-style trap we want arbitrarily, even though we know we will never be able to escape it no matter what evidence presents itself.

I do not think (b) is wise. Do you?

 

[Meow Mix]

But you can't assume that is the case because you can't make any claim about whether or nor what they are doing is right or wrong without first having an objective moral standard to appeal to.

Who is to say it's wrong to kill off all humanity and replace it with martians?
Maybe from their perspective they have a good reason. How are you going to tell them their perspective is objectively morally wrong?

As stated elsewhere, we don't have to have to have moral realism to get a contradiction between claimed benevolence and causing suffering (when there are alternatives to causing that suffering). You'll get various definitions out of benevolence from different dictionaries but they are generally something like "the quality of being well-meaning, kindness." It is easy to understand that benevolence is not in congruence with causing gratuitous suffering: even a sociopath that hurts people could recognize that they are not benevolent even though they have no real conception of what empathy even is.

This is why I frame the PoE in terms of suffering and benevolence instead of nebulous terms like "good" or "evil."

There are people today who think killing of 95% of the human population would be morally good thing. People like Bill Gates think the ideal situation would be no humans on earth. How are they any different from the martians who want to wipe out humanity for what they think is a good reason? How can you tell them they are wrong for wanting to do this?

We can't even begin to talk about how we assess the morality of god's actions without first establishing why you think you have an objective moral standard which can be used to judge god against.

The same way anyone else might tell someone they're wrong for genocide: by disagreeing with the hierarchy of values that led them to that moral belief, based on my own hierarchy of values. In a discussion people either agree on the same or similar enough hierarchy of values or they don't. Things follow if they do. If they don't, all you can try to do is get someone to perform belief revision on their values.

I don't think people consciously choose their values, but values can change when exposed to new information, just like beliefs can.

Doxastic voluntarism is false: I can't just will myself to believe something just because; but if I'm given a reason to believe something, I might find myself convinced (or not): also beyond my conscious control.

The problem with your position here is that it is an appeal to preference and convenience rather than logic.

It's still a logic/reason appeal when people share similar value hierarchies. If I value empathy and you value empathy, I can make arguments to you about what you should do. This is because moral propositions are only propositional in a cognitive way when they're hypothetical imperatives: if you value X, then you ought to do Y. Of course, it's more complicated than that, but that is a starting point.

Again, if you don't share the same hierarchy of values, or you share the same values but in a different hierarchy (e.g. we both value life and property, but perhaps one values life more than property and the other values property more than life or something like that, such that two people would answer the question "is it okay to steal if absolutely necessary to keep someone alive" differently), then the most we can hope for is to make arguments that try to get the other person to perform belief revision on their values based on new ways of thinking/new evidence/etc., whatever triggers for belief revision there are.

It's still logically true to say that God's omniscience makes it literally impossible for you to ever assume you are in a position to know enough about why God did something in order to judge it.

You might find this an undesirable position to be in but that doesn't change the logical conclusion we must necessarily reach.

I responded to this in a new response, should be Post #257. I refer to that post here.

 

[Meow Mix]

If you don't mind, since this post summarizes Post #254, I will just respond to this one directly to keep our posts under control a bit. I have read #254, not just ignoring it.

I am not arguing based on divine command theory as I understand it to be defined. But it might depend on how you define "divine command theory"
My understanding is that divine command theory says something is moral just because God commands it and that morality is defined by God's commands as duties.

That's just a convenient way to put it (regarding making commands). It doesn't have to be in the form of commands. Really any moral theory that places God's decisions or intent as the basis of morality such that God's decisions/intent make moral truths/real oughts is DCT whether God explicitly "makes commands" or not.

I am adding emphasis in bold to this next quote block to make referring to things easier.

I think the problem with that argument is not that it's untrue but that it is a theologically based argument that starts from Biblical presumptions I don't assume the opposing interlocutor will accept.

Therefore, the argument I am making for objective morality and it's source is based on purely logical and philosophical grounds that should be in common with the non-biblical interlocutor.

The basis for what I have said is:
1. Clearly defining what objective morality is.
2. Logically identifying the only place where that could come from.

