Special Pleading and the PoE (Part 3)

[Rise]

@Meow Mix

Considering that my last series of responses depends on establishing my arguments about objective morality and responding to your objections, I plan to gather your comments related to that and respond to them next.

I would therefore recommend you wait to respond to my latest posts until you also see the counter arguments I give on the morality issue.

 

[Meow Mix]

@Meow Mix

Considering that my last series of responses depends on establishing my arguments about objective morality and responding to your objections, I plan to gather your comments related to that and respond to them next.

I would therefore recommend you wait to respond to my latest posts until you also see the counter arguments I give on the morality issue.

I was just about to say that I had to wake up on 3 hrs of sleep to pick a friend up from the hospital so I won’t have the brain to respond today anyway, at least not until I get more sleep.

I enjoy having a conversation I want my brain for. Kudos

 

[Rise]

The following are responses dealing with the morality issue.

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.

By the very definition of calling something omnibenevolent you are making a moral judgement to say that good and evil exist and that this being is 100% good.
It is impossible to say something is omnibenevolent without first asserting moral good and evil exist.

Therefore, when you claim that the existence of suffering is not consistent with omnibenevolence, you're making a moral judgement that this being is not good for allowing such suffering to take place.

You're claiming the suffering could be prevented. And by extension you're accusing this being of not being all good if they don't prevent it.

Those are judgements that are impossible to make without an objective moral standard to appeal to.

And it is impossible to appeal to an objective moral standard to judge the creator of all things when the creator is the only possible source of objective morality by virtue of being the one who defined "how things are suppose to be" when he created everything according to his own intentions and purposes.

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.

You're talking about causing suffering, but the PoE question goes beyond that to imply that a being with the power to stop suffering has a moral obligation to stop it even if they didn't cause it.

Otherwise the problem is solved simply by saying God didn't cause any of the suffering but people and satan cause all the suffering.

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.

...

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.

You are trying to redefine omnibenevolence in a way that doesn't make linguistic or conceptual sense and have engaged in the fallacy of circular reasoning while doing so.

You have tried to define omnibenevolent as the maximal quality of not wanting to see others in pain in order to prove your claim that god can't be omnibenevolent if pain exists. That is circular reasoning and not consistent with the plain definition of that term.

Let's look more closely at the definition:

Omni-benevolent. Derived from the Latin for "all" + "good".

"Good"
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/good

Let's take the first two:
1. morally excellent; virtuous; righteous; pious:a good man.
2. satisfactory in quality, quantity, or degree:

The very first definition is explicitly moral in nature. Good is defined as what is morally right in opposition to what is morally wrong.

But even the second definition is still a value judgement that requires being able to say how things are suppose to be. You can't say something is of sufficient standard without first having a standard to meet.


So when you define "preventing suffering" as "good", you are inherently making a moral judgement that not preventing suffering is "bad"

Therefore, you cannot claim that to fail to prevent suffering is bad or to prevent suffering is good unless you can first justify those claims using an objective moral standard.

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."

Benevolent:
marked by or disposed to doing good
Definition of BENEVOLENT

So your claim is not true. Ultimately we have to look at what the definition of good is. And I already dealt with that above. You therefore cannot define what benevolent is without defining what evil (ie the opposite of good) is.

Even the definition of "well meaning" won't save you:

Well-Meaning:
having good intentions
Definition of WELL-MEANING

Good and well meaning are words that require the qualification of placing a moral value judgement on actions. Ie. What is "good".

You can't say the martians aren't well-meaning to exterminate humanity unless you can define what ill-will is.
You can't say it's bad for humanity to be exterminated unless you can say what is good for humanity.

You can't make any claims about what is good for humanity without an objective moral standard to appeal to. Otherwise you're just talking about your personal preference and not an objectively true statement that everyone is obligated to abide by regardless of their opinion.

 

[Rise]

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).

You can't get away from the proper definition of omnibenevolence as inherently a moral judgement.
As a result, anything you plug into the category of "problem I don't like" means you are making a moral judgement that for god to not stop what you don't like that he must either be bad or lack the power to do so.

You are trying to redefine omnibenevolence in a way that means it no longer is omnibenevolence by definition. In order to get around the inconvenience the definition poses for your desired conclusion without having to admit you've actually abandoned the premise of the PoE question entirely.

At that point you are no longer talking about the PoE because you're no longer talking about genuine omnibenevolence but your own personal distorted definition of it where you choose to define omnibenevolence "whatever it is I personally like".

Which really just makes the whole question an exercise in fallacious circular reasoning. You define evil as "whatever it is I don't like", and benevolence as "the opposite of whatever I don't like". Then your question just becomes a pointless tautology that doesn't tell us anything objectively true about reality but only tells us what your subjective personal opinion is.

It's not unlike Krauss trying to redefine "nothing" to mean "something" in order to get around the problem of how you explain how we got something from nothing. You don't solve logical problems by redefining terms to change the concept behind those terms while still pretending that word applies to the original concept you were trying to explain. It's putting on a masquerade of pretending one has solved the problem when they haven't. The concept of nothing still exists and is still a problem waiting to be solved. You don't solve it by simply slapping the label of "nothing" on something and then pretending the concept of nothing now no longer exists.

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).

You aren't talking about morality at that point.

Morality by definition is how something is "suppose to be" as opposed to "how it is".

You have nothing to appeal to in order to determine how things are suppose to be.

Your personal preference for something doesn't make it right or true.

Your preference doesn't give you any logical power to insist that someone else is wrong for wanting something different.

Likewise, you have no basis for saying that god would be wrong for not preventing suffering just because your preference is for preventing suffering.

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).

Several problems with your statement:

1. As I pointed out, you can't define the PoE as benevolence vs suffering without first being able to prove that benevolence is not compatible with suffering.

2. You can't do that without making a moral judgement about it being good or bad to allow suffering.

3. In order to try to avoid having to make a moral judgement, you create a circular reasoning fallacy by simply redefining omnibenevolence to mean "that which prevents suffering". Even though that is not how the word is actually defined.

4. Your premise that involves changing the definition of omnibenevolence remains factually untrue regardless of whether or not you get someone to agree with your premise. Therefore you cannot expect to reach a true conclusion because your premise is not sound.

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).

...

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.

I have now addressed that issue in my latest previous posts.

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.

You are confusing the concept of proving what is true with simply telling someone your opinion.
You don't prove something is objectively morally wrong by telling them what your opinion is.
Otherwise you have no way of proving their opinion is wrong and yours is right. So any discussion of who is wrong or right is meaningless as no one can be said to be right or wrong.

Therefore, you can't objectively say hitler's genocide was wrong. You can only say you disagree with it. But your opinion is meaningless with regards to determining what is objectively true. Opinions are freely discarded without logic and evidence to show why they must be accepted to be truth.

Without an objective moral truth, you would be no more morally right to use force to try to stop the genocide than hitler was for trying to use force to commit the genocide. It would just be your opinion against his, and the only thing that determines the outcome is who has more force to accomplish their goal with.


Likewise:
Your opinion of God doesn't do anything to advance our understanding of what the truth about God is.

The PoE question was designed to determine what is logically true about God, not merely to determine what someone's opinion about God is.

If you don't have an objective standard of morality to appeal to then you have no basis for claiming anything God does or doesn't do is immoral. It's just your opinion - but your opinion doesn't make it true.

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.

Your belief about your inability to make moral choices or change beliefs is ultimately not relevant to the issue in contention - which is that the PoE proposes to pass moral judgement on god's actions and you don't even have an objective moral standard to appeal to for passing such judgement.

Just because you think your moral beliefs are encoded into your body in a deterministic way doesn't change the fact that it's still just your subjective personal preference and not an objective moral truth.

You still run into all the same logical problems I outlined as if you believed you could choose your beliefs and morals.

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.

When I said you were making an appeal to convenience rather than logic, I was referring to the fact that you are trying to claim you need to be able pass moral judgement on the actions of others even though you don't have any standard of objective morality to do that.
I expounded on this more in my latest few posts with regards to the Jack analogy.

 

[Rise]

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.

If you don't believe in good, evil, or moral truth, then your entire PoE question is null from the start because you reject two of the premises of the PoE:
1. The idea that omnibenevolence (all-good) could exist.
2. The idea that one has the capability to pass moral judgement on god based on the existence of bad things happening.

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?

That proposition comes out of the fact that what is objectively true and moral about reality comes out of God. He is the only one who is capable of defining those things for reality. Therefore, He is the objective standard.
Objective morality is like objective truth: There's only one of it by definition, otherwise it's not objective.

If there were another being like god who could create a different reality according to different truths and morals, then we wouldn't be able to say one is objectively true and moral over the other because neither of them is subject to the other and there is no one above them to subject both of them to itself.

Therefore, if god were just the god of this universe, and other gods of equal position and power were gods of their own universes, then we couldn't say the truth and morality that defined our universe were objectively true but merely the subjective expression of one god as opposed to another.

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.

Not if objective truth and and morality come from God as the source of that expression for reality.
If there is no other equal to, above, or before God, then there is nothing else but what He has defined as true and moral. Therefore, it becomes objective by definition because it is the singular and sole truth above all else that subjugates all else to it.

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?

You could not logically or philosophically actually have a situation where you had two equal gods who were not subject to anyone/anything else. There would still have to be something above them which defined the reality they shared because neither of them by themselves is able to define the reality they share. If one did define the reality they share then they would subjugate the other to the truth and morality of the reality as they defined it - so they wouldn't be equal but one would take superiority in defining what is objectively true/moral. So they only way they can share a reality but be independent of each other to create their own sub-realities, with neither being able to lay claim to objective truth, is if a third entity has defined the reality they share and nether of them has any power of that entity.

