Omniscience and omnibenevolence

[Astro Cat]

My PoE questions why there is an apparent incongruence with the existence of physical suffering with particular properties a lot of people intuit God to have (omnipotence, omniscience, and then the thing we are trying to explain a little better -- some sort of "never malevolent" property and some kind of "never negligent" property that usually gets simplified to "benevolence.")

I don't think that's even a clear case. "Physical suffering" is part of many worthwhile endeavours, such as fitness training, public service, parenting, and even learning. After all, one physical pain any academic knows well is the feeling of discomfort, disquietude and ill-ease generated by confronting a new and difficult idea. The pain in one's head is called, "learning."

I think it is fairly clear what sort of suffering is physical vs. what sort of suffering is mental. A simple way to parse them is to ask, "if my body were invincible, would I experience this kind of suffering?" Consider a video game such as Doom where you can type "iddqd" and then take a bullet without taking damage: effectively, physical suffering has been removed from the Doom's simplified universe with a keystroke.

In a toy world, it's not possible to stub your toe or to catch a disease. You don't have to endure physical discomfort to tone your body because becoming overweight or whatever isn't a risk. A toy world is like some peoples' intuitive conception of what Heaven might be like in a lot of ways: do people have to weight train in Heaven? I somehow doubt that fits with peoples' intuitive conception of Heaven. Perhaps someone just really likes weight training for whatever reason, but it's easy to conceive of a universe where God makes it so that they can achieve their results that way whereas people that don't like it can just will their body into being the shape they want. Often in these kinds of discussions we need to remember just how wild the omnipotence/omniscience combo can really get.

I think a good rule of thumb for deciding what's physical suffering and what isn't is to ask "if I typed iddqd in real life, would this kind of suffering affect me?" Then a little thinking past that (such as with the weight training example) should be easily thought out from there, it seems. I do not, for instance, see how learning could be considered "physical pain." Nor boredom. Those seem to obviously be mental discomforts.

Your will would be free if you couldn't stub your toe because physics doesn't allow for it;

You wouldn't be allowed to kick things with a particular force, perhaps. And there would be some decisions you would not be permitted to make...such as to harm yourself or another person. You might be theoretically "free," but in practice, the environment, inexorably shaped to "benevolence," would not permit you a whole range of activities, and would not permit your activities to impact others in certain ways.

Would you be "free" if your environment were so regimented as that you could only do the good? Well, one way in which you wouldn't be, is that you couldn't choose the good. It would be forced upon you, by means of the constraints against evil.

But our choices are already limited and we consider ourselves free (also, you could kick the doorframe full force if you want; the physics of the universe might just subtract inertia from the blow towards your toe). You and I can't walk on our ceilings, we can't teleport to Mars, we can't summon the TV remote from the coffee table telekinetically to our hands. We could say, "You can't choose to be subject to gravity, it's forced on you," and it still wouldn't mean we're not free.

Let us say that the total number of physical freedoms is a big deal (I don't think that it is, but let's consider it). Well, for every physical freedom removed by being unable to hurt ourselves or others, it's a trivial matter for God to add a freedom to "make up for it" that doesn't instantiate physical suffering: if God removes the capacity to stub toes on door frames, God could add the ability to walk on the ceiling. As I said, the omnipotence/omniscience combo means we can get quite creative with possibilities. So, if the objection is "but the number of freedoms would be less," the answer is both "I don't think that matters that much since we already lack some freedoms yet still consider ourselves free" but also "if the total number does matter, then God could trivially add a freedom we don't currently have for each physical suffering-causing freedom taken away such that the total number of freedoms remains the same."

...a lot of people intuitively think Heaven is a place without physical suffering yet with free will.

Well, leaving aside the idea of "Heaven," which is often misunderstood, one might simply say this: it's not necessary for one always to be free in a particular way in order to have been free, and to have made a free choice that is genuine.

Marriage would be an example. People find each other, and then swear their commitment to each other, including "forsaking all others," and "'til death do us part." That's a one-time commitment (ideally, supposedly). Is it the less free for having been one-time? No, obviously not. It's the "one-timeness" that actually makes it so serious and so absolute.

But what if one was not allowed to choose one's partner at all? What if the universe forced you to take what it considered a "good" partner, and never anybody else? Would you then be able to make such a commitment at all? And what would it mean to say that you "chose" them, when you literally could not have chosen otherwise?

In a world without physical suffering, there are still character-building choices. Just because you can't stab your neighbor doesn't mean you can't break a promise to them or say jerkish things to them: God isn't culpable for that, only you are. God is culpable for your ability to stab them though, so that is why my version of the PoE focuses on physical suffering.

Being a jerk is a necessary potentiality in order to have free will. Physical suffering is not. You can still get your soul-building theodicy through exclusively non-physical suffering because people have to still decide whether they're going to be nice to one another, whether to keep their promises, whether to not spread false rumors about someone, how they want to deal with unrequited love and things like that.

The term "innocent victim" wouldn't exist in a toy world because the only kind of suffering someone could experience is as a result of their own choices: if physical suffering exists, you can get stabbed or get born with a debilitating birth defect and may have never done anything to "deserve" it. Yet in a toy world, if someone says something mean about you, you may choose to ignore it. It's on you if you let it get to you. It's on you to keep a promise or break a promise, that sort of thing (and it's on you whom you trust with a promise). There's no such thing as something just happening to you completely out of your control and completely outside of something you did to "deserve." There are no innocent victims in a toy world. That's part of the point: why are there ostensibly innocent victims?

Either there are no innocent victims (and just world hypothesis is true; and somehow that baby with leukemia did something to deserve it -- I don't think either of us wants to seriously explore this, or do we?), or there are; and God is culpable for the very concept of its existence since the world could have been made otherwise.

...it's possible to create a toy world (that being a world without physical suffering yet with free will),

I'm suggesting that it is possible for there to be a world that is consequent upon a free-will choice, but is free from evil. But I think it's pretty clear that unless people were at least at one time in a world where evil was possible, then they never had free will at all. They never had anything but the good to choose.

But this is like saying, "People that are subject to gravity and spent their whole lives walking at the bottom of a gravitational well never had any free will at all, they never had anything but being subject to gravity to choose." Because that's the way it is: we don't have a choice in that regard, we are stuck on a planetary surface due to gravity; we can't decide to float away if we choose. Yet we still regard ourselves as free, don't we?

Well, if I weren't able to shoot my neighbor, I would still be free. I'd be able to decide whether I'm going to play board games with friends today or whether I want to take my partner to see a movie. I'm able to decide whether to debate philosophy on the internet or whether I want to play a video game. I'm able to decide whether I want to be an engineer or a scientist with some of my time. I'm able to decide, if I were so inclined, that I don't like the way that guy wears his hat and I'm going to tell him (rudely) that I think it's ugly. I just can't stab him over it. I'm still I think very obviously free. I can't stab the guy with the ugly hat and I can't walk on the ceiling, but so what?

Conversely, God is not culpable for emotional and mental suffering.

That would be hard to see, given your previous argument. Such suffering always seems to reflect a disjuncture between a personal perception of "what is" and of "what should be."

I mean that if one of the premises is that free will is good to have, then having free will requires the ability to do some things where will actually wouldn't be free if we couldn't do it. I'm still free if I can't stab a guy, but I'm not still free if I can't think the guy's hat is ugly. I'm still free if diseases don't exist, but I'm not still free if I can't choose to break a promise. So free will does entail some kinds of suffering existing; I'm saying that physical suffering is not among those necessarily entailed by having free will. We can do away with all of physical suffering and still be free, but we can't do away with all of emotional/mental suffering and still be free. So God is not culpable for emotional/mental suffering (on the premise that God couldn't help but to have it exist as a side effect of having free will at all), but God is culpable for physical suffering (in that we could still be free without it, so free will existing is not an excuse to have physical suffering exist).

I don't think you can have free will without things like breaking a promise, unrequited love, or simply using words to be a jerk to someone else. God isn't culpable for that because it's not logically possible for God to bestow free will while somehow preventing these kinds of things:in this case, free will is a greater good that these sort of potentialities have to exist in order to enable. Not so with physical suffering, though, as explained above.

No, I don't find that an easy distinction to believe in. I would suggest that physical and mental kinds of suffering are actually related to each other, though not in a precisely causal way. I would suggest that both are part of a fallen world, it's true; and sometimes they also evidently go together in a causal way...as when the unkind words of a friend cause you to weep physically, perhaps, or when a blow struck by that same friend causes you the horror of betrayal. But there is a physical element to volition itself. If one can want to strike another, but cannot actually perform the action, then one is still beset by the hostile feelings, but one now has no potential to act on them. One has, again, lost one aspect of free will.

And if "harm" is understood more broadly -- as including not merely physical pain but mental ones as well -- then you would have to say that God allows harm to take place, even if nobody gets physically hit.

