Special Pleading and the PoE (Part 3)

[Meow Mix]

It appears to be the same reason most people rebel against God - they want what satan promises them. So they engage in willfully allowing themselves to be deceived in the hopes that they will get what they want.

Your suggestion is based on a false premise that the problem with people's lives is they lack sufficient information to do what is right.

There are drug addicts that will openly tell you they know their habit is going to kill them one day - they just decide they want the drugs more than they want life.

The problem here is not a lack of information about the consequences of their lifestyle, but a choice they make. The reasons for which can be varied, but it utimately comes down a choice.

It seems you are claiming God should be required to give Adam and Eve his entire omniscient understanding of what their choice would result in and that what He did tell them wasn't sufficient.

This comes back around to the same fallacious thinking you had that people will always do the right thing if they are given enough information. No, because that assumes they will want to believe the information that is true when it is presented to them.
Clearly this is not always the case with people.

This is the main theme of this post, so I've gathered a bunch of the quotes together here; with special exceptions below.

What are some reasons why someone might make a choice with negative consequences?
1) They might believe they can avoid the consequences in some way (maybe the consequences aren't real, maybe they can win a confrontation, etc.)
2) They might believe that they can accomplish a goal while suffering negative consequences (a sacrifice for some goal believed in)
3) They might make a choice with negative consequences because they don't care about the negative consequences, or actively seek the negative consequences, or despise whatever positive thing the choice harms (or you might just say "because they are evil" in some worldviews)
4) They might make a choice with negative consequences because they are not rational/reasonable

With Adam and Eve, we're talking about a pre-Fall choice (since we're wondering why the Fall happened in the first place). So in your worldview, do you not have to go ahead and weed out (3) as a possibility?

Information weeds out (1) and (2) as possibilities (and this is why I bring up God giving them information). If they know the consequences are real and that they can't "win" a confrontation with God (and they know there is no reason to have a confrontation with God, at that), then (1) is weeded out. If they know that it isn't some sacrifice that will have positive side-benefits to make the choice, then that weeds out (2).

Seems like we're left with wondering: were Adam and Eve rational/reasonable actors? This opens a whole can of worms, like "how much is God culpable for how much humans value reason?" For instance, could God have made humans less or more reasonable by nature? If so, then doesn't it stand to reason that God could have made Adam and Eve reasonable enough not to make a choice with negative consequences out of sheer irrationality?

If God has no control over how rational humans are, then doesn't it stand to reason that it does become a probability game: given enough time, the humans will eventually make the bad choice: the probability approaches one? You have earlier stated that this isn't the case, so it seems like you must reject out of hand that God doesn't have control over how rational humans are: it seems a consequence, if you want to stick to that notion, that God can make humans highly or even perfectly rational!

But if God can create Adam and Eve to be rational beings, and we can weed out (1) and (2) if God gives them information, and we can rule out (3) since this is pre-Fall corruption, what is left to explain why Adam and Eve would make a choice with bad consequences?

If you say, "they could deceive themselves because they want something to be true that's not true," that would be irrational: so the question becomes, "why didn't God make them more rational?" If you say, "God couldn't have made them more rational," then the problem becomes, "OK, then eventually, given enough time, they would have made an irrational choice, the probability would have approached one: so the Fall was inevitable, and God had to have known that!" Doesn't that seem like a problem?

Addendum: if you believe that in the future, humans will never make bad choices again, and you say God will "remake" them in some other way, that seems to indicate they'll never make bad choices for irrational reasons, which seems to indicate you do believe God has power over how rational humans are. N'est-ce pas? Then why would self-deception ever be a problem unless God desires it to be?

The best objection to this little spiel I can think of is attacking, as you have, the premise that giving information can weed out (1) and (2). You said:

Because if you aren't going to believe God when he tells you His word is truth and this tree is bad, then why would you be more likely to listen if he merely elaborated more on why the tree is bad?
You could just as easily assume he's lying about all those details too.

I'm spitballing here, but doesn't it feel prima facie like an omnipotent and omniscient being could do something convincing to convince a rational actor? If the actor is rational, then they're not going to have a position of radical skepticism where they think God's lying "just because," or "because it's possible." If the actor is rational, they would weigh the consequences of God telling the truth vs. God lying. God could do something like implant a picture in their mind showing the horrors of the modern world (where it isn't real, and no one really ever suffered in merely transmitting the idea). God could prove things that Satan can't, God can reveal Satan's origin and the reasons Satan might be lying (whereas Satan can only respond with "nuh uh" and "oh yeah, well what if God is lying?")

Parents grow tired of childrens' questions because parents are finite and have fundamentally limited ability to transmit information: God suffers neither tiring nor these limitations. There is no reason God can't give Adam and Eve literally everything they require to make an informed, rational choice. Unless you presume God can't build them rational, in which case you suffer the other problem (where, if God can't build them rational, then the probability they will choose wrong eventually for sheerly irrational reasons converges to one).

3. You have no reason to believe God would not have a good reason for limiting information to the bare essentials even if God did do that. If we assume God is all good and all knowing then that would mean God has a good reason for doing this that is actually the best option to take.


4. You are assuming Adam is capable of being downloaded with the omniscience of God. But you can't assume that is the case. Based on how God has set up the universe's limits with space-time, and the limits God may have built into Adam, you have no reason to assume the entirety of God's understanding could be comprehended by Adam.

You may ask, why didn't God create Adam differently or the universe differently?

But you have no reason to assume God didn't have a good reason for how he did create Adam and the universe.
If we assume God is all good, and all knowing, as the Bible tells us He is, then we must logically assume God has good reason for how he has designed things.

These epistemic traps would be better debated under the epistemic trap section of the debate, because you can build anything with this form and never escape from it once you do, etc. These are conversation enders because you can "justify" anything and never be convinced otherwise once you adopt these. Literally nothing could be evidence against them, even if God created tortureworld ran by Pinhead and Freddy Krueger where everyone on Earth is pulled apart by hooked chains every day for eternity*. There are meta-epistemic reasons not to hold these, in other words.

(* -- I feel compelled to nip a possible objection in the bud: I am not presuming that the tortureworld scenario would be inherently bad. I'm pointing out that it really could be explained by the epistemic trap despite our intuition: it is meant only to show that literally nothing could ever be evidence against the epistemic trap, not even the most extreme appearances)

 

[Meow Mix]

It is the absence of God in mankind that leads to physical death instead of the eternal physical life God designed and intended for mankind.

Those who are resurrected with new glorified physical bodies will not experience suffering that came as a result of the fall.

So this refutes your idea that suffering is an unavoidable fact of the way God set up the laws of physics.

We die for multiple physical reasons that are related to biology, which is related to chemistry, which is related to physics: for instance, telomere degradation and oxidation leading to aging. Being decapitated is clearly a physical cause of death. Imagine that I can plop a book of coroners' reports on your desk and read through them. It is flatly absurd to say that physics has nothing to do with death.

In order for a person to live forever, their telomeres would either have to not exist or not degrade. Their head would have to be incapable of being separated from their body, blood would have to be guaranteed to carry nutrients to the brain, I don't have to come up with some long list of examples because you likely know exactly what I'm saying. To argue that all of this has nothing to do with the way the physics of the universe are is profoundly missing some explanation or is just profoundly wrong.

You mention that when God's hanging out in force that lions could eat straw, but can't you see that this is equivalent to saying God's changing their biology, chemistry, physics?

 

[Rise]

There are plenty of people that would accept the premises I put forth: if they must specify the premises further, then we examine what they're wanting to add. It's a good starting point. It makes sense to make the premises meta-ethically neutral. If someone wants to get into the meta-ethics to try to resolve it, then so be it

...
As I said above, I think there are plenty of people that accept the premises;.

You ignored the important point: which is that I don't believe you can name a single religion, much less a major religion, that believes in the premises as you have tried to narrow them down.

Those premises are:
1. That god doesn't like suffering.
2. That objective morality doesn't exist and therefore god isn't all good by definition because morality doesn't exist.
3. That god is subject to abstract ideas that preceded him and doesn't have power over everything in reality outside of himself.
4. But god has the power to stop suffering.
5. That god is all knowing.
6. That suffering exists.

Hence the problem: If you can't identify someone who actually believes all those premise then the question has no relevance.

You're erroneously focused on just trying to justify only the idea that someone might believe in the premise that god doesn't like suffering whilst ignoring all the other premises you are trying to smuggle in to the question that they would also have to believe too.

Part of the problem is also that you have an unspoken premise: which is "If god doesn't like suffering then he must act to stop it". But that is to assume there can't possibly be a good reason for God's actions to not stop it. It doesn't make provision for the possibility either that to stop it might violate God's nature in some way.


Once you put the premise that objective morality exists back on the table along with the fact that God is all good then the entire equation changes.

