Special Pleading and the PoE (Part 3)

[Rise]

However, it's possible to argue that there might be logical limitations such that God is incapable of preventing some kind of suffering because God is achieving a goal that preventing the suffering would contravene, which is exactly what Plantinga does in God, Freedom, and Evil. Have you read this?

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

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

I have not read it. Briefly looking up transworld depravity’s meaning, I would say there is no Biblical support for the idea of transworld depravity in the sense that it asserts every being is destined to sin if given free will. If that were the case then all of the angels would have rebelled against God instead of only one third of them.

I believe it would be true to say that God can give mankind perfect conditions but there is no guarantee they will not want to rebel against God’s rule in order to give themselves over to another ruler (satan).

We don’t just see this with mankind rebelling against the perfect conditions of the Garden of Eden (not trusting God that they already had everything they needed). We also see this with the history of Israel where time after time God is offering them the promise of wonderful living conditions if only they will follow His ways. Sometimes they do follow God and achieve improved conditions but then they rebel from their position of comfort and conditions worsen or destruction comes upon them.
We can even look at the angels that rebelled and ask what could have possibly been unsatisfactory with their conditions?

But you can’t blame that on transworld depravity and be Biblically consistent.

Transworld depravity also has another issue which is that if it were true then that means they would never stop rebelling and therefore could never be in Biblical union with God.

It doesn’t seem like Plantinga’s idea has any way of getting around that problem because it seems like transworld depravity is a feature of free will itself and there’s no way to ever change that without doing away with free will.

His idea doesn’t seem to make any provision for the Biblical idea that mankind can be transformed into a new creation so that the unavoidable propensity to sin (as a result of the fall) no longer has a hold over them.

I should point out for clarity: The propensity to sin as a result of the fall, being given a sin nature we weren't created with, is different from having the free will choice to take on a sin nature.

The former can be removed and replaced with a new nature. That much is clear in the Bible.

It's not explicitly clear to me what happens with regards to the second issue. As I expressed in an earlier post I see several possibilities for how to explain that but can't see enough Biblical evidence at this point to believe I have to commit to any particular one as the answer.

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


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

You can’t put people in that position if you try to premise your question in a way that denies things they actually believe that are essential to reaching the conclusion they do: like the existence of objective morality, God’s nature as all morally good, etc.

I would say you’re at more risk here of having to abandon premises you want to have based on some of the things you have tried to argue.

You tried to imply with your analogy about Jack that you think you have an a priori need to be able to assess whether or not someone has a good reason to murder someone or not.
You tacitly imply the consequences to society would be bad if we weren’t able to do this.

You actually believe this to be true.
You live your life as though it’s true.
But your worldview doesn’t give you any reason to believe it actually is true that there are bad reasons to murder someone and that there are good reasons to avoid doing this.

Without life having a defined purpose of how things are suppose to be you have no logically objective claim to say people shouldn’t just murder whoever they think they should.

You can’t even claim your desire to not be murdered carries with it any truthful claims about reality because your preference to not be murdered doesn’t constitute it being true that to murder you would be objectively wrong or bad in any way. Because good and bad don’t exist. Things just are the way they are and they can’t be any different.

You try to justify your feelings that it’s bad by saying you’re just programmed that way – but that doesn’t make your feelings true. It doesn’t mean murder is actually objectively wrong just because you feel it is.

The problem for your arguments here is that you aren’t content to just stay confined to asserting moral truth doesn’t exist and your feelings are just subjective.

You find yourself, with the Jack analogy, of being in the position of trying to convince me that you we must conclude Jack’s belief that he should murder is wrong. But you can’t do it. You don’t have the objective toolkit to do it with. If I don’t already share you’re a priori assumptions then you can’t appeal to anything outside of ourselves in order to claim my own assumptions need to change to conform to what is actually true.

You see this proves that it’s easy to hold a philosophical idea that objective morality doesn’t exist until you realize you don’t have any logical way to tell someone else that what they want to do is wrong.

It’s an unworkable philosophical viewpoint for society which is why you can’t live consistent with what you claim is true.

It's not consistent with what you actually believe is true about reality, as evidenced by your behavior. If you really believed your worldview then you wouldn't even bother trying to convince me Jack is wrong, and you wouldn't worry about it, because nothing ultimately matters and nothing is objectively wrong.

You might try to argue that you have no choice but to argue for this because it's how you feel and dna compels you to act out your programming - but then that undermines your entire premise that you think we can arrive at truth by arguing over the details of what is true using reason.

This entire conversation is irrelevant, and so is every other conversation you'd ever have on using reason to arrive at truth, if all you are doing is acting out your programming to arrive at the conclusion you were predestined to.

You aren't actually engaged in a process of reason if you don't have free will and consciousness but are just a robot responding to stimuli according to your programming.

I submit that your behavior shows what you know to be true in your inner being is not consistent with what you intellectually claim to be true. Which suggests you need a new worldview to account for what you know to be true inwardly.
When a scientific model fails to explain what we know to be true about reality but a competing theory can explain it then it’s only sensible to drop the former to embrace the later.

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

It’s not an issue of metaphysics but an issue of logic. It baffles me sometimes the extent to which some scientists are not exercising basic logic to understand why their arguments don’t work.

How can we have otherwise intelligent people who depend on the scientific method (which is defined as logic and math) fail to grasp basic logical errors in their hypothesis?

I think in some cases they are too invested in their philosophical worldview of materialism to be willing to acknowledge the contradictions in their claims. Someone could so desperately want to believe something can arise from nothing under the constraints of materialism that they start to engage in intellectually dishonest and illogical nonsense with seemingly no self-awareness of what they are even doing.

One might expect such nonsense from the sociology department but not the physics department.

I have wondered if the problem stems from a lack of logic and philosophy being taught in academia across the board, with people not realizing how necessary it is for being able to think clearly and accurately about a problem regardless of the discipline engaged in.

I think it's great that you take so much interest in philosophy as well as being trained in cosmology. It seems to be a rare combination.

This suggests to me you are someone who cares about the deep questions of life and wants to get to the bottom of understanding how and why everything is - because of all the scientific fields I would say cosmology is probably the best expression of a desire to want to understand the how and why behind everything.

I have heard it said that science is the handmaid of philosophy and philosophy is the handmaid of theology.

That is to say, it starts with theology and then we use philosophy to better understand that. And then we use the scientific method to arrive at more accurate philosophy. But theology is king because without it others cannot arrive at ultimate truth by themselves. Science is just a method for assessing a certain type of truth. Not everything is accessible to it. Philosophy is just a discipline of assessing what is true and how we know it is true, but no one can use philosophy by itself to arrive at all the conclusions about what is true in reality. Some things are simply not accessible to our mind directly. There are some things about reality which can only be known by accessing it by our spiritual understanding and revelation from the transcendent creator who already knows everything and is willing to communicate it to us.

Right conclusions about scientific observation can only come out of starting with a right philosophical worldview to hang your data on. And right philosophical conclusions about what worldview to have can only come out of right theological premises.

Modern academia has ironically inverted this paradigm to think the scientific method is king and there is no need for philosophy, let alone theology. But this ignores the fact that the scientific method is riddled with implied philosophy that the practitioner may not even be aware of. And philosophy can't be done without starting from a host of a priori beliefs; with no way of make sense of those a priori beliefs without transcendent revelation from a higher source to anchor our perspective of how we are to frame those beliefs in relation to reality.

 

[Rise]

And to go back to morality being about the way things ought to be, that is still the case with noncognitivism: I value altruism, so I think the world ought to be a nicer place. This is still a morality. Moral realism is not required for that, ….

Your opinion about how things are suppose to be does not mean that is actually how things are suppose to be.

Morality by definition cannot exist without a statement of how things are actually suppose to be.

You aren’t making a claim that your opinion represents how things are actually suppose to be. You admit you not only can’t know that but that such a thing is impossible to exist by your worldview because no one has created everything in order to give it intention and purpose and therefore decide how things are suppose to be. In the absence of a creator there is no purpose or ought behind anything.

All you are doing is merely expressing your personal preference for how you wish things were. Like a preference for chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla.

But a statement of preference is not a moral statement about how all people should, or have a duty to, choose chocolate over vanilla if given the option.

You make no objective claim about how things are actually suppose to be – Which is required for something to definitionally be “morality”.

That is why even the concept of “subjective morality”, although a term commonly thrown about, is actually an oxymoron. It can’t be morality by definition if you aren’t making an objective claim that your opinion represents how things are suppose to be.
To call it subjectively moral is to not say it is moral in any real sense of the word but is to simply say it is your personal subjective preference.

in fact I suspect moral realism is probably noncognitive nonsense .I have no idea what it would mean for an ought to correspond to mind-independent reality, and even then I might as well have just typed "fhqwhgads."

I think you are confusing two different concepts. I am talking about Biblical “objective morality” while you keep referring to what appears to be a kind of platonic philosophical abstract moral realism as though the two are equivalent. But they aren't.

Objective morality is a statement that there is an objective truth about how things are suppose to be. It implies purpose which implies creation.
God, as creator, determines what this is. And He has determined what it is based on who He is.
Biblically moral good is defined as that which is consistent with God’s character/nature and bad is that which is not.

It would be safe to say that morality is then grounded in something concrete - the nature of God or Gods decrees.

Abstract moral realism (which is what you seem to suggest when you say "mind-independent reality"), in contrast, would be a form of platonism which believes that moral ideas are not just abstract concepts but that these abstract objects exist as real things that are eternally pre-existent aspects of reality and have the power to influence or shape reality to conform to them.

It is not unlike what you are doing when you try to make logic into an eternally pre-existent aspect of reality – another form of platonism.

It is just as how some scientists try to suggest that maybe abstract concepts of math must be an eternally pre-existent aspect of reality which has the power to conform reality to itself. Platonism.

What I find interesting here is that you seem perfectly ok with positing the idea that abstract concepts like math and logic can be pre-existent aspects of reality which conform reality to itself but you find the idea of abstract concepts like morality doing the same thing to be noncognitive gibberish.