You can still remove the physical suffering from this scenario and have a completely sensible scenario (I have already addressed the "reduced number of free actions" issue in a section above, so I think that responds to "One has, again, lost one aspect of free will."

In a toy world, if a friend says unkind words to you, perhaps you may have a choice to cry (if you find it cathartic) or not; but you would of course suffer emotionally because of your friend's betrayal. God isn't culpable for that, that's an unavoidable condition of having free will that your friend can choose to betray you. However, God is culpable for your friend being able to strike your face. There's no reason your friend needs to be able to strike your face. They're still free if they can't strike your face.

So yes, in the world we're familiar with, physical and mental suffering are often intertwined, that doesn't mean it has to be the case. Physical suffering's existence still demands an explanation. Mental suffering's existence can be explained if we simply posit that having free will is "worth it" to have it.

So, wrapping this explanation up to get back to your comment about the differing parent styles, I don't think it's that complicated with things like physical suffering. What parenting style is best for the girl? That's a really tricky question.

Right. And that's my whole point there. It's easy to throw out terms like "harm" and "benevolence," but very tricky to say what they are. Life's just to complicated and intermixed.

Sometimes words are used for brevity; I slip often back into just saying "benevolence" when, as mentioned, I mean something more like "never malevolent and never negligent." I think it is just a matter of carefully and meticulously outlining everything that's meant. Ultimately, "benevolence is not congruent with causing or allowing gratuitous physical suffering" is an intelligible sentence; it perhaps just takes being a little pedantic to parse it out. But it can be done. The greater good theodicy basically attacks the "gratuitous" part by suggesting physical suffering isn't gratuitous. But we talk about the greater good theodicy elsewhere.

The theist can (and often does) develop a greater good theodicy for this too, usually by saying physical suffering exists because it does enable some kind of greater good, but it is usually thrust into the realm of the unknowable:

Not in the passages I quoted, of course. In them, the goods to be achieved are actually named.

They don't seem to be very explicitly named to me -- general things like bliss and comfort. If I take that at face value, it doesn't make much sense.

If I slap a toddler in the face and then give them a candy bar, am I a nice person -- is that congruent with being never-malevolent? Even if I did something really nice afterwards, like slapped them in the face and then paid their future college tuition, isn't that obviously still incongruent with never-malevolence? The very question is whether or not physical suffering is required to attain bliss or comfort, and that's the greater good theodicy at work. But the "hows" of it, even in those verses, are still left to be implied as unknowable or at least unknown. That is a problem.

I'm familiar with this concept (that physical suffering was actualized to enable some greater good; also a specialized theodicy under that same umbrella, the soul-making theodicy).

It's not a strange concept, actually. As I was suggesting, the athlete in training, the rigorous academic, the woman giving birth, the selfless humanitarian, the committed soldier...all know that it is to accept physical suffering in aid of what they take to be a higher good. It's such an ordinary experience of human life that one can hardly doubt it.

In the world we experience where suffering is unavoidable, some things are commendable because they seek to alleviate, reduce, or prevent other kinds of suffering. I would argue, though, that this line of argument leads to silly things. I think we've touched on this before, long ago: is it "worth it" to have house fires just so we can have heroism (firemen)? I can't speak for everyone else, but that's prima facie ludicrous. It seems like it would be better simply not to have house fires or firemen, we wouldn't miss them since the thing they alleviate couldn't trouble us.

It would be like saying it's wonderful smallpox existed because it meant someone was able to come along and make the vaccine (something most of us would intuitively think is good). I can't help but to think that it's better to simply have had a world where smallpox never ravaged the masses than it is to have a world where so many suffered just so someone can cure it. Yet that's what it sounds like when some theodicists say that it's good we can murder because a selfless martyr taking a bullet to protect their lover for instance wouldn't be possible without murder. But isn't it better to simply not have either? What's so bad about a world without martyrs if the bullets they might take for us are never a threat in the first place? I sincerely have trouble following the sentiment of those particular theodicies.

I think that it makes the case that sometimes, it's more reasonable to doubt there's an unknowable reason for apparent malevolence/negligence than it is to accept that there is

I would ask, "Unknowable to whom?"

You surely don't mean "unknowable to God," assuming such exists. You would have to merely mean, "Unknowable to us limited, contingent, transient beings, with our limited knowledge." And we really have no reason to think that something epistemologically beyond us provides us with any reason to believe that there actually can be no answer. What we could, maybe, conclude is that we, at least at the present moment, just don't know the answer. But we'd have to hold open the possiblity that somebody else perhaps could, and that God Himself also could...assuming, again, He exists.

That we don't know the reason for everything (at the present moment) does not mean there's no answer. It just means that we, at the present moment, don't happen to know what it is. It doesn't even tell us we couldn't know; just that, maybe, at present, we don't.

I agree, though. Perhaps the appearance of malevolence is really benevolence for some reason unknowable to us right now. I've never denied that's possible. What I'm saying, though, is that we still have to make rational decisions based on what we do know. That was also the reason for my third edit, too: perhaps the appearance of benevolence is really malevolence for some reason unknowable to us. We can't actually distinguish which is the case so long as we're just appealing to the unknown: both are equally unknowable and so have equal epistemic weights to us! Why should we assume that God is wholly benevolent when there is evidence of malevolence? (Well, because of some unknowable reason!) Why should we assume that God is wholly malevolent when there is evidence of benevolence? (Well, because of some unknowable reason!) Since they're both unknowable, we actually have no reason to suppose one is the case and the other is not other than flipping a coin or just having a personal fancy for one over the other.

Other than that, we have to make rational decisions on limited information all the time. That's why I made the alien analogy in that other post. If there is an alien that is mentally superior to humans (and so is capable of conceiving of things that we can't conceive of), and that alien says they're perfectly benevolent (we can define that however we need to: perfectly never-malevolent, perfectly never-negligent, or perhaps something like perfectly incapable of acting evilly if you prefer, whatever), then a greater good theodicy can be made to excuse anything at all that the alien does: if the alien runs through the streets shooting people with death rays, screaming "do not run, I am your friend," the greater good theodicists may of course say the alien, being perfectly benevolent and mentally superior (and so, able to conceive of reasons to do things that we can't), must have a good reason for blasting people in the streets. But can't we agree that despite being epistemically limited, there is a threshold where it's reasonable and rational to suppose that maybe, just maybe, the alien is not our friend, that the alien is not perfectly benevolent even if the alien can demonstrate their mental superiority?

That is what I'm getting at with the PoE: there is a threshold where it's more rational than not to doubt that a creator, if it exists omnipotently and omnisciently, is actually benevolent no matter what it claims. The same with the alien claiming to be benevolent (and our friend!) as it blasts people: it's perfectly reasonable to say "maybe they're not actually our friend." Even though we're epistemically limited and perhaps the alien does have a good reason, the argument is that we're still being reasonable/rational by doubting the alien based on the evidence we're able to process.

Edit 3: A related argument is that we have no reason (other than God saying so, ostensibly) to believe that God is never-malevolent and never-negligent more than we have to suppose that maybe God is always-malevolent.

Not a very good argument, I have to say.

One is struck not just by the presence of "malevolent-seeming" phenomena, but also of the good and the beautiful. One needs, I think, an explanation not merely for the negatives, but for the positive phenomena as well. And it's not easy to make one up. Moreover, it's actually impossible to ground in an objective way our assessments of good and evil -- why should we not simply think, "What is, is?" and leave it at that?

To say "I perceive malevolence," or "I perceive evil," is to say one is perceiving a value judgment. If it's merely a subjective value, then the indictment against the Creator reduces to, "He allows things AC doesn't like" -- not a very serious charge, I think you'll have to admit, since most of the world does the same. But if "malevolence" or "evil" are objective properties, then you have a much better indictment against the current order of things...but what can you mean by those words? In a world that is purposeless, random, merely mechanistic, or otherwise theologically inert, there can be no "evil." The word has no meaning. It's simply a synonym for one of the indifferent things that "is." It fails to entail any condemnation. Some things happen that AC does not prefer. But they're not evil. They're just unpreferred.

That's all very hard to make sense of. How can you look at the world, "see" malevolence, harm or evil? What do those words mean? Are they reflections of any objective assessment, or not?

I think some of this is leaving into a different discussion (moral realism), which we've done some elsewhere. I think that we don't have to consider moral realism to still agree that to behave benevolently is not to cause gratuitous physical suffering. We don't have to define good and evil (terms that mean something different to me than they do to you) and I do that on purpose for that very reason. Physical suffering is objective, if S suffers physically then S experiences pain, maiming, bodily disfunction, death, or similar. A moral spin doesn't even have to be put on those words if benevolence is simply defined in some way as to not gratuitously cause those things: there can still be an incongruence between what is perceived about the world and what is proposed about the creator without having to use moral realism.

That is all a sidebar though, and I hope not to mire the greater discussion too much with our separate debate about moral realism. I've been typing for a while now so thoughts are getting fuzzy (LOL!), so I'll just summarize by saying that benevolence is incongruent with causing or allowing gratuitous suffering both with and without moral realism.