I can try to summarize again to make clear why this is an argument based on common philosophical and logical grounds:
a-The definition of morality has to break down essentially to saying how things are suppose to be instead of how things are.
b-Objectivity is defined as that which is true regardless of what people think about it.
c-Nothing is truly good or evil without an objective moral standard.
d-We cannot talk about what is truly good or evil without identifying an objective moral standard.
e-The only source there could possibly be for an objective moral standard is something independent of humanity which can declare how things are suppose to be.
f-Only a mind can impart intention to something and therefore declare how it is suppose to be.
g-This independent mind cannot just be an alien as it has no more claim to be able to say what the objective purpose or all creation is than we do. Even if we assumed aliens created mankind and earth, they could not create the universe itself so either the aliens are still subject to a higher created purpose and morality (and therefore ultimately don't get to declare what is moral for humanity) or no true objective morality for the universe exists.
h-The act of creating something by a mind automatically and necessarily imparts purpose to that creation by the intention of the mind that created it. No creation can exist without a mind and intention, by definition, because otherwise it's not a creation but is just random assemblies.
i-There is no other way that purpose and intention could be imparted to the world unless a mind was responsible for it's creation.
j-If a mind was responsible for the creation of the world, then purpose would be automatically imparted to it by the act of intentional creation itself. It is unavoidable and logically necessary.
k-This mind would have to itself be necessarily uncreated, otherwise whatever super mind above it would impart purpose to the mind and therefore be the true source of objective morality. Resulting in an impossible infinite regress of always needing some higher mind to create the mind in question.
l-This mind would also have to have no peers with equal ability to create universes otherwise this being’s definition of how things are suppose to be doesn’t reflect objective moral truth but merely subjective preference.
m-Therefore, the mere existing of objective morality as a fact of reality would necessitate us concluding there is an uncreated being with a mind who intended to create the universe and had the power to do so, who has no one else above him or preceding him and no other beside him.

Therefore, objective morality is part of the very act of creation itself as an expression of the intention of the creator when he created it. There is no other logical way we can arrive at an objective morality for our world.

I have added letters to be able to easily refer to particular lines, my emphasis is in bold.

I'm going to go ahead and reserve the right to dispute any of these (c and d for instance) that talk about "good" and "evil" and anything resembling a "moral truth" as meaningful concepts because I am a moral noncognitivist and I do not grant that these utterances are meaningful in my own worldview.

Granting the premises for the sake of argument (literally) for now. I think most of this does follow (with caveats*) until we get to somewhere around l (that's lowercase L). Something strikes me about this: why would the existence of another being make the moral framework subjective preference? Can't it still be a subjective preference even if it's just the one? What I'm saying is that not having other beings of similar creative power does seem like a necessary condition, but it doesn't seem sufficient: such that if you say it would be subjective preference if another being existed, you need to add more to the premise. Am I saying this right? Let me try rephrasing in the hope this communicates what I'm thinking better (I'm a little tired, sorry):

If having multiple creators makes the moral framework of one creator "subjective preference," then it feels like it would be subjective preference anyway: being the lone creator seems like a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition to leap the gap from subjective preference to objective framework.

I think of it like this: say the universe starts with 2 gods for the sake of argument. By (l) we would say that their moral frameworks are subjective preference. Now say one of the two gods poofs out of existence. Would the remaining god's moral framework all of a sudden be objective, or would it still be subjective preference? It seems like a lone being's framework could be subjective preference even though it's alone: so the absence of others might be necessary, but it's not sufficient. Ai-je tort?

In any case, that's a minor objection. I'll get to the asterisk * now, the caveats: I do not think it's established that a creator's preferences are deontological. I can imagine a universe where a person (uncreated person, popped up in a quantum vacuum for the thought experiment) programs The Matrix full of true sapient/sentient AI, and the programmer's preferences for that world don't seem prima facie deontological solely for the fact that they are the creator's preferences. But this is really just disagreeing with DCT: the inhabitants of this Matrix might come up with DCT and decide that the programmer's preferences are deontological, but there doesn't seem to be a fact behind that: it's not self-compelling. It requires some argument. The same goes with God-as-creator: why should God's preferences be deontological just because God is the creator? You argue that God is creator as if this fact itself justifies that God's intentions (I say preferences, but I'll say intentions here for you) are deontological, but I see no reason to accept this premise. Why should I? Where's that argument?

I snipped the end because it was talking about literal commands and how we don't need them to allegedly get deontology, but that's addressed at the top of this post: we're still talking about DCT here, we don't need literal commands for it to be DCT.

 

[Rise]

Okay, this is going to be a long response over such a short sentence, so... sorry about that.