And the original PoE does presume God is all good. Which is the definition of omnibenevolent.

but even if I grant that there aren't for the sake of argument, there are theists that believe in something closer to the "God of Philosophy" than the particular Abrahamic gods. If I were to become a theist, it's very likely it would be something more like the sterile philosophical God than the characters depicted in the holy books because of all the baggage they come with that seems just so far from reality from my perspective. There's merit to the exercise as far as I'm concerned; and each post has attracted people interested in the problem.

That is not relevant to the point I was making: which is that the PoE doesn't become relevant to some idea of a philosopher's god unless their idea of god fits the PoE premises.

So far the only one I know who is advocating your idea of god is yourself and you don't actually claim to believe in the premises you are pushing.

Most theologians disagree, and I do mean most. William Lane Craig (whom you have turned to elsewhere: see Logical Truth and Omnipotence | Reasonable Faith) accepts that the limits of God's power are what is possible to actualize.

You are confusing two separate issues.

The issue here is not whether or not there are limits on what God will do - the issue here is what is the ontological source of those limits.

Craig absolutely rejects your essentially platonism claim that there exist abstract objects (properties) that pre-exist god, which god has no power over, and which make god subject to them.

Craig affirms the Biblical position just as I do: Which is that nothing outside of God, abstract or concrete, existed prior to God and everything came into being through God.

He has a 550 page book devoted to that exact issue.

If it's a consequence of the belief "God is morally all good" that "god doesn't like suffering," then the shoe still fits regardless of the reason for the shoe fitting.

Several problems with your argument:

1. Your argument is logically incoherent from your worldview.
Since you deny that morality exists you have no logical basis for arguing that "to not like suffering" is a requirement to be considered a good person.
Good doesn't exist according to your worldview so you don't get to claim that anything is required in order to qualify as being good.

2. It doesn't refute anything I argued.
Because if you admit that God is all morally good as a premise (which is omnibenevolent), instead of only saying "god doesn't like suffering", then you automatically are forced to conclude God must have a good reason for what he does.

3. You ignored the fact that I have demonstrated omnibenevolence and "god doesn't like suffering" are not synonyms. You are in error by trying to treat them as synonyms. Because although we might be able to say that an omnibenevolent person won't like suffering; we cannot say that anyone who doesn't like suffering is omnibenevolent.

 

[lukethethird]

I have started quite a few threads about the PoE, but there is still more to talk about. Today I'd like to talk about this little issue: ostensibly, given the premises that God exists, that God is omnipotent, that God is omniscient, and that God created humans deliberately, then it is reasonable to conclude that God is responsible for our moral compasses: that evaluation that we perform when we feel something has morally good or morally bad implications.

For instance, perhaps this is the reason that we might feel guilty if we hurt somebody, even unintentionally.

Ostensibly, if God is benevolent and wishes for us to be morally good agents, God would endow us with functioning moral cognitive faculties: God would give us the ability to detect what is morally good and what is morally bad. (Now, obviously as a non-theist and moral non-cognitivist I don't believe any of this; just working within the framework of the premises).

Let us return again to the example given in the last couple of PoE posts: childhood leukemia. If we were to imagine a being giving or allowing a child to suffer horribly from leukemia and then die, most of our moral compasses tingle "this is bad."

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?

In other words, we are between a rock and a hard place: if children with leukemia is actually congruent with God's benevolence, and God gave us functioning cognitive, moral faculties, why wouldn't this register as good to us?

If it is actually good, but registers on our moral compasses as bad, why did God give us malfunctioning moral cognitive faculties? Wouldn't that be an entirely new problem unto itself?

What does PoE stand for?

 

[Meow Mix]

What does PoE stand for?

Problem of Evil

 

[Meow Mix]

I think I notice a recurring theme here where you seem to be thinking of reality only in materialistic terms of brains processing information and actuating bodies to move in response to that. Such a worldview does not give you a grid for plugging spiritual concepts or realities into. So it seems like you keep trying to understand spiritual concepts as just being indirect ways of communicating materialistic physical laws instead of recognizing them as something different.

The entire chapter of 1 Corinthians 2 deals with this subject of how the mind alone, without the spirit, is incapable of understanding the things of the spirit because they must be discerned by your spirit.

To use an analogy: You'll never be able to properly understand what sight is without a sensory device attached to your body for experiencing that. Likewise, you'll never be able to understand spiritual things without using the sensory device God has given you for receiving and discerning the spiritual aspect of reality.

If you don't recognize that this spiritual sensor exists inside of you then you can't expect to use it. You won't be listening for it's input. Or, when you do receive information through it, such as your inner sense of objective morality you can't get away from, you try to explain it away by natural processes.

The mind, consciousness, and free will, are all the same thing and take place at the spiritual aspect of reality and not as material processes. But, again, without recognizing a spiritual aspect to reality and your own ability to discern it, you are at a loss to explain this by material processes alone.

If the argument is that I require a sense I don't have in order to understand indecipherable claims, then I'm not sure what can be done about that: if these concepts can't be explained with reason and language, but only this mystical je ne sais quoi that I don't possess or otherwise don't have access to, isn't that it, then? Isn't my only recourse to simply doubt the claims are meaningful until such time that they're made so?

I don't know what it means for something to "be" love any more than I know what it means for something to "be" length, I don't know what it means for spirits to be in, over, upon, withdrawn from things. I'm not sure how these can be meaningful things if they can't be explained with language.

For instance I can imagine things like magic, I can imagine a spooky cloud entering someone and now that person has the power to shoot fireballs from their hands; even if I wouldn't understand the mechanism of how that would be accomplished. But you're saying things that don't even make sense in that regard: you're saying that things somehow "are" properties (which, by the way, in nearly all of your responses you are understanding what I'm saying about properties wrong; I am not saying God is "composed" of properties that abstractly existed before God, etc., but we'll get to that in later replies -- just letting you know you've understood me wrong). You're saying something like my spooky cloud example but it doesn't make sense for other reasons (such as the death thing, which I've asked more questions about in post 342.

I can understand and form a mental image of magical things. But I can't form an understanding of what it means for a being that is a person to "be" a property like love or life any more than I could understand what purple tastes like.

The fact would be that Adam and Eve were not created morally flawed in the sense that they desired to bring harm on others or themselves. An act of self deception was required before they could go through with something that would be harmful by denying the truth of what God had told them.

So, this goes to my post 341 then: as a quick recap, God could have given them enough information and the rationality not to self-deceive; and if God couldn't have done that, then putting the tree out there is like a kind of entrapment if Adam and Eve are capable of irrationally choosing things like radical skepticism (and the odds would converge to one that they would eventually, irrationally, make the wrong choice).

And self deception is the key word there - that is what makes them responsible for their choice. They made a choice to embrace a lie because they thought it would be better for themselves than the truth. It's not something that just happened to them, outside of their ability to control. They had everything they already needed to make the right choice.

If it's not true that it was possible to make things better for themselves, that is a matter of having enough information. This goes back to the "why would someone make a choice with potentially negative consequences" section of post 341.

You might try to argue that perhaps their ability to disbelief God is itself a design flaw - but that wouldn't be a moral flaw in the sense of desiring to do evil. You also can't call it a flaw when the ability to make a choice about whether or not they believe God is the essential requirement for free will relationship with God to exist. If you are forced to believe God then you'll never choose to rebel because you'll never disbelieve what he says is true.

Being able to make that choice for yourself of who God is and whether or not what He says is true we can assume is a greater good that warrants the risk of what we see has happened.

If you accept the premise that God is all good and all knowing, then you are forced to conclude that God has a necessary and good reason for how He has done things.

I don't think you or most people would disagree that they like their free will and wouldn't want to give it up.

I'm not sure about what you've said here: just giving someone information and rationality such that they don't make a wrong choice because they're ignorant doesn't remove their free will!

Believing God is a liar with no reason to believe so is an irrational form of radical skepticism: if Adam and Eve were created with functioning, rational cognitive faculties, they would not be radical skeptics for no reason whatsoever.

Believing that God is holding out on them and they have something to gain from rebelling is a situation where they are ignorant and can be cured with mere information: God could make it clear that there is nothing to gain and that they have everything they need. Again, doubting this "just because" would be irrational radical skepticism.

You seem to be arguing that the only way Adam and Eve could have free will is that if they could bumble into evil by ignorance (ignorance that God is not a liar, ignorance that they might have something to gain by rebelling, and so on). But ignorance isn't required to have free will. In fact I would argue that making choices while ignorant is less free than making choices while aware! Adding ignorance to the equation is effectively like adding a randomizer, whereas if choices are made with information by rational actors, there is no question as to whether they've chosen right or they've chosen wrong: they have to deliberately choose wrong in order to do wrong in the absence of ignorance!

You say that if Adam and Eve weren't ignorant, then they'd "never choose to rebel because [they'd] never disbelieve what [God] says is true." That doesn't make them not free: they could infinitely, eternally simply freely, rationally, choose not to make the wrong choice!