Edit: sorry for the length of this post. I’m sleep deprived so organizing thought is hard right now. In my next response I’ll condense things in a better way.

Also I forgot to wrap around to the purpose of this OP (asking why God didn’t make people omniscient and omnibenevolent). A side question to that is why God doesn’t make the reasons why leukemia is actually good to exist (if it is) known to us.

[Sculptor]

Yes, he took someone else's fucked up tribal religion and made it universal. No thanks. Doesn't he have anything better to offer?

I'm not sure that "Jesus" did that as such. Whatever collection of journalists that wrote the testaments, and whatever religious committee put the bible together rejecting some and featuring other scripts designed a religion for a new age of Empire, to grow and thrive in the Roman version of civilisation. Not the design nor intention of one man but the a committee of people who co-opted a myth for their own ends.
Unpacking from all the accretion from what some Rabbi may or may not have wanted or said at least a century before any of it was written down is impossible.
Omniscience and omnibenevolence is something invented much later than even the invention of Christianity.

Need to chose which interpretation of the sources is most probable. I agree with your historical anthropological interpretation. The fact remains that the myth helped a lot to carry forward the core Axial Age message.

As a historian I would not accept a concept such as "Axial age".

Whatever you might think of as the Axis Age I think the Jesus myth possibly did more to unpack it rather than support or carry it forwards.

Elements of the Jesus myth might well have been borrowed from the time when "axial age" is associated but Christianity was very much a New Religious Movement 400 years after the close of that age and was mobilised to bring cohesion to the world of the 4thC CE with Constantine's imperial power.
That's really the time when Xianity coalesced into a unitary form still recognisable until the ruptures of the Reformation.

[Astro Cat]

My brain is so tired, I keep fretting about how long and meandering that post was. If you want me to start over after I get some sleep let me know @Immanuel Can

[Immanuel Can]

Killing rabbits is part of what defines weasel and is neither good or bad....It's unlikely that the biological human is any more bad than the weasel or the rabbit.

Okay, then, explain what you mean by this, then...

The human does bad things because of his cultural ideology.

No, he does human things because of his human nature. Just like weasels do weasel things because of their weasel nature. You can't call them "bad" now.

You already ruled that out. Evil no longer can be invoked, according to you.

[Belinda]

I'm not sure that "Jesus" did that as such. Whatever collection of journalists that wrote the testaments, and whatever religious committee put the bible together rejecting some and featuring other scripts designed a religion for a new age of Empire, to grow and thrive in the Roman version of civilisation. Not the design nor intention of one man but the a committee of people who co-opted a myth for their own ends.
Unpacking from all the accretion from what some Rabbi may or may not have wanted or said at least a century before any of it was written down is impossible.
Omniscience and omnibenevolence is something invented much later than even the invention of Christianity.

Need to chose which interpretation of the sources is most probable. I agree with your historical anthropological interpretation. The fact remains that the myth helped a lot to carry forward the core Axial Age message.

As a historian I would not accept a concept such as "Axial age".

Whatever you might think of as the Axis Age I think the Jesus myth possibly did more to unpack it rather than support or carry it forwards.

Elements of the Jesus myth might well have been borrowed from the time when "axial age" is associated but Christianity was very much a New Religious Movement 400 years after the close of that age and was mobilised to bring cohesion to the world of the 4thC CE with Constantine's imperial power.
That's really the time when Xianity coalesced into a unitary form still recognisable until the ruptures of the Reformation.

The myth of Christ , and the core moral message of Jesus are not the same ideas.
Some other historical man may have been the mythical Christ. The core moral message of Jesus may have been quite other than it was---Jesus may have been partial to the Roman-compliant priesthood. But it's historical 'fact' that Jesus was believed to be Christ, and it's historically very probable Jesus disliked Palestinian priests who were Roman bootlickers.

[Belinda]

In his reply to Astro Cat, yesterday Sunday, Immanuel Can wrote:

Would you be "free" if your environment were so regimented as that you could only do the good? Well, one way in which you wouldn't be, is that you couldn't choose the good. It would be forced upon you, by means of the constraints against evil.

True about the choice that God gives us, in a universe where God is a reality. Your observation is also true as an argument against absolutely Free Will.

Absolutely Free Will gives us no choice because absolutely Free Will overrides any choice and randomly does whatever it does for no reason.

[Sculptor]

Need to chose which interpretation of the sources is most probable. I agree with your historical anthropological interpretation. The fact remains that the myth helped a lot to carry forward the core Axial Age message.

As a historian I would not accept a concept such as "Axial age".

Whatever you might think of as the Axis Age I think the Jesus myth possibly did more to unpack it rather than support or carry it forwards.

Elements of the Jesus myth might well have been borrowed from the time when "axial age" is associated but Christianity was very much a New Religious Movement 400 years after the close of that age and was mobilised to bring cohesion to the world of the 4thC CE with Constantine's imperial power.
That's really the time when Xianity coalesced into a unitary form still recognisable until the ruptures of the Reformation.

The myth of Christ , and the core moral message of Jesus are not the same ideas.
Some other historical man may have been the mythical Christ. The core moral message of Jesus may have been quite other than it was---Jesus may have been partial to the Roman-compliant priesthood. But it's historical 'fact' that Jesus was believed to be Christ, and it's historically very probable Jesus disliked Palestinian priests who were Roman bootlickers.

Give that we are talking about omniscience and omnibenevolence, I think it more useful to talk about the myth of Christ since these concepts were codified by Roman theologians.
You are claiming that it is "historical fact" that Jesus was thought to be the "Christ". There is no reason to think that was the case in his lifetime. There are plenty of Jewish scholars who will explain the linguistic confusion concerning words for "Rabbi" that might have led to that misunderstanding.
And given the long wait for the cobbling together of what is called "the scriptures", with the selections, deletions and choices made generations after his execution we cannot really have much to say about Jesus' likes or dislikes at the time.
At a time when the entire world was "bootlicking" the imperial authority, trouble makers like JC and Barabbas were the terrorists of their day, and Masada awaiting their defeat.
What have those Romans ever done for us?

[Immanuel Can]

My PoE questions why there is an apparent incongruence with the existence of physical suffering with particular properties a lot of people intuit God to have (omnipotence, omniscience, and then the thing we are trying to explain a little better -- some sort of "never malevolent" property and some kind of "never negligent" property that usually gets simplified to "benevolence.")

I don't think that's even a clear case. "Physical suffering" is part of many worthwhile endeavours, such as fitness training, public service, parenting, and even learning. After all, one physical pain any academic knows well is the feeling of discomfort, disquietude and ill-ease generated by confronting a new and difficult idea. The pain in one's head is called, "learning."

I think it is fairly clear what sort of suffering is physical vs. what sort of suffering is mental.

I'm saying that often, I don't think it's easy at all. We are, after all, souls in bodies, to put it simply. What affects the body has echoes in the soul, and out of the intimations of the soul come many things that produce bodily effects. There is a harmonization between the two that is not easy to account for in strictly dualistic terms.

In a toy world,

I'm not sure what that means, "toy world." Is it an expression from a conversation you had with somebody else? Maybe I need some background to understand what you intend it to imply.

Often in these kinds of discussions we need to remember just how wild the omnipotence/omniscience combo can really get.

I'm not sure we do. After all, as I said earlier, "omnipotence" and "omniscience" are not Biblical descriptors, but rather attempts by some theologians to label some feature they think might adequately capture a divine property. But because they're only invented terms, they need a lot of theological nuancing and explaining before they can be accepted at all. We've seen, in my last message, ways in which both "omnipotence" and "omnibenevolence" are far from clear concepts.

I do not, for instance, see how learning could be considered "physical pain."

It literally is. It's the sensation of one's neural synapses being forced into new connections contrary to their existing state. That's what makes people say things like, "Doing maths makes my head hurt." There's a distinct feeling of effort and strain that is not obviously physical, but is derived from the physical dynamics of neuroplastic change. And there are real physiological reasons for it, though it is induced by cognitive actions.

Your will would be free if you couldn't stub your toe because physics doesn't allow for it;

You wouldn't be allowed to kick things with a particular force, perhaps. And there would be some decisions you would not be permitted to make...such as to harm yourself or another person. You might be theoretically "free," but in practice, the environment, inexorably shaped to "benevolence," would not permit you a whole range of activities, and would not permit your activities to impact others in certain ways.

Would you be "free" if your environment were so regimented as that you could only do the good? Well, one way in which you wouldn't be, is that you couldn't choose the good. It would be forced upon you, by means of the constraints against evil.

But our choices are already limited and we consider ourselves free (also, you could kick the doorframe full force if you want; the physics of the universe might just subtract inertia from the blow towards your toe).

Yes, but that's not problematic for the issue of free will. Free will does not require that we must be able to do everything. Its requirements are actually quite minimal. Let me suggest what they are.