I think that we can still draw reasonable conclusions: we are finite beings that are forced to draw conclusions from incomplete epistemic circles all the time. When we do science, we're doing the best with what we have: just so with nearly everything else. Precisely because of these limitations, we need to be aware of epistemic traps that are impossible to evidence ourselves out of once we fall into them. Let me give another example.

Consider a case similar to David Berkowitz (a serial killer named Son of Sam who, the story went, took his orders to murder people from what he believed to be a spirit possessing his dog). Let's say we have a serial killer that takes orders from a voice claiming to be God, just to get a closer analogy to the point here. Let's call our dude Jack for brevity.

Now, Jack affirms propositions such as
(1) God exists
(2) God is omnipotent
(3) God is omniscient
(4) God is omnibenevolent

So far so good for most people. Jack also affirms a consequence of these propositions that
(5) It's possible for God to communicate with me privately if God wanted to

I think most people would still grant this without controversy. However, what happens if Jack starts hearing a voice that tells him to kill? He's now adopted a proposition that many people would find controversial (okay a set of them):
(6) God is actually speaking to me
(7) God wants me to kill Susan next door

Now, here's part of my point: why is (6) controversial, let alone (7)? After all, as you point out, we don't know everything: who are we to say God can't do as He pleases, and perhaps speak to Jack. Is it reasonable for us to say that (6) is probably false? I think it is reasonable, and I suspect that you do too (we will see what you say).

Notice how you say it's "reasonable" to draw your conclusion, but you don't provide any reasons for why you would draw your conclusion. By definition for something to be reasonable you first need reasons.

So what are you reasons?

They are based on presumptions that you believe are held in common. Which are, perhaps:

1. That killing is immoral.
2. That god isn't immoral.
3. Therefore god wouldn't be telling this person to kill because it would be immoral.

Or

1. That god doesn't exist.
2. Therefore god can't be speaking to someone.


The problem with the first proposition is that it is actually an entirely unreasonable position for a nontheist/atheist to take.

It highlights the absurdity of the nontheist/atheist position that they take for granted that objective morality exists but such a thing is impossible to exist under their worldview.

They don't live or think in a way that is consistent with their worldview.

If you truly followed nontheism/atheism to it's ultimate logical conclusion then we would be forced to conclude that the first proposition is, in fact, unreasonable, because morality doesn't even exist.

You would only be saying your conclusion is reasonable on the basis that you don't believe god exists. But you can't prove that is true and can't assume others are going to accept your premise. But at least it's still a reasonable conclusion to draw from your worldview as opposed to the first proposition which would be an unreasonable conclusion from your worldview.

But how can this be so when we are finite beings with finite epistemic bubbles and there is so much we don't know, and God (given the other premises) really could be doing (6)?

Two points:

1. We have to examine here the implied premise underneath your question.
Which would be that you think it's unworkable in practice to live as though we cant make judgements about Jack's claim.
Therefore, we should just go with what we believe is true and operate according to that.

But what you don't seem to realize is that this dilemma you find yourself in only demonstrates the unworkability of the nonatheist/atheist worldview in practical reality. Because you don't have the capability of making objective moral claims and deriving your actions from those objective moral conclusions.

You recognize the practical need to be able to make such judgements but find yourself unable to justify doing so according to what you claim is true about reality.

So you live as though there is a singular theistic source of objective morality (out of necessity) while at the same time not recognizing the necessary existence of a singular theistic source.

The logical problem you find yourself in of not being able to pass judgement on the morality of God in relation to that command doesn't go away just because you feel there is a practical need to be able to make such judgements.
If anything this dilemma should only demonstrate the unworkability of a worldview that has no basis for claiming morality can exist.


2. You are operating from an incomplete premise.
It is an incomplete premise that assumes the only answer we have in this situation is to use our own limited understanding to figure out what is true.

A Biblical worldview doesn't require us to be able to figure everything out with our own limited understanding.
It allows for God to speak to us and speak to others as confirmation, to guide us through the Holy Spirit acting on our inner being and mind, and has given us a book full of where He has spoken for us to compare that to.

This is why Jesus and Paul tell us we have the ability to make right judgements about something if we judge by God's spirit.
1 John 1:4, John 7:24, 1 Corinthians 2:14-15, Isaiah 11:2-3, 1 Corinthians 12:10, 1 Thessalonians 5:21, Hebrews 5:14, 1 Kings 3:9, Acts 17:11, Philippians 1:9-10, Hosea 14:9, James 1:5, 1 Corinthians 2:11,

Therefore, a Biblical worldview doesn't run into the same problem as the nontheist/atheist with being unable to judge the morality of an action in light of God's morality, or the ability to judge whether or not God has actually spoken to an individual.