You seem to be arguing that the only way for free will to be free is if someone does make a wrong choice, not just that the choice is available to them: and I do not think this is correct.

So what is really wrong with a scenario where Adam and Eve have free will, but they are created as rational actors, and they are given enough information that the only way they make a wrong choice is if they deliberately, knowingly, make that wrong choice?

 

[Meow Mix]

That's like Krauss saying in his debate with Craig that "nothing means different things to different people" and that saying he didn't care how other people defined it.

Snipping everything about terms, that's the least interesting thing to me by far, I will simply type out what I mean until I decide what terms to use. I do object that philosophers are generally comfortable with noncognitivists using terms and understanding they have different contexts, so I might be snarky and just use "borality" and "bulpable" or something like that. Fair warning.

 

[Meow Mix]

You are effectively engaging in the fallacy of circular reasoning.
"It's bad for you to conclude that God must have a good reason because it's bad for you to conclude God must have a good reason."

You haven't established there is actually anything wrong with drawing the only logical answer to the premises as given - If God is all good and all knowing then the only answer one can assume is that God has a good reason for what he does and it is actually the best option available.

If God is good. The argument is that we have reason to doubt that premise: the existence of suffering; the meta-epistemic argument (it is not reasonable to defend premises in ways that are epistemically invulnerable/can't be counter-evidenced out of); and for instance the principle of indifference in epistemic probability.

I addressed your four possibilities in a previous post.

But what I want to say to this is that your logic is flawed because you do not solve logical formulations by rolling dice to determine the answer.

You responded to a different set of four possibilities as far as I can see: this set of four was unique to this post you were responding to.

What I was saying is that sometimes we have to make decisions about epistemic systems for which we don't have complete information. It's reasonable for us to do this based on probabilities in an epistemic way: for instance Bayesian epistemology is a whole field in epistemology.

We can epistemically do things like P(A|B) = P(B|A)*P(B)/P(A) (hopefully that was correct because that was from memory, but you get the point).

So the argument I was making was using the principle of indifference: if we know how many possibilities there are but we don't know how likely those possibilities are, the principle of indifference is that it's reasonable to make decisions based on them having equal probabilities of being true. It's among unintuitive epistemic probability issues like the Montey Hall problem (which I recommend checking out also if you're not familiar).

So, if we know that there is more than one explanation for the observation of suffering, the lone explanation that leads to the conclusion of omnibenevolence becomes less and less epistemically likely: that would mean it has to be justified in some other way (that suffering is explained benevolently).

That is, of course, the definition of a premise. You say it like it's a problem, but it isn't given what the purpose of the PoE question is as a challenge to Biblical ideas about God by way of trying to show a supposed contradiction between three premises.

If you don't want to assume the three PoE premises then you don't pose the PoE question.
And if you aren't assuming the three PoE premises then you aren't asking the PoE question.

So obviously if you pose the PoE question with three premises the conclusion you will draw has to be consistent with the three premises.

If you can come up with a conclusion that is consistent with the three premises then you have no reason to drop a premise as impossible.

Therefore, you have no basis for claiming the Biblical idea of God is inconsistent with itself (which is what the PoE tries to do).

I tried to establish in one of the last rounds of responses that I was setting out to attack the premises, not to grant them and see where they go. We have a lot of posts going on, though.

I think you're thinking of the so-called "logical PoE," which would attempt what you're talking about (seeing where the premises go). I've been working on attacking the premises, which I believe is called the "evidential PoE."

 

[Meow Mix]

You should dispense with the pretense of posing the PoE question and simply start attacking the Biblical idea that God is any one of those attributes with whatever reasons you believe you have for that claim.

That's the intent. You're thinking of the logical PoE as I just mentioned in another response I'm pretty sure. I'm attacking whether premises are true when taken in conjunction with each other and observations, not granting that they're true.

The real question you need to be asking is "what reason do I have to force you abandon one of your premises when you've managed to give an answer that keeps all three intact?"

That's the point of the meta-epistemic argument I've been making. By "the meta-epistemic argument," I mean my argument that it's not reasonable to take premises that rely on human non-omniscience and lead them to a conclusion that defies all evidence which we can't refute because we're not omniscient. These kinds of arguments can be made arbitrarily and can't be escaped from, it's not reasonable to make them.

It can be boiled down to:

1) God can do things in ways humans can't know since they aren't omniscient
2) God has a property
3) Observations appear to conflict with (2)
C: The observations do not conflict with (2) because (1) makes the apparent conflicts congruent with (2) in some unknown way

But can't you see that we can fill this in with anything we want? Isn't that a problem?

1) Unies can do things in ways humans can't know since they aren't omniscient
2) Unies have (some property)
3) Observations appear to conflict with (2)
C: The observations do not conflict with (2) because (1) makes the apparent conflicts congruent with (2) in some unknown way

We can fill in any actor (as long as they're smarter or more powerful than humans; they don't even have to be omnipotent/omniscient), and we can fill in any property; and then it doesn't matter what we observe because our observations can never conflict with (2) because of (1)! This is a trap, and if we are reasonable, we should endeavor not to fall into traps that we can both build arbitrarily and then never be evidenced out of.

If (1) and (2) are taken as true, then (3) never matters, no matter what: never.

This is the meta-epistemic argument: reasonable actors avoid arbitrarily built epistemic traps, so we shouldn't do it.

So the only way we can avoid the trap is by making it non-arbitrarily. But how do we do that? We have to be aware of the trap and see if we can justify the premises very substantially. Do unies or a God exist? Do unies or God actually have the property in question in (2)?

So in this case, I'm attacking the omnibenevolence property on a couple of fronts: I'm arguing it shouldn't be defended by just assuming it and falling into the trap (because you have to assume it in order to get the trap), this is the meta-epistemic argument side. I'm arguing that there are other possibilities that have to be considered, and we can reasonably decide even with epistemic incompleteness (that's the argument from the principle of indifference). I'm arguing several things to attack whether the premise about the property (in this case, omnibenevolence) is true. The meta-epistemic argument attempts to limit possible responses by pointing out they can be arbitrarily built and can't be escaped from (and are so unreasonable), the argument from the principle of indifference attempts to argue that it's less likely that omnibenevolence is congruent with the observation of suffering than the alternatives where it's not.

 

[Meow Mix]

You are begging the question by assuming life and death are purely materialistic processes and there can't be any other spiritual component to this equation you aren't aware of.

You would have no way of proving life is a purely materialistic enterprise with no spiritual component to it.

So, this is why I was saying I was giving a biological definition of life which is a descriptive list like "body that seeks homeostasis, reacts to stimuli," etc. The laws of physics are both necessary and -- this is key -- sufficient for this definition of life.

This is why earlier I was saying you are very likely going to have to define what you mean by "life" if you weren't satisfied with the biological definition.

Now I can try to play ball as best I can and just sort of imagine a spirit, whatever that is. I guess I can imagine spirits as being able to move under their own power, responding to stimuli, some other descriptive list that doesn't include physicality.

But it would still end up being the case that for at least some life (us, here, on Earth) that physics accounts for most of the processes making up the definition and physics is responsible for the deaths that result: from disease, from being trampled, from things like decapitation, so on and so forth.

We call this "death." But this brings up a problem:

Are spirits dead? Genuine question. If I die, am I dead? If I'm dead, is my spirit form alive? See how this is a little hairy? I think it's obvious that something different is meant by "life" (being alive here, on Earth) and "life" (being a spirit, wherever). N'est-ce pas? Otherwise, post-Earth-life spirits are "dead," right? Since they died on Earth.

But this would only mean what I've been saying the whole time would be true: "you must mean something else by 'life' than we normally mean." Do you see?

You aren't alive in the sense that Adam and Eve were before the fall. You are subject to physical death and entropy. They weren't.

So, the physics of the universe was different? Entropy didn't cause telomere degradation? If the wind caused a rock to roll down a hill into one of them, the momentum of the rock and its mass wouldn't hurt them?

This definitely has to be that the physics were different, right?

Entropy starts trying to kill people from the moment they are conceived.

Entropy is not a nebulous spooky force that does dark and nefarious things: it is a consequence of probability; and a deeply profound necessity of the way the physics of the universe are built.

You are assuming without basis that there is no other component to life than material physics such as a spiritual component.

This is false, Biblically, because Adam and Eve were not subject to death and after the resurrection the people of God will have new bodies that are not subject to death.

The Bible doesn't say God changes the laws of physics for them. It says He gives them something which is necessary for them to have life.

So how does it work if they're struck by lightning? What prevents them from being hurt, if the laws of physics weren't different?

I don't see that it would be a bad analogy to think of God's Spirit as a type of resonate energy that is part of your being and interacts with your physical body in a way that provides something to it.
Of course it's not just a energy like an impersonal force, but it is God Himself.