I suppose you could ask, what if there were different gods that didn't actually share a reality together? (By sharing a reality together, think of it as how the universes in a multiverse theory still share the same primordial math and logic that powers the universe generation mechanism. They are still part of the same ultimate reality source).

I would say the problem with that is it strains credibility of how one defines "reality". How can each god define it's own reality according to it's own truth and morality but then still be considered part of the same reality so that we can consider them as being existing together without some higher reality over them that they share?

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.

By admitting there is a creator you automatically are forced to admit there is an objective purpose/morality.
Because no act of creation can be undertaken without having an intention behind the creation.
That intention necessarily defines what the purpose and parameters of the creation is suppose to be.

The only thing in creation that could be subject to morality is also another mind with the free will to violate what they were created to do.

Therefore, if a creator creates conscious free will beings then you automatically end up with objective morality by virtue of the act of creation. There's no way around it.

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?

Your analogy is unsuitable for many similar reasons to why your mars attacks analogy was not suitable.
Your analogy strips away many of the essential attributes of God that allow us to make the conclusions we do.

The person in your analogy is not uncaused and uncreated in the way God is. God never began to exist. God has always existed. That person began to exist. And laws of physics and math preceded them as the ultimate cause for why the person to come into existence.

I have already given the reason for why God's attributes and status as creator make him the objective standard of morality. I can try to summarize it again for clarity.

I should note though, that I'm wondering if some of the difficulties you have with this could come from having an inaccurate idea of what consciousness and free will are (you effectively seem to deny they exist by saying you don't think you have the ability to choose what you believe, and thinking that consciousness/free will could arise from physically deterministic AI processes). I'm not sure yet if we would have to get into tackling that issue in order to deal with God as the source of objective morality.

We are also starting to skirt close to the other issue I haven't gotten to responding to yet: the origin of logic and math. It's starting to look like that could also be another issue that has to be resolved before you can understand what I'm saying about God as the source of objective morality. But I'm not sure yet. Let's keep going with this and see if it's not necessary to break this down to even more basic levels to establish common ground.

Back to resummarizing what I already said about objective morality with God as the origin:
1. All acts of creation are only the product of a free will mind. Otherwise it's not an act of creation it's just random uncaused forces.
2. The defining attributes of what makes something a creation is intent by a mind.
3. It is impossible to create something without having some level of intent behind it.
4. Morality is defined as "how things are suppose to be".
5. Intent implies purpose.
6. "How a creation is suppose to be" is necessarily determined by what the creator intended/purposed when he created.
7. God created all things.
8. Therefore, God has an intent and purpose behind all things.
9. God is uncaused and uncreated, with nothing above him, before him, or beside him. Therefore, he alone is the source of the intent and purpose behind things. It's objective sole source.
10. Only free will created beings could have the ability to violate their intended purpose.
11. Hence, morality becomes a concern for free will created beings because they need to know what their intended purpose is so they can follow it as opposed to doing what is wrong.

You see here, morality is inherent to purpose which is inherent to intent and intent is unavoidable when a mind creates anything.

 

[Meow Mix]

@Rise

I will try to post tonight if I can; but if I can't, I'm going to make a concession about the word "omnibenevolent."

The intention of the Problem, as I pose it, doesn't rely on terms like "good" and "evil." If "omnibenevolent" has them as implications then I concede the term, with the caveat that I never meant it in the first place, then.

I would replace the premise "God is omnibenevolent" as one of the Problem's premises with something like "God doesn't like sapient beings to suffer, and would not cause or allow suffering where possible." This is what I have always meant. This avoids the hairy baggage that comes with "omnibenevolent." I just need to spell it out is all. There may be some better way to word the premise, but I'm in the middle of merging databases with 186,000 galaxies and this is going to involve a lot of mental juggling to catch problems and keep track of subsets, etc. I'll get to things as I can.

 

[Rise]

@Rise

I will try to post tonight if I can; but if I can't, I'm going to make a concession about the word "omnibenevolent."

The intention of the Problem, as I pose it, doesn't rely on terms like "good" and "evil." If "omnibenevolent" has them as implications then I concede the term, with the caveat that I never meant it in the first place, then.

I would replace the premise "God is omnibenevolent" as one of the Problem's premises with something like "God doesn't like sapient beings to suffer, and would not cause or allow suffering where possible." This is what I have always meant. This avoids the hairy baggage that comes with "omnibenevolent." I just need to spell it out is all. There may be some better way to word the premise, but I'm in the middle of merging databases with 186,000 galaxies and this is going to involve a lot of mental juggling to catch problems and keep track of subsets, etc. I'll get to things as I can.

You can certainly propose any premises you'd like as part of an argument - but then we need to examine the soundness of those premises.


I would, in light of how you've defined your position over these past posts, restate your argument like this:

Premise 1: god doesn't like sapient beings to suffer (instead of saying he is omnibenevolent).
Premise 1a: god would not cause sapient beings to suffer if possible.
Premise 1b: god would not allow sapient beings to suffer if he could stop or prevent it.
Premise 2: god is all knowing (omniscient).
Premise 3: god has the power to prevent sapient beings from ever suffering physically (Instead of saying "omnipotent". Because that is a concept you've essentially rejected in previous posts by putting arbitrary limits on god's power, making god explicitly not have power over all aspects of reality, and claiming god is subjugated to something else that preceded him and is above him -ie. logic/math)
Premise 4: sapient beings suffer physically.
Conclusion: god can't exist because sapient beings suffer physically.


The first and most relevant question to this formulation is: Where are you getting your premises about the attributes of god from?

Your premises would have to be coming from one of two places in order to be a meaningful philosophical question.
1. They are based of what people currently, or use to, believe about a particular idea of god.
2. These premises are one what is logically/philosophically forced to arrive at somehow.

The original PoE is clearly premised off the attributes of God as found in the Bible, as there is really nothing else that it could be based off of. I don't see any reason to believe one would have ever had a purely logical or philosophical need to arrive at those combination of attributes unless they were specifically trying to show a supposed logical contradiction the Jewish/Christian idea of God.

But if your premises aren't based off any idea of god that currently exists then what would be the philosophical or theological point of proposing such a question?


The problem with using arbitrary premises that aren't based on any existing idea of god or based on demonstrated philosophical/logical necessity is that we could just as easily plug any arbitrary values into this question and get the same result so it just becomes a circular tautology.

For instance:
Premise 1: god doesn't like ice cream.
Premise 2: god is all knowing
premise 3: god has the power to prevent ice cream from existing.
Premise 4: ice cream exists.
Conclusion: therefore god must not exist.

It might be a logically valid argument structure but that doesn't mean the premises are sound starting points for helping us arrive at the truth about God - because the premises are entirely arbitrary and are set up in a fallaciously circular reasoning way to allow any premise to be used to prove god doesn't exist.

Who says god doesn't like ice cream?
Who says he has the power to prevent it from existing?
Why must we assume either of these premises are true?
What god are we even talking about?

In order for this question to be a valid challenge to the idea that any particular god exists you'd need to identify why these premises are an accurate representation of said god.
Or, in leiu of that, you'd need to establish why we have logical or philosophical reason to assume a god must fit the description of your premises if he is to exist at all.



There are many questions that arise out of the premises of your argument that would need to be answered, especially in light of your denial of objective morality.

1. Why must we assume god doesn't like sapient beings to physically suffer?
2. Why would it be wrong if he did?
3. Why would it be wrong if anyone else did for that matter?
4. Does this include any kind of physical suffering in the slightest or could there be acceptable forms of physical suffering that serve a good purpose? Such as pain to warn of danger, disciplining a child, or punishing a criminal?
5. Even if we accept the premise that god doesn't like sapient beings to suffer physically unnecessarily - why would you assume god doesn't have a necessary reason for allowing or causing physical suffering?
6. Why do you assume god is all knowing?
7. Why do you assume god has the power to prevent any kind of physical suffering?
8. How exactly would he do this?
9. Why is it not possible that there could be something preventing god from doing this considering you already put limits on his power and think he is subjugated to something which preceded him? I wouldn't be surprised if you also think god must be created or caused by whatever logic/math you think preceded him.
10. If god is preceded by a higher objective truth that involves logic/math, and is subjugated by it: why would we assume god is a free will agent who can make a free choice; and not just deterministically required to act based on how the laws governing reality dictate he act? You already seem to reject your own free will consciousness that would allow you to act outside of your supposed deterministic programming.
11. If god is just acting out his deterministic programming like you are, then who/what programmed god to abhor the physical suffering of sapient beings?
12. Which takes us back around to the first question again but in a different way: why do you even assume god must be programmed to abhor the physical suffering of sapient beings?
13. If we conclude god might not abhor the physical suffering of sapient beings then so what? What does that tell us? Why would it matter? It's not like you can make objective moral claims against god for having that viewpoint because you've denied objective morality exists.

Ultimately the way you have formulated your question ends up proving nothing because you don’t believe in objective moral value judgements so we have no reason to say there is anything wrong with a god who loves suffering therefore why not believe in a god who loves suffering?

The implication of the question you pose carries with it the tacit assumption that we shouldn’t or can’t believe in a god who would love suffering - but your worldview affords you no logical reason to draw that conclusion.