In order for an entity to have free will (in a domain of relevance), he/she must be possessed of no fewer than two options.

In other words, a person needs two "roads of choice" in any given domain in order to have free will in that matter. And I don't think one can argue with that: it seems terribly obvious. If one has only one way to go, one cannot, by definition, "choose." One simply has to go where one is forced to go.

Now, what is the "domain of relevance" in our present discussion? Let me suggest it, again in the very broadest terms. It is the domain of "the good." I'll leave it that vague for the moment, since "the good" encompasses many things, such as being loving, being generous, being compassionate, being honest, and so forth, so we need a catch-all label for all of that. In Christian thought, though, the consummate good is "loving God" and having a personal relationship with Him, so that would also have to be part of that broader package, presumably...if Christian conceptions of the good are implicated.

So we move forward step by step. One needs two choices. The matter of relevance is choosing "the good." If one is going to choose "the good," then inescapably one is going to need to also have the option of choosing "the-not-good," something that is not whatever "the good" is. For convenience, let's call that "evil."

The upshot is that inorder for a being to have "free will" in the moral domain, it is necessary that he/she must be able to choose between things that are genuinely good, and things that are genuinely not-good, or evil.

Then the question arises: is "free will" then a "good"? Well, we all certainly seem to think it is. It's a sine qua non for a lot of things human beings value passionately...freedom, love, personhood and individual identity, volition, courage, honesty, mercy...and a ton of other obvious "goods."

Is free will such a surpassing good that it would be better to have a world in which some not-good existed than to have a world in which both evil and choice were eliminated (along with love, mercy, charity, courage, freedom, personhood, etc.)?

I'm going to say, yes. It seems evident to me that a world that contains free-will having beings is much better than a world that does not, even if in that latter world, none experience evils. It seems to me that personhood, identity, conscience, and so forth, along with mercy, courage, commitment, moral choices, and so forth is much more meaningful and liberated than a world that lacks all those things.

...a lot of people intuitively think Heaven is a place without physical suffering yet with free will.

Well, leaving aside the idea of "Heaven," which is often misunderstood, one might simply say this: it's not necessary for one always to be free in a particular way in order to have been free, and to have made a free choice that is genuine.

Marriage would be an example. People find each other, and then swear their commitment to each other, including "forsaking all others," and "'til death do us part." That's a one-time commitment (ideally, supposedly). Is it the less free for having been one-time? No, obviously not. It's the "one-timeness" that actually makes it so serious and so absolute.

But what if one was not allowed to choose one's partner at all? What if the universe forced you to take what it considered a "good" partner, and never anybody else? Would you then be able to make such a commitment at all? And what would it mean to say that you "chose" them, when you literally could not have chosen otherwise?

In a world without physical suffering, there are still character-building choices. Just because you can't stab your neighbor doesn't mean you can't break a promise to them or say jerkish things to them:

I think this vastly oversimplifies the role that volition plays in harm, as well as the role consciousness plays in moral guiltiness. And I don't see any justification for the distinction there.

If to "break a promise" and to "say jerkish things" are forms of harm at all, then God would still be culpable for allowing "harm," would He not? So is it just a matter of degree? Is it just that a physical wound is less egregious than a mental wound? I think there are people who would doubt that. But in any case, if we indict God for allowing "harm," I see no reason for saying, "But mental harms are not a big deal; only physical harms are." They seem, to me, to be of-a-piece in that respect. And I see not justification in blaming God for physical harms, on the one hand, but giving him a total pass on all harms that don't obviously involve a physical wound. Is not, for example, mental abuse at least sometimes a fairly egregious form of "harm"?

I know folks who would insist it is.

You can still get your soul-building theodicy through exclusively non-physical suffering because people have to still decide whether they're going to be nice to one another, whether to keep their promises, whether to not spread false rumors about someone, how they want to deal with unrequited love and things like that.

To me, it looks like you're positing a world in which people are just as full of hateful and harmful impulses as always, but are chained by impotence from acting on them. It doesn't seem a nice place at all, but rather a place of tooth-grinding incapacity.

And I think it's not really a good description of a place with "free will" at all. After all, part of having a choice is that the choice has to be something one can genuinely have. The desire to act and the ability to do so are a package. Absent the ability to act, what does the desire to act actually signify? But the ability to act in an evil way inevitably implicates the ability to do harm to others, and even to "innocent" others. (Though "innocence" itself is also hard to judge in a non-superficial way.)

...in a toy world ...

I still think I need some clarification before I can rightly comment on this particular coinage.

...it's possible to create a toy world (that being a world without physical suffering yet with free will),

I'm suggesting that it is possible for there to be a world that is consequent upon a free-will choice, but is free from evil. But I think it's pretty clear that unless people were at least at one time in a world where evil was possible, then they never had free will at all. They never had anything but the good to choose.

But this is like saying, "People that are subject to gravity and spent their whole lives walking at the bottom of a gravitational well never had any free will at all, they never had anything but being subject to gravity to choose."

No, because "gravity" is not the domain of concern in the matter of moral and personal freedom as we are speaking about it. I say again: we don't need to have at our disposal every kind of choice, just at least two genuine alternatives within the relevant domain of concern. "Free will" does not imply the total absence of restrictions, but rather this much more modest requirement of a genuine good and evil between which to choose.

So free will does entail some kinds of suffering existing;

Ah.

So what we're talking about is only a matter of degree. You're just not certain that the proportions of suffering in the world have been rightly balanced, not that having any suffering at all is always bad.

But how do we estimate "the right proportions"? How do we know that the proportions of suffering God has allowed in this world are not the exact minimum necessary for genuine free will to be possible? How do we balance and weigh, from our limited, embodied perspectives, all the variables that would go into creating and running such a world?

We might be able to imagine a world with "less harm" (but not "no harm") in it: but how do we discern whether or not that harm-reduced world is adequate to produce all the requisite choices for all the people who are living and have lived on the face of this planet? Are we not quite at-sea for that?

I think I should pause here. I don't want to disregard or dismiss the rest of your message, but I've said some heavy things above, and I think they do call for me to allow you space to object before we try to move on. So let this be a pause, not cutting-off, if it may.

I also think maybe we need to pause from sheer volume of ideas. We're dealing with a lot here, and trying to deal with it all at one time. I think maybe that accounts for why you say,

Edit: sorry for the length of this post. I’m sleep deprived so organizing thought is hard right now. In my next response I’ll condense things in a better way.

And so on.

We're trying to do too much at once, I'm thinking. And I also went back to the other posting you indicated, and I see that we have a very great deal more to deal with there, as well. I'm loath to seem dismissive of any of that, too...and I don't want to fail, in any way, to honour all the concerns therein. But to deal with it all would create messages perhaps twice the length of your last one, the one you found so perplexing and tiring even at its own length. And really, I don't know how we're going to do it all without losing our way, if we don't slow down and go step-by-step.

So maybe what we do is deal with the above, and save the rest for follow-up issues? I'm thinking that, because I think I've laid out the fundamental argument for free will above, at least in its most rudimentary form. And I think that maybe some of those follow-up questions will look different once we've decided whether or not the above can be considered a baseline.

Let me simplify. It seems to me we have three points of difference at the moment, regarding the basics of free will. Firstly, are physical and mental suffering totally distinguishable, the former being grounds for indicting God with allowing harm, but the latter not? Secondly, what is "a toy world"? Thirdly, what is the basic requisite package in order for us to have "free will"?

Does that simplify the situation in hand for the moment sufficiently? If I've missed something, feel free to say. But perhaps, broadly speaking, these three points would be our baseline concerns, or at a least would be three of the various basic ones.

Fair enough?

P.S. -- I do notice that the "toy world" thing occurs in the following context:

I will borrow Swinburne's term "toy world" for such a category of world (where physical suffering isn't possible because the physics don't allow it).

What I don't understand is why this is "toy," which seems to imply the question is not a serious one, whereas it seems to me that the issues we are addressing are very serious, even foundational ones. So I'm still going to need some help with the concept.

P.P.S. -- I also notice, in your other post, that the answers you presuppose from the Theistic-apologist are not ones I would give, nor ones I have personally heard given. I don't side with anybody who thinks "it's all a great mystery" is a sufficient rejoinder even to the appearance of evil, let alone to its reality, and I would not hesitate to pose the question...in a respectful and reasonable way, of course. So I agree with you that that is not a very good answer, but I don't think it's an adequate representation of the right sort of answer.

There will inevitably be some justified appeal to "mystery" at some level. (On a question like, for example, how can the universe be infinite-yet-expanding? What's it expanding into, if it isn't more universe? A limited, contingent, temporal being cannot only not expect to know that answer, but can't ever be expected to have the data to answer it, and that's fair enough.) But I do not think that the question of evil entirely falls into such a zone of the legitimately unknowable, even if, on the fringes, it might well end up there.