OK, so I can think of some magic that I can make a picture of, like a vampire that turns somebody: now they're a vampire, they have an essence of vampire-ness that causes them to magically stop aging.

I can also imagine a vampire being super-strong and resisting a lightning strike, or a boulder rolling on them, etc.

So I guess I can imagine God making His essence, which is everywhere per an earlier comment, be part of somebody... I guess?

I can see how doing that would make a person not die. But there are other ways to make people not suffer. If God can't be "in" someone because they're not "in tune" with God, God could still shield them from physicall suffering by simply changing physics. The lightning bolt doesn't have to strike them, the boulder doesn't have to keep its momentum when it strikes them. The whole point of all of this was answering the question "why does God allow the world to inflict physical suffering?" and the fact that since God created the world, God is responsible for said possibility of physical suffering.

Now of course, it's theodicy from there: but I am still just trying to get agreement that God is responsible for the suffering. You were trying to argue that God can't help but for the suffering to be possible because if people are "out of tune" He can't do anything about that. But He can: with physics.

I think this may be a fitting analogy:
If you unplug your laptop from the wall, it won't immediately die. It can run for a while off what it has already been given. But it's death will become inevitable by virtue of being unplugged from it's only electrical source.

Continuing with the "God being with you is like being a vampire: filled with magic" train of thought, it seems like physics are necessary and sufficient for you to be alive in the sense of life that we normally mean it where we're alive here on Earth, sustained by physics and killed by physics. See my comments about "if I die, am I dead or alive?" and whether spirits are alive or dead above: I still think you are talking about "life" in a different way than we normally mean. So what is that way?

We have death here on Earth, but you say death is the opposite of life. If I die and become a spirit, if I'm not dead, then you're talking about a different death and a different life.

Or maybe spirits are dead? But then what about the spirits that have union with God or whatever, what does it mean for them to be alive but for your average Joe hit by a mac truck to be dead? What's the difference between these two spirits?

The problem with your use of that term " properties" is that you appear to be coming from the platonist perspective of how plantinga understands God. But it's not a Biblical understanding of God.

Properties are not abstract objects that exist prior to God and then come together to make God what He is.

God is what He is and He is all those things that are ascribed to Him, but we draw our description of "properties" from trying to describe and understand who He already is.

The properties don't exist prior to God and get applied to God.

The properties we identify are descriptions of God's nature which has always been and never came into being. God is not composed of abstract objects called properties which had to exist before He did.

I am not a Platonist, I'm just not an ontological materialist.

Properties are limitations. A ball is red if it's not yellow or green, etc. Things that exist possess properties, they're not made out of them like some kind of jigsaw.

So, it would be appropriate to say that a ruler, which has the limitation of having spatio-temporal extension (as opposed to not), is "lengthy." It would fundamentally be an error to say that the ruler "is length."

This is because "length" is a class of limitation (to have more spatiotemporal extension in one direction than others). There is nothing out there that exists as "length" (that's what the Platonist would tell you: that something does exist called "length"). All that exists are things with that particular class of limitation.

Similarly (for the most part), there is nothing out there that exists that "is love." Love is an emotion felt by beings, a particular limitation they experience and instantiate. Things can be loving, but they can't be love: not even God.

 

[Meow Mix]

You cannot prove the Biblical view of omnipotence is illogical unless you could prove platonism is true - but you can't.

The reason your definition of omnipotence is not either Biblically correct, historically correct with the understanding of that word, or even correct by the plain meaning of the word, is because you seek to place some abstract objects above god and preceding him which make god subject to themselves. Something which would be by definition something outside of himself he would have no power over.

This is wrong on a few accounts: I've already addressed the incorrect Platonism accusation in the last response, so I'll leave that there. This is wrong on the historical account as well: Aquinas himself acknowledged that all-power means all possible power, and pretty much everyone since with the very few oddballs like Descartes. Among modern theologians I can only find one (Earl Conee, in the 90's) that argues otherwise; this is not well received by peers. I have already explained how it is correct by the plain meaning of the word (there is no more "all" than "all possible," you can't get any more "all" than that).

EDIT: I thought William Lane Craig came up again in this post, but he does not. I will have more to say on limitation and logic and WLC whenever I get to that post.

Biblcally, there is nothing outside of God that he did not create or have power over.

As I have said, then this is the easiest case to make against the Bible: this is necessarily wrong for being illogical.

The only limit on God is internal, which regards to be consistent with his nature.

You have never directly addressed this point: for God to have a nature, that nature must be limited (after all it must be God's nature, and not the nature of a horse). God could not have chosen this nature (because it requires having a nature already to choose a nature), and God would have no power over God's primordial nature. God is dependent on having that primordial nature to be God.

What is a nature? It's limitation. God isn't limitation Himself, because God had to be limited to be God. God can't be the source of limitation, again because God had to be limited to be God to be the source of anything in the first place. Arguing otherwise firmly places the cart in front of the horse.

I am not saying that limitation is an abstract thing floating out there Platonically. I'm saying that limitation is exactly what it means to exist: to exist is to exist as something, and not as something else than what it is. But this is the referent for logic: when we "do" logic, we are doing the reference: we are pointing to (referencing) limitation (the referent). But since God is dependent on being limited to be God, and God has no power over His own limitation, and God is not the source of limitation (this follows from the other two), God is not the source of logic, either: because logic is just a description of how limitation is.

So in short, God has limits that aren't internal to God: His very own limitations, what it means for God to even be God or to be said to exist.

Biblically omnipotence is defined as power over everything outside of God.
You are not defining omnipotence that way, but are trying to force God to be subject to outside forces and abstract objects.

You cannot call your concept omnipotence that is consistent with the Biblical definition.
Nor could you prove the Biblical definition is impossible logically.

I can, and have. If the Bible thinks that God can do things that aren't possible, that's illogical by definition.

Please do attempt to answer this question: could God have chosen God's primordial nature? I will explain what I mean by "primordial" again to avoid confusion. Let's say that God can affect His nature now: after all, incarnating as a mortal man named Jesus seems like a substantial alteration of nature in some respects. So let's say that God has nature A, and God can choose to make His nature to instead be nature B.

Could God have chosen his nature A though? In order to choose nature A, God must have already had a nature: namely, God had to have knowledge of what kinds of natures God wants to instantiate, and God must have had the power to actualize the desired change. Can you see that there is at least one nature that God couldn't have chosen: some "first" nature, some primordial nature? In order to have chosen this primordial nature, God must have already had a nature to do so, which contradicts by putting the cart in front of the horse!

So, could God have chosen His primordial nature? If you say "yes," you have fallen into illogic. If you say "no," you have to concede that there are things God doesn't have power over, which God is not identical to, which don't have their source in God (how could they, it would be the same cart-before-horse problem!) And "those things" would be limitation itself.

Limitation is reality, it's incorrigible, necessary (in all possible worlds), but shouldn't be thought of like a Platonic form; but it definitely doesn't come from God in the sense that it's a "rule" that God doesn't create; God is subject to the rule, because limitation is what it means to exist. If God exists, then God is limited, and God can't help that; and that fact doesn't come from God.

The Platonist would say, "there's this thing out there called limitation that exists, and provides substance to all instantiations of limitation." That is silly and illogical for the same reason other Platonism is (e.g. a Platonic triangle would have to have contradictory properties like being right-sided and isocoles, which is illogical). I'm not saying there's this floaty thing out there called limitation. I'm saying that there are rules to existence that nobody, not even God, makes: because they are necessary and incorrigible; even their absence would entail their presence (so their absence is impossible). Limitation defines what it means to exist.

Once you accept that God can't be the source of limitation, you'll find it's not so bad: it doesn't harm theism in the least. It does, however, pre-empt illogical theistic concepts. (Note I'm not saying "theistic concepts," just that some -- like this notion that omnipotence can do something more than what's possible to do -- are illogical). If you hinge belief in the Bible on the illogical, that is just bad news. Most theism is totally unharmed by this.

As I showed in previous posts; Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean there's anything logically wrong with the statement.
There is nothing you can show to be linguistically or logically wrong with the statement "God is Truth.

I can show both.

"God is truth" would necessarily mean that God is identical with what we call truth. Not that truth is part of God, but identical with it (this is linguistically what that statement is saying). But truth doesn't have the same property set God has: truth isn't causal, truth isn't a person, truth doesn't have knowledge, etc. Truth is a description of whether references to referents corresponds to reality. God can't be truth any more than God can be purpleness (note this isn't just "God is purple," which could make some sense even if false).

If "God is truth," then there is no need for the word "truth." If I say "there are no married bachelors," you could just say "That is God." Or you could say "Truth is omnipotent and omniscient, and created the universe." But when we say something is "true," we aren't talking about an omnipotent, omniscient, casual thing with personhood: we're talking about a relationship between references and reality. So this would be absolute nonsense.