Functionally these concepts operate according to the same platonic principles: Which is that abstract objects are declared to be eternally pre-existent, not dependent on anything else for their existence, and being imbued with casual power over concrete objects to either create them or to conform them to their will after they are created.

It is deifying abstract objects and assigning to them the attributes normally reserved for God.
It is really just a type of pantheism at that point.

You ironically recognize the need for a mind to be involved in conceiving and manifesting reality for the abstract concepts of morality - but don’t recognize the need for a mind to be involved in conceiving and manifesting reality for the abstract concepts of math.

This comes back around to what I started to get into earlier about how abstract ideas cannot first exist without a being to create it via their mind or at least to embody those concepts as part of it’s nature. Because abstract ideas cannot exist disembodied from the reality they describe unless they are contained within a mind.

And abstract concepts have no casual power to force anything concrete to abide by it, so claiming they pre-exist concrete reality and conform reality to it doesn’t logically work.

Platonism is where you end up when you recognize the necessity of abstract concepts to transcend creation but aren’t willing to accept a creator with a mind as the only logical source. Platonism doesn’t work but what other choice does the atheist/nontheist have? They can’t abandon the necessity of abstract concepts transcending creation. Science knows this all too well with regards to the necessity of math and logic.

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

You think evolution causes you to value altruism as most beneficial to survival/thriving.

Guess what; the Nazis thought evolution proved the best way to survive/thrive was to kill off anyone you considered weak, inferior, or not useful. They engaged in eugenics long before the death camps started operating.

You have no way of telling them they are wrong with your worldview. If they don't accept your premises then what are you going to do?

The only way you resolve the dispute is by murdering each other.

You are at that point describing the fallacy of might makes right and appeal to popularity.

If the Nazis had killed off everyone who disagreed with them, then brainwashed the next generation to believe what they did, then you’d have to conclude that what they believe becomes the norm.

And if you were raised in that society you’d be brainwashed to suppress what you truly know to assert what they tell you to believe, if you weren’t outright killed for being unwilling to do that.

Nothing in your scenario allows us to actually arrive at what is morally true because the moral truth doesn’t exist in your worldview.

Therefore, there’s no way to build a better world by finding out what moral truth is and persuading people to abide by it or the benefit of all. You can’t find that which doesn’t exist to be found.

 

[Meow Mix]

@Rise

This is the roadmap of my planned responses, in an order that I think I can make some sense out of; and hopefully optimally to avoid having to cover something on a "later" post that would be useful in an "earlier" post, etc.

273 (Cognitivity)
274

275 (Omnipotence)

282 (Morality and noncognitivism, objective morality/moral realism distinction)

279 (What is PoE pointed at?)
280
281

258 (Theodicy and Jack the serial killer)
259
260

 

[Meow Mix]

273 (Cognitivity). I am going to try quoting the most relevant/non repeated elements to compress our discussion down in terms of quote load; I will always try to leave a link (in the form of the little arrow in the first quote).

You are drawing a false equivalence between two unrelated concepts.

...

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

...

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

This is a good point. I think I've become confused on this point about cognitivity and contradictions somewhere down the line, and I'm not sure where that happened. I concede the point that proposed contradictory properties aren't the same as a string of nonsense characters.

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

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

Maybe I'm going about it the wrong way, then: I've attacked them after setting them up to save time (by the nature of post-and-wait formats). What I really mean to be doing (depending on which time we're talking about) is to build a scenario and ask "is this similar to what you're saying? Because I've built this in a way that if you say 'no, there is a difference,' then the difference is what I'm interested in hearing more about." It's a roundabout way of asking for elucidation when it's difficult to find a more direct way to ask for that elucidation.

I suppose it's like asking "how is this different from (some scenario)?"

I will also use analogy to show that some thing, while possibly a necessary condition for some consequence, might not be a sufficient condition for the consequence.

In any case, I'll think before using an analogy about whether there's some other way to get the information or make the point; and employ them more sparingly if I can. As I've said, I'm not a formally trained philosopher. I guess I think in analogy a lot.

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

That's based on past experience with similar terms from people and that's unfair to you. I'll be more mindful about making those kinds of assumptions.

 

[Meow Mix]

274 (Cognitivity)

Let's re-examine my simplified summary you were responding to:
Premise 1: Death and evil exist in the world.
Premise 2: God's nature is life and love.
Premise 3: Death is the opposite of life and evil is the opposite of love.
Conclusion: Death and evil exist in the world when God's nature is removed from something.

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

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

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

Here's where I'm encountering trouble. I prefer a biological definition of life, which would be a list of properties like "seeking homeostasis, response to stimuli," so on and so forth. But I can take a look at a dictionary and see what it says. This is what I get from Google for "life":

"the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death."

The reason why I don't think this works in your schema is because it makes no sense to me for God's nature to be "the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death." I understand that you're saying something different from "God is alive" when you say "God's nature is life," and with this definition of life, it doesn't make sense to say a nature "is" that definition. This is why I have to conclude things like "you're saying 'life' in some novel way, and it does matter what way that is" and "I don't know what you mean when you say 'God's nature is life.'"

I think I can summarize my need for clarification:

1) What does it mean for a nature to be a property? My understanding of what "nature" means in this context is to possess properties: your nature is defined by what properties you possess. I don't know what it means to say that a nature is a property. I understand "Erin's nature is to be mortal," but I do not understand "Erin's nature is to be mortality."

2) What does it mean to "remove a nature" from something? I have properties like being mortal, being female, having tattoos, some list of properties that make me myself. I have no conception of what it would mean to "put my nature onto something" in order to "remove" it.

3) The definitions of life and love may or may not matter depending on how I'm to cognize (1) and (2), I suppose. We'll see?

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

This is what I cognize when you say "there is something about God's nature that is necessary for you to have life." I think, "okay, I'm alive, which means that my body seeks homeostasis, I respond to stimuli, so on and so forth; and it's possible for these processes to stop (death)." If there is something about God's nature that makes it necessary for me to have life, the only sort of property that makes sense for that is the property "being the creator of the conditions for life," which means God wrote physics to allow for systems which seek homeostasis, respond to stimuli, etc. But if that's what's meant, I still don't know what it means for God to "remove his nature" such that homeostasis and response to stimuli ceases: the physics of the universe don't change just because we die after all.

This leads me to think that what I think when you say that is not what you mean. So I have to ask you what you're saying. What does it mean for God's nature to be that it is necessary for me to have a body that seeks homeostasis, that I respond to stimuli, and so on?

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

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

I said that I don't know what it means to say that "God's nature is love." If you had said "God's nature is to be loving," that I would cognize. I know what "God is loving" means, I do not know what "God is love" means. Natures are about having properties, not being identical to them.

 

[Meow Mix]

275 (Omnipotence)

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

omnipotent - definition and meaning

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

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

The argument is that "all" includes logical limits: a being that can actualize any logically possible state of affairs does have "all power," because that's all the power that's possible to have. Making a married bachelor isn't possible because there's no possibility there to make: this is why an omnipotent being can't do it; there's no "it" to do. Just as we can't ask an omnipotent being to make strawberries taste purple, or to make itself not exist, or make a rock so big it couldn't lift it (that old silly canard).

What about "unlimited?" This just means the omnipotent being doesn't ever lose this power, or get tired, or can only affect a portion of the universe at any given time, etc.: there is no limit to which they can actualize any possible thing. But the things it can actualize obviously have to be possible to actualize. It's what the word even means.

You have said that God can't lie: if God weren't bound by logical limits, then God could lie at the same time as not being able to lie, which is nonsense. The reason God can't make a rock so heavy He can't lift it omnipotently is because it's equivalent to making an irresistible force and immovable object at the same time and in the same respect: but the force isn't irresistible by definition if there is an immovable object, and the object isn't immovable by definition if the force is irresistible. It's not possible, so even God can't do it, because there's nothing there to do: doing one entails not doing the other.

I could also do this: I could just ask you "is it possible that some being could make a Euclidean circle that is a Euclidean square at the same time and in the same respect?" and you would have to answer "no," because if you answer "yes," that's you rejecting non-contradiction, and immediately self-refuting into incoherence. Because a "yes" answer is the same as saying "it's possible for A to be ¬A at the same time and in the same respect." But you can't communicate this to me coherently: you have to use identity, excluded middle, and noncontradiction to reference referents to me and thus communicate. Since you can't do any of that, you have to answer "no" to be coherent or to call your utterances a communication.

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

This feels related to the etymological fallacy to me (yes I know it's not exactly that, but it feels like something in the same family). Descartes was one of very few that took an incoherent view on omnipotence.

Let me try another tack with modal logic. What does power even mean? Modally, I have the power to do X if <> (possibly) I can actualize X: this is what power means. But notice that word: possibly.

Similarly, omnipotence can't instantiate a necessary state of affairs: it's possible for some agent G to actualize a necessary state of affairs X only if <>X and if G had not acted, X would have failed to obtain. But []X (necessarily X), by definition of being necessary, obtains regardless of whether anyone acts: so obviously G can't actualize []X, G can only actualize <>X.

(Note: On a reread I found this vague, so skip this note if you got it, I'm just trying to clear it up a little bit.

[]X is only necessary if it necessarily obtains. But if X depends on whether some agent G actualizes it or not, that means that if G fails to do so, X doesn't obtain. But that's exactly the same thing as saying <>¬X, which means ¬[]X: thus obviously, even an omnipotent being can't actualize a necessary state of affairs!)

The concept you're trying to talk about isn't a concept, it's contradictory and incoherent. You can't even say that it's possible. It can't be the definition of "omnipotence" because it can't be the definition of anything: it can't define anything.

All of this has been noted about Descartes' notion in "Meditations" by philosophers, theologian and not alike. If you can't call what you're talking about a definition, and you can't call it possible, then what are you talking about? It's just utterances, and that is what I've been trying to say. It's not communicating anything because it can't. (Yes, I've ceded that it's not strictly the same as saying a string of nonsense characters; but it's still utterances, not a definition, not possible, etc.)

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

Being a nontheist doesn't mean I can't be interested in what's possible. "Being capable of actualizing any logically possible state of affairs" is possible, and since this is the maximal power -- it is all the power possible to have (maximal, all-encompassing), which can never run out (unlimited) -- might as well be called omnipotence. That's possible; what you're talking about, though, isn't.