The Bible doesn't treat the question as utterly unknowable, but as partially knowable, as perhaps unknowably in extremis, but not utterly so. And I'd tend to treat it the same way. Moreover, in books like Habakkuk or Job, it treats the question as quite reasonable and legitimate, and as capable of at least partially being answered. It even treats such a question as reverent and appropriate, I would say. So I'm going to side with you against the appealers to "mystery" here, and say they haven't done enough work on the question yet.

[Immanuel Can]

Absolutely Free Will gives us no choice because absolutely Free Will overrides any choice and randomly does whatever it does for no reason.

Well, nobody's been talking about "absolutely free will," in that sense, B. The domain of our concern is not, say, the ability to flap one's arms and fly. Nor does "free will" imply "for no reason." In fact, since free will inevitably involves choice, "reasons" will also always be involved, be they good or bad ones.

We're talking about moral volition, the ability to choose between a "good" and a "not-good." And if you check my message to AC, you'll see that the demands for such free will are actually extremely modest. Free will does not require much in order to exist, but it does entail much. Not everything, though.

[Astro Cat]

I'm saying that often, I don't think it's easy at all. We are, after all, souls in bodies, to put it simply. What affects the body has echoes in the soul, and out of the intimations of the soul come many things that produce bodily effects. There is a harmonization between the two that is not easy to account for in strictly dualistic terms.

Just because things interact doesn't mean they aren't separable conceptually. Regardless of whether you find it implausible, do you think that it's logically possible to have a world where your body doesn't experience discomfort or pain? Do you think it's logically possible to be rejected by a love interest without feeling a hollow feeling in your stomach (though perhaps still feel mentally bad about it)?

I'm not sure what that means, "toy world." Is it an expression from a conversation you had with somebody else? Maybe I need some background to understand what you intend it to imply.

"Toy world" was used by Swinburne to talk about special types of universes that are logically possible where God might have done different things to prevent suffering. In the context of my argument, a toy world is a world that is possible for an omnipotent and omniscient being to create where people do not experience physical suffering (not just "don't experience pain," but cannot be harmed by hot burners, cannot stub their toes, cannot catch diseases or be born with defects, and so on).

I'm not sure we do. After all, as I said earlier, "omnipotence" and "omniscience" are not Biblical descriptors, but rather attempts by some theologians to label some feature they think might adequately capture a divine property. But because they're only invented terms, they need a lot of theological nuancing and explaining before they can be accepted at all. We've seen, in my last message, ways in which both "omnipotence" and "omnibenevolence" are far from clear concepts.

I clarified these, though. Let's talk about some of the terminology:

1) Do you think God has the power to actualize any logically possible state of affairs? This precludes being able to do anything logically impossible such as making a Euclidean square-circle, making a rock so heavy He can't lift it, being God and not-God at the same time and in the same respect, and so on. Do you agree God has this level of power? If so, that is what's being called "omnipotence" for this scenario.

2) "Gratuitous suffering" is suffering which doesn't have some higher purpose behind it, it's just suffering. For instance, if I step on an ant on my way to my vehicle, the ant has ostensibly suffered gratuitously because I didn't do this in order to enable some greater purpose down the line such that it was "worth it" to step on the ant: it just suffered, period, end of story. Giving someone an inocculation isn't gratuitous suffering because there's some greater reason behind the suffering (it's a necessary part of boosting their immune system). Do you agree with this distinction between gratuitous suffering and non-gratuitous suffering such that I can use these terms understandably?

3) It is really convenient for me to just use the word "benevolence," so let's try to come to an understanding by what I mean by that even if it's idiosyncratic to this conversation. When I say that "S is benevolent," I mean that S will attempt to avoid instantiating gratuitous suffering both by positive action (directly inflicting the gratuitous suffering) and by omission of action (allowing the gratuitous suffering to exist). If I didn't know that the ant was there when I stepped on it, that doesn't make me non-benevolent because something happened outside of my knowledge that caused suffering. However, if I see the ant and don't change the way I'm walking (or worse, deliberately step on it), then I could be said not to be benevolent in that case.

4) It is also convenient for me to be able to use the word "malevolence," so again, let's try to come to an understanding even if it's idiosyncratic to this conversation. When I say "S is malevolent," I mean that S will either attempt to cause gratuitous suffering by positive action (deliberately step on an ant) or not care that she has caused gratuitous suffering in pursuit of her goals even if she could have done something otherwise (e.g., seeing the ant, and instead of walking around, stepping on it).

Do you have any problems with the usage of any of these terms, even if you find some of them to be idiosyncratic for this conversation?

But our choices are already limited and we consider ourselves free (also, you could kick the doorframe full force if you want; the physics of the universe might just subtract inertia from the blow towards your toe).

Yes, but that's not problematic for the issue of free will. Free will does not require that we must be able to do everything. Its requirements are actually quite minimal. Let me suggest what they are.

In order for an entity to have free will (in a domain of relevance), he/she must be possessed of no fewer than two options.

In other words, a person needs two "roads of choice" in any given domain in order to have free will in that matter. And I don't think one can argue with that: it seems terribly obvious. If one has only one way to go, one cannot, by definition, "choose." One simply has to go where one is forced to go.

Now, what is the "domain of relevance" in our present discussion? Let me suggest it, again in the very broadest terms. It is the domain of "the good." I'll leave it that vague for the moment, since "the good" encompasses many things, such as being loving, being generous, being compassionate, being honest, and so forth, so we need a catch-all label for all of that. In Christian thought, though, the consummate good is "loving God" and having a personal relationship with Him, so that would also have to be part of that broader package, presumably...if Christian conceptions of the good are implicated.

So we move forward step by step. One needs two choices. The matter of relevance is choosing "the good." If one is going to choose "the good," then inescapably one is going to need to also have the option of choosing "the-not-good," something that is not whatever "the good" is. For convenience, let's call that "evil."

The upshot is that inorder for a being to have "free will" in the moral domain, it is necessary that he/she must be able to choose between things that are genuinely good, and things that are genuinely not-good, or evil.

Then the question arises: is "free will" then a "good"? Well, we all certainly seem to think it is. It's a sine qua non for a lot of things human beings value passionately...freedom, love, personhood and individual identity, volition, courage, honesty, mercy...and a ton of other obvious "goods."

Is free will such a surpassing good that it would be better to have a world in which some not-good existed than to have a world in which both evil and choice were eliminated (along with love, mercy, charity, courage, freedom, personhood, etc.)?

I'm going to say, yes. It seems evident to me that a world that contains free-will having beings is much better than a world that does not, even if in that latter world, none experience evils. It seems to me that personhood, identity, conscience, and so forth, along with mercy, courage, commitment, moral choices, and so forth is much more meaningful and liberated than a world that lacks all those things.

Your comments here remind me of Plantinga's "God, Freedom & Evil" where he performs a similar move: he demarcates "free will" from "relevantly free will," where S is "relevantly free" if S is able to make choices that inflict suffering on others.

I have a few points:

A) People would still be relevantly free in a Toy World (one in which physical suffering isn't possible). As I've pointed out, people may still choose "not-the-good" by breaking promises, by treating someone in a jerkish way, by lying, and so forth. So, I don't think you can make the argument that physical suffering is necessary for "relevantly free will." The world can lack physical suffering and still contain relevantly free will where people must choose honesty over lying, being nice over being a jerk, and so forth.

B) I disagree that "relevantly free will" is a good thing when it comes to physical suffering, and I think many people would intuitively agree with me after a few points.

i) For instance, a lot of Christian conceptions of Heaven are as a place with free will yet without physical suffering. Do you share this view? If so, the reasons for why physical suffering aren't there in Heaven also differ from person to person, so let me ask you (on the condition you do share the view that Heaven is a place without physical suffering yet with free will): are people in Heaven not relevantly free; can they not choose the not-good?

ii) Let me re-visit my alien analogy from the other thread. Say there is a pocket universe where people exist in a Toy World, one without physical suffering. These people go about their day doing what they will, perhaps visiting a park, perhaps playing games with some friends, perhaps spending time with a partner, perhaps writing a book, and so on. Nobody in this world suffers from disease, there is no such thing as violence (people can try, of course, but nobody gets hurt). The word "innocent victim" doesn't exist because nobody can be a victim of a violent crime, they don't even have a word for how to describe it when something like an innocent child is brutally slaughtered; it's not even in their vocabulary.

Now let's say an alien goes to this dimension and changes the physics of the world such that suddenly, earthquakes shake the land, people start being born with debilitating birth defects, people suddenly find that violence is possible and are able to hurt one another. The world is now filled with privation, starvation, disease, rape, and violence.

Did the alien really do this world a favor? Does your intuition really say "ah yes, what a benevolent and good alien for doing this, the freedom to suffer and inflict suffering is so much better than what they were doing before?"