Similarly, if "God is love" and "God is truth," then transitively, truth is love: I would tell my lover "I'm in truth with you," or "I'm in God with you." But this isn't what we mean when we say "I'm in love with you," is it?

In another post, you said something about keeping the list of terms we use short to avoid confusion. Well, I submit that if you went around saying about true things "Ah yes, that's God" (instead of "that's true") or told your friend "I God you" (instead of "I love you"), you'd be generating a whole lot of confusion: and there's a reason for that (we don't mean God when we say those words).

Linguistically, logically, this is nonsense unless you have some further clarification.

Truth is also where we get logic from. The laws of logic are nothing more than what we have identified about how truth functions and is defined.

That's why God is Himself logic because He is himself Truth. And since the Bible tells us god never changes, He can never lie or contradict Himself.

I have shown elsewhere in this post how God can't be logic, or even the source of it.

 

[Meow Mix]

I think you are verging on a similar error. You seem to be trying to affirm we can have functional objective morality, ie all the benefits of objective morality existing, while at the same time denying it actually exists. As though it is a kind of useful fiction we adopt out of necessity. Or, as it may be in your case, claiming we don't have a choice and it's part of our evolutionary programming.

But you haven't considered the full logical and philosophical ramifications of what is possible in a world where everyone admits no objective morality exists.

What is going to keep people moored to adhering to this useful fiction if they are fully aware it actually is a fiction?
Because even most hardcore atheists still want to believe objective morality is real. They aren't willing to give up belief in it. Even if they can't logically justify it.
They not only understand the danger of going down that route, but they are incapable of doing so because they believe deep in their heart that it is factually true to say that some things are just truly are wrong no matter what anyone believes about it. And because of that belief they simply can't entertain the cognitive dissonance of denying that objective moral values and duties exist.

You get around that by denying people have choice and it's just evolutionary programming - but if we were just materialistic robots we'd be bound by physical determinism and we wouldn't even be conscious beings with the ability to have intent.

Obviously we have conscious intent, so we can't just be bound by materialistic determinism. Our mind needs to transcend the limits of determinism.
Which means we have free will by definition. The defining aspect of consciousness - will (another way of saying intent) - is the same defining aspect of free will. Because will by definition doesn't even exist unless it's free. Just like you can't have intention about something without having free intention about it. Intention dictated by something else wouldn't be your intention by definition anymore.

I'm not saying that it's a useful fiction. My comments are a description of how people operate.

One thing I've always wondered is this: if some kind of objective morality or moral realism is true, why don't people feel guilty more often? It seemed to me that if there were moral facts of some kind -- be it because of DCT or moral truths existing -- that no matter how depraved someone was due to their choices, they would feel guilty about it. But there are people that do very unempathetic things, very unaltruistic things, very self-centered things and don't feel a single regret over it. There are sociopaths that walk among people like wolves in sheeps' clothing: even if they aren't the serial killer type, they tend to rise high up in corporate ladders and make others' lives living hell with ruthlessness and they never by definition feel a drop of remorse or wonder how their actions are hurting people. Why is this possible?

If objective morality or moral realism is true, why are there moral quandaries like the Trolley Problem? In the same way there is only one truth, there would only be one morality, right: shouldn't there be one answer that is obviously correct to everybody? It doesn't make sense that these are problems to people.

Now I know that the answer from a Christian worldview is probably something like, "because of the Fall, their moral compasses are damaged, so they don't feel any guilt for causing others suffering." Or for moral quandaries the answer is "because their moral compass is damaging, they get confused." This is a really unsatisfying answer, because if you think about it, it looks exactly the same as if there weren't any objective morality/moral realism at all! Why would that be?

So I looked into whether objective morality/moral realism made any sense, I needn't bore you with the journey through Kant's categorical imperative and the like (though I picked up interesting things long the way). I just don't think that either of them do make any sense. I think it describes the world that we see that people have value hierarchies, they construct hypothetical imperatives based on those; and this is why there are moral dilemmas like the Trolley Problem (because hierarchies are complex and some layers are contradictory unless we figure out how they're layered), and this is why there are some people that don't feel remorse for hurting people (they don't value altruism or empathy), and so on.

It explains why people that don't believe in gods or magic are generally still people that try their best not to hurt other people, and to help those in need (because they do value empathy and altruism).

You wring your hands over the possibility of people thinking morality is a "useful fiction," but I submit there's nothing to worry about. I've been a moral noncognitivist for a long time and I'm probably further away from ever hurting anybody or failing to help somebody than I was in my 20's. Our values are what they are, they don't have to be propped up with anything.

People that don't hurt people because they're afraid of consequences don't really value empathy and altruism all that much, they're more self-centered. But that is why laws exist in societies, to get as many people on board with altruism as possible; even the ones that have to be coerced a little. I think there are plenty of people that hold these values high on their own accord.

 

[Meow Mix]

I could establish objective moral duties too, but we would be getting ahead of ourselves if we on't first deal with the reality of objective moral values.

There would be no point in debating whether or not God has the authority to put duties on us if we can't first settle whether or not objective moral values even exist - let alone where they come from.

If an objective moral value doesn't have the material implication of having a duty, I'll need you to define what you mean by "objective moral value?"

I've decided I'm just going to use the word obligation instead of duty when speaking from my worldview to you since you object to the word duty (though I stress that this is not a problem in philosophical literature).

For what else can I call a value we feel obliged to follow? A preference like peanut M&M's over regular M&M's doesn't seem to be accompanied with any obligations: I would pretty much never have to make a choice regarding peanut M&M's that goes against what I want to do.

But with my values relating to empathy and altruism (as two such examples), I feel an obligation that I impose on myself: I might really want to get a new purse instead of taking money out every two weeks for activism; but I feel obliged not to do that. I might want to punch the annoying guy at the bar that won't take "no" for an answer in the face, but I feel obliged not to do that. I might feel obliged to tell a lie to make things easier for myself, but I feel obliged not to do that. These don't act like food preferences. They carry obligations. Now most philosophers are fine with calling these duties ("agent-relative duties," such as I think Nagel would say). You object, so that is fine (though odd), I shall just call them obligations all the same.

Edit: OK, I looked it up. Nagel actually used the terms "objective duties" and "subjective duties," and I would be talking about the latter. Derek Parfit is the one that re-coined these as agent-neutral and agent-relative duties.

-------

Combining another short post to lower the post count:

The issue here is not whether or not there are limits on what God will do - the issue here is what is the ontological source of those limits.

Craig absolutely rejects your essentially platonism claim that there exist abstract objects (properties) that pre-exist god, which god has no power over, and which make god subject to them.

Craig affirms the Biblical position just as I do: Which is that nothing outside of God, abstract or concrete, existed prior to God and everything came into being through God.

He has a 550 page book devoted to that exact issue.

The incorrect Platonism accusation was handled in another response recently, so I'll leave that be.

I would still need to see Craig's reasoning, as from what I recall from an earlier comment I made based on an overview of his book (which I will still intend on reading), I had made a comment about how he was making a similar mistake of confusing the reference with the referent of things like logic. It doesn't make me terribly hopeful; but I'll still check it out.

If you happen to know his arguments, feel free to present them.

 

[Meow Mix]

@Rise

One more thing. Inspired by the "poof or drown" thread elsewhere here.

Let's say for the sake of argument that I accept this whole "God is life, if you don't have God then you die" thing (I am not granting this, just granting it for right now).

Why does that have to include suffering? In the "poof or drown" thread, someone asked: take it for granted that God is done with humanity and is going to flood the world. Flooding is a horrible way to die. Why not just poof them out of existence instead of this horrible, scary, painful way?

So going back to people dying from lightning bolts and boulders and diseases, if we accept that they're going to die in some finite number of years, why do they have to suffer in the meantime from the physics of the universe, which God could make different? Why not have physics that don't allow for the terrifying, painful, heart wrenching suffering; but people still die when their allotted time is up? (The proverbial poof, as opposed to the drown?)

This may or may not be rhetorical if the answer is just going to be "some unknowable reason because we're not omniscient and God is good and powerful, so must have a reason for torturing people with physics that allow for their bodies to be ravaged" Then I guess we're still stuck back at the meta-epistemic argument, the principle of indifference, and all of that.

I can't help but to feel that answer must not be very satisfying to give. Just imagine the torture people endure on this planet because physics are the way they are, the slow dwindling deaths some diseases ravage people with, children starving in mudholes, and so on: all stuff that doesn't have to exist if God just changes physics (doesn't even have to "put his spirit on them" or whatever, just has to change physics a little).

 

[Alienistic]

If it is actually good, but registers on our moral compasses as bad, why did God give us malfunctioning moral cognitive faculties? Wouldn't that be an entirely new problem unto itself?