 

[Rise]

@Meow Mix

Looking over the rest of your posts here that remain for me to respond to, I have concluded I think it would be safe to say that the logic/math transcendence issue could be broken off into it’s own thread in order to keep this discussion more focused on the PoE question and issues directly related to it.

The logic/math issue would be a good discussion to have in it’s own right - but I don’t know that at this point it’s necessary in this thread to establish agreement on the nature of logic/math in order for for your PoE question to be dealt with as is.

I would definitely like to continue seeing where we can take the logic/math discussion as part of a separate thread, as I am very interested in that particular issue and would welcome being challenged about it; but I’ll have to go back to the cosmology posts and finish responding to those before I take on yet another new topic. These are weighty issues that often require me to put a lot of thought or research into before responding so it’s difficult to get involved in more than one at a time. As it stands, my responses to the cosmology thread have been delayed because I have been putting the focus on this thread. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but what happened is this thread ended up quickly diving into a lot more theological and philosophical depth than I anticipated it would need to when I first responded to it. I was mistaken in thinking I would have the time to respond to both threads at once.

The only reason I even originally brought up the issue of logic in relationship to god was to help illustrate the fact that you were bringing premises to the table about the nature of god which the PoE as a question didn’t require you to assume because there was no philosophical/logical need to assume those things.

This is in contrast with someone approaching from a worldview that says the Bible is true - then they have a need to approach the question assuming what the Bible says about God is true.

Now, in the case of logic/math’s nature, you do try to dispute that you don’t have a philosophical/logical basis for that conclusion - so that disagreement would have to be resolved if I wanted to press God's relation to logic as a valid analogy for my point.

But I don’t think I need to press that particular analogy in order for the original purpose of my analogy to remain intact: which was to demonstrate there are many presumptions about god’s nature and character which you are making which you have no reason to assume must necessarily be true. Because I can point to a lot of things you assume to be true about god which you don’t have any philosophical or logical need to insist must be true. I pointed out many of them in my latest post when I asked pointed questions about the premises behind your version of the PoE in light of what you believe about reality.
In the absence of you having some kind of theological commitment to a particular religious worldview there’s nothing forcing you to reconcile reality with a particular idea of god; therefore no reason you must assume god has certain attributes and character.

It seems problematic philosophically if you just start arbitrarily assigning attributes to the idea of god that you aren't philosophically or theologically required to. Because then you end up with being able to do what I did with the ice cream analogy: you can literally presume anything you want is true about god in order to prove any conclusion you want about god; because your idea of god is just the invention of your own mind and isn't tethered either to a logical necessity of what we know to be true about reality nor is it tied to trying to dispute or defend an existing religious idea of god.

 

[Koldo]

@Rise

I will try to post tonight if I can; but if I can't, I'm going to make a concession about the word "omnibenevolent."

The intention of the Problem, as I pose it, doesn't rely on terms like "good" and "evil." If "omnibenevolent" has them as implications then I concede the term, with the caveat that I never meant it in the first place, then.

I would replace the premise "God is omnibenevolent" as one of the Problem's premises with something like "God doesn't like sapient beings to suffer, and would not cause or allow suffering where possible." This is what I have always meant. This avoids the hairy baggage that comes with "omnibenevolent." I just need to spell it out is all. There may be some better way to word the premise, but I'm in the middle of merging databases with 186,000 galaxies and this is going to involve a lot of mental juggling to catch problems and keep track of subsets, etc. I'll get to things as I can.

Good job keeping up with the walls of text.

 

[Meow Mix]

I'm going to respond to these in this order, having written the post numbers in Notepad:
267 (re-elucidating the premises of my PoE)

263 (Morality)
264
265

258 (Theodicy)
259
260

268 (Re: splittinf off logic/math)

However, I'm responding in such a way that I've read all of them: so parts that are repeated or that have become irrelevant by the changing landscape of the discussion may become truncated or cropped to try to keep things tidy.

This is post 267 response part 1 of 2

You can certainly propose any premises you'd like as part of an argument - but then we need to examine the soundness of those premises.


I would, in light of how you've defined your position over these past posts, restate your argument like this:

Premise 1: god doesn't like sapient beings to suffer (instead of saying he is omnibenevolent).
Premise 1a: god would not cause sapient beings to suffer if possible.
Premise 1b: god would not allow sapient beings to suffer if he could stop or prevent it.
Premise 2: god is all knowing (omniscient).
Premise 3: god has the power to prevent sapient beings from ever suffering physically (Instead of saying "omnipotent". Because that is a concept you've essentially rejected in previous posts by putting arbitrary limits on god's power, making god explicitly not have power over all aspects of reality, and claiming god is subjugated to something else that preceded him and is above him -ie. logic/math)
Premise 4: sapient beings suffer physically.
Conclusion: god can't exist because sapient beings suffer physically.

While I could open another side topic on omnipotence and argue that the way I've been using "omnipotence" isn't idiosyncratic to me but rather how theologians generally use the term, I'm fine with omitting the term as long as we use "God is capable of actualizing any logically possible state of affairs" for Premise 3, where the premise you've written above would be Premise 3a. I think it's important because some responses to theodicies and the like depend on God having the broadest possible power.

The first and most relevant question to this formulation is: Where are you getting your premises about the attributes of god from?

Anecdotally, I've interacted with enough theists that would affirm the premises as written that it's useful. professional and amateur. Plantinga (whom I will probably reference a lot because I've interacted with him personally and have read his works directly more than many) would agree with the premises as written, for instance; one need only glance through "God, Freedom, and Evil" or indeed through my own correspondences with him to see that he would consider these premises as written a problem. He considers them a problem to the point that he writes theodicy alone is not enough, that to defeat the Problem the theist needs a defense, hence his free will defense and Transworld Depravity and the like.

(By the way, I would likely need to find it, but Plantinga would affirm that omnipotence necessarily has logical limits. In fact, I'm pretty sure we'd find at least one example of this affirmation in "Does God Have A Nature?")

So I see it like this: many theists would affirm these premises. Of course, some won't. The argument isn't meant for those that don't; but it may be interesting to find out why they reject one or more premise if the premises they do uphold are close.

(I skipped the ice cream parody because I agree we can make any such Problem (using capital P here for any PoE-format reductio ad absurdum problem), and I agree that we'd have to answer why we're bothering with the premises. Well, as I've said, I know many theists that would accept the premises I've been presenting.

There are many questions that arise out of the premises of your argument that would need to be answered, especially in light of your denial of objective morality.

1. Why must we assume god doesn't like sapient beings to physically suffer? I think this is the wrong question: the PoE-presenter doesn't care why someone holds the premise, just whether or not they do. Ask many theists whether they think God would like sapient beings physically suffering and I am very confident you'll get a lot of "no, He wouldn't like sapient beings to physically suffer" responses.

2. Why would it be wrong if he did? This is irrelevant to the argument, it doesn't make a value judgment on whether God disliking suffering is good or not. Consider your ice cream example: if someone believed in such a being, and someone presented your PoE parody to them, they would be missing the point if they asked, "why would it be wrong if God did like ice cream?" All that matters is that God disliking ice cream (and wanting to do something about it) is incongruent (given His power and knowledge) with the observation of ice cream existing everywhere.

3. Why would it be wrong if anyone else did for that matter? Irrelevant for the purposes of the argument for the same reasons as 2. Liking or disliking suffering doesn't even have to have any moral connotation to still entail an incongruency with the observation of prolific suffering given things like the power and knowledge to have build a world where it isn't there.

4. Does this include any kind of physical suffering in the slightest or could there be acceptable forms of physical suffering that serve a good purpose? Such as pain to warn of danger, disciplining a child, or punishing a criminal? I have written entire posts about this, so I'll try to answer this briefly. First, pain to warn of danger would be unnecessary if there is never any future danger: no need to learn not to touch a hot stove with a singed hand if the stove can never hurt you. Second, I don't think physical suffering is necessary to discipline a child, but that's a good question that I'd probably want to think about. Third, I have to think about what crime would even entail in a Toy World: without privation why would there be theft for instance? In any case, we punish many crimes without ever causing criminals to physically suffer. (Actually same for children, so there's that).

 

[Meow Mix]

Quote

Just added the quote so it has the little arrow to get you back to the original post if you wanted it.

This is response to 267 part 2 of 2.

5. Even if we accept the premise that god doesn't like sapient beings to suffer physically unnecessarily - why would you assume god doesn't have a necessary reason for allowing or causing physical suffering? That's what most of the rest of these posts have been about. In short, my answer to this is that it's reasonable to make conclusions based on what we can see without direct justification of a good reason; and that just saying there's a good reason by appealing to our non-omniscience is unreasonable (this is a meta-epistemic argument, I've decided to call it in lieu of knowing what else to call it).

6. Why do you assume god is all knowing? The PoE-giver is just using the premises their target uses.

7. Why do you assume god has the power to prevent any kind of physical suffering? I've written entire posts on this, too, depending on what you mean. If you mean "why assume God has this power," then same answer as 6. If you mean "how does it follow that God could do this if God is capable of actualizing any logically possible state of affairs," then this is what I've written entire posts about. The short answer is that it can be simulated, and anything that can be simulated can be actualized by a being that can actualize any logically possible state of affairs.

8. How exactly would he do this? There are many ways, but an easy to imagine one would be by making the universe's physics conditional. For instance, "if knife is cutting tomato, allow. If knife is cutting living skin of sapient creature, disallow (perhaps by removing all inertia, any number of things are imaginable)." Or God could just effortlessly directly intervene (effort means nothing to a being that can actualize any logically possible state of affairs, and concentration means nothing to an omniscient being) if suffering would occur. There are many ways. I think people that think God takes a "hands off" approach would like the conditional physics example (and it plays well with the "if it can be simulated, God could actualize it" intuition).