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

If I say that God must have had some primordial properties, I mean that if God is capable of choosing His own properties (and maybe He is), He could not have chosen his original properties: because how could He have? That would be putting the cart before the horse!

In order for God to choose properties for Himself, He must already have properties: for instance, the knowledge of what properties are possible to choose between, and the power to make the change. So God could not have chosen to be omnipotent and omniscient: He must have been omniscient and omnipotent beyond His ability to object, He had no choice in the matter. He was powerless to choose His primordial properties. If He later uses omnipotence to change His properties (in some possible way, of course), that is fine, but there will always be one set of properties He could never have had any control over: His "first" ones.

But this simply means that the aseity-sovereignty intuition is incorrect: He didn't have sovereignty over His primordial properties (because He couldn't have), and since He didn't have sovereignty over them, the fact that He had that set of primordial properties is a relevant dependence and so not congruent with existing a se.

I am not saying that God began to exist, so I'm skipping past arguments combatting that notion. Things can be "prior" and "primordial" without meaning a temporal context.

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

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

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

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

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

Well, you bring up things that can't be true, but then say it's for a different thread: I can contain myself, I suppose. But I will tell you: it can't be true that logic was created by God, and it's totally incorrect that logical limitation is an "abstraction" that has anything to do with a mind. We will get to it when we get to it I guess.

 

[Meow Mix]

282 (Morality and noncognitivism, objective morality/moral realism distinction)

Your opinion about how things are suppose to be does not mean that is actually how things are suppose to be.

Morality by definition cannot exist without a statement of how things are actually suppose to be.

You'll find value-based definitions under the definition of morality (not that I think dictionaries are the ultimate arbiter of what words we use so long as we make ourselves clear).

For instance: "a particular system of values and principles of conduct, especially one held by a specified person or society."

Value-based morality is still morality because it deals with what a person thinks ought to be. The word covers this under its umbrella.

You aren’t making a claim that your opinion represents how things are actually suppose to be. You admit you not only can’t know that but that such a thing is impossible to exist by your worldview because no one has created everything in order to give it intention and purpose and therefore decide how things are suppose to be. In the absence of a creator there is no purpose or ought behind anything.

All you are doing is merely expressing your personal preference for how you wish things were. Like a preference for chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla.

But a statement of preference is not a moral statement about how all people should, or have a duty to, choose chocolate over vanilla if given the option.

There are two kinds of values (at least, I guess: that I can think of right now). They all relate to preferences, but there is a difference between a preference and a moral preference.

I prefer peanut M&M's because I value them over regular M&M's, but my value doesn't entail a self-imposed duty: I feel nothing like a duty because if I choose regular M&M's instead, I would only do this if I wanted to at the time (or perhaps to make a point that I could, or any number of things). So this kind of value doesn't really have a duty attached.

Some values do have self-imposed duties attached, though. If I value property, then there may be some times where I want an item, I would prefer to have it, but I feel a self-imposed duty not to take it as part of my value about the states of affairs surrounding the item in question (the concept of theft).

When I value my cat sitting on my lap as opposed to across the room, I don't have a duty, I just have a preference. When I feel like I have a duty to transfer some of my biweekly activism funds from local causes to help displaced Afghans and Haitian earthquake survivors, I can know the value I'm operating on is of a different kind because it comes with that self-imposed feeling of having a duty. This is why moral preferences feel different from regular preferences. I value peanut M&M's, but I don't feel a duty regarding them. I do feel a duty regarding my moral values.

I feel the need to add pre-emptively: the duty felt is self-imposed, it doesn't seem to come from anywhere transcendental; and different peoples' felt duties can contradict between each other anyway.

I think you are confusing two different concepts. I am talking about Biblical “objective morality” while you keep referring to what appears to be a kind of platonic philosophical abstract moral realism as though the two are equivalent. But they aren't.

Yes, granted. On reading this sentence I immediately realized you were right, snipping the rest. Objective morality is not the same thing as moral realism, I agree. Sorry about that confusion.

It is not unlike what you are doing when you try to make logic into an eternally pre-existent aspect of reality – another form of platonism.

Not an aspect of reality. The standard by which reality is defined: literally, being definition itself. Not a concept, not an abstraction. Just to be clear. But I know you wish to save that for another thread, so I'll leave it at that.

What I find interesting here is that you seem perfectly ok with positing the idea that abstract concepts like math and logic can be pre-existent aspects of reality which conform reality to itself but you find the idea of abstract concepts like morality doing the same thing to be noncognitive gibberish.

It's not that I think two substantially different things are transcendental: the argumentis that math is just a fancy name for consequences of logic (it is extended logic).

It sounds like you reject moral realism as much as I do (well, I am at least skeptical of it; as my complaint is that nobody has posed the notion in a cognitive way).

Functionally these concepts operate according to the same platonic principles: Which is that abstract objects are declared to be eternally pre-existent, not dependent on anything else for their existence, and being imbued with casual power over concrete objects to either create them or to conform them to their will after they are created.

Not abstract, and no causal powers, to be clear on my position. Still saving it for when you want to do the thread.

You ironically recognize the need for a mind to be involved in conceiving and manifesting reality for the abstract concepts of morality - but don’t recognize the need for a mind to be involved in conceiving and manifesting reality for the abstract concepts of math.

And for good reason that we'll get to: understand that I don't make the assertion whimsically.

Actually, technically you're right to be a pedant for a second: yes, a mind must exist for the abstract concepts of math. (The references to math). But not for math itself (the referent), which is neither abstract nor a concept. We abstract from it and make concepts about it. If you think I'm talking about some mysterious Platonic form, then you're not cognizing my position just yet. We'll eventually make the thread.

You think evolution causes you to value altruism as most beneficial to survival/thriving.

Guess what; the Nazis thought evolution proved the best way to survive/thrive was to kill off anyone you considered weak, inferior, or not useful. They engaged in eugenics long before the death camps started operating.

You have no way of telling them they are wrong with your worldview. If they don't accept your premises then what are you going to do?

The only way you resolve the dispute is by murdering each other.

Irreconcilable value hierarchies don't always have to lead to violence. But in the case of Nazis: yes, you're exactly right. I think that describes the world. We have to kill the Nazis (or otherwise stop them) if we value protecting the people they want to kill. They will try to kill us (or whomever we're killing them to protect). That seems to describe the world alright. We had better always make sure there are more people that despise genocide than support it: or that we are stronger.

Side note: what are you going to do if the Nazis become strong? I do not think we are in such different positions. You may believe that God will punish Nazis in the afterlife, but it still seems you need to hope and help ensure there are more (or that there are stronger) people that abhor genocide than support it here in the world we inhabit right now.

You are at that point describing the fallacy of might makes right and appeal to popularity.

In order for it to be a fallacy of the form "might makes right," then "right" as a concept would have to be claimed to be meaningful. It's not being claimed to be meaningful. What's being claimed is we have value hierarchies that we form hypothetical imperatives with and feel duties about.

We can reason that if we don't like genocide, we had better make sure that those that do value genocide don't outnumber us or outgun us. (Making sure we outnumber those that value genocide by, say, teaching children our values and objecting to people spreading genocide-friendly values can be values in themselves). Of course, those that value genocide would think the same thing from their side (before you point that out). Of course that's the case. I still think this describes reality.

If the Nazis had killed off everyone who disagreed with them, then brainwashed the next generation to believe what they did, then you’d have to conclude that what they believe becomes the norm.

I've never argued that we ought to agree with the norm. I've argued that we make our own oughts out of our values. I argued that altruism of some kind is a human norm probably for evolutionary reasons; but obviously that doesn't guarantee someone won't value genocide for whatever reason.

So, I mean that there's a nature side and a nurture side to our values (and later on there's a belief revision side, where we get exposed to information and arguments and sometimes our values change because of that). I was saying empathy is very common in humans because I think it's heavily skewed for on the nature side of things: I mean in a statistical way (e.g., sociopaths by nature are relatively few). I never insinuated that this would prevent humans from arriving to values we'd find terrible on the nurture or belief revision side of things.

 

[Meow Mix]

279 (what is my PoE pointed at?)

(Edit: the quality of this post is a little reduced, I've been awake for a very long time doing thinking-intensive stuff for school. I still endorse what's been said in this post, just give me a little slack on this one. Thanks ^.^)

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

...

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

There is a longstanding joke about the "God of the Philosophers," where it's thought with a nudge and a wink by theologians that it's this deity that everybody talks about when they're doing analytical philosophy, but that nobody believes in. I'm not sure that's true (not that this is very important). Antony Flew, when he famously converted, as far as I know ended up believing in some sort of "God of the Philosophers."

If I were to reconvert, I imagine that's the sort of god I would be convinced of. I can buy that there might be an omnipotent and omniscient creator-being, but the particular characters sketched out in holy texts I've been exposed to are so problematic to the point of being ridiculous (and I am not trying to be offensive by saying this, just giving my point of view).

In any case, I don't find who it's pointed at to be a problem. As long as someone agrees with the premises for whatever reason, they must deal with it somehow.

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

I know there are different kinds of theism. When I said it's pointed at theists, that's for brevity. Anyone that believes the premises is obviously a theist.

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

The omnipotence thing has its own response at this point, so I'll just say that the omnipotence premise is widely accepted. As for the omnibenevolence thing, it doesn't matter why the theist believes God doesn't like suffering, would attempt not to cause it if possible, etc.; it only matters that they do. If this leads them to launch into a defense of why God can not like suffering and want to prevent it isn't incongruent with the observation of suffering in the world, then that is the tack they can take. I don't see this as a problem.

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

I'm tempted to start an RF poll asking about some of the premises you find to be contentious to see whether even with that rather unscientific sampling we find that there are, in fact, theists that accept them -- as I'm very certain there are.

The premises about whether God likes suffering or not are probably still believed by people that believe God is omnibenevolent and that DCT is true. So the PoE still triggers. They can respond to the PoE by making arguments from DCT as you have done, and that's valid to attempt -- but it doesn't mean the PoE as presented is pointless; it still has to be answered if the premises trigger.