If I were an evil creating genius, I’d likely give mankind malfunctioning moral cognitive faculties so that I can control it, deceive it, manipulate it, and enslave it, carrying out my will and have them all convinced that I’m the only god and I am good. They’d defend me and justify me all day long. Being my good little soldiers all mentally trained to consciously parrot all of the same things in my defense.

 

[Rise]

Picking up where I left off on your last round of posts.

The argument has been made somewhere (though it may have been in a different series) how God, by changing physics, could remove the capacity for physical suffering without relevantly impacting free will.

Aside from the fact that it would be a logical contradiction to have a world with the benefits of God in it, but without having God, I can point out another problem with your logic:


God already created a world to operate in a way that had no physical suffering.
It was designed to function a certain way.
Man's free will choice to violate that design is what causes problems.
God has made provision for being free from that problem through Christ so that you can restore what Adam and Eve had in your life.
Man must make a free choice to reverse the curse by embracing the source of redemption from it.

Let's use an analogy here:
Someone creates a car that is immune to safety issues if driven on roads.
The creator warns you not to take the car into the water or death can result.
The driver chooses to drive their car off a cliff into the ocean.
They suffer and die.
Now you want to blame the creator of the car for the negligent choice of the driver?

You might say "well, he should have just designed the car to survive falling off cliffs and going in water."

This gets into the rebellion issue. You're demanding God cater to your rebellion to set up the world the way you want it to operate. Instead of recognizing his right to create the world as he sees fit to do so then accepting the consequences you incur for not wanting to go along with that design.

Nevermind the fact that what you demand of God may not be logically possible, for all the reasons I already outlined previously.

Putting that aside; the fundamental problem here is that you are actually trying to put a moral obligation/duty on God by saying he must cater to your desire for how the world is to operate. But you can't put a moral obligation/duty on God when you don't believe morality even exists.

It is a completely illogical position for you to take that the Biblical God is obligated to make the world function according to your rebellion instead of expecting you to conform to his designs. You refute your own position by your other premise that morality doesn't exist, therefore moral duties/obligations can't exist.


There's also another issue: What you want is a logical contradiction.
You can't have the conditions of paradise without having the cause of paradise.
And by cause I don't mean that which merely created paradise initially but that which is required to continually be present to uphold paradise as a state of being.

The Bible says God upholds the forces of physics in an ongoing and continual way - he did not just build it to be self contained and self operating.

If God withdraws His active involvement, Himself, completely from the equation then you cease to exist physically.

Mankind rejected God's involvement in their life.

This has consequences of resulting in disorder and a loss of paradise conditions.

The only way to restore this is by God's influence to be invited back in to restore order.

So there is logically no reality possible in which you exist in paradise without God being involved in making it paradise for you.

To demand God create a word in which it is paradise as though He were actively involved in keeping it paradise, but then demand he leave you alone and have nothing to do with you, is logically impossible.

As for the first paragraph, this goes back to what I argued in another post: the point is to doubt the premises: to examine them in the face of evidence.

You were using the wrong form of argument for what your current stated goal is.

You couldn't show contradiction with the original PoE questions. They are able to be easily answered.

So you tried to replace the premises of the PoE with your own premises. But you never proved your premises have to be accepted as being true. Anymore than you could prove a premise is true that God hates ice cream.

So if you can't logically force us to accept your premises are true, and we don't already believe the premises you are using, then your argument doesn't actually prove or disprove anything.


It's not even clear exactly what you are trying to disprove.

If you are trying to disprove God exists then you don't do that by inventing your own premises about God as an unintentional strawman and attacking them (ie. god hates ice cream, ie cream exists, therefore god doesn't exist).

If you want to attack a specific premise of what the Bible says about God then you would need to clearly identify what that premise is and then try to logically show why it can't be true.

But you haven't done that with regards to a specific premise.

You haven't, for instance, shown that it is logically impossible for God to be all good.

You aren't even in a position to make an argument like that because you don't even accept that morality exists. You can't accuse god of being immoral if immorality doesn't exist.

You are trying to disprove God's existence by showing contradiction with certain premises, but the problem is you are inventing your own premises about god that no one actually believes in as a whole (ie. Demanding someone accept the premise that morality doesn't exist, or demanding they reject the premise that God is all good, as part of accepting your premise that God doesn't like suffering)

 

[Rise]

It's possible God has a good reason for suffering to exist, but it's also possible He doesn't.

It's logically impossible that God doesn't have a good reason for whatever he does if you start from the premise that God is all good.

And it is logically impossible God has not actually chosen to do what the most good option is if you also start from the premise that God is all knowing.

To assert otherwise would require you being able to prove the existence of something violates one of those premises. Which you cannot logically do.

Refer to the argument made from the principle of indifference and epistemic limitation (post 321).

If it's just possibly true that God has a good reason, with the principle of indifference, only one out of four possibilities entails perfect goodness, or unfailingly disliking the existence of suffering: it's actually reasonable to induct that it's the least likely possibility. We'd have to attack induction or the principle of indifference (and so radically alter what epistemic probability and what's reasonable to believe even means) to get around that.

I addressed in a preceding post why that argument is fallacious.

If only one out of four option fits the logical premise conditions then you don't say there is a 25% chance of it being the right option - you say there is logically a 100% chance of it being the right option if your premises are true.

If neither option can be said to be right, then there's a problem - but in the case of your four options I already showed why only one answer is the logically right answer based on the PoE/Biblical premises.

You can't get away from that answer being the only right one unless you can disprove the Biblical/PoE premises about God.

You are trying to get around this issue by inventing your own new premises - but you can't justify why we must accept your premises are true (which would mean accepting the Biblical premises are not).

And by that I don't just mean accepting one of your premises are true, but all of the premises you try to use to make your argument disproving god.

You try to defend your invented formulation by pointing to the fact that just about any monotheist is going to accept the premise that God doesn't like suffering but you are ignoring the fact that most are not going to accept the other premises that are necessary to force the conclusion you want.

Such as:
1. That morality doesn't exist.
2. Therefore morality is not relevant to the question.
3. Therefore god can't assumed to be all good because good doesn't exist.
4. That god is not all powerful over everything outside of himself, but is subject to things above or preceding himself.
5. That god has the power to remove suffering without contradicting his nature of violating free will.

Well this is awkward, because that's what I've been arguing for a couple of posts (not before you made this response, I mean just tonight). I'm doing the former, but perhaps some language I've used has given you the notion that I'm doing the latter (I can see it by using things like "using their premises against them" and "only applies if the premises do," but by this I just mean it gives the foundation for the attack).

It is not just your verbage but the formulation of your argument which suggests confused goals.
The kind of argument formulation you are using doesn't line up with what your stated goals are. So it ends up being incoherent as a logical argument.

For example, you are trying to argue :
Premise 1: God doesn't like suffering.
Premise 2: God has the power to stop suffering.
Premise 3: God is all knowing.
Premise 4: Suffering exists.
Conclusion: God either doesn't exist or one of these premises is false.

This style of argument only works by way of showing a contradiction in premises the other person already accepts.
And it only works if they don't have a valid way of explaining why it isn't in contradiction.

If you don't use someone else's premises against them then this argument style proves nothing.
If you want to force someone to accept your premises then you need to first establish those before your formulation has relevance.

The problem here is you claim you're trying to show the Biblical premises to be false, but you have not identified any specific premise you want to attack and then given any case for why it should be regarded as false.

You are really trying to attack the existence of God in general with your conclusion.
But that only works if your argument holds up as actually being a contradiction.


Which first requires you to disprove Biblical premises and prove your own premises as replacements, because you aren't using Biblical premises to show a contradiction with itself.

Saying "God is omnipotent" and then saying "omnipotence doesn't have logical limits" is exactly equivalent to saying God can do illogical things, though: n'est-ce pas?

The issue being debated is not that omnipotence can exist without limits. The Bible already prescribes limits for us.

The issue here is what is the ontological basis for those limits.

The Bible tells us God created everything outside of Himself and has all power over that.
But the Bible also tells us God does not change, lie, or violate his nature. This put's limitations on what He does.
Theologians have historically called this being all powerful.

The points I made concerning this:

1. Your definition of all powerful is not the historical or theological definition of it.

2. Your definition of all powerful is linguistically not actually all powerful. Even less so than the theological definition. Because at least in the later case god is not being subject to anything outside of himself that is beyond his power. So a linguistically correct argument can be made that god is truly all powerful over all things that are not himself. In your case you cannot linguistically truthfully say god is all powerful because there are things outside of himself which he is subject to and has no power over. You are talking about a being that can never be all powerful by definition but is only the maximum possible power under what your worldview says about how reality works.

3. Therefore, it makes no sense for you to use this term based on your definition and doing so is only asking for confusion.