9. Why is it not possible that there could be something preventing god from doing this considering you already put limits on his power and think he is subjugated to something which preceded him? I wouldn't be surprised if you also think god must be created or caused by whatever logic/math you think preceded him. Because the premise is "God can actualize any logically possible state of affairs," so logical limitation is the only limitation. I do not give logical limitation causal power, no. However, it's possible to argue that there might be logical limitations such that God is incapable of preventing some kind of suffering because God is achieving a goal that preventing the suffering would contravene, which is exactly what Plantinga does in God, Freedom, and Evil. Have you read this?

Transworld Depravity (a bulk of the argument in G,F,&E) would be a major detraction from this argument, but we could talk about it elsewhere sometime if you would like. I've talked to Plantinga at length about it, and a major problem with it is that it uses premises that have suffering hidden within the premises that are attempting to explain the existence of suffering, so it doesn't work well.

However I can give my own example: if God has the goal of having creatures with free will, then God might be limited from preventing suffering that would subvert that goal in a direct and gratuitous way: perhaps God can't stop unrequited love or broken friendship because in order to do so, God would have to subvert free will gratuitously. Not so with physical suffering, though: God could prevent this without gratuitously subverting free will.

10. If god is preceded by a higher objective truth that involves logic/math, and is subjugated by it: why would we assume god is a free will agent who can make a free choice; and not just deterministically required to act based on how the laws governing reality dictate he act? You already seem to reject your own free will consciousness that would allow you to act outside of your supposed deterministic programming. Being relevantly dependent on logical limitation doesn't prima facie prevent one from having free will if free will is a meaningful concept (which I grant for the sake of argument). Truth be told I'm undecided on the free will debate and I don't think we have to get into it to talk about this. I can say that God being limited (to being God and not ¬God, for instance) has nothing to do with whether or not God can make choices.


11. If god is just acting out his deterministic programming like you are, then who/what programmed god to abhor the physical suffering of sapient beings? Still doesn't matter for the argument; we don't have to know why God has a property in the premises to see if those premises lead to an incongruency. As a side note, this question has to do with the aseity-sovereignty paradox, which I feel like we need to talk about more (probably elsewhere).

12. Which takes us back around to the first question again but in a different way: why do you even assume god must be programmed to abhor the physical suffering of sapient beings? The argument would still work if it's just happenstance that God abhors suffering; all that matters to the PoE-giver is that the target believes the premises.

13. If we conclude god might not abhor the physical suffering of sapient beings then so what? What does that tell us? Why would it matter? It's not like you can make objective moral claims against god for having that viewpoint because you've denied objective morality exists. The PoE isn't about making moral claims against God, it is only about whether the claimed properties of God are congruent with observation of the world around us. A solution to the PoE is for the theist to simply say "Sometimes God makes people suffer," and the response to that isn't officially "what a monster," the response would officially be "okay, then the PoE doesn't apply to your conception of God." (Then, probably, the giver would change tack and say "what a monster," but that's separate from the PoE )

Ultimately the way you have formulated your question ends up proving nothing because you don’t believe in objective moral value judgements so we have no reason to say there is anything wrong with a god who loves suffering therefore why not believe in a god who loves suffering?

The implication of the question you pose carries with it the tacit assumption that we shouldn’t or can’t believe in a god who would love suffering - but your worldview affords you no logical reason to draw that conclusion.

I don't think you're thinking of this correctly. As I said, the theist could simply say "Yeah God is cool with people suffering sometimes," and the PoE-giver just stops giving the PoE, they must do something else from that point on.

The point of the PoE is to put the target in a position of having to give up premises that most people want to have. But not everybody. Some theists are totally fine with God drowning babies just to prove how awesome He is. PoE just doesn't work on (and isn't meant for) them. The PoE-giver must decide what else to say at that point.

 

[Meow Mix]

This responds to Post 263.

The following are responses dealing with the morality issue.

I'm cutting out stuff where I'd otherwise have to defend the term "omnibenevolent," as I've abandoned it.

You're talking about causing suffering, but the PoE question goes beyond that to imply that a being with the power to stop suffering has a moral obligation to stop it even if they didn't cause it.

Just to be clear, as it's elucidated now (and as has been intended from the start), it does not make such an implication: it is only concerned with whether the being happens to want to stop suffering; it does not say that the being should want this.

(Post 264 starts below)

At that point you are no longer talking about the PoE because you're no longer talking about genuine omnibenevolence but your own personal distorted definition of it where you choose to define omnibenevolence "whatever it is I personally like".

Which really just makes the whole question an exercise in fallacious circular reasoning. You define evil as "whatever it is I don't like", and benevolence as "the opposite of whatever I don't like". Then your question just becomes a pointless tautology that doesn't tell us anything objectively true about reality but only tells us what your subjective personal opinion is.

I don't think this is the case: the premises as newly elucidated are premises that many theists do accept, and they do encounter the Problem with the incongruence with the observation of suffering. Theodicy or defenses are still required for many of them (the theists).

It's not unlike Krauss trying to redefine "nothing" to mean "something" in order to get around the problem of how you explain how we got something from nothing. You don't solve logical problems by redefining terms to change the concept behind those terms while still pretending that word applies to the original concept you were trying to explain. It's putting on a masquerade of pretending one has solved the problem when they haven't. The concept of nothing still exists and is still a problem waiting to be solved. You don't solve it by simply slapping the label of "nothing" on something and then pretending the concept of nothing now no longer exists.

For what it's worth, I don't think most physicists are great at metaphysics (or communicating about it at least).

You aren't talking about morality at that point.

Morality by definition is how something is "suppose to be" as opposed to "how it is".

You have nothing to appeal to in order to determine how things are suppose to be.

Your personal preference for something doesn't make it right or true.

Your preference doesn't give you any logical power to insist that someone else is wrong for wanting something different.

Likewise, you have no basis for saying that god would be wrong for not preventing suffering just because your preference is for preventing suffering.

The very nature of moral noncognitivism rejects affirming the notion that there are "oughts" that are truths (to us, a nonsense utterance), unless couched in terms of hypothetical imperatives: if I value X, then I ought to do Y.

So, the noncognitivist appeals to the listener's values: if you value X, you ought to do Y (or if you value X, you ought to believe Y ought to be a certain way, and so on). If the listener doesn't value X, the appeal can't be made. I guess another way of putting this is that if both speaker and listener share a value then they can speak prescriptively to each other: "since you value property, you ought not steal that item." If they don't share the same values, then they can just speak descriptively of themselves: "well, I value property, so if you steal that item, I will try to stop you."

So, this has a few things to do with the topic at hand. One, if the PoE-giver and the target of the PoE agree with values like "suffering is bad*," and they believe God shares the same value, then I can speak prescriptively about it with them because that is how hypothetical imperatives work. If they don't share values like "suffering is bad," then they probably don't believe the premises of my PoE in the first place (such as that God would want to stop suffering, because if they don't believe it's bad, why would they believe God would want to stop it?)

(* -- I realized I need to clarify: by "is bad," they mean only that they think the thing ought not happen, not that there is anything mind-externally true about there being an ought-not about the thing)

For instance, it is likely that a person that has the value "suffering is bad" would probably think God shares the same value, such that they can even speak prescriptively to/about God.

Speaking prescriptively in moral noncognitivism is equivalent to pointing out a logical error. If I claim to value altruism but I punch babies in the face for fun without explanation, this is incongruent with my claimed valuing of altruism: it is likely that it's not true that I value altruism if I do that, and my claim was a lie, or a confused utterance of some other kind.

Long story short: all that it requires to get my PoE off the ground is for the target to believe God has values, and that God has values like those described in the premises. They can speak prescriptively about God at that point just like I can with someone that shares my values. To recap, what it means to do this is to point out that there is an incoherence with acting a certain way if a value is held: a value can't truly be held while acting in a gratuitously incongruent way with it.

And to go back to morality being about the way things ought to be, that is still the case with noncognitivism: I value altruism, so I think the world ought to be a nicer place. This is still a morality. Moral realism is not required for that, in fact I suspect moral realism is probably noncognitive nonsense. I have no idea what it would mean for an ought to correspond to mind-independent reality, and even then I might as well have just typed "fhqwhgads."

You are confusing the concept of proving what is true with simply telling someone your opinion.
You don't prove something is objectively morally wrong by telling them what your opinion is.
Otherwise you have no way of proving their opinion is wrong and yours is right. So any discussion of who is wrong or right is meaningless as no one can be said to be right or wrong.

If someone shares a value, it actually is a logical process that can be done wrong; and you can correct someone. For instance, I'm trying to think of an example in fiction for brevity... in Ender's Game, I think it was the case that the insectoid alien race didn't know that humans were sentient because they don't think with a hive-mind. The aliens might hold a value, "it is wrong to kill sentient beings," but they had to learn new information -- they had to be corrected -- to come in congruence with their value regarding humanity.

We have hierarchies of values that are very complex. I value property, but I value life more: if a literally starving person stole a loaf of bread, I'd find that permissible. The reason this isn't a contradiction is because our values are a hierarchy: a person's life is higher up the ladder than the concept of the property and the monetary value of the bread in my hierarchy of values.