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

I think it is useful as I've argued above -- because I don't think it matters whether someone believes God doesn't like suffering because God is omnibenevolent and DCT is true, or whether someone believes God doesn't like suffering because it's just happenstance that He doesn't (yes, I know probably nobody believes this second one, just making a point). It doesn't matter how they arrive to the specific premises about suffering I laid out; if they believe all the premises, they must answer the Problem. If it's "easy" for them by being able to solve the Problem by appealing to some new premise which causes the suffering premises to fall out of that new premise, then they've done a good job answering the Problem.

At this point, though, you have brought up enough things that the PoE is no longer the most interesting angle of attack for me: some of the things you've brought up in the overall discussion are. For instance, the aseity-sovereignty problem. If you hang your hat on God being the foundation for logic, that is the most interesting angle of attack for me.

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

I don't tell the theist that they can't explain why they buy into the premises of the Problem. As said above, perhaps one theist buys into the suffering premises because omnibenevolence+DCT. Perhaps another buys in because omnibenevolence+the other horn of Euthyphro. Perhaps another buys in because they think God just happens to have those traits by happenstance (unlikely anyone believes that, but just saying). It doesn't matter how they arrive to agreeing with the PoE premise; it's just that if they do, they must explain away the Problem. If they can do that by appealing to why they hold the premises in some way that solves the Problem, then so be it.

Now, the problem we encounter there is that if they appeal to stuff that is contentious in its own right, then we have to have those debates before getting back to the PoE. This is what's happened to us. And that's okay with me, I like these discussions (I hope you do too). For instance, perhaps they can't appeal to what they think they can, but they still want to believe the PoE premise.

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

Half of these are debates unto themselves, and some of them are contradictory with things you've argued (e.g. that God can't lie or contradict His nature, yet you also argue He can do illogical things, which means He can lie and contradict his nature!)

We are already debating some of these elsewhere.

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

I'm not sure this is true. The PoE premises trigger whether or not objective morality is meaningful and/or exists. Objective morality can be appealed to as a response to the Problem. So the Problem is looming, with this appeal hanging in the balance as a response: that doesn't make the Problem worthless. It just means a sub-debate has to occur on the appeal now.

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

For myself: this is the rest of the roadmap for tomorrow (rather, today I guess, it's 6 AM)
280 (the rest of "What is the PoE pointed at?")
281

258 (Theodicy and Jack the serial killer)
259
260

 

[Rise]

Response to 265.



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

You are confusing two separate concepts.
Saying something is an objective statement about what someone believes is not the same as saying what they believe is objectively right.

You obviously believe objective truth exists.
It could be objectively true to say that someone sincerely believes the moon is made of cheese; but it would not be objectively true that the moon is, in fact, made of cheese.

Just because you find someone else who also believes it to be true that the moon is made of cheese, and therefore argue with them as though your premise were true, doesn't mean your premise is actually true.

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

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

Simply saying you reject it doesn't mean you have an logical basis to reject it.

I gave you a logical outline of why we are philosophically and logically forced to reach the conclusion that morality is inherently embedded into the act of creation itself.

You haven't given any reason why my argument would be wrong.
You have shown no error in my reasoning, no unsoundness in my premises, and no fault with my evidence.

Therefore, you have no grounds to reject or dismiss my conclusion.

You must be able to pose a valid counter argument if you don't want to be logically forced to cede the truth of my conclusion.

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

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

I see what you are saying.
But I would have to say the evidence clearly shows people can will themselves into believing things if they want to believe it is true badly enough.
Or to put it another way, as Scripture would suggest: They aren't lovers of the truth but are lovers of something else.

This is psychologically part of why so many people fall for nigerian prince scams. The desire to believe their monetary troubles are about to be fixed overrides what they would otherwise inclined to believe is true. They will a belief in something absurd, something they normally wouldn't believe, out of a desire for it to be true.

The Bible affirms this aspect of man's will to choose to believe things they otherwise know aren't true. Paul tells us that people suppress the knowledge of what is true about God out of their desire to sin and feel like they can get away with it without facing punishment.

But, this does raise an interesting question: If they are merely suppressing what they believe is true in order to believe a lie, would we be able to say they truly believe the lie because somewhere in their heart they still know what the truth is?
As far as they are aware they do believe the lie. They may even act consistent with believing it.

Maybe when the Bible talks about the heart becoming hardened it means that their previous awareness of what was really true in their heart disappears and is replaced with a real and unopposed belief in the lie they have embraced. So they come to truly believe it.

Or perhaps it would still be in there somewhere, just walled off and inaccessible by choice so they are fully self-deceived.

Interesting theological questions, but I don't think it has any bearing on the issues in contention either way.

 

[Rise]

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

I already gave you the logical and philosophical basis for why the intent of the creator embeds the information of how something is suppose to be into the creation by the act of creating. You haven't dispute the validity of that logic. Therefore the conclusion stands

Consider the fact that the way you try to oppose DCT is on the basis of objective moral grounds. This is illogical from the standpoint of your professed worldview. You are inherently making an appeal to the idea that objective morality exists by implying that God can't create an evil world and have it be called moral because you have an inner sense of what is objectively moral.

If your moral compass were not based in something objective then appealing to it as a guide to what is right and true would be meaningless.

Your objection is not one you can make from the position of your worldview because morality doesn't exist in your worldview. Therefore you can't object to DCT on the basis that it could result in God declaring torture to be moral because you don't even think objective morality exists.

Take note here: you aren't merely trying to oppose DCT on the basis that you think it would violate my idea of what morality is. You are doing it on the basis that it would violate your idea of what morality is. And that's not something you can do from the current worldview you advocate.

The reason you have a moral compass, Biblically speaking, is because God put that in you so that you would know what you were suppose to do with your free choice.

Therefore, the reason we can say this hypothetical world sets off your moral compass alarm is because that is not how God actually designed things.

And the Bible also says that God designed the world's purpose consistent with his character and nature.

Therefore, if your God given moral compass is telling you that the world could not be designed a given way it not only tells you that God did in fact not design the world that way but it also tells you something about God's character and nature that He would never design the world that way.

This, of course, assumes your moral compass is not faulty, as the Bible warns us ours can be due to the fall of Adam.

But the fact remains that we do have a moral compass and it generally speaking does work at least some of the time for everyone to some degree. I don't think I've ever seen someone for whom their moral compass was completely 100% broken in every possible way to no longer give any accurate indication of God's morality at all. Even the most evil people usually retain some level of God given moral sense about some things; such as providing for some of the needs of their immediate family while they kill and steal from everyone else. Or maybe they have one friend they show good to while they do evil to everyone else. I suppose complete moral disconnect could happen if they were given completely over to love demonic evil - but such a thing would have to be exceedingly rare. I don't even know if you would recognize such people as being mentally functional because of the kind of disorder that would bring to their ability to relate to the world around them

I think in order to make this point you'd have to establish why the creator's intent is deontological for the creations.

...

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

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

You are introducing a concept into my premises that was never there. As a result, your objection is based on false premises.
I never made an argument for duty based morality via divine commands. Which is what deontology would seem to suggest.

I said that morality exists as a result of creation because morality's definition boils down to being a statement of "how things are suppose to be". And you define how things are suppose to be by the intent you have when you create something.

Since only God can give purpose and intent to creation only God is ever in a position to define what is moral ("Moral" meaning: "how things are suppose to be").

And it is impossible for God to create without an intention or purpose because what we know about minds is that they always have some level of intent behind any creation and if they didn't then it wouldn't be a creative act by definition because they input no intention into the act.

That is not the same as saying something is moral because God gives a command and decree that something should be so post-creation. Although we can Biblically make a case for that being true, it is not the basis upon which I have argued for morality being inherent to creation as an expression of how things are intended to be.

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

The problem, as I already pointed out, with your analogy, was that you stripped this person of the attributes that God has which are required for us to reach the conclusion I did.

God can be the only one to define what the purpose of creation is by virtue of being an uncreated and always existing being who depends on nothing else to define his nature and truth for Him.

Therefore, God is the only being in existence that can truly create purpose for something.

This is because if person A is created by the quantum law driven physical phenomenon B then person A is subject to the laws of phenomenon B. Therefore person A's creation C will be subject to the laws of phenomenon B by extension of the fact that person A's behavior is dictated by the laws of phenomenon B.

Because if you talk about a person being popped into existence by a result of a law of physics then we are talking about materialistic determinism. How they act can only be the result of how they were programmed, and how they were programmed was determined by the operation of physical unchanging laws. So ultimately how those laws operate will necessarily dictate how they will be programmed. So there is no genuine consciousness, free will, or concept of mind in this scenario.

At that point you actually aren't even talking about a genuine creator because no genuine mind exists and therefore no intent exists to create. They are just acting out their programming based on the laws of physics so they can't be said to be genuinely make an intentional choice to do anything.

God, in contrast, is a genuine free will conscious mind who is unbound by anything outside of Himself that would dictate what He must create or how He must create it. And since God is uncreated and always existent, we can't say His nature/character is the product of anything else either.

Because if God's nature/character were the result of whatever preceded him then that thing that preceded him would really be the creator of all. And then you end up with an impossible infinite regress problem of never having stopping point for what created that which preceded something else.

The reason we say only God can be the stopping point as the uncreated first cause of creation, and not a law of physics, is because the abstract concept of math/logic has no casual power to create anything. But an all powerful being with a mind does.

Now, people do have genuine free will consciousness because God gave that to them as part of their creation. To put it another way: God gave them a mind. Just as He has a mind.

The problem with your analogy is that you try to smuggle that assumption of people having genuine minds into your analogy without having any basis for doing so according to the parameters of the analogy. If a person were created by a quantum process of physics then under those circumstances we have no reason to think free will consciousness (ie a mind) would even exist. They would just be a deterministic robot acting out the programming of how the laws of physics demand they operate.

The key defining feature of what makes a mind a mind is it's ability to transcend known physical limitations and processes to act independent of physical determinism. Ie. genuine free will choice. Or to put it another way: To have it's own independent intentions about something. Intentionality would be one of, if not the primary, defining feature of a mind.