4. Your insistence on calling it all powerful at that point doesn't even make philosophical sense. You don't even have any theological commitments that require you to nominally assert in the concept of all powerful but then try to create caveats to take away certain power that you can't logically justify. From an atheistic philosophy standpoint there is no reason not to just declare omnipotence as a concept is logically impossible and move on.

I mean, true; but if someone wants to adopt something illogical to try to respond, I can just breathe a sigh of relief and attack that much easier, juicier target immediately instead.

I believe you are missing the point I was making; Which is that I was trying to point out how you are bringing certain worldview presumptions into the POE question which not every person is necessarily going to accept.

Even something as basic as the premise that God can't commit a logical contradiction.

That is why the PoE only make sense in the context of someone who accepts the premises as a way of trying to show a contradiction with the premises.

That is why the PoE tries to use existing Biblical premises against the Bible's conclusion.
And part of the PoE is the assumption that logic is real and God won't or can't violate it because that is itself a Biblical premise derived from God's unchanging and Truth nature.

So I was trying to point out that you are getting a similar conclusion but getting it from a different ontological source. Therefore, you can't expect someone to accept your premise unless you can prove they are forced to accept it.

Now, given that reality reflects objective truth and logic because God made reality to reflect His nature as Truth, I do believe it could be possible to engineer an argument that prove truth/logic must transcend the universe based purely on philosophical logic rather than theological revelation - just not for the reasons you think it transcends the universe.

So if that could be done then you could force someone to accept that as a starting premise on purely logical grounds.

But if you can't do that then the PoE is a non-starter because you can't even get the other person to accept that contradictions in god's attributes has to be a problem.

 

[Meow Mix]

God already created a world to operate in a way that had no physical suffering.
It was designed to function a certain way.
Man's free will choice to violate that design is what causes problems.
God has made provision for being free from that problem through Christ so that you can restore what Adam and Eve had in your life.
Man must make a free choice to reverse the curse by embracing the source of redemption from it.

Let's use an analogy here:
Someone creates a car that is immune to safety issues if driven on roads.
The creator warns you not to take the car into the water or death can result.
The driver chooses to drive their car off a cliff into the ocean.
They suffer and die.
Now you want to blame the creator of the car for the negligent choice of the driver?

You might say "well, he should have just designed the car to survive falling off cliffs and going in water."

This gets into the rebellion issue. You're demanding God cater to your rebellion to set up the world the way you want it to operate. Instead of recognizing his right to create the world as he sees fit to do so then accepting the consequences you incur for not wanting to go along with that design.

First of all, most theories of justice would not support the notion of punishing descendants for the crimes of ancestors: does yours?

If there was no physical suffering, then either Adam and Eve were created invulnerable to physics, or the physics of the world was different.

1) If Adam and Eve were created invulnerable to physics (and physics was the same then as it is now), then the question is, "can God change physics via omnipotence?" I think prima facie, most would agree that He could. If He can, then He actually could prevent physical suffering even in a "fallen world" with vulnerable humans. This would lead to the conclusion that in fact, physical suffering exists because God wants it to. The theist only has theodicy to turn to from there. If God can't change physics via omnipotence, I think that would be a very idiosyncratic position to hold; and would probably require further explanation.

2) If Adam and Eve didn't suffer because physics was different, then it answers the question of whether God can omnipotently change physics. The question becomes, "did God have a choice regarding how physics changed?" If He didn't, then we're already at the theodicy stage of parsing out whether that's true or makes sense. If He did, then again, God is responsible for physical suffering existing -- deliberately -- and we do theodicy from there.

Either way it's an important point to establish whether physical suffering exists because God wants it to and intends it to. There are many possible routes that have this outcome.

Nevermind the fact that what you demand of God may not be logically possible, for all the reasons I already outlined previously.

I suppose we will have to see your responses to the most recent round of responses where these are challenged.

Putting that aside; the fundamental problem here is that you are actually trying to put a moral obligation/duty on God by saying he must cater to your desire for how the world is to operate. But you can't put a moral obligation/duty on God when you don't believe morality even exists.

It is a completely illogical position for you to take that the Biblical God is obligated to make the world function according to your rebellion instead of expecting you to conform to his designs. You refute your own position by your other premise that morality doesn't exist, therefore moral duties/obligations can't exist.

If God has values whereby He wouldn't want people suffer, then He'll feel obligations to act according to those values; it would be what possessing such values even means.

There's also another issue: What you want is a logical contradiction.
You can't have the conditions of paradise without having the cause of paradise.
And by cause I don't mean that which merely created paradise initially but that which is required to continually be present to uphold paradise as a state of being.

The Bible says God upholds the forces of physics in an ongoing and continual way - he did not just build it to be self contained and self operating.

If God withdraws His active involvement, Himself, completely from the equation then you cease to exist physically.

Mankind rejected God's involvement in their life.

This has consequences of resulting in disorder and a loss of paradise conditions.

This is very convoluted and difficult to understand: before I was told God has to have His spirit on or in or over (or whatever) people for them to have "life" (but life means something other than we normally mean when we say it, who knows what, we have to see what responses to the last round of responses are), but unless people are "in union" with God (whatever that means) He can't put His spirit on/over/in them (and they supposedly do this by their free will, but I don't remember ever having an informed choice on the matter).

But now, God is still there partially anyway to uphold existence?

Which is it: God can't be there or God is there? This is terribly confusing to me, and I'm not trying to be obtuse at all; I'm trying to entertain these concepts in good faith.

In any case, it still comes down to whether God can omnipotently control physics or not. You seem to suggest God "upholds" physics, which given divine sovereignty, would imply He does have power over physics: so there is no contradiction with God choosing to uphold physics which do not allow for physical suffering. Since physics is outside of human beings, it seems as though it wouldn't matter whether He can have His spirit over/on/in someone or be "in union" with them. This would be like if I can't change the interior of a car, but I was omnipotent, I could still change things around the car so that it doesn't suffer a collision.

It is extremely difficult to argue against metaphysics that are so nebulous with apparently contradictory rules (God can't be in us if we're not "in union," but He is in us upholding us, etc.) I will say that it has the appearance of being highly contrived, like mental gymnastics using finger waggly concepts and words like a New Ager trying to describe what they mean by crystal energy or something: this is not an argument, so I'm not giving you an argument from incredulity. Just a personal observation that might help show where some of my difficulty is here. I am trying to take it seriously and reason things out with it, but it's very difficult to do so when it's all so vague with magical concepts and words and things like that. I can't suss out potential issues with a thing that's barely comprehensible.

The only way to restore this is by God's influence to be invited back in to restore order.

So there is logically no reality possible in which you exist in paradise without God being involved in making it paradise for you.

To demand God create a word in which it is paradise as though He were actively involved in keeping it paradise, but then demand he leave you alone and have nothing to do with you, is logically impossible.

This doesn't make sense to me either. If I were God, I would understand no concept of effort. If someone was like, "Hey God, you're cool and everything, but I don't really want to hang out with you," I'm not going to give them leukemia. I would understand that they mean "I don't want to interact with your personality." So I would still uphold the laws of physics that don't allow them to get sick because I don't want people to suffer, and since I don’t have to expend effort, it costs me nothing to just continuing to ensure they don’t suffer.

And nobody in their right mind is going to be like, "No God, I mean get out of me completely, I'd rather have leukemia."

But this is tantamount to what you're saying, or at least as far as I can understand that. I can only fathom that I'm still understanding everything you're saying wrong, because it can't be that brow furrowing if I've understood you right.

I also don't understand the whole never getting an informed choice thing for people living today. I don't understand how Adam and Eve making some choice affects everybody: or if it did, how that could ever be considered just or in line with most of our values. To me, if a theist said "yeah, God just punishes descendants for the crimes of ancestors," I'd chalk that up to just ceding any premise in which God isn't simply a monster (yes, as judged by my values, yes, you do not need to point out that isn't objective because it's never been claimed to be). I wouldn't give the PoE anymore at that point because whatever "omnibenevolence" the theist is defending at that point is something too alien for me to even consider subjectively good. Wouldn't be any different from God torturing people and being defended with DCT, there's just no point in giving the PoE at that point.

If you want to attack a specific premise of what the Bible says about God then you would need to clearly identify what that premise is and then try to logically show why it can't be true.

Perhaps I should put it this way: maybe I'm attacking certain intuitions people have about goodness and God. I wouldn't aim the PoE at someone that thinks God tortures people, or deliberately gives people leukemia (by making the conditions for it); because I think that person's values are so out of alignment with mine that it's pointless. I'd just consider their God a monster, and move on to some other argument.

The argument I'm giving is for someone that is likely to agree with views like "it is good not to torture people or allow people to be tortured," or "it is not good to punish descendants for the crimes of ancestors," and other intuitions shared by many humans grounded in empathy and altruism.