In a world without physical suffering, there are still character-building choices. Just because you can't stab your neighbor doesn't mean you can't break a promise to them or say jerkish things to them:

I think this vastly oversimplifies the role that volition plays in harm, as well as the role consciousness plays in moral guiltiness. And I don't see any justification for the distinction there.

If to "break a promise" and to "say jerkish things" are forms of harm at all, then God would still be culpable for allowing "harm," would He not? So is it just a matter of degree? Is it just that a physical wound is less egregious than a mental wound? I think there are people who would doubt that. But in any case, if we indict God for allowing "harm," I see no reason for saying, "But mental harms are not a big deal; only physical harms are." They seem, to me, to be of-a-piece in that respect. And I see not justification in blaming God for physical harms, on the one hand, but giving him a total pass on all harms that don't obviously involve a physical wound. Is not, for example, mental abuse at least sometimes a fairly egregious form of "harm"?

I know folks who would insist it is.

First, I'm not saying that physical wounds are more egregious than mental wounds.

I'm saying that in terms of removing an entire category of suffering, if God removed physical suffering, will would still be free as people would still be able to do and think and say as they like. However if God were to remove mental suffering, that would necessitate people not saying what they think, or perhaps not even thinking what they might think. It would necessitate people not feeling things about other people to avoid mental suffering such as unrequited love, it would necessitate controlling people to prevent things like broken promises. Removing mental suffering irrevocably imposes on free will to such an extent that one would wonder by the end whether what was left was still "free" at all. Not so with physical suffering, and that's the point: if you remove all of physical suffering, an entire category of it, beings would still be quite free.

I have also considered framing the argument in terms of innocent victims and asking why God couldn't prevent innocent victimhood such that the only times you suffer are as a result of a choice you've made (rather than being at the whims of someone else's choice, or acts of nature). Even so, removing physical suffering takes care of the most egregious forms of innocent victimhood. You can make an "innocent victim" by lying to someone or calling them mean names, I suppose, but people have the power to stop listening to liars and name-callers; people don't have the power to stop getting stabbed: it seems categorically different kinds of innocent victimhood.

To me, it looks like you're positing a world in which people are just as full of hateful and harmful impulses as always, but are chained by impotence from acting on them. It doesn't seem a nice place at all, but rather a place of tooth-grinding incapacity.

Well, and at the risk of adding yet more to a conversation with a lot going on, that was the point of asking why God didn't give people more knowledge. The conversation that prompted this whole thing came from me asking a Christian why Adam and Eve were able to sin after they made a comment that Adam and Eve were formed perfectly and without the desire to sin (which itself came from a question about whether people sin in Heaven, and they had said "no, because people will be perfected in Heaven). Their response was that Adam and Eve were deceived into sin. So I wondered, "well, why wouldn't God arm them with knowledge against deception from the first place then?"

If people have "hateful and harmful" impulses, why do you think that is, IC? Is that the way that God made them; and if so, isn't that sort of on God?

So free will does entail some kinds of suffering existing;

Ah.

So what we're talking about is only a matter of degree. You're just not certain that the proportions of suffering in the world have been rightly balanced, not that having any suffering at all is always bad.

But how do we estimate "the right proportions"? How do we know that the proportions of suffering God has allowed in this world are not the exact minimum necessary for genuine free will to be possible? How do we balance and weigh, from our limited, embodied perspectives, all the variables that would go into creating and running such a world?

That is why I try to choose entire categories rather than "degrees" of suffering. God could have done without the entire category of physical suffering, all of it. Or God could have prevented the entire concept of innocent victimhood from physical suffering.

---------

I think we have mostly stuck to your three questions in this post, hopefully it is staying relatively contained, lol!

[Belinda]

Killing rabbits is part of what defines weasel and is neither good or bad....It's unlikely that the biological human is any more bad than the weasel or the rabbit.

Okay, then, explain what you mean by this, then...

The human does bad things because of his cultural ideology.

No, he does human things because of his human nature. Just like weasels do weasel things because of their weasel nature. You can't call them "bad" now.

You already ruled that out. Evil no longer can be invoked, according to you.

I defined bad as departure from the biological animal,and I defined good as the default state i.e. the biological animal. Evil is cultural in its definitions, and existence; evil is understood as cultural analyses, and is expressed as ideologies.

I cannot call bad events bad because of man's biological nature, but because of man's departure via bad ideologies from his biological innocence.

When you say "human nature" you are not differentiating between biological nature and biological nature that has been misshapen due to bad cultural influences.

[Immanuel Can]

Regardless of whether you find it implausible, do you think that it's logically possible to have a world where your body doesn't experience discomfort or pain?

Well, I'd say it's logically possible; but logically, would be a world of robots, essentially. They would also have to be utterly insensate robots, since even ordinary touch, neurologically, is a mild form of physical pain. Or possibly they'd be a kind of leper, with no active nerves left, so that whatever they touched they didn't feel.

And if the volition of such robots, lepers or zombies was free, but their physical bodies were not, then it would logically be a vale of tormented robots, as well, continually imagining what they were utterly powerless to actualize. I'm not sure that would be anything we would want to imagine.

Let's talk about some of the terminology:

1) Do you think God has the power to actualize any logically possible state of affairs? This precludes being able to do anything logically impossible such as making a Euclidean square-circle, making a rock so heavy He can't lift it, being God and not-God at the same time and in the same respect, and so on. Do you agree God has this level of power? If so, that is what's being called "omnipotence" for this scenario. If you're still worried, we can call it "omnipotence-1" so that it's very clear when we're talking about this specific definition (though it's the only one I ever use, just trying to speak to your comfort level with the term here).

Okay, so we're not going to include moral character in any discussion of "omnipotence," say by asking, "Can God do evil?" (Of course, the answer would be "No," obviously, since God Himself would be the thermometer of any such judgment, objectively.) But we're only going to focus on what is logically possible? That's what you want from the word "omnipotence?"

I just have to make sure I understand the stipulations of the usage you wish to make of the term, before we go on. It's evident that "omnipotence" is not really understood that way in theology, but I'll give you whatever stipulative usage you wish.

2) "Gratuitous suffering" is suffering which doesn't have some higher purpose behind it, it's just suffering.

How would we detect "gratuitous" suffering? "Gratuitious" means "free." In this case, does it mean free of causes? Or does it mean free of consequences? I don't think so. I think you're trying to say, "Suffering for which no justification or purpose can ever be produced." But I think we'd need to be God in order to detect such a thing. There's a kind of "butterfly effect" problem here, at the very least...too many variables in play, over too long at time, for us ever to be able to say with any assurance, "That bit of suffering was entirely without warrant, purpose, consequences..."

Who's qualified to say they know that?

3) It is really convenient for me to just use the word "benevolence," so let's try to come to an understanding by what I mean by that even if it's idiosyncratic to this conversation. When I say that "S is benevolent," I mean that S will attempt to avoid instantiating gratuitous suffering both by positive action (directly inflicting the gratuitous suffering) and by omission of action (allowing the gratuitous suffering to exist).

Well, we're back to the former problem: how do we detect that a particular suffering was "gratutious"? If the avoidance of "gratuity" were sufficient, then a strict Determinist or Calvinist would say that God is utterly benevolent, since nothing He does or allows is ever gratuitious. I'm not in their camp on that, but I see the problem that raises: it's the difference between what you and I see as gratutitous, and what actually might be gratutitous. The two are clearly not the same. I often do not understand the particular reasons for something coming about; that does not even remotely imply there were no such things as causes, purposes or consequences involved...it only shows I really don't know everything...not a surprise, even to me.

That I perceive something to be "gratuitious" is a statement about my epistemological powers and limitations.

That something IS "gratuitious" would, in contrast, be an ontological claim, and one my epistemological powers do not give me the means to judge reliably.

In fact, I think a great deal of harm, of the mental sort, anyway, is done by people's demand to have knowledge of things they clearly do not know. For example, you'll be familiar with the phenomenon of the allegedly-sympathetic friend who tells you, "I know exactly how you feel."

She knows no such thing. You know she knows no such thing. She has not been you. She did not experience exactly what you experienced. What she's saying is, "I draw on my own epistemological powers, and find something in my experience that makes me think I can analogize that to your experience." But she's wrong. The analogy may or may not approximate your feelings, but it never captures them absolutely.

Or think of the person who says to somebody else, "I know why you have cancer; it's because you smoked, or because you had a job in a toxic place, or because you didn't eat broccoli." Does she really "know" any such thing? What temerity, on her part, to presume to "know" why you got cancer! But is she any wiser if she says to you, "I know there's no reason for your cancer; it's gratuitious." Is she any better positioned to know either thing?

Does God allow "gratuitous" suffering? What would be our evidence that He did?

It would surely not be enough for us to say, "I don't see the reason for X, therefore there can't be a reason for X." That's not at all logical. Many things I do not see, or do not yet see, have reasons for being of which I have no actual knowledge. That's a truism.