Consciousness itself requires a transcendent quality in order to be self aware. We have no reason to believe a robot, entirely governed by the laws of physics, no matter how sophisticated, would ever be truly self aware and not just acting out it's elaborate programming.

 

[Meow Mix]

You are confusing two separate concepts.
Saying something is an objective statement about what someone believes is not the same as saying what they believe is objectively right.

You obviously believe objective truth exists.
It could be objectively true to say that someone sincerely believes the moon is made of cheese; but it would not be objectively true that the moon is, in fact, made of cheese.

Just because you find someone else who also believes it to be true that the moon is made of cheese, and therefore argue with them as though your premise were true, doesn't mean your premise is actually true.

That is all I was saying: the objectivity is in the hypothetical imperative. It's objective that if one values x one ought to do y, but not objective that one ought to do y nakedly (without the hypothetical). So, what you're saying is correct. I'm clarifying that I wasn't trying to assert otherwise.

Simply saying you reject it doesn't mean you have an logical basis to reject it.

I gave you a logical outline of why we are philosophically and logically forced to reach the conclusion that morality is inherently embedded into the act of creation itself.

You haven't given any reason why my argument would be wrong.
You have shown no error in my reasoning, no unsoundness in my premises, and no fault with my evidence.

Therefore, you have no grounds to reject or dismiss my conclusion.

You must be able to pose a valid counter argument if you don't want to be logically forced to cede the truth of my conclusion.

My objection has been that your hidden premise that a creator's intent for the space they live in is deontological for the creation is unjustified: it's just asserted. I've said that you need to justify that assertion.

You had summarized like this in 265:
"1. All acts of creation are only the product of a free will mind. Otherwise it's not an act of creation it's just random uncaused forces.
2. The defining attributes of what makes something a creation is intent by a mind.
3. It is impossible to create something without having some level of intent behind it.
4. Morality is defined as "how things are suppose to be".
5. Intent implies purpose.
6. "How a creation is suppose to be" is necessarily determined by what the creator intended/purposed when he created.
7. God created all things.
8. Therefore, God has an intent and purpose behind all things.
9. God is uncaused and uncreated, with nothing above him, before him, or beside him. Therefore, he alone is the source of the intent and purpose behind things. It's objective sole source.
10. Only free will created beings could have the ability to violate their intended purpose.
11. Hence, morality becomes a concern for free will created beings because they need to know what their intended purpose is so they can follow it as opposed to doing what is wrong."

Here is my trouble with this line of reasoning. If "wrong" is just definitionally assigned to going against God's intent for the world, such that we can replace the word "wrong" with "going/went against what God was intending," this doesn't answer the question of whether there's a duty.

Why ought we go with God's intent? This part isn't justified, it's just asserted nakedly.

For instance, if God created the world with the intent of enjoying the suffering of beings, then the purpose of the world is to foster this suffering; and God would intend for its beings to help torture each other. But does that mean the beings have a duty to do so? I don't see how: one of the beings might instead help their fellows, which would be "wrong" since "wrong" in this scenario means exactly to "go against God's intentions;" but there is nothing defended here about "going against God's intentions" having some kind of duty attached to it.

And so, let me give a less silly example: the Bible admonishes homosexuality. I'm a homosexual woman. If the Bible's God exists, then it is perhaps God's intent that I just be celibate my entire life. If I enter a relationship, that would be "going against God's intent." But why do I have a duty not to enter a relationship: why should I care what God's intent is if it doesn't align with my values? This is a gap that you would need to bridge for this line of reasoning to go anywhere.

We think of the word "wrong" with negative contexts, but if "wrong" just means "not in accordance with some being's whims," why is that negative (even if that being created the world)? Why ought I care what the purpose assigned to the world by God is if I have my own purposes for it? What about God's creating the world means that only God's purpose for it matters?

I can take other peoples' creative projects and repurpose them; I recently took an old nightstand someone else had painted and painted it to match my own decor, for instance: their choice of paint came from their free will (so not from God, to pre-empt that argument); so they purposed it to be an ugly brown. I have my own purpose, and I purposed it to be eggshell. If I have a duty not to make my own purpose in God's world, where does that duty come from, and what form does it take?

I see what you are saying.
But I would have to say the evidence clearly shows people can will themselves into believing things if they want to believe it is true badly enough.
Or to put it another way, as Scripture would suggest: They aren't lovers of the truth but are lovers of something else.

This is psychologically part of why so many people fall for nigerian prince scams. The desire to believe their monetary troubles are about to be fixed overrides what they would otherwise inclined to believe is true. They will a belief in something absurd, something they normally wouldn't believe, out of a desire for it to be true.

The Bible affirms this aspect of man's will to choose to believe things they otherwise know aren't true. Paul tells us that people suppress the knowledge of what is true about God out of their desire to sin and feel like they can get away with it without facing punishment.

I have never been impressed with these lines of reasoning. The theist says the skeptic "knows" God exists but suppresses it so they can sin, the skeptic turns around and says the theist "knows" they're fooling themselves because they want to live forever, so on and so forth. Furthermore, even when we're fooling ourselves, we can introspect that we are; there's an awareness, however dim. Furthermore still, I don't think any good definition of knowledge allows for us to know without introspection of that knowing. Part of knowing is knowing that one knows. Otherwise we're doing foolish things in the same category as saying "It is raining, but I don't believe that it is."

 

[Meow Mix]

Consider the fact that the way you try to oppose DCT is on the basis of objective moral grounds. This is illogical from the standpoint of your professed worldview. You are inherently making an appeal to the idea that objective morality exists by implying that God can't create an evil world and have it be called moral because you have an inner sense of what is objectively moral.

That is not what I've been arguing: I've been purposely choosing the torture world example just to grate against intuition. The argument has not been "torture world is evil, and God doing it would make evil good, but it can't be good because it's evil." Beings in torture world would probably not want to be tortured is the point (by definition), the example is just to give an easy instance where they might want to go against God's intention. By DCT definitions, it would be wrong of them to do so (and I'm not saying this ironically, it would literally be "wrong" by DCT definitions, as you know).

But my real question has been: so what if it's "wrong," if "wrong" only means to literally go against a creator being's intentions? Why do they have a duty not to do wrong? "Going against God's intentions" does not inherently carry a duty: if you assert it does, then that needs justification.

When you say the world has a purpose imposed on it by God, I don't see how this is different from an artist having a purpose for a sculpture. We intuitively understand that an artist's purpose for their piece doesn't rub off on everyone else: I'm not bound to the artist's purpose for their piece, I don't have a duty to use their piece as the artist intended. If I buy that sculpture to use as a doorstop, I might be tacky, but I haven't broken some duty because there was never a duty.

God has a purpose for the world, but this is like an artist having a purpose for a piece. Other free beings don't seem to have a duty to go along with that purpose just because they're in the world any more than I have a duty to go along with a room's designation by an architect as "bedroom" just because I'm inside of it, maybe I want to use it as an office or a yoga studio. Creators imparting purpose to an environment doesn't spread that purpose to other beings even if they are in that environment, there is no duty imparted. If you assert that there is, the onus is on you to demonstrate that.

Therefore, if your God given moral compass is telling you that the world could not be designed a given way it not only tells you that God did in fact not design the world that way but it also tells you something about God's character and nature that He would never design the world that way.

Already clarified that I wasn't making the argument you thought I was at the beginning of this response, so skipped some stuff (I was not asserting that my moral compass tingling meant anything about the way the world ought to be outside of my hypothetical imperatives).

But on this note, there are instances where my moral compass is not in line with what the Biblical God's character are supposed to be: for instance, I do not think homosexuals choosing to enter a relationship rather than remaining chaste to be bad. If God is responsible for my moral compass, and somehow it is bad, then something went wrong somewhere.

This, of course, assumes your moral compass is not faulty, as the Bible warns us ours can be due to the fall of Adam.

Why doesn't God make our moral compasses register correctly so we can correctly be culpable for sins? How is someone culpable for a sin if it doesn't even register to them as bad?

You are introducing a concept into my premises that was never there. As a result, your objection is based on false premises.
I never made an argument for duty based morality via divine commands. Which is what deontology would seem to suggest.

I said that morality exists as a result of creation because morality's definition boils down to being a statement of "how things are suppose to be". And you define how things are suppose to be by the intent you have when you create something.

Since only God can give purpose and intent to creation only God is ever in a position to define what is moral ("Moral" meaning: "how things are suppose to be").

And it is impossible for God to create without an intention or purpose because what we know about minds is that they always have some level of intent behind any creation and if they didn't then it wouldn't be a creative act by definition because they input no intention into the act.

That is not the same as saying something is moral because God gives a command and decree that something should be so post-creation. Although we can Biblically make a case for that being true, it is not the basis upon which I have argued for morality being inherent to creation as an expression of how things are intended to be.

I don't think I said anything about "commands," and if I did (I haven't scrolled up), let me be clear that it doesn't have to be anything like a verbal command. If God creates a thing with an intention and expects things to follow that intention, that is a command. If beings must do things "the way they are supposed to be," that is a duty. I would ask "why must created beings do things the way God intended," but that is a rehash of the top part of this post, so don't answer again here, just answer up there.

The problem, as I already pointed out, with your analogy, was that you stripped this person of the attributes that God has which are required for us to reach the conclusion I did.

God can be the only one to define what the purpose of creation is by virtue of being an uncreated and always existing being who depends on nothing else to define his nature and truth for Him.

Therefore, God is the only being in existence that can truly create purpose for something.

Quick caveat: art comes from free will. I'm wondering how you reconcile this: does the artist get to assign purpose for their art? It seems it would be equivalent to saying the artist doesn't have free will if you say "no," you might get trapped in a contradiction.

Because if you talk about a person being popped into existence by a result of a law of physics then we are talking about materialistic determinism. How they act can only be the result of how they were programmed, and how they were programmed was determined by the operation of physical unchanging laws. So ultimately how those laws operate will necessarily dictate how they will be programmed. So there is no genuine consciousness, free will, or concept of mind in this scenario.

Oh no, not another subject! I'll shortly say that consciousness appears to be able to arise from mechanistic processes (after all, here we are) and we'll debate that some other time.

 

[Meow Mix]

Finishing yesterday's roadmap.