So the logical problem your position faces hasn't gone away: You still logically have no basis for being able to claim you can know enough about an all knowing being to be able to claim they don't have a good reason for what they do.

You worldview doesn't give you that option.

A biblical worldview does give you that option. Because not only does it provide a basis for objective morality to exist, but it also gives you the tools to make determinations of whether or not God has spoken.

So, again, we end up concluding that the nontheist/atheist worldview is not equipped to give a consistent and coherent answer to the dilemma you posed - but Biblical theism is.

This should cause one to re-examine the soundness of their worldview as a premise to base other conclusions on.

I could launch into a series of explanations for why it's reasonable to doubt (6) is true, but I'm sure you can imagine them so I will not have to be so explicit unless you make me: it isn't parsimonious for instance to bring God into the picture when when an alternative explanation is
(6') Jack is experiencing a hallucination

(Supported by premises that humans sometimes hallucinate, etc.)

That is a possibility based on reason. However, you don't have a basis for being able to say it is the most likely answer unless you are able to assert one of the two propositions I outline above.

If you can't assert that God doesn't exist, or you can't assert that God wouldn't say that, then you really aren't in a position to logically claim Jack is even most likely wrong.

You merely take it for granted that most people in our society would share your conclusion that Jack is wrong - but you haven't examined the logical grounds upon which you presume your conclusion is true. And, afterall, popularity doesn't prove something to be true.

You will find the nontheist/atheist worldview doesn't provide adequate logical or philosophical grounding for such a claim to be made. But the Biblical theistic worldview does.

Now, if you agree that we can be reasonable in doubting the truth of (6), then I think you are on track to seeing why we can be reasonable in doubting that apparent malevolence by a more intelligent being is really, somehow, secretly benevolent.
We can be reasonable in the absence of all information because we're forced to, it's routine for us to have to do this. N'est-ce pas? And it's reasonable for many of the same reasons: believing there is a secret reason that an apparent thing, even a blatantly apparent thing, really isn't that thing (say, that apparent malevolence is somehow inexplicably benevolence) isn't very parsimonious.

So, I haven't been arguing that we can know in an absolute sense that apparent malevolence isn't secretly benevolence when performed by a more intelligent being: I have been arguing that it's reasonable to doubt that it is.

As I pointed out, your worldview doesn't give you the ability to make any logically true declaration about the truth of that.

But the bigger problem is that your proposition is incoherent from the start if your worldview denies the existence of objective morality.
You can't judge whether God's actions are immoral if morality doesn't exist.

That by itself is sufficient to undermine your claim without even having to get into the issue of whether or not you have enough knowledge to know whether or not God's actions are moral.

And even if we assumed you had a basis for asserting objective morality exists, you don't solve the dilemma of your worldview by appealing to the practical necessity of having to make a determination - all you really do is highlight the inadequacy of your worldview by showing it can't answer this question.

We therefore cannot say your claim is reasonable in light of your worldview because your worldview doesn't give you valid logical reasons based on sound premises for you to reach your conclusion.

If we conclude that it is a logical necessity that you must be able to judge moral right or wrong of the actions of others, yet your worldview makes that impossible to logically do, then the only logical conclusion is that your worldview is in error and you need a better worldview to explain the necessities of reality.

 

[Rise]

Let's talk about (7), where Jack believes God has told him to kill Susan next door. At first, Jack finds this to be incongruent with (4), that God is benevolent. But Jack has an idea!

(8) God, being smarter than Jack, has an unknowable reason for commanding Susan's death that is in congruence with (4)

But isn't this a problem? Can't Jack make any infinite number of premises in the same style of (8) that justify literally anything? Once Jack shunts away responsibility for reasonably assessing the situation ("God might have a reason I can't know"), Jack could literally form any premise of this form. Nothing could ever convince Jack, once he's accepted a premise with the same form as (8), that premise (4) might be false: nothing could ever convince him.

This is the epistemic trap. So, knowing that (8)-style premises are literally inescapable, is it reasonable to form an (8)-style premise in the first place if we know we can never get out of it once we adopt it? I don't think that it is: I think this is some form of meta-epistemic argument about the styles of premises we should adopt or more aptly avoid adopting because of their inescapability.