Because of this complexity, sometimes we literally just make reasoning errors. It's possible to correct someone's reasoning errors when they're doing moral calculus. In fact, it's possible to correct reasoning errors like this even if we don't share their same hierarchy of values: all we have to do is point out that the hypothetical imperatives that arise from their values are incongruent with what they're doing, thinking of doing, or wishing for; etc.

So yes, we can correct someone on moral issues as long as we understand what their value hierarchy is because from that point on it is a process of reasoning: having this value in this relation to this other relevant value leads to this outcome, and it's possible to get that wrong (and so be corrected).

Without an objective moral truth, you would be no more morally right to use force to try to stop the genocide than hitler was for trying to use force to commit the genocide. It would just be your opinion against his, and the only thing that determines the outcome is who has more force to accomplish their goal with.

I think this does describe reality. It is fortunate that most humans value empathy and altruism, probably as a combination of evolutionary and cultural reasons. I can self-consistently hope that those who would stop Hitler always out-number and out-force those that would repeat Hitler. I think our nature (evolutionary instincts, e.g. altruism being evolutionarily favored) helps maintain this status quo, but it isn't always guaranteed as we saw in early 1940 Germany.

 

[Rise]

The following two posts deal with the comprehension issue.

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 are drawing a false equivalence between two unrelated concepts.

To say a random string of letters is not the same as to say an illogical statement that can be perfectly understood to be making a claim but whose claim is simply false based on bad logic.

For example:
One could say "All mammals are alive. Spiders are alive. Therefore spiders are mammals."

A clear idea is being communicated. M is A. S is A. Therefore S is M.

It is not disputable that an idea is being communicated here and that the language is clear enough to understand what that idea is.

The only question remains is whether or not that idea is true based on valid logic and sound premises.

We would say no, it is a formal logical fallacy that does not recognize the fact that there are other things that can be alive which are not mammals.

The fact that I can understand the idea being communicated enough to tell you exactly why it is wrong proves there was a clear idea being communicated. It was just a false/illogical idea.

The same would not be true of your false analogy whereby you offer a random string of characters or nonsense words that have no recognized meaning. In that case there is no idea being communicated because you aren't using words that are even intended by you to have any communicative meaning.

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).

You are correct that a strawman is not the correct term if you think your analogy is a legitimate representation of what I am arguing. In that case it would simply be a wrong analogy and I used that term incorrectly.
However, if you were using a knowingly incorrect analogy just to tease out differences, I am not sure that wouldn't still be a strawman.

I think, on consideration, that what makes your analogies seem fallacious as a counter argument really comes down to,not so much the question of strawmanning but the fact that I don't think you're attempting to meet the burden of proof you bear for proving that your analogy is indeed an accurate representation of what I argued.
You're asserting your analogy is an accurate representation of what I said, and giving arguments, but you don't actually directly assail what I said at any point to prove why your analogy is legitimate.

You seem to be tacitly demanding I prove why your analogy isn't accurate after you have asserted it; but that would be a type of the fallacy of shifting the burden of proof. It ignores the fact that you as the one making the analogy first bear the burden of proof to establish that your analogy is an accurate representation of what I actually said.

Maybe you think you are meeting your burden of proof and just don't realize why the analogy doesn't work.
But I don't think there would be any confusion about this if you paired your analogy with an attempt to directly attack what I actually said and demonstrate where the fault supposedly lays with it.

Now that I think of it, I can't think of any academic professional who can make effective arguments by only speaking in analogies. They have to make direct arguments and counter arguments. The analogies are merely a supplement to the direct arguments they make in order to help the listener understand.

I think it becomes problematic if one's only response to an argument is to erect an analogy and attack it, without any attempt being made to prove that one's analogy is actually a valid analogy of what they are responding to. It can look evasive as though one is not able to deal with the argument directly head on.

I think you will find, as far as I am aware, that when I use analogies I always use it as a supplement to direct argument and never as the sole form of counter-argument against something.

I believe if two people were to only argue back and forth in analogies then it is asking for all kinds of confusion to creep in to the argument due to the imprecision inherent in analogies.

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.

The problem, as I pointed out, was not that you asked for more definition - but that you accused my argument of logically saying nothing and being fallaciously circular reasoning.

Your claims are self refuting because if you claim to not understand what I am arguing for then it is logically impossible for you to claim I was objectively saying nothing or committing logical fallacies. Both of those assertions would first require you to understand what I am saying before you could even begin to assert they are true.

Instead all you would have the logical basis to claim is that you personally don't understand what I was saying and therefore needed clarification.

 

[Rise]

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?


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.

You are fallaciously drawing a false equivalence with an inaccurate analogy. For two reasons:
1. I used english words that you have a common understanding of their meaning and are free for you to look up the definition for if there is any doubt.
In contrast, you are using nonsense words you just made up that cannot be known by anyone without first being given the definition by you.

2. You are falsely assuming my use of the terms "life" or "death" require a special definition for my argument to be valid. Even though a common understanding of those terms still makes the argument valid. Therefore your claim that a special definition is needed is without merit.


Let's re-examine my simplified summary you were responding to:
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.

Any common dictionary definition of these terms will allow us to prove it is true to say that death is the opposite of life and evil is the opposite of love.

Therefore no special definition of these terms is needed for my argument to be logically valid to you.

I invite you to go pull up a dictionary and then see if you can find any fault with my argument on that basis.




I think what you are not understanding here is that the argument I have made doesn't actually hinge on any special definition of those terms.

Because the core of my argument hinges on the assertion that God's nature is life and love therefore the absence of God results in the opposite of that. This is true using a standard dictionary definition of those terms and does not hinge on any special Biblical definitions.

That's why I said your claim was false when you tried to assert that my argument required me to define those terms in order for my argument to be logically valid. It is logically valid simply using a dictionary definition.

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.

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.

You are confusing whether or not you personally understand the mechanism of how something works with the whether or not something is logically coherent as an idea.

It is logically coherent and valid to suggest that there is something about God's nature that is necessary for you to have life instead of the opposite which is death.

Just because you don't understand what that is, or how it works, doesn't mean the idea itself is not logically coherent and valid.

G equals L.
Minus G equals D.
L is not equal to D.
That is a a logically valid statement without inconsistency or error. Just because you don't understand how God equals Life doesn't mean there's something invalid with the structure of the logic.

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?

As we have already established, you're making a moral judgement about God when you say he wouldn't be benevolent to do that - but you have no basis in your worldview for passing moral judgement on God.

So you can't say there's anything wrong with God doing that if that were in fact what he did.

And you certainly can't say God doesn't exist based on that judgement.

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.

I don't accept your premise that God is not loving according to a standard dictionary definition of what love is.

Can you give reasons why you think God is not loving according to a standard definition of what love is?

You would only be able to appeal to your own personal definition of love, if it differed from the standard definition, if you could give reasons why your definition should be regarded as a more true and accurate definition of what love actually is.

Appealing to your own definition doesn't mean anything if you can't prove it is more accurate because your personal definition could just be a circular tautology that says "love is whatever I don't like, and god does things I don't like, therefore god isn't loving". That's just begging the question at that point.

 

[Rise]

This post deals with the omnipotence issue.

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.

Your definition of omnipotent is not consistent with the definition of that term
Omnipotent again comes from the Latin for "all" and "powerful".

omnipotent - definition and meaning

• Having unlimited or universal power, authority, or force; all-powerful.

You can't be all powerful if there are things over which you have no power.
You have dropped belief in the prefix of "omni" from your word.

If you think true omnipotence is impossible then all you prove is that true omnipotence is impossible. You don't prove that omnipotence means something different.

You don't have any reason as a nontheist to be insisting that omnipotence must be a real thing to the point where you must strain to find a way to make it work logically. You don't have a theistic belief that explicitly demands you must believe in omnipotence. Therefore the only logical thing for you to do in your position is to simply abandon omnipotence as a concept that is deemed to be logically impossible.

You can't redefine omnipotence as no longer being omnipotent and then still talk of something being omnipotent. You simply need to call it something else at that point.

It's like the issue with omnibenevolence - you can't redefine it to no longer mean omnibenevolent but then insist you are still talking about omnibenevolence.

Just like Krauss can't redefine "nothing" to mean "something" and then presume to talk as though he's referring to genuine nothingness when he says "nothing".

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.

When you say "primordial" you imply god came into existence at some point. That seems to be the fundamental error here.

Anything that comes into existence is subject to that which caused it to come into existence.

But the Bible doesn't say God ever came into existence. Therefore, He is Himself the primordial cause of everything else.

That is why reality is reflection of His nature, and His nature is not a reflection of anything else that preceded Him.

In fact, it is logically necessary that there must be a stopping point on the primordial cause chain otherwise you end up with an impossible infinite regress of first causes.

Biblically, God is that stopping point.
That is why the Bible says literally everything was created by God, that nothing seen or unseen was created without God.
And John, when he wrote this, without a doubt was well aware of Greek platonic ideas about abstract concepts existing as their own independent entities - considering he specifically appeals to the Greek understanding by referring to the pre-existent "logos" in order to describe God to them.

Any objection you try to raise against God being the primordial casual stopping point could just be turned against whatever thing you try to place before God.
Why should you assume your primordial stopping point gets to be the first cause but God can't?

In my case I have reason to say logic and math can't be that primordial precursor to God because you run into a whole slew of logical and philosophical problems with regards to why abstract objects can't existent independent of a mind or matter and how they have no casual power to bring forth God to be subject to their reality - but that would really be a debate for a different thread.

The main reason I felt the need to address this here is related to the omnipotence issue to point out why it would be wrong to assume anything has to be outside of God's power.