280 (the rest of "What is the PoE pointed at?")
281

258 (Theodicy and Jack the serial killer)
259
260

This is 280.

I don't know how to do it, but we may want to consider reconsolidating topics again.

(“God and Abstract Objects: The Coherence of Theism: Aseity” and “God over all: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism”)

"God over all" deals with indispensability, something I'm less impressed with than incorrigibility. I'm not familiar with "God and Abstract Objects," and it's $123 for a copy. I'd like to get this at some point, but right now a lot of my disposable income for books and the like is going to Haiti and Afghans. If you've read this first work, I'd welcome a discussion about it: I wonder if WLC is addressing what I'm talking about at all, or something else (because the logic and math I speak of are not abstractions).

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

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

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

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

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

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

The point of the PoE is to make the person second-guess the premises they've already accepted. The purpose of this series of threads, starting with Part One, has been a meta-epistemic argument about why turning around and adopting the premise that God has an unknowable reason for causing suffering that's congruent with benevolence is not reasonable for a person to uphold.

The reason I've had to reformulate my arguments not to mention objective God-given morality is because I don't think that concept makes sense, so how can I answer objections about something I don't think makes sense to stay on the PoE topic? We've moved away from the topic anyway; but that was the reasoning for setting up the PoE with narrower premises simply related to what God likes or not rather than why God likes them or not.

If you'd have preferred, instead of giving the PoE in terms I could understand, I could have turned around and just made the entire discussion about objective morality: but then we wouldn't be talking about the PoE for a long time, if ever (if we never reached an agreement). Is what I'm saying here making any sense? This has become quite convoluted.

Let me try again. I presented the PoE. You raised objections that would make me either talk about concepts that I'm not convinced are meaningful in order to continue the conversation. So, I amended the premises to avoid having to do that, but which should still "snag" the theism you're defending. You insist on talking about those concepts that I'm not convinced are meaningful though (and there is nothing wrong with that, I'm not complaining). But that means we do have to just talk about the objective morality thing after all, and put the PoE on the back burner, the situation I was attempting to avoid by being more specific about the premises.

Hopefully that explains why I've done what I've done a little better. It may well be that we can never talk about the PoE itself because we will first have to hash out whether objective morality is meaningful, and several of these other things, that there's no guarantee whether or not we'll ever find common ground on. So we may just never "get to" the PoE. I'm still fine with seeing where everything goes.

If I were to win every sub-battle though, we would eventually arrive to the PoE. I'm under no illusion that will happen for various reasons. For instance, I'm very confident that some of the conceptions you have are either incoherent or self-contradictory. (Easy example is believing God can do the illogical in and of itself; but especially in conjunction with believing that God "can't" do some things like lie. If God can do the illogical, then God can lie even if God can't lie. There are several examples like this that we've been building towards, but our conversation is sprawling: I will eventually get to them).

 

[Meow Mix]

@Rise

I'm debating whether it's best to go back through and continue with the roadmap, responding to everything said. Is it good enough that I've read it? The same with some of my posts for you?

Would it be best if we stopped for a moment and reconsolidated our thoughts, taking into consideration what we've seen of each others' positions?

Perhaps we can each make lists of points we want to talk about and get clarification on?

I'd like to continue, but if we must each respond to 9+ posts each day (which themselves grow longer, such that it will become more posts), it will become totally untenable.

 

[Meow Mix]

@Rise

This is my attempt to consolidate the things I care about most, which I may edit as I think about more things:

1) The meta-epistemic argument that started this PoE series

1a) We can make reasonable beliefs even though we're not omniscient (this would get into me defending the Jack analogy from your recent replies)
1b) Accepting a premise that can be arbitrarily constructed that rescues some premise from being contradicted by observation by appealing to our non-omniscience alone is unreasonable​

2) Omnipotence must have logical limits, there is no "higher" form of omnipotence than this

2a) God can't do what is not possible to do
2b) God can't actualize modally necessary states of affairs​

3) Your morality argument

3a) Does a creator's intention impart a duty on created beings with free will to follow that intention?
3b) Where does this duty come from, what justifies belief in it if it isn't simply introspected from deontological values?
3c) What explains the existence of deontological values not in congruence with the creator's intentions? E.g., I may have values which make me feel duties like "I will fund activism for LGBT+ rights to marry" that might not be in congruence with God's intentions: how can this be the case?​

4) Aseity-sovereignty

4a) God has to have had primordial properties which He didn't choose, so the sovereignty intuition is wrong
4b) Since God didn't choose primordial properties, they are outside God's power and sovereignty. Since that is the case, God is dependent on their being the way they are: God is not a se.
4c) Since God is not a se, God can't be the foundation of logic: logical limitation has to be transcendental to God.​

5) Your theodicy (the "God's nature is life, removing God's nature means death" stuff)

5a) Making your claims cognitive: what does it mean for a nature to be a property rather than to possess properties?
5b) What does it mean to "put one's nature on" something or "remove one's nature from" something?
​

Are there any of these we want to split off into a separate thread? Do you want to add anything?

 

[Rise]

Edit: I posted this before I saw your latest post.
This was the last of the older posts I had not finished responding to.

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



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

...

It's still incoherent with the claim that they could (and it's implied, would) make perfect moral decisions, anyway.

There is a distinction between the two concepts you are failing to make.

1. They were created to be in union with God, which in that state they would only do things that were consistent with God's nature.

2. They had an option to reject union with God. Which, only in that state of disunion, would they be inclined to do the opposite of what God would; or do whatever they had united themselves to instead would incline them to do.

The inclination about what does is not the same as the free choice about what yo want to be united to.
The inclination of what you do comes out of the free choice of what you want to unite to.

That free choice of what to unite to must exist for man to make a free choice to be in relationship with God instead of being a robot.

The choice is free and not necessarily connected with God's nature.

It is the consequence of that choice that determines what nature you take on.

And the consequence of that choice would be logically impossible for God to change to be different. Ie To reject union with God is to embrace evil and all that comes with it. Because God can't give you the opposite of evil, which is his nature, if you have chosen to reject it, without violating your free will choice. It would be logically impossible for you to reject the only source of goodness and continue to possess the quality of goodness.

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

Human wills and minds are not mathematical probability equations.
You aren't guaranteed to do something if given enough time.

In fact, in Heaven, there is no concept of time, so how do you think only some of the angels rebel but others don't?

This is like leaving a loaded revolver in a toddler's room, I certainly don't see how this adds to God's claimed benevolence.

There are many problems with your analogy.

1. It is false. Adam and Eve had knowledge and understanding of what would happen and the free choice to actuate that outcome. A toddler has no knowledge or understanding of what they are doing when they play with a revolver and is usually not even intentionally actuating the firing of it.


2 You are comparing the existence of free will choice to have relationship with God to something deadly and unnecessary.

What then is the consequence of your viewpoint?
Are you saying you don't want the free will to choose to be in relationship with God?
Do you want to be a robot or a slave held against your will?
Would your rather just not be created at all?

Is that your idea of benevolent?

Because that's your only other option.

What else do you expect to happen? You're criticizing reality for what it is without giving a logical alternative.

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

...

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

It ties in with the difference in two concepts I outlined earlier.

If God does not allow Adam the freedom to break union with God then it can never be a free choice to be in union with God.

But so long as Adam retains that choice to be in union with God then he should act consistent with God's nature.

But if he makes the choice to disunite in rebellion, then the door opens to no longer operating consistent with God's nature and all kinds of evil can enter in.

It would never be God's intention to force Adam to make the choice to remain in union as that would violate free will.

We could say perhaps God made special provision for Adam to be able to make this free choice to leave union with God even though such an action would not be consistent with God's nature.

That would be enough to provide a potential answer your objection.

I suspect one objection you might raise to this is not liking the idea of there being special provisions to otherwise consistent rules; but that would be coming from a false science based expectation that everything needs to operate according to laws and that God must be bound by laws - forgetting we are talking about God as a person with a will who is perfectly free to do whatever He pleases in whatever way He pleases as long as it doesn't violate who He is.

That is one of the consistent issues I have noticed with people trying to approach God as a science problem instead of approaching Him as a personal being with a will.

This inherently personal attribute of God might frustrate our attempts to put him in a scientific box; but there is no expectation that even a man can be understood in all his ways by scientific analysis.

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

I never mentioned "patience" so I don't know where that came from or why you think it's relevant.

You also aren't in a position to accuse God of not being benevolent without a belief in objective morality or the ability to know if anything he has done is not the best good option available.

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

Meaning God's spirit resting on and/or in someone.
It's nothing like mental persuasion.
It is a changing of your nature by being in the presence of God's nature.

Think of it like a resonance energy. If you are exposed to this you will either resonate with it in greater levels of sympathy to higher levels of conforming to God's will or you will resist and be torn apart by the dissonance.

If it's possible to do whatever that makes people not want to leave and therefore suffer, why not do this from the start?

I could provide answers but they would just be speculative at this point. I gave several possibilities and we don't even know if the one you are referring to is actually the right answer. Therefore we don't even know if it requires further explanation.

I don't even think we can say scripturally for sure that rebellion isn't still an option but people simply choose never to do it again because of what happened.

If so then God would be culpable for it happening to Adam:

Definition of CULPABLE
Culpable is a moral term denoting a moral wrong has been done and an agent is morally responsible.

You can't use that term because you don't believe in objective morality.

And if we start from the Biblical premises then it's impossible for you to accuse God of being immoral for all the reasons I have already gone over in detail in other posts.

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

Knowledge wasn't the issue. Trust was the issue.

God already told them what would happen.

The problem wasn't a lack of knowledge bout what would happen - it was a failure to trust what God said was true.

Satan specifically tried to convince Eve that she was mistaken for thinking God had tol her not to eat of that one fruit.

Then satan specially tried to convince Eve that God was lying about what would happen because God was supposedly holding something good back from Eve.

 

[Rise]

@Rise

I'm debating whether it's best to go back through and continue with the roadmap, responding to everything said. Is it good enough that I've read it? The same with some of my posts for you?

Would it be best if we stopped for a moment and reconsolidated our thoughts, taking into consideration what we've seen of each others' positions?