In fact, we can build any kind of trap like this that we like. Given these premises:
(9) An unie exists
(10) Unies are omnipotent
(11) Unies are omniscient
(12) It is the nature of unies to abhor blue M&M's and to seek their destruction and removal from planet Earth

We might look around us at planet Earth and see a lot of evidence that is incongruent with (12). We might reasonably doubt that the collection of premises (9)-(12) possibly describes reality given the contradiction. But wait! We can make an (8)-style premise and fall into an epistemic trap if we like:

(13) Unies, being omnipotent and omniscient, could have an unknowable reason for allowing the blue M&M's we see on Earth to exist for right now that's in congruence with (12)

We're saved, right? As long as we make something smarter than us in the premises, we can literally make any kind of (8)-style premise to say anything we want, anything we can imagine, and we can never escape from it no matter what the evidence is after we've adopted it!

Although I could approach this from many angles, some of which I have already covered (Your worldview can't call it morally wrong, the Biblical worldview has a solution to this, etc), I think we really need to drill down to the core underlying premise here that you can't justify.

Premise: It's bad if we can't tell Jack he's wrong.

Because you're basically admitting you don't have a logical basis for the following conclusions:
1. That Jack didn't hear from god.
2 That god wouldn't say that.
3. That if god did say that then He must not have a good reason, therefore he must be malevolent.

Since you can't reason your way to concluding that Jack is wrong, what are you really appealing to?

You're appealing to the idea that you have a necessary requirement to be able to tell Jack he's wrong.

Well, who says you have that need? Why do you have that need?

Behind your assertion is the implied claim that life would be practically unlivable without being able to tell Jack he's wrong - because there would be so much disorder that society would fall apart and all kinds of immoral behavior and unnecessary suffering would result.

You intuitively know that to be the case - but the question you are required to answer at that point is do you have a reasoned basis for concluding why that is an objectively bad situation and not just your subjective personal preference?

According to your worldview there can be no objective morality or ultimate purpose. So upon what basis do you claim to need to be able to make a judgement about this matter?

You are merely expressing a personal preference to be able to judge such matters, without being able to articulate from your worldview what the actual reasons would be why you must be able to.
That's why I said you aren't making a logical argument but are merely expressing your desire and preference.


In contrast, the Biblical worldview gives me actual reasons for why I need to be able to discern whether or not Jack is hearing from God and why I need to be able to tell Jack he's wrong.

From the Biblical worldview I can tell you why we have a need to be able to answer these questions:
1. Satan seeks to deceive people, and Satan's goal is to kill/steal/destroy, so we must recognize that as a possibility an be on guard against it.
2. Killing, stealing, and destroying is immoral.
3.We have a destined purpose to do good for others, so it would be bad if anyone were killed unnecessarily.
4. We have ways of concluding Jack is not hearing from God, in which case it would be bad for Jack to go down this path because it will probably lead to his eternal separation from God.
5. We have a moral duty from God to do justice and protect the innocent.
6. We have a moral duty from God to safeguard what is true and proclaim what is true to others.
7. Unnecessary suffering is not God's will, so we must seek to align society towards what is morally true because that is the only way suffering will be reduced.


You have correctly identified the intuitive inner sense you have that you legitimately need to be able to answer this question for society to not fall apart - but you are rejecting the worldview that would give you the ability to answer it. Your worldview not only won't allow you to answer the questions but it won't even allow you to think the question needs to be answered.

In light of that, it would be your worldview that needs to change to conform to what you know to be true about reality.

Otherwise you are the one engaging in the fallacy of special pleading: You are trying to make a special plea for being able to make objective moral judgements about Jack even though your worldview affords you no logical ability to do so

Is this epistemologically sane to do? Is it reasonable?

By definition, your expectations aren't reasonable because you haven't articulated a reasoned basis to justify why you think you can judge actions as bad and why you think bad things must be avoided.

You take it for granted that there is an ideal state of coexistence which we must strive for in society without being able to articulate why that would be objectively true and not just subjective preference.

You take it for granted that murder is wrong without being able to articulate why it objectively is.

Holding beliefs about what is true about reality without reason would be the very definition of unreasonable.

Actually, Jack's hypothetical beliefs would technically be more "reasonable" than yours simply on the basis that he at least provides a reason for what he believes.

But that's using "reasonable" in a technical sense.

You are using reasonable in more of a sense of "are these reasons true or not?"

Well, as I pointed out, your worldview gives you no way of answering that question. But other worldviews do.