But I don't really need to press this point in order for my arguments about omnipotence to be true because I can already do that based on appealing to the definition of omnipotence - pointing out that you simply aren't talking about omnipotence and require a new definition to describe what you are actually talking about.

 

[Meow Mix]

Response to 265.

Objective morality is like objective truth: There's only one of it by definition, otherwise it's not objective.

Hypothetical imperatives are objective. For instance, if someone values property more than human life, it's objectively true that they ought to object to a starving person stealing bread. (And since I value them in the opposite -- human life more than property -- it's objectively true that I ought to find that abhorrent). This is because it's just a chain of reasoning stemming from some value hierarchy.

But, I understand what you're arguing here under the premises that God can be a source of morality (again, something I don't grant is even meaningful but will play ball for a while for funsies). I would agree if that's sensical that you couldn't have two of these: if God's desires are deontological for us all, there can't be two such sources of deontology.

By admitting there is a creator you automatically are forced to admit there is an objective purpose/morality.
Because no act of creation can be undertaken without having an intention behind the creation.
That intention necessarily defines what the purpose and parameters of the creation is suppose to be.

If there is a creator then indeed the creator has purpose, but what I'm rejecting is that a creator's purpose is deontological for creation merely by fiat of the creator being a creator. Continued after your response about my analogy.

Your analogy is unsuitable for many similar reasons to why your mars attacks analogy was not suitable.
Your analogy strips away many of the essential attributes of God that allow us to make the conclusions we do.

The person in your analogy is not uncaused and uncreated in the way God is. God never began to exist. God has always existed. That person began to exist. And laws of physics and math preceded them as the ultimate cause for why the person to come into existence.

I have already given the reason for why God's attributes and status as creator make him the objective standard of morality. I can try to summarize it again for clarity.

I should note though, that I'm wondering if some of the difficulties you have with this could come from having an inaccurate idea of what consciousness and free will are (you effectively seem to deny they exist by saying you don't think you have the ability to choose what you believe, and thinking that consciousness/free will could arise from physically deterministic AI processes). I'm not sure yet if we would have to get into tackling that issue in order to deal with God as the source of objective morality.

Just a quick interjection that thinking doxastic voluntarism is false isn't equivalent to rejecting free will. I'm undecided on free will (frankly I've never cared that much: if it isn't free, the illusion seems enough to speak as though it is). Being unable to will our values or beliefs to be different doesn't mean we can't make choices. (And note I'm not saying values and beliefs can't/don't change. Just that we do not consciously will this to be so by nothing but willpower. We can become convinced, but whether we are convinced or not is itself beyond our control.)

As just a really quick example, if I told you there's a dragon in my room right now without any corroborating evidence, could you make yourself believe me? Truly, actually believe me? Or would you find that you can't help but to be skeptical, even if you sat and... I don't know. Furrowed your brow or something really hard and tried as hard as you could to just *poof* believe me? That's what I'm talking about when I say I doubt doxastic voluntarism is true. You might be unable to help whether you believe me or not, but you can choose how to respond (just as one silly example of still having choice and agency).

We are also starting to skirt close to the other issue I haven't gotten to responding to yet: the origin of logic and math. It's starting to look like that could also be another issue that has to be resolved before you can understand what I'm saying about God as the source of objective morality. But I'm not sure yet. Let's keep going with this and see if it's not necessary to break this down to even more basic levels to establish common ground.

Back to resummarizing what I already said about objective morality with God as the origin:
1. All acts of creation are only the product of a free will mind. Otherwise it's not an act of creation it's just random uncaused forces.
2. The defining attributes of what makes something a creation is intent by a mind.
3. It is impossible to create something without having some level of intent behind it.
4. Morality is defined as "how things are suppose to be".
5. Intent implies purpose.
6. "How a creation is suppose to be" is necessarily determined by what the creator intended/purposed when he created.
7. God created all things.
8. Therefore, God has an intent and purpose behind all things.
9. God is uncaused and uncreated, with nothing above him, before him, or beside him. Therefore, he alone is the source of the intent and purpose behind things. It's objective sole source.
10. Only free will created beings could have the ability to violate their intended purpose.
11. Hence, morality becomes a concern for free will created beings because they need to know what their intended purpose is so they can follow it as opposed to doing what is wrong.

You see here, morality is inherent to purpose which is inherent to intent and intent is unavoidable when a mind creates anything.

I would probably object to 4 as being too broad. I don't think that creators' intents are deontological for creations just because they are creations and there exists an intent of a creator. This is really just becoming an objection to DCT. For instance, perhaps God could have been really into torture, and created a universe just to torture its inhabitants. That's the intent of the world: does that mean there's a deontology to this creation intent for the created beings? Is it that they should help by torturing one another? My moral compass tingles "no," for whatever that's worth. It seems like there's a gap that someone would have to bridge between "creating a world with an intent" and "now that intent is deontological for the creations."

I think in order to make this point you'd have to establish why the creator's intent is deontological for the creations. That is why I made the analogy I did: if I create a Matrix full of AI with the intent to torture the occupants, it doesn't seem like they have any duties to torture each other just because that's what I want. I don't see why it's relevant that I'm not God: the part of the analogy that I'm trying to highlight isn't whether or not I as the creator am God, but whether or not the act of creation causes deontology.

So by the time we get to bullet point 6, I feel like we can ask "why?" I fully understand that God intends the creation to be a certain way, but I don't understand why this transfers deontologically to free agencies within that creation. Why would they have a duty to do what God intended when He made their environment? They have their own intentions and wills.

Now I'm fully willing to admit that this might be because I'm a moral noncognitivist. I genuinely don't understand what deontology would entail if it's not in the form of hypothetical imperatives. If we just say "you have a duty to do what the creator wants you to do" I wouldn't understand and I'd ask "why, what does that even mean?" I know what it means to have a duty to seek the actualization of our values. But I don't know why the creator's values create a duty for me if my values aren't the same.

(Reminder to myself: I still have 258, 259, and 260 to respond to from the current batch)

 

[BrightShadow]

But why? If we are to use the theodicy that this post series is about (that is, "God has an unknown, but benevolent, reason for causing/allowing physical suffering in the world"), why wouldn't our moral compasses register this as good even if we didn't understand why, if it was actually good?

I think everyone is born with a functioning moral compass but our upbringing shapes it into what we have today. I think a child dying from leukemia is wrong but many things in this world won't make sense to us because IMO we don't have enough background information behind God's actions.
It is my personal belief that we have a history with God and Angels in our soul form but our memory of that interactions have been erased from us by God prior to our arrival to this world.
So, with lack of any knowledge of that period of our existence - it is impossible to understand God's reasoning behind many things! Things such as OP regarding a kid getting leukemia and dying from it after suffering!

Since we are starting from a wrong premises - we inadvertently could end up with a wrong or confusing conclusion! We could question God's reasoning without understanding the background!

If we consider the notion that God created us in our soul form millions or billions of years ago and during that existence at some point some of us (billions of rebellious souls) somehow broke the ultimate covenant and thus disappointed God by questioning his absolute authority - then we will see certain things will start to make sense! However this is just a theory! I think the truth is out there scattered in many religious doctrines! If one religion had all the answers then everyone would adopt it already!

Maybe in our earlier existence (in our soul form) we asked God to prove to us that he is the only God and there is no one else besides him/her. Maybe at that point God did decide to show us the proof. We got convinced and then we repented and asked him for his forgiveness for our arrogance and for questioning him in the first place!
Maybe at this point the souls (smart and devoted ones) that did not question God's absolute authority (billions of Angels) suggested to God to destroy us all (the tainted ones) but instead of destroying all the arrogant dubious souls - God decided to give us a second chance and decided to send us to this world one by one and to prove ourselves again!
Now depending on the level of our distrust in God's absolute authority and the arrogance approach that we took - every rebellious soul got a negative number in a point system. Based on these numbers we are assigned to different parts of the world and in different levels of challenging settings. Some of us are born in a rich country or into a rich family and someone of us are born in a poor country or poor family! Some with more religious guidance and some with less guidance! God knew our hearts when we questioned his authority - so God knows how tough the test need to be when we try our second shot at redemption.
Of course the child that dies from leukemia didn't have any sins from this world but he too had a past in the soul form! His/her negative number might not have been that bad compared to the rest of us. So, soon after arrival to this world he/she underwent leukemia and thus was forgiven and taken back to heaven. Once he is forgiven - everything is erased again and he could be very happy in heaven for eternity. Thus the test is completed with no lasting effects! But he/she did need to go though leukemia or something similar to get redeemed and get exonerated from that earlier sin (the original sin).
It is not possible for us to know how God forgives or what kind of scale is used. But I think all of us need forgiving, otherwise we won't be in such a world where babies are dying for no apparent good reason!
This is my opinion. I am not saying this is the only explanation but this is the only thing that makes sense to me!

 

[Rise]

I have consolidated the relevant responses of various posts here and will address them collectively

Anecdotally, I've interacted with enough theists that would affirm the premises as written that it's useful. professional and amateur. Plantinga (whom I will probably reference a lot because I've interacted with him personally and have read his works directly more than many) would agree with the premises as written, for instance; one need only glance through "God, Freedom, and Evil" or indeed through my own correspondences with him to see that he would consider these premises as written a problem. He considers them a problem to the point that he writes theodicy alone is not enough, that to defeat the Problem the theist needs a defense, hence his free will defense and Transworld Depravity and the like.


So I see it like this: many theists would affirm these premises. Of course, some won't. The argument isn't meant for those that don't; but it may be interesting to find out why they reject one or more premise if the premises they do uphold are close.