4) It is also convenient for me to be able to use the word "malevolence," so again, let's try to come to an understanding even if it's idiosyncratic to this conversation. When I say "S is malevolent," I mean that S will either attempt to cause gratuitous suffering by positive action

Same issue here.

Do you have any problems with the usage of any of these terms, even if you find some of them to be idiosyncratic for this conversation?

Well, just the above. I think we need to be sure we can warrant the term "gratuitious." We certainly can't take for granted that there is such a thing, and then just move on as if we know there is. And our lack of accuity in being able to discern what the causes or purposes for a thing is ought to chasten any claims we try to make subsequently, and make them at least somewhat humble.

It's not a clear case, then, that we can say, "There are gratuitous incidents, and God causes or allows them." We don't know that. We're letting our manifestly flawed and partial epistemology be treated as if it were giving us an ontological fact. That's too much to do.

But our choices are already limited and we consider ourselves free (also, you could kick the doorframe full force if you want; the physics of the universe might just subtract inertia from the blow towards your toe).

Yes, but that's not problematic for the issue of free will. Free will does not require that we must be able to do everything. Its requirements are actually quite minimal. Let me suggest what they are.

In order for an entity to have free will (in a domain of relevance), he/she must be possessed of no fewer than two options.

In other words, a person needs two "roads of choice" in any given domain in order to have free will in that matter. And I don't think one can argue with that: it seems terribly obvious. If one has only one way to go, one cannot, by definition, "choose." One simply has to go where one is forced to go.

Now, what is the "domain of relevance" in our present discussion? Let me suggest it, again in the very broadest terms. It is the domain of "the good." I'll leave it that vague for the moment, since "the good" encompasses many things, such as being loving, being generous, being compassionate, being honest, and so forth, so we need a catch-all label for all of that. In Christian thought, though, the consummate good is "loving God" and having a personal relationship with Him, so that would also have to be part of that broader package, presumably...if Christian conceptions of the good are implicated.

So we move forward step by step. One needs two choices. The matter of relevance is choosing "the good." If one is going to choose "the good," then inescapably one is going to need to also have the option of choosing "the-not-good," something that is not whatever "the good" is. For convenience, let's call that "evil."

The upshot is that inorder for a being to have "free will" in the moral domain, it is necessary that he/she must be able to choose between things that are genuinely good, and things that are genuinely not-good, or evil.

Then the question arises: is "free will" then a "good"? Well, we all certainly seem to think it is. It's a sine qua non for a lot of things human beings value passionately...freedom, love, personhood and individual identity, volition, courage, honesty, mercy...and a ton of other obvious "goods."

Is free will such a surpassing good that it would be better to have a world in which some not-good existed than to have a world in which both evil and choice were eliminated (along with love, mercy, charity, courage, freedom, personhood, etc.)?

I'm going to say, yes. It seems evident to me that a world that contains free-will having beings is much better than a world that does not, even if in that latter world, none experience evils. It seems to me that personhood, identity, conscience, and so forth, along with mercy, courage, commitment, moral choices, and so forth is much more meaningful and liberated than a world that lacks all those things.

Your comments here remind me of Plantinga's "God, Freedom & Evil" where he performs a similar move: he demarcates "free will" from "relevantly free will," where S is "relevantly free" if S is able to make choices that inflict suffering on others.

I think something's not quite right there.

It doesn't seem to me that "relevantly free" means "able to inflict suffering." I could be relevantly free to try to burn down my neighbour's house, but fail to do it, while still being relevantly free, in that I can try it. It seems to me that it's not so much a question of what suffering happens, but whether or not I'm free to enact certain actions that I believe to be capable of issuing in such a result. And that seems to me to be "malevolent" as well, whether or not my plot succeeds.

So maybe we could say that "freedom" (relevantly considered) entails the ability to perform actions capable of causing harm to others, actualizing a mental intention to harm in concrete terms, even if not guaranteed by circumstance to achieve their end.

But why just "harm"? Why not "benevolence," too? Is it not equally the case that "free will" would entail that I am granted the power to perform actions which I calculate to be capable of benefitting, blessing or helping my neighbour? Why would we suppose "freedom" would only be actualized on the "malevolent" side? I see no reason to skew the discussion in the negative direction from the get-go, do you?

I have a few points:

A) People would still be relevantly free in a Toy World (one in which physical suffering isn't possible).

And one in which blessing, love, joy, help, charity and so forth were also not possible?

But I don't think that's a sufficient characterization of "relevant freedom," so no, the "toy world" is not free, as I indicated above. It's the land of tormented robots, possibly, but not of what we'd call "freedom."

As I've pointed out, people may still choose "not-the-good" by breaking promises, by treating someone in a jerkish way, by lying, and so forth. So, I don't think you can make the argument that physical suffering is necessary for "relevantly free will."

What about my observation that "mental" harms are still harms, and, far from being the insignificant thing you might suppose, can sometimes be as bad or worse than physical harms?

I think there's a strong case to be made for that. I know both men and women who from, say, a childhood of mental and verbal abuse, live as emotional cripples and victims. And some of them would actually prefer to be mentally disabled, if they could.

True story. I had a female friend who was bipolar. I went to visit her, and she offered me dinner. While she was stirring something on the stove, I looked down at her wrist. She had carved her name (three initials) into her own wrist.

I asked her, "How did that happen?"

She said, "I tore a pop can in half, and carved that there myself."

I said, "Why did you do it?"

She said, "Because the pain in my head was so great, that only when I hurt myself can I be distracted from it. With the pop can, I can start and stop the pain at will. I can't do that with the pain in my head."

That iilustrates just how bad mental suffering can be. It can be so bad that physical suffering is better.

And maybe you also have a similar experience. I've noted this: that young men, when they are being cruel to each other, generally tend to get into physical altercations and punch it out. It's short, violent and decisive, in many cases. But after that, things are often settled. The combatants may actually even end up as reluctant respecters or even friends, if the altercation resulted in a balanced and seemingly-fair outcome. By contrast, young women are unlikely to engage in fisticuffs. They mistreat each other by way of things like reputation-savaging and ostracism from the group. And they're vindictive, too...much longer in their antipathies, and much more obsessive with them than most men tend to be.

Are the cruelties young women visit on each other less or more egregious than the violent conflicts that often characterize young men? You tell me, from your experience; because I've been in fistfights, but I know nothing of the catty cruelty of women, except from the outside. Do young women do each other mental harm? Are they "malevolent"? Do they do evil?

If they do, is it any better than what the young men do? Is the mental injury really so distinct from the physical? And can we indict God for allowing the sudden violence of the young men, but completely exonerate Him of any complicity with the wickedness of the young women, simply because their cruelty was mental and the former was physical?

B) I disagree that "relevantly free will" is a good thing when it comes to physical suffering,

Oh, I never said anything close to the idea that "relevantly free will...when it comes to physical suffering is a good thing." I said that physical suffering is an entailment of "relevantly free will," and as such, is an inevitable part of the latter. But it's a regrettable part...not something we would wish, if we could have it otherwise.

However, logically, we cannot. Given that, the necessity of physical suffering is something we have to accept.

That's quite different from saying, "It's a good thing" when people suffer. It's just a better thing that they are free that not.

i) For instance, a lot of Christian conceptions of Heaven are as a place with free will yet without physical suffering. Do you share this view?

I did deal with this earlier.

The term "heaven" is problematic, and comes with a bunch of pop-culture baggage I don't want. But that's a secondary point. More importantly, what is sufficient for free will (in the domain of choosing the good), is to have, at one time, sufficient opportunity to make a genuine choice. After that, the choice is forever a free one, regardless of whether or not the option to reverse that choice remains.

So I gave the example of marriage. In marriage, we pledge to be, in a sense, "unfree." We bind ourselves to another, in such a way that we "forsake all others, as long as we both shall live," in the famous coinage. We swear an oath to that effect, in fact. But after we do, nobody comes up to us and says, "Do you realize your choice was not free? Because now, you can't sleep with everybody anymore." That would be silly. We'd reply, "I have freely chosen to bind myself to this one person forever; and it is a perfect exercise of my freedom to do so, because I am willingly relinquishing the false freedom of multiple partners for the permanent freedom of loving somebody forever."

Heaven (to employ your term) is that. It's the permanent consequence of having freely bound oneself to another Person in love. As such, one no longer needs to revisit the choice; it was, and is, fully free. But being "married" to the new nature, one is not any longer a slave to sin. One does not any longer desire the allurements of the alternative to the Good. It is as if one has given up promiscuous evil in order to be committed to absolute good. There's nothing at all unfree about such a decision.

are people in Heaven not relevantly free;

Yes.

can they not choose the not-good?

No.

But if they had NEVER had an alternative offered to them, if they'd NEVER had an option to choose not-God, or not-good, THEN we could not speak of them as having "made a choice," and they would not be "relevantly free." However that state is the state of no human being.