So how can you continue to hold to a nontheist worldview that can't explain the concept of objective morality that you know to exist?

Instead of making a special pleading for why we must accept that objective morality is true, despite it being impossible according to your worldview, why not consider the possibility that your premises may be unsound because you're starting from a flawed theological worldview?

I don't think that it is. I think that we have to make this kind of meta-epistemic analysis to understand that there are some kinds of premises that are traps that we should not adopt.

Furthermore, I think that we have to realize that we can and do make reasonable beliefs about things for which we are not omniscient: such as doubting Jack is actually hearing the voice of God in the face of the evidence that Jack may just be hallucinating -- or doubting that all the suffering God would be culpable for (like physical suffering) is really somehow benevolent when it's normally malevolent to cause suffering when there are alternatives.

This goes back to the implied premise I talked about: Who says you shouldn't adopt that premise?
Who says it's bad if you can't tell Jack he's wrong?

What objective basis do you have for declaring it would be bad if we couldn't tell Jack he was wrong?

The only real answer you'd be able to provide based on your worldview is "because I just know in my inner being that it is true".

Well, I would say your inner knowing is right - but it's not consistent with your nontheism worldview, which gives no provision for objective morality and transcendent objective purpose to exist.

So these are mutually exclusive properties. There can't be both nontheism and objective morality. But you know objective morality is real. So what are we left to conclude? That there must be a theistic source.

 

[Rise]

Edit: I wanted to put it like this. When confronted with something smarter than us in the premises, it feels like we have two options when we find an apparent contradiction with the premises and the world that we see:

a) We form a reasonable belief even though we're not omniscient based on what we do know, like when we reasonably doubt Jack is hearing the voice of God telling him to murder. (I would also argue: like if we doubt all the physical suffering in the world really has some secret benevolent explanation).

b) We form a premise (8)-style trap and just let ourselves fall into it, even though we know that we can form any kind of (8)-style trap we want arbitrarily, even though we know we will never be able to escape it no matter what evidence presents itself.

I do not think (b) is wise. Do you?

I have already addressed that in what I wrote above, but there is one thing that is part of your premise here that should be addressed:

Your argument breaks down because it's based on the false premise that you're merely talking about a being who is smarter than you. But that is not the case with God.

Three key reasons:

1. An omniscient being is not merely smarter than you. They don't need to use brainpower to make logical deductions based on observation.

To be all knowing is to simply know all things.
You don't need to think about it. You don't need to process it. You don't need to reason your way to it. You just know it already.

This makes it logically impossible for you to ever claim they are wrong and you are right about what the truth of something is. By definition of being omniscient they already know what is true. Which is why you are dependent on them for revelation about what is true because you lack the capacity to find the answer on your own.

If God tells you that He is all good and has a good reason for doing something, you will never be in a position to question that if you accept the premise that he is actually all knowing.


2. The only way you can try to argue that is by questioning whether or not he is actually all good. Which would imply you think he was lying to you when he said he was all good, even though he's all knowing.

But this is impossible for you to do based on the premise of the PoE question which assumes God is already omnibenevolent.

That is another reason your martian analogy falls apart in relation to God - because we don't assume the martians are omnibenevolent. We don't even assume they are all knowing. We simpy assume they are smarter.

So therefore the only thing the theist has to do to answer the PoE question based on it's premises is to point out that if God is truly both all good and all knowing then we are perfectly within reason to assume that God not only has perfectly good intentions for what he does but that he has the knowledge to know that what He is doing is actually the most good option available.

There only has to be an infinitesimally small chance that God could possibly have one good reason for taking an action in order for the premises of the PoE to force us to conclude that God must have a good reason for what He has done.

The only way you can logically prove a contradiction between these different premises is if you can prove that god has taken an action that can't be good.

But you are utterly incapable of proving such an assertion is true. Therefore, even the smallest possibility that your assertion could not be true forces us to conclude that it must not be true, based on the starting premises of the PoE question.



3. As the creator of all, a theistic creator defines what is moral by the act of creation itself via what their intention was they created it. For the reasons I have already given.

This makes it logically impossible for you to claim any theistic conception of a creator is morally wrong in what they purposed their creation for.

Although the idea that this omni being is the creator of all things is not explicit in the PoE premises, we could establish it is necessarily implied by being all powerful. I don't think you would dispute we could do that, so I don't think I need to go through the steps of how we'd do that.