For instance if someone said to me, "God can set babies on fire while laughing maniacally and it would be good because (some DCT argument), you might not like it but all you have is a preference whereas God's action is objectively good," that's not a good PoE target: they already believe God does apparently (to our everyday notions) monstrous things so the PoE will be incapable of shocking them out of holding one of their premises. It's time for a different argument in that case. I'd also be wary of that person's value hierarchy because it probably isn't in congruence with mine if they don't also find it monstrous, but that's beside the point.

-----------------

Some of this response sounds snarkier than intended on a readthrough, so I feel like I should be clear that I'm still enjoying the conversation a lot. I think I'm in a mood because of schoolwork.

 

[Meow Mix]

It's logically impossible that God doesn't have a good reason for whatever he does if you start from the premise that God is all good.

And it is logically impossible God has not actually chosen to do what the most good option is if you also start from the premise that God is all knowing.

To assert otherwise would require you being able to prove the existence of something violates one of those premises. Which you cannot logically do.

I think I covered this in the most recent round of responses that you haven't gotten to yet; but I'm not trying to present the logical PoE. If I present the PoE, it's more like I'm trying to get people to second guess their intuitions about God and goodness; to get them to second guess the premise that God is good in alignment with their intuitions and values tell them goodness even is. Yes, I'm using the words from my worldview so you should understand I mean their moral preferences.

I addressed in a preceding post why that argument is fallacious.

If only one out of four option fits the logical premise conditions then you don't say there is a 25% chance of it being the right option - you say there is logically a 100% chance of it being the right option if your premises are true.

No, it's not fallacious. The argument is given without granting the premises as being true because the point of the argument is to show via epistemic probability that they might not be; it's a justifier for rejecting the premise.

You try to defend your invented formulation by pointing to the fact that just about any monotheist is going to accept the premise that God doesn't like suffering but you are ignoring the fact that most are not going to accept the other premises that are necessary to force the conclusion you want.

Such as:
1. That morality doesn't exist.
2. Therefore morality is not relevant to the question.
3. Therefore god can't assumed to be all good because good doesn't exist.
4. That god is not all powerful over everything outside of himself, but is subject to things above or preceding himself.
5. That god has the power to remove suffering without contradicting his nature of violating free will.

(4) is a logical necessity; the theist already loses if they doubt (4) on illogical grounds. (5) has independent arguments supporting it in the post preceding this one, and in a multitude of other posts in recent responses.

My noncognitivism has never been a part of the actual argument: I have only said conversationally that I'm a noncognitivist to answer why I wasn't using certain moral terms. Most theists have intuitions about what "good" means, and the way I presented the argument does render the question irrelevant. For instance many theists are not DCT proponents but take the other horn of Euthyphro.

(Skipping another rehash of "if you're trying to do the logical PoE you're doing it wrong," because I'm not.)

(Skipping more omnipotence stuff because it comes up in recent round of responses)

(Actually that was the rest of the post, so I will keep this response short by referring to recent responses)

 

[Rise]

I agree regarding truth. Yet a person self-contradicts by doubting objective truth; they do not self-contradict by doubting objective morality.

The self contradiction on doubting objective morality is not evident in the statement of doubt, no - but it is evident in what people do and believe vs what they claim is true about morality.

You rarely find anyone honest enough about their atheistic/materialistic worldview to admit objective morality can't exist in order to be consistent with their worldview.

And of those, I've never seen one that didn't act and live their life as though objective morality actually existed.

Actually living consistent with that worldview is unworkable and not something people are willing to do.

You yourself live as though objective morality exists.
-You hold yourself to standards of behavior as though it were an objective value and duty.
-You admitted earlier you believe in trying to convince other people to follow what you think is right, which is treating it as though it were objectively right.
-You are willing to execute other people who violate your standard of right and wrong (nazis committing genocide) which again is treating your standard as though it were an objective standard. Otherwise where do you get the right to judge others as so wrong you get to execute them?

You are not treating your belief system as though it were just a preference.
If it were then you’d have no logical right to stop someone from trying to kill or torture you. It might be your preference that such a thing not happen, but logically they have just as much right to take what they want as you have to not want it to happen. You don’t even have the logical grounds to fight back against it. Much less kill them to stop it. If you were truly altruistic you’d just give them whatever they desire because there’s no right or wrong – just competing preferences.
So why not lay down your preferences for their preferences if you prefer being altruistic and no genuine right or wrong exists?

There is nothing functionally different about your behavior from someone who believes and lives as though objective morality exists.

The only difference is what you think the ontological source of this belief is.

But your ontological source is incoherent in the sense that it can't account for this behavior you exhibit that is consistent with treating morality as if it were real and objective.

People that actually live a life consistent with not believing in objective morality would be classified as having various types of mental illness.

It's not nonsensical to talk about non-objective morality.

You haven't refuted any of the reasons I gave for why it is nonsensical. Because morality by definition doesn't exist without also laying claim to objectivity in values or duties.

What you are talking about without objectivity is nothing more than personal preference.

To call that personal preference morality is a misnomer and only brings confusion to trying to discuss the nature of morality.

What does it mean for a moral value to be objective?

You are asking the wrong question.

The question you need to ask is: How can something be moral without being objective?

Morality by definition is right vs wrong.

Right vs wrong is an exclusive binary concept much like true vs false.

Nothing can be truly said to be right or wrong without making an inherently objective claim about how things are intended to be.

If you aren't trying to make an objective claim about something being either right or wrong then you therefore aren't talking about morality by definition.


This false concept that morality and truth can be subjective leads to bad and inaccurate philosophy.

That is why, in analytic philosophy, accurately defining, understanding, and ordering your concepts is critical to be able to arrive at accurate conclusions about what is true.

I suspect that you will arrive to a deontology and possibly even moral realism if you continue down that path: e.g., if you say it's objectively true we ought to value x. This would give you both moral realism (because it contains a moral truth)

...

If you reject moral realism, this is not a good path to go down for you.

Moral realism is a philosophical idea based in platonism. The idea that morals float around as real objects and make up the fabric of reality and then influence people to believe or act in accordance with certain ways.

It’s nonsensical because abstract concepts have no ability to cause anything. That’s one of the defining attributes of being abstract vs concrete.

And if there is something about the way the universe is built that has certain things like morality embedded in it and therefore the laws of the universe casually act upon things according to those concepts (like one would embed math into it) then it only raises the question of who invented these concepts and embedded them into the universe? This cannot be “just so” because there is no efficient cause given for it, nor can it be explained by random chance.


You're not acknowledging alternative possibilities of where objective moral values come from. Which I have already outlined in detail.

Such as:
1. Moral values come necessarily out of the act of creation via the intent of the creator. And they can come from no where else.
2. Moral values come out of the character of who God is. His nature defines what is moral. The opposite of Him defines what is immoral.
3. You can combine the two and say God created everything with an intention that is consistent with his nature character.

and a deontology (because valuing x means you ought to do y).

That is false. You are begging the question by assuming having a value means you must do that value - but there is no logical requirement that someone has a duty to act according to what they value.

Duty requires an authority to impose an obligation on you. Who is imposing this duty on you?

You can't impose your own duty on yourself because then it's not a duty by definition which comes from an external source outside of your own will.

It's also incoherent to even talk about taking authority over yourself to impose decrees on yourself - you're already presumed to be a free will agent capable of doing what you desire.

It is like saying "I'm free to do what I want so I'm going to force myself to do that thing I already want"

You telling yourself what to do is simply called doing what you want. It's not a duty by any definition.

Otherwise, if this objection misses what you were saying, I need some more clarification on what you mean by objective moral values.

I don't know what exactly you would need clarification on. I thought I was being pretty clear already. Let me try to break down the definition into it’s constituent parts.

“Objective” means it is true regardless of what people think about it.
There is something external to people that makes this objectively right or wrong.

“Moral” means right or wrong. Which can only be derived from how things are intended to be. And requires objectivity to exist.

“Values” is placing a judgement on something to say how it aligns or doesn’t align to a given standard.
Values, by itself, is a more neutral and potentially subjective word depending on how you use it.

In the context of being paired with objective morality, “values” is about making judgements about which behavior qualifies as moral and immoral.

But merely identifying something as moral or immoral doesn’t necessarily obligate one to a certain action in the absence of a moral duty.

For example: It could be a morally good value to become either a teacher, doctor, or firefighter. But you aren’t obligated to do all three of them. That would be impossible. You can’t physically do every morally good value there exists for you to do. You have to make choices.

The only way one is a more morally good value for you to pick is if God designed you with the intention of performing a certain field for the betterment of others. Therefore, to pursue that particular field is what is in keeping with what is moral for you and to do otherwise would be violating the intention God had for you as your creator.

But even then we don’t say duty comes into this equation.
There could be natural consequences for not doing things according to God’s design and intention. But there’s no talk at this point of having an obligation or duty to do things according to God’s intention.

Moral duties is a separate argument to make.