Perhaps we can each make lists of points we want to talk about and get clarification on?

I'd like to continue, but if we must each respond to 9+ posts each day (which themselves grow longer, such that it will become more posts), it will become totally untenable.

I don't necessarily have an expectation that you need to respond to everything I have posted. It would be sufficient if you read it and then chose what you wanted to respond to.
I might still want to respond to some of your latest posts but you wouldn't be obligated to respond to them in turn.

Although, we might see some issues keep trying to pop up if they are necessary to make certain points.

I have been very surprised at how difficult it can be to talk about this issue without opening up a pandoras box of so many other issues at the same time. It was completely unexpected.

I think it's because so many of our premises are so diametrically opposed that it's difficult to even find common ground without first resolving some issues so that common ground can be established.

I have even tried to steer away from getting into debating certain issues that don't seem necessary; but I guess when we're dealing with a question that requires hitting philosophical bedrock ("The problem of evil") then some of these questions become unavoidable so that we can establish common premises.

@Rise

This is my attempt to consolidate the things I care about most, which I may edit as I think about more things:

1) The meta-epistemic argument that started this PoE series

1a) We can make reasonable beliefs even though we're not omniscient (this would get into me defending the Jack analogy from your recent replies)
1b) Accepting a premise that can be arbitrarily constructed that rescues some premise from being contradicted by observation by appealing to our non-omniscience alone is unreasonable​

2) Omnipotence must have logical limits, there is no "higher" form of omnipotence than this

2a) God can't do what is not possible to do
2b) God can't actualize modally necessary states of affairs​

3) Your morality argument

3a) Does a creator's intention impart a duty on created beings with free will to follow that intention?
3b) Where does this duty come from, what justifies belief in it if it isn't simply introspected from deontological values?
3c) What explains the existence of deontological values not in congruence with the creator's intentions? E.g., I may have values which make me feel duties like "I will fund activism for LGBT+ rights to marry" that might not be in congruence with God's intentions: how can this be the case?​

4) Aseity-sovereignty

4a) God has to have had primordial properties which He didn't choose, so the sovereignty intuition is wrong
4b) Since God didn't choose primordial properties, they are outside God's power and sovereignty. Since that is the case, God is dependent on their being the way they are: God is not a se.
4c) Since God is not a se, God can't be the foundation of logic: logical limitation has to be transcendental to God.​

5) Your theodicy (the "God's nature is life, removing God's nature means death" stuff)

5a) Making your claims cognitive: what does it mean for a nature to be a property rather than to possess properties?
5b) What does it mean to "put one's nature on" something or "remove one's nature from" something?
​

Are there any of these we want to split off into a separate thread? Do you want to add anything?

All of that and more can certainly be debated, and I think it could be good to do so; but I don't think now would be the time for it yet. I think we should pull back from all of that and first refocus on the original question.

Which I actually don't think will be difficult or time consuming to resolve when proper restraints are put on it.

And I think I identified in some of my latest posts what the core problem here is that resulted in a gumming up of clear communication.

The core problem here is a lack of definition about whose premises you are attacking as part of the original PoE formulation. (Note I said "whose" premises and not "what" premises. The "what" doesn't become philosophically relevant unless we can first identify who actually believes it).

If we can resolve that question then I think we can start over on the PoE question directly without having to get bogged down in an ever expanding list of debate topics.

The reason I say this is because, as I already outlined in great detail, the PoE question is only philosophically relevant to religions rooted in Judaism. Therefore in order for it to be a relevant question we must work with the fullness of what a given Biblical religion actually believes about God.

This is actually one of the first objections I made when I pointed out that the kinds of arguments you were trying to make didn't make sense in the context of Biblical beliefs considering that the PoE only makes sense as an opposition to Biblical beliefs.

Because if we aren't debating over what the Bible actually says about God and whether or not that is logically consistent, then it's inevitable we spin off into a general philosophical debate about what you believe vs what I believe.

Which is really not relevant to the PoE question if you aren't the one supplying the premises to it but you are just trying to find fault with someone else's premises. If you aren't the one supplying the premises then we don't need to debate whether or not your personal premises are sound.

You are free to tell me whose premises you are trying to undermine and we can go from there.
But I would recommend we formulate the PoE around what the Bible says about God's attributes and then see if there is any contradiction there.
As opposed to dealing with what one particular individual believes about God. Because if you did that then the debate could simply come down to showing why that particular individual believes wrong things that don't line up with what the Bible says they should believe.

 

[Meow Mix]

There is a distinction between the two concepts you are failing to make.

1. They were created to be in union with God, which in that state they would only do things that were consistent with God's nature.

2. They had an option to reject union with God. Which, only in that state of disunion, would they be inclined to do the opposite of what God would; or do whatever they had united themselves to instead would incline them to do.

The inclination about what does is not the same as the free choice about what yo want to be united to.
The inclination of what you do comes out of the free choice of what you want to unite to.

That free choice of what to unite to must exist for man to make a free choice to be in relationship with God instead of being a robot.

The choice is free and not necessarily connected with God's nature.

It is the consequence of that choice that determines what nature you take on.

And the consequence of that choice would be logically impossible for God to change to be different. Ie To reject union with God is to embrace evil and all that comes with it. Because God can't give you the opposite of evil, which is his nature, if you have chosen to reject it, without violating your free will choice. It would be logically impossible for you to reject the only source of goodness and continue to possess the quality of goodness.

Rather than adding more to the copious amount of threads we have going on, this question can be revisited after we talk about section 5 of my attempted reconsolidated list in #295: we will first have to hash out 5a and 5b and what they mean before anything about this topic will make any sense to me. So, I will wait until we do that.

In fact, in Heaven, there is no concept of time, so how do you think only some of the angels rebel but others don't?

Does this mean there is no separation of events, or just that people don't have the ability to count the passage of time? Or don't have the desire to? I'm not sure what to make of this claim, can you elucidate it?

1. It is false. Adam and Eve had knowledge and understanding of what would happen and the free choice to actuate that outcome.

I would argue that this is a problem. If original sin marred Adam and Eve and twisted moral compasses and the like, this means it has the consequence that Adam and Eve had to have knowingly chosen to take an action that would cause leukemia, rape, famine, all the abject suffering that we see today before becoming twisted by original sin. How is that possible?

It seems possible how they might have made a choice that would cause these things if they didn't fully understand that it would happen, or what it entailed. But you're saying they had this knowledge and understanding. How, then, could they have made that choice if they had to make the choice before original sin twisted their moral compasses?

I am (on your view) twisted by original sin, but if I had a magic button that gave me $1,000,000 but even just one person somewhere in the world had to die, I wouldn't press the button. How am I supposedly doing better at this than a pre-Fall Adam and Eve? This just doesn't seem to add up.

2 You are comparing the existence of free will choice to have relationship with God to something deadly and unnecessary.

What then is the consequence of your viewpoint?
Are you saying you don't want the free will to choose to be in relationship with God?
Do you want to be a robot or a slave held against your will?
Would your rather just not be created at all?

Is that your idea of benevolent?

Because that's your only other option.

What else do you expect to happen? You're criticizing reality for what it is without giving a logical alternative.

We will have to hash out 5a and 5b from my consolidated list to understand this. The reason why is because I argue that God could still make the laws of physics such that free agents don't suffer physically even if they don't want to hang out with God. But you argue that this isn't possible because it's about a "union" with God, and God "removes His nature," and that this causes death (even though my understanding of death is related to the laws of physics, so I don't understand this, etc.) Basically, I need you to clarify these things that you're saying because they do not make any sense to me as it stands.

I'm waiting to see how you want to reconsolidate or if you want to just continue the way we have been (by responding to 9+ threads). Then I'll either respond to this here or we will naturally touch on it when we discuss 5a and 5b from my list.

It ties in with the difference in two concepts I outlined earlier.

If God does not allow Adam the freedom to break union with God then it can never be a free choice to be in union with God.

But so long as Adam retains that choice to be in union with God then he should act consistent with God's nature.

But if he makes the choice to disunite in rebellion, then the door opens to no longer operating consistent with God's nature and all kinds of evil can enter in.

It would never be God's intention to force Adam to make the choice to remain in union as that would violate free will.

We could say perhaps God made special provision for Adam to be able to make this free choice to leave union with God even though such an action would not be consistent with God's nature.

That would be enough to provide a potential answer your objection.

This'll all have to be talked about after you clarify 5a and 5b, otherwise I have no hope of understanding what this union concept means.

I suspect one objection you might raise to this is not liking the idea of there being special provisions to otherwise consistent rules; but that would be coming from a false science based expectation that everything needs to operate according to laws and that God must be bound by laws - forgetting we are talking about God as a person with a will who is perfectly free to do whatever He pleases in whatever way He pleases as long as it doesn't violate who He is.

If it helps, I have no such objection to God making special provisions to otherwise consistent rules as long as it's possible to do so.

Meaning God's spirit resting on and/or in someone.
It's nothing like mental persuasion.
It is a changing of your nature by being in the presence of God's nature.

Still need to talk about 5a and 5b: this means absolutely nothing to me. I don't understand what it's supposed to mean in the least (to be specific, what it means for a "spirit to rest on/in" someone, or for having a "nature change by being in the presence of God's nature."

Think of it like a resonance energy. If you are exposed to this you will either resonate with it in greater levels of sympathy to higher levels of conforming to God's will or you will resist and be torn apart by the dissonance.

This sounds to me like mind control. In Stargate SG-1, Hathor uses a pheromone that drives the male members of the base to be aroused by her so she can manipulate them -- to the point that they are worshipful of her. They still somewhat choose what actions they take in that they choose actions that are in accordance with Hathor's will now, but how they accomplish her will is still their choice.

Is that at all similar? If not, what's different?

Definition of CULPABLE
Culpable is a moral term denoting a moral wrong has been done and an agent is morally responsible.

You can't use that term because you don't believe in objective morality.

This is appeal to definition fallacy (which is the fallacy I was looking for earlier when I said something was "on the same track as the etymological fallacy," I forget in which post: but this is the one I was looking for).

Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. Because many people use the term "culpable" within the framework of objective morality or moral realism, the dictionary is going to describe the word in such a way. However for instance in that same definition there is the archaic definition of being guilty.

When I say that X is culpable for Y, I mean that X has performed actions that helped to bring about Y in a way that they can reasonably be held accountable for.

If a person sets a cup on a table and a Rube Goldberg sequence of events unfolds where a bird flies in and knocks over the cup, someone else trips on the cup, then they try to steady themselves on the charcoal grill and burn their hand -- the person that set the cup down is not culpable.

If a person toes a string across a doorframe trying to play a mean trick on their sibling, but their grandmother unexpectedly trips over the string and hurts herself instead, there is culpability there: this can be tied back to the person's intentions even though the target was unintended. We don't have to have objective morality (or moral realism, though I understand we're not bothering with that here) to be able to talk about intention and culpability.

 

[Meow Mix]

I don't necessarily have an expectation that you need to respond to everything I have posted. It would be sufficient if you read it and then chose what you wanted to respond to.
I might still want to respond to some of your latest posts but you wouldn't be obligated to respond to them in turn.

Although, we might see some issues keep trying to pop up if they are necessary to make certain points.

Understood. I try to use my judgment on what to address, but keep in mind I am responding while doing thesis work and performing my night job: I definitely apologize for my undoubted contributions to ballooning of topics and spots that aren't clear because it is difficult to keep everything in a mentally organized checklist. Sometimes it's like having blinders on, just responding to what I'm looking at in the moment. I try to be cognizant of that. You've been bearing with me admirably. We'd maybe have a tighter, more succinct thing going on if you had my undivided attention (which I would love to give, I definitely don't insinuate that my attention is divided by anything other than necessity: this is the best discussion on RF I have going on by far).

I have been very surprised at how difficult it can be to talk about this issue without opening up a pandoras box of so many other issues at the same time. It was completely unexpected.

I think it's because so many of our premises are so diametrically opposed that it's difficult to even find common ground without first resolving some issues so that common ground can be established.

I have even tried to steer away from getting into debating certain issues that don't seem necessary; but I guess when we're dealing with a question that requires hitting philosophical bedrock ("The problem of evil") then some of these questions become unavoidable so that we can establish common premises.

C'est la vie, it seems!

All of that and more can certainly be debated, and I think it could be good to do so; but I don't think now would be the time for it yet. I think we should pull back from all of that and first refocus on the original question.

Which I actually don't think will be difficult or time consuming to resolve when proper restraints are put on it.

And I think I identified in some of my latest posts what the core problem here is that resulted in a gumming up of clear communication.

The core problem here is a lack of definition about whose premises you are attacking as part of the original PoE formulation. (Note I said "whose" premises and not "what" premises. The "what" doesn't become philosophically relevant unless we can first identify who actually believes it).

If we can resolve that question then I think we can start over on the PoE question directly without having to get bogged down in an ever expanding list of debate topics.

The reason I say this is because, as I already outlined in great detail, the PoE question is only philosophically relevant to religions rooted in Judaism. Therefore in order for it to be a relevant question we must work with the fullness of what a given Biblical religion actually believes about God.

This is actually one of the first objections I made when I pointed out that the kinds of arguments you were trying to make didn't make sense in the context of Biblical beliefs considering that the PoE only makes sense as an opposition to Biblical beliefs.

Because if we aren't debating over what the Bible actually says about God and whether or not that is logically consistent, then it's inevitable we spin off into a general philosophical debate about what you believe vs what I believe.

Which is really not relevant to the PoE question if you aren't the one supplying the premises to it but you are just trying to find fault with someone else's premises. If you aren't the one supplying the premises then we don't need to debate whether or not your personal premises are sound.

You are free to tell me whose premises you are trying to undermine and we can go from there.
But I would recommend we formulate the PoE around what the Bible says about God's attributes and then see if there is any contradiction there.
As opposed to dealing with what one particular individual believes about God. Because if you did that then the debate could simply come down to showing why that particular individual believes wrong things that don't line up with what the Bible says they should believe.

This might be possible, but I have a problem: if we tried to talk about the PoE using your exact premises, I don't understand some of them. This would prevent me from being able to hold up my side of the discussion. It seems clear to me that I have to understand some of your arguments before I can get back to the PoE, or they will just come up again, and then I still won't understand them. That would be the problems listed under section 5 on my list probably. Also understanding where duty comes from in section 3. I think the other sections are places where I do understand what you're saying, but believe that it's wrong; so those are less pressing.

 

[Rise]

Does this mean there is no separation of events, or just that people don't have the ability to count the passage of time? Or don't have the desire to? I'm not sure what to make of this claim, can you elucidate it?

I can tell you it's not an issue of desire. Heaven exists outside of spacetime as we experience it.

I don't know if it's reasonable to expect an explanation for what that is like when it's beyond our experiential context as beings bound by space-time.

Perhaps it is not unlike the concepts of how quantum level events could happen in sequence according to physical laws prior to the big bang without space-time existing.
There is no time as we understand it, yet events do still happen in a casual sequence.

I would argue that this is a problem. If original sin marred Adam and Eve and twisted moral compasses and the like, this means it has the consequence that Adam and Eve had to have knowingly chosen to take an action that would cause leukemia, rape, famine, all the abject suffering that we see today before becoming twisted by original sin. How is that possible?

They didn't believe God.
They believed satan when he said God was lying about the consequences.

If the Bible has anything to teach us: It's that all of mankind's problems come down to not trusting God.

Israel could have lived the closest thing to Eden earth can see until Jesus returns if only they had fully trusted God.

It seems possible how they might have made a choice that would cause these things if they didn't fully understand that it would happen, or what it entailed. But you're saying they had this knowledge and understanding. How, then, could they have made that choice if they had to make the choice before original sin twisted their moral compasses?

They didn't even need a moral compass. They already knew it was wrong. God told them directly it was.

It wasn't a lack of discernment that was the problem.

The problem as a lack of trust in God.

I am (on your view) twisted by original sin, but if I had a magic button that gave me $1,000,000 but even just one person somewhere in the world had to die, I wouldn't press the button. How am I supposedly doing better at this than a pre-Fall Adam and Eve? This just doesn't seem to add up.

They chose to believe satan's deception. They didn't believe God's Word that there would be negative consequences.

This is the story of mankind's repeating problem throughout history. We see it all throughout the Bible and today in our country - people choose to believe God won't ever judge them and that there could never be negative consequences for their sin.

We will have to hash out 5a and 5b from my consolidated list to understand this. The reason why is because I argue that God could still make the laws of physics such that free agents don't suffer physically even if they don't want to hang out with God. But you argue that this isn't possible because it's about a "union" with God, and God "removes His nature," and that this causes death (even though my understanding of death is related to the laws of physics, so I don't understand this, etc.) Basically, I need you to clarify these things that you're saying because they do not make any sense to me as it stands.

We can talk about it in more detail, sure; but it's really not a complicated explanation.

There is something God has which can give you the eternal life as opposed to death.

Only God has it.

If you aren't willing to take it from God then there's no other way to have it.

Of course you want to understand more of the hows and whys behind how this works. And that curiosity is great to have. But I think it has to be recognized that the simple explanation is already sufficient as a valid explanation without the need for more details to make it a valid explanation.

I think the false assumption you seem to be operating out of is the assumption that any explanation I give is not valid unless it can be explained to a certain degree of detail.

This brings to mind something I saw William Lane Craig say which I think is most apt for much of our objections:
"You don't need an explanation of the explanation in order for the explanation to be valid".

The reason being:
If you always had to have an explanation of your explanation before it could be accepted as a valid explanation then you could never have an explanation for literally anything because nothing can ever be fully explained. Not in science or any other field.

My simple explanation for life and death and God's relationship to it is logically valid and sufficiently explanatory as it stands. It doesn't necessarily require more detail to be sufficient.

Although I welcome discussion about more detail, I think it's important to point out where some false premises may be at work behind your questions.

Still need to talk about 5a and 5b: this means absolutely nothing to me. I don't understand what it's supposed to mean in the least (to be specific, what it means for a "spirit to rest on/in" someone, or for having a "nature change by being in the presence of God's nature."

I don't think it would be expected to make a lot of sense without having a broader understanding of Biblical knowledge about the nature of God's spirit, it's work in the believer, the nature of sin, redemption, etc.

I did give you an answer to your question, but I suspect you may be lacking sufficient Biblical schema to plug that answer in to have it fully make sense.

I am not sure what the best way to explain this succinctly is without risking not giving you enough schema to understand the answer.

Let's try it this way:
1. God's spirit resided with mankind, inside of them, and over them as a covering prior to the fall.
2. This is union with God and if received fully conforms one to God's nature of all good.
3. This was lost with the fall of Adam. We at best now only partially experience God's spirit in and upon us, with few achieving a restoration of full union with God in this lifetime.
4. Jesus, the second Adam, begotten directly of God and not descended from Adam via a male lineage, restored what was lost with Adam's fall via Jesus's sacrifice and resurrection to a fully restored nature.
5. We can experience what Adam once had through faith in Jesus and receiving of the Holy Spirit (God's Spirit) inside of us.
6. The Holy Spirit transforms us to be more like God, to the degree we are willing to be transformed and obey God.
7. One day those people who put faith in Jesus will be transformed at the return of Jesus to earth to resurrected with new bodies and a fully new nature like Jesus has.
8. Those that don't will be permanently separated from God, experiencing eternal torment.

Now, that may very well just raise more questions for you.

This sounds to me like mind control. In Stargate SG-1, Hathor uses a pheromone that drives the male members of the base to be aroused by her so she can manipulate them -- to the point that they are worshipful of her. They still somewhat choose what actions they take in that they choose actions that are in accordance with Hathor's will now, but how they accomplish her will is still their choice.

Is that at all similar? If not, what's different?

Ah, an SG-1 reference. That brings back memories. One of the few shows I watched every season and episode for.

Back to the question:
You have the choice to reject union with God. So you can't accuse God of mind controlling you.

You have to make the choice to willingly want to become more like God, who is all good. And then that option becomes available to you.

So what do you want? Do you want God to force you to be in union with Him or do you want the freedom to make that choice?