(I skipped the ice cream parody because I agree we can make any such Problem (using capital P here for any PoE-format reductio ad absurdum problem), and I agree that we'd have to answer why we're bothering with the premises. Well, as I've said, I know many theists that would accept the premises I've been presenting.


…


1. Why must we assume god doesn't like sapient beings to physically suffer? I think this is the wrong question: the PoE-presenter doesn't care why someone holds the premise, just whether or not they do. Ask many theists whether they think God would like sapient beings physically suffering and I am very confident you'll get a lot of "no, He wouldn't like sapient beings to physically suffer" responses.


2. Why would it be wrong if he did? This is irrelevant to the argument, it doesn't make a value judgment on whether God disliking suffering is good or not. Consider your ice cream example: if someone believed in such a being, and someone presented your PoE parody to them, they would be missing the point if they asked, "why would it be wrong if God did like ice cream?" All that matters is that God disliking ice cream (and wanting to do something about it) is incongruent (given His power and knowledge) with the observation of ice cream existing everywhere.


3. Why would it be wrong if anyone else did for that matter? Irrelevant for the purposes of the argument for the same reasons as 2. Liking or disliking suffering doesn't even have to have any moral connotation to still entail an incongruency with the observation of prolific suffering given things like the power and knowledge to have build a world where it isn't there.




…


6. Why do you assume god is all knowing? The PoE-giver is just using the premises their target uses.


…



11. If god is just acting out his deterministic programming like you are, then who/what programmed god to abhor the physical suffering of sapient beings? Still doesn't matter for the argument; we don't have to know why God has a property in the premises to see if those premises lead to an incongruency. As a side note, this question has to do with the aseity-sovereignty paradox, which I feel like we need to talk about more (probably elsewhere).


12. Which takes us back around to the first question again but in a different way: why do you even assume god must be programmed to abhor the physical suffering of sapient beings? The argument would still work if it's just happenstance that God abhors suffering; all that matters to the PoE-giver is that the target believes the premises.


13. If we conclude god might not abhor the physical suffering of sapient beings then so what? What does that tell us? Why would it matter? It's not like you can make objective moral claims against god for having that viewpoint because you've denied objective morality exists. The PoE isn't about making moral claims against God, it is only about whether the claimed properties of God are congruent with observation of the world around us. A solution to the PoE is for the theist to simply say "Sometimes God makes people suffer," and the response to that isn't officially "what a monster," the response would officially be "okay, then the PoE doesn't apply to your conception of God." (Then, probably, the giver would change tack and say "what a monster," but that's separate from the PoE )


…


I don't think this is the case: the premises as newly elucidated are premises that many theists do accept, and they do encounter the Problem with the incongruence with the observation of suffering. Theodicy or defenses are still required for many of them (the theists).


…


Just to be clear, as it's elucidated now (and as has been intended from the start), it does not make such an implication: it is only concerned with whether the being happens to want to stop suffering; it does not say that the being should want this.


…


The very nature of moral noncognitivism rejects affirming the notion that there are "oughts" that are truths (to us, a nonsense utterance), unless couched in terms of hypothetical imperatives: if I value X, then I ought to do Y.


So, the noncognitivist appeals to the listener's values: if you value X, you ought to do Y (or if you value X, you ought to believe Y ought to be a certain way, and so on). If the listener doesn't value X, the appeal can't be made. I guess another way of putting this is that if both speaker and listener share a value then they can speak prescriptively to each other: "since you value property, you ought not steal that item." If they don't share the same values, then they can just speak descriptively of themselves: "well, I value property, so if you steal that item, I will try to stop you."


So, this has a few things to do with the topic at hand. One, if the PoE-giver and the target of the PoE agree with values like "suffering is bad*," and they believe God shares the same value, then I can speak prescriptively about it with them because that is how hypothetical imperatives work. If they don't share values like "suffering is bad," then they probably don't believe the premises of my PoE in the first place (such as that God would want to stop suffering, because if they don't believe it's bad, why would they believe God would want to stop it?)


(* -- I realized I need to clarify: by "is bad," they mean only that they think the thing ought not happen, not that there is anything mind-externally true about there being an ought-not about the thing)


For instance, it is likely that a person that has the value "suffering is bad" would probably think God shares the same value, such that they can even speak prescriptively to/about God.


Speaking prescriptively in moral noncognitivism is equivalent to pointing out a logical error. If I claim to value altruism but I punch babies in the face for fun without explanation, this is incongruent with my claimed valuing of altruism: it is likely that it's not true that I value altruism if I do that, and my claim was a lie, or a confused utterance of some other kind.


Long story short: all that it requires to get my PoE off the ground is for the target to believe God has values, and that God has values like those described in the premises. They can speak prescriptively about God at that point just like I can with someone that shares my values. To recap, what it means to do this is to point out that there is an incoherence with acting a certain way if a value is held: a value can't truly be held while acting in a gratuitously incongruent way with it.


…



If someone shares a value, it actually is a logical process that can be done wrong; and you can correct someone. For instance, I'm trying to think of an example in fiction for brevity... in Ender's Game, I think it was the case that the insectoid alien race didn't know that humans were sentient because they don't think with a hive-mind. The aliens might hold a value, "it is wrong to kill sentient beings," but they had to learn new information -- they had to be corrected -- to come in congruence with their value regarding humanity.


We have hierarchies of values that are very complex. I value property, but I value life more: if a literally starving person stole a loaf of bread, I'd find that permissible. The reason this isn't a contradiction is because our values are a hierarchy: a person's life is higher up the ladder than the concept of the property and the monetary value of the bread in my hierarchy of values.


Because of this complexity, sometimes we literally just make reasoning errors. It's possible to correct someone's reasoning errors when they're doing moral calculus. In fact, it's possible to correct reasoning errors like this even if we don't share their same hierarchy of values: all we have to do is point out that the hypothetical imperatives that arise from their values are incongruent with what they're doing, thinking of doing, or wishing for; etc.


So yes, we can correct someone on moral issues as long as we understand what their value hierarchy is because from that point on it is a process of reasoning: having this value in this relation to this other relevant value leads to this outcome, and it's possible to get that wrong (and so be corrected).

You would be correct in saying that you are capable of arguing the issue by taking whatever premises the opponent has and trying to show why they would be inconsistent, without a need for yourself to have any belief about the attributes of God.

However, there are several problems here. Which take us full circle back to some of the objections I raised from the very beginning.

For issues of length and forum character limits, the response will follow in the next post.

 

[Rise]

...

There are several issues with your responses:

1. You prove my original claim is true that the PoE question only makes sense in the context of being raised as a logical objection to the idea of God as found in the Bible.

Plantinga’s book “God, Freedom, and Evil” was only inspired to be written as a response to atheist philosophers attacking the idea that the Biblical God could be logically consistent.

The PoE as a philosophically meaningful question simply doesn’t exist outside of being raised as an objection to the Biblical idea of God (The PoE as formulated by J. L. Mackie) – and virtually no religion today has this idea of God unless that religion can trace it’s roots back to Judaism.


2. It disproves your claim that the PoE can be a philosophically neutral question. As I have pointed out, you have no purely logical or philosophical grounds for asserting the attributes of the PoE (even your version of the PoE). Your question can only exist in opposition to what someone else already claims to believe. And virtually the only religions that you’re going to find with such beliefs are rooted in Judaism.


3. Saying you are posing this question to “theism” in general is not coherent for two reasons:
a) Because there is nothing inherent in the idea of a theistic being that forces you to believe in those premises.
b) Because theism in general can’t be said to have any commonly accepted set of beliefs. You are mistaken if you think it can because you’re looking at what Abrahamic religions believe and then concluding that one must believe only that to be a theist.

Plantinga is not merely giving a defense of “theism” in general – he’s giving a defense of Biblical theism specifically. Because the PoE formulate he was responding to was put forth by J. L. Mackie as an attack on the Biblical idea of God as supposedly being illogical.
The PoE is therefore not posed as a challenge to theism in general – it’s posed a challenge to Biblical theism specifically (or those that share those same Biblical beliefs).


4. You aren’t actually letting the other person define what their premises are and then using their premises against them. You are trying to impose your premises upon them by defining what omnibenevolence and omnipotence mean to you, even though you don’t accept them to even be real things, instead of going off what those terms mean to the other person who accepts them to be real things.

If you are trying to claim that your definition of the terms is consistent with what a particular person or religion believes then the burden is on you to first identify whose position you are attacking. And then the possibility exists to examine their position to see if you have accurately represented what they believe.

If you don’t identify whose position you are attacking then there’s no way of questioning whether or not you are right to start with the premises you have invented.

That is why, under those standards, you could get away with formulating an argument that proved god doesn’t exist from the premise that god hates ice cream and ice cream exists – because you don’t have to believe it or even find someone who does believe it.

Earlier you tried to say you were posing the question to whoever believed in those premises, even though you chose to define the premises according to your own ideas about what they should be.
The problem with that approach is it can’t be logically said to prove anything about any topic without identifying who actually believes what you claim.

I could argue from the premise that god hates ice cream to prove god doesn’t exist and then when challenged on what the relevance of my argument was I could simply reply “well, I’m just talking about anyone who does believe god hates ice cream. If they believe my premise then this applies to them. I know they are out there somewhere”.

But such an exercise is not philosophically or logically meaningful to helping us arrive at what is true. You only arrive closer to what is true by challenging what people actually believe.


5. You are misrepresenting what Biblical theists believe when you try to strip away many of the defining attributes of God that they hold as premises and then demand the Biblical theist accept your stripped down premise as their own.

Although you might be correct to say that most Biblical theists would agree with you that God doesn’t like people to suffer – your argument becomes fallacious on the basis of what you try to require them to omit from their beliefs.

You are trying to arbitrarily force out of the discussion by the way you reformulate your premises other Biblically derived presumptions about God that the Biblical theist would hold; demanding they accept your stripped down premises instead.

The following are Biblically derived presumptions you are trying to remove from the equation of what a Biblical theist actually believes (or at least what is required to be believe to be consistent with the Bible):
-Objective morality exists.
-God is the source of objective morality.
-Morality comes out of the nature of who God is.
-God is all good, morally speaking.
-God designed us to be like Him, but gave us the free will to choose.
-God is eternally existent with nothing before him.
-God is subject to nothing but himself. All things are subject to Him.
-God cannot lie or contradict his nature.
-Nothing gave God His nature. Everything else derives it’s nature from God.

Which goes back to why your analogies often fail to be correct is because they deny important premises about God’s nature which allow the Biblical theist to come to the conclusions they do (such as your mars attacks analogy ignoring God’s presumed omnibenevolence and omniscience)

Since you often refer to Plantinga: What formulation of the PoE was he responding to? It could not be the formulation you are proposing which denies objective morality.
J. L. Mackie formulated his PoE as an attack against the major monotheistic religions.
All the major monotheistic religions will assert that objective morality exists and that God is all good in an objectively moral sense.
Therefore, the PoE question posed to Plantinga must have assumed those two things existed otherwise it could not be a coherent objection against what they actually believe.

Any PoE question that didn’t assume objective morality existed would not be a question that were relevant to any religion that has Judaic roots.

And the PoE as a question is not relevant to any religion that doesn't have Judaic roots by virtue of the fact that basically only Judaic rooted religions believe in those combined attributes about God.

So, therefore, intrinsically, the PoE question must assume objective morality exists in order to be theologically or philosophically relevant. Because the only religions to which the question is relevant all assume objective morality exists and assume God is all morally good.


So what exactly is the source of the premises as you have defined them? Whose view are you challenging?

It can’t be theism in general as there is no shared definition of belief for what that means.

Plus it would be a contradiction since some concepts of theism outright contradict your premises.
Only the Abrahamic religions would even believe in the premises of the PoE.

So whose idea of God are you actually trying to challenge?
Is it Abrahamic shared conceptions of God in general?
Is it Christianity specifically?
Is it an individual like Plantinga’s beliefs specifically?

What you identify as the source of your PoE premise will determine how we approach it.

If you don’t identify a source for the premises then the implication is that you are the one providing your own premises to the question.

Which, in that case, brings us back to what I said about how the burden would then be on you then to give a reason for why you hold to those premises. But you can’t give a reason for most of them based on your worldview. You are 100% dependent on someone else providing the premises to you in order for you to attack them unless you believe you can argue in favor of a premise on the basis of philosophy/logic alone which they then must accept. But you don't even try to do that for most of the premises you bring into the question.



Coming full circle back to what I originally said: The PoE question is only meaningful and relevant as a challenge to the concept of God as found in the Bible. As you will probably not find such a concept of God believed by any religion that doesn’t have it’s roots in Judaism at some point.

Therefore, in light of this, any discussion about the PoE inherently must become not merely a philosophical question but a theological question about what the Bible says about God.

 

[Rise]

While I could open another side topic on omnipotence and argue that the way I've been using "omnipotence" isn't idiosyncratic to me but rather how theologians generally use the term, I'm fine with omitting the term as long as we use "God is capable of actualizing any logically possible state of affairs" for Premise 3, where the premise you've written above would be Premise 3a. I think it's important because some responses to theodicies and the like depend on God having the broadest possible power.


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(By the way, I would likely need to find it, but Plantinga would affirm that omnipotence necessarily has logical limits. In fact, I'm pretty sure we'd find at least one example of this affirmation in "Does God Have A Nature?")

Tying in with what I said above:

Talking about premise 3’s definition would first require identifying whose viewpoint you are trying to attack.

Are you attacking Plangtina’s idea of God?

Are you attacking what is the historically accepted Christianity concept of God (which would have it’s source in the Bible)?

You can’t simply be attacking “theism’s idea of god”. Because there is no belief system called theism with shared attributes about god.

In fact, there are many beliefs of theism (such polytheism or pantheism) that would directly contradict the possibility of there being an omnipotent being.

In actuality, the viewpoint you advocate about limits on god’s power is more in line with platonism or pantheism than Biblical monotheism.

Plangtina is a platonist.

William Lane Craig has written a great deal that shows why the idea of platonism is not consistent theologically with Christianity. As well as showing why Platonism is not a philosophically necessary way of understanding the relationship of abstract objects to the world.
(“God and Abstract Objects: The Coherence of Theism: Aseity” and “God over all: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism”)

I don’t believe there’s a need to get into debating that particular issue yet. It would tie in with the logic/math debate that would be good to get into as a separate thread at some point.

It is sufficient for my point here to say that Plangtina’s personal views can’t be assumed to represent Biblical theism. Which is why you need to be more precise about whose views you are trying to undermine when your proposition is made up entirely of premises that you yourself don’t believe.

Even if we accept the premise that god doesn't like sapient beings to suffer physically unnecessarily - why would you assume god doesn't have a necessary reason for allowing or causing physical suffering? That's what most of the rest of these posts have been about. In short, my answer to this is that it's reasonable to make conclusions based on what we can see without direct justification of a good reason; and that just saying there's a good reason by appealing to our non-omniscience is unreasonable (this is a meta-epistemic argument, I've decided to call it in lieu of knowing what else to call it).

It’s not a reasonable conclusion for you to make if you start from the Biblical premise of assuming God is omnibenevolent. Which means “all good” and is a moral judgement. For the reasons I already outlined.

Since we start from the premises that God is all knowing, all good, and all powerful, the only logical conclusion, if you can’t prove an action by God is not good, is to assume He must have a good reason for it that you aren’t aware of.

Your martian analogy was a faulty because no one started from the premise that we must assume the martians are omnibenevolent or all knowing.

You are trying to reformulate your premises to not involve moral judgements – but you haven’t identified who you think holds these views.

What Biblical theist believes God doesn’t like suffering but also doesn’t believe objective morality exists and doesn’t believe God is not morally all good by definition?

I think you would have to agree that it not an accurate representation of what most would believe. But those additional other premises radically change what kinds of conclusions you draw.

3. Does this include any kind of physical suffering in the slightest or could there be acceptable forms of physical suffering that serve a good purpose? Such as pain to warn of danger, disciplining a child, or punishing a criminal? I have written entire posts about this, so I'll try to answer this briefly. First, pain to warn of danger would be unnecessary if there is never any future danger: no need to learn not to touch a hot stove with a singed hand if the stove can never hurt you. Second, I don't think physical suffering is necessary to discipline a child, but that's a good question that I'd probably want to think about. Third, I have to think about what crime would even entail in a Toy World: without privation why would there be theft for instance? In any case, we punish many crimes without ever causing criminals to physically suffer. (Actually same for children, so there's that).

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8. How exactly would he do this? There are many ways, but an easy to imagine one would be by making the universe's physics conditional. For instance, "if knife is cutting tomato, allow. If knife is cutting living skin of sapient creature, disallow (perhaps by removing all inertia, any number of things are imaginable)." Or God could just effortlessly directly intervene (effort means nothing to a being that can actualize any logically possible state of affairs, and concentration means nothing to an omniscient being) if suffering would occur. There are many ways. I think people that think God takes a "hands off" approach would like the conditional physics example (and it plays well with the "if it can be simulated, God could actualize it" intuition).



9. Why is it not possible that there could be something preventing god from doing this considering you already put limits on his power and think he is subjugated to something which preceded him? I wouldn't be surprised if you also think god must be created or caused by whatever logic/math you think preceded him. Because the premise is "God can actualize any logically possible state of affairs," so logical limitation is the only limitation. I do not give logical limitation causal power, no.


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10. If god is preceded by a higher objective truth that involves logic/math, and is subjugated by it: why would we assume god is a free will agent who can make a free choice; and not just deterministically required to act based on how the laws governing reality dictate he act? You already seem to reject your own free will consciousness that would allow you to act outside of your supposed deterministic programming. Being relevantly dependent on logical limitation doesn't prima facie prevent one from having free will if free will is a meaningful concept (which I grant for the sake of argument). Truth be told I'm undecided on the free will debate and I don't think we have to get into it to talk about this. I can say that God being limited (to being God and not ¬God, for instance) has nothing to do with whether or not God can make choices.

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1. Why do you assume god has the power to prevent any kind of physical suffering? I've written entire posts on this, too, depending on what you mean. If you mean "why assume God has this power," then same answer as 6. If you mean "how does it follow that God could do this if God is capable of actualizing any logically possible state of affairs," then this is what I've written entire posts about. The short answer is that it can be simulated, and anything that can be simulated can be actualized by a being that can actualize any logically possible state of affairs.

This tells me more about what you believe, but at this point what you believe is no longer relevant to the question - because you are asserting that your own beliefs are not what determine the premises of the question. You claim the premises of your question come entirely from what someone else believes.

The question then remains to ask: Whose premises are you deriving this question from?

Because your premises as formulated don’t fit any of the major monotheistic religions.

Not so much because of what you assert but because of what you try to deny can be allowed into the formulation.