Did the alien really do this world a favor? Does your intuition really say "ah yes, what a benevolent and good alien for doing this, the freedom to suffer and inflict suffering is so much better than what they were doing before?"

Well, like all analogies, it's like its subject in one way, but unlike in others: and to be a good analogy, it really needs to line up in the relevant areas. I find that this one doesn't.

Could I revise? What if the "Alien" were to happen on a land of robots. And suppose he were to desire that they should be freed to become persons, individuals, autonomous agents, with choices, creativity, personalities, and so forth. And suppose the Alien's intentions were benevolent toward the robots, desiring that the should not become merely free, but also his friends and companions, to whom the Alien would then open up all the voyaging, exploring, and creative possibilities of the entire universe, to be enjoyed mutually forever?

But suppose he were to know that in doing so, he would logically also have to open up to them the possibility that they would choose badly? And what if he realized that if they were going to choose the good, they would also logically have to be able to choose something quite bad; and that there was rationally no possibility of avoiding this situation?

Should the Alien free the robots? Your call.

I'm not saying that physical wounds are more egregious than mental wounds.

Okay. But then both are equally "harm." And if we're going to indict God for allowing physical harms, how can we simply turn a blind eye to all the mental harms, and say they don't matter? Don't we have to be consistent, in order to be just?

If God has to allow mental harms, in order for free will to be operative, then why would we think physical harms would be any worse? Would they not be part-and-parcel of exactly the same thing: of a world of free moral agents, each fully able to both will and to do as he/she would decide, in the battle between the good and the evil?

I'm saying that in terms of removing an entire category of suffering, if God removed physical suffering, will would still be free as people would still be able to do and think and say as they like.

And that's what I'm interrogating. I suspect it's just not true. I think desire and action are of-a-piece, when it comes to the business of human volition. One cannot merely have desires upon which one is utterly prevented from acting, and say that one's cognitions are being granted "freedom," or one's personal agency is being upheld. One is, instead, a tortured robot.

Removing mental suffering irrevocably imposes on free will to such an extent that one would wonder by the end whether what was left was still "free" at all.

Right.

Not so with physical suffering, and that's the point: if you remove all of physical suffering, an entire category of it, beings would still be quite free.

I'm suggesting they wouldn't be. But in any case, that wouldn't get God off the hook. A God who allowed mental suffering would still be a God who allowed suffering...and very significantly so.

I have also considered framing the argument in terms of innocent victims and asking why God couldn't prevent innocent victimhood such that the only times you suffer are as a result of a choice you've made (rather than being at the whims of someone else's choice, or acts of nature).

Yes, so have I.

But it entails at least one obvious problem. Probably more.

I'm not speaking of the difficulty of locating the term "innocent victim," though that's significant, for sure. I'm speaking instead of the coercive properties of being prevented from actualizing one's decisions, whether they entail victims or not. If you are going to be allowed to choose evil, then evil being what it is, it takes victims. It's not a tame thing. It's not a form of good. It doesn't restrain or respect anybody, and it especially has no regard for justice. So victims are exactly what evil delights to take. And the more "innocent," the better, so far as evil assesses things.

This is why we regard pedophiles with special horror. This is why Satanists celebrate the defiling of virgins. This is why predators seek out the weak and vulnerable and the more pure, and defile it. Evil really is evil. Don't expect it to leave the victims alone.

Moreover, if free choice is to be a reality, it can only be so in a world in which there is no automatic and evident connection between things like doing the good and getting good results, or doing evil and getting harmed for it. If people are to be free, then the immediate consquences of their choices must be at least roughly equal, so far as they can know in advance. The evil must look roughly as desirable as the good, if for different reasons. So it must not be the case that the right hand of every thief immediately falls off, or the tongue of every wicked gossip immediately explodes into flame. There must at least seem to be some chance of proximal gains for thieves, and some chance of stirring up some delicious drama for the gossip, and no certain prospect of immediate punishment. Otherwise, what happens is that the environment itself operates like a "classical conditioning" experiment, dealing out rewards and punishments for good and evil choices, respectively; and the human subject is coerced into choosing only good behavior by the impossiblity of succeeding at bad behaviour, and by the threat of immanent punishment.

So that argues for a radically-free environment, as well...one in which justice and injustice are suspended, and their results not known in advance. There must be no obvious cause-effect chain militating against one choice or another. It must seem, from different perspectives, equally feasible to steal as not to steal...and perhaps even slightly more attractive to do the evil option, as the good one already has its own attractions, but evil does better with adornmments of some kind.

You can make an "innocent victim" by lying to someone or calling them mean names, I suppose,

Well, that's certainly characteristic of the world of women, as it seems to me. They do awful things to one another, without ever lifting a finger. But you'd know more about that than I, I suspect.

Adam and Eve were formed perfectly and without the desire to sin...

Milton used the phrase "sufficient to have stood, but free to fall.' Theologians refer to that as a state of "innocency." Not "innocence"; "innocency," to distinguish it deliberately from "innocence."

"Innocency" means that the original state of human beings was as not guilty of any particular sin, but also as volitionally free...with the capacity to have chosen the good, but also with the option to choose otherwise.

So I wondered, "well, why wouldn't God arm them with knowledge against deception from the first place then?"

He did, according to Milton et al. But they still were volitionally free.

And do you remember what I said earlier about evil, that it sometimes needs an adornment in order to sell itself? Well, the adornment for the fall was the promise of total autonomy, of "being like God," rather than simply of "being with God." (Gen. 3:5 ) That adornment sold the package.

If people have "hateful and harmful" impulses, why do you think that is, IC? Is that the way that God made them; and if so, isn't that sort of on God?

Well, the Biblical answer is that mankind is no longer walking in step with God. He/she is alienated, in rebellion, rejecting, and going his/her own way. And what happens when one moves away, and breaks one's relationship with the Ultimate Source of all goodness, life, light, joy, health, wisdom, truth, hope, and so on? One gets (and one becomes) the opposite of all those things.

What's obvious to both of us, I think, AC, is just what you identify here: that people DO have "hateful and harmful impulses." That's empirically obvious, isn't it? But why don't we step back one step, and ask ourselves this, as well:

How is it that we are able to recognize certain impulses as "hateful and harmful," or "evil"? I mean, given the assumption that you and I live in a universe that is actually just a product of time plus chance, a place that exists purely by accident and changes purely by physical processes, moving in no particular direction and without intended purpose of any kind, how is it that you and I don't see everything that happens as merely neutral? How is it we are able to assess some things as "good" and others as "evil," and even pose such questions as require us to adopt the view that evil is an objective property, as we do when we ask, "Can God allow evil"? (You can see, we have to be meaning objective evil, or there's no actual question there at all.) How did we, contingent, accidental beings that we are, come up with such a concept as morality? And when we think we "recognize" good and evil, are we "recognizing" them as being actually there, or only as epiphenomenal delusions in our contingent minds?

So if, AC, you're saying to me, "It's wrong of God to allow innocent victims to be hurt," you're already drawing heavily on the presuppositions of objective morality -- presuppositions to which you would have no right at all, and no logical entitlement, if we did not actually live in a universe that had objective moral properties in it.

But how did such things get there? That's the question the skeptic can never sufficiently answer.

I think we have mostly stuck to your three questions in this post, hopefully it is staying relatively contained, lol!

I'm getting long and windy again, I confess. If your questions weren't so good, and didn't provoke so much thought, maybe I could be more parsimonious. So I'm going to blame you, if anybody will buy that.

[iambiguous]

Logic revolves around the rules of language. And while other creatures use sound to communicate none but our own species have come up with an Aristotle.

"What is the importance of language in logic?

Logic, which protects our minds from falling into error, finds a space for expression through language. Thoughts and concepts that qualify as right or wrong occur through language. Therefore, in order to determine the logical validity of any reasoning, it must be expressed through language and gained an argument form." https://zenodo.org/record/3733477#.Y98Vzy_MLIU

Human beings needed to invent language in order to describe things scientifically, philosophically. To explore what it is rational to know about things. No other species really comes even close to us. At least on this planet.

The distinction I make is between thinking logically about interactions in the either/or world...biology, physics, chemistry, geology, meteorology etc. And then the limitations of logic/language in regard to conflicting goods in the is/ought world...moral, political and spiritual value judgments.

So, this comes down to something of an equivocation (not on your part knowingly, but society's) where the word "logic" is used to mean something that's actually more in line with the word "reason."

Lots of people use them interchangeably. But then there is "philosophical logic":

"Understood in a narrow sense, philosophical logic is the area of logic that studies the application of logical methods to philosophical problems, often in the form of extended logical systems like modal logic."

Okay, but how narrow? And what problem?

That's why I always suggest we focus in on a particular "human all too human" context and note how we distinguish between them. Rational often revolves around behaviors deemed either to make sense or not to make sense. Logic seems more in regard to the language we use to encompass them in our communication with others.

In Star Trek, when Spock said "that seems logical, captain," it is nearly always the case that what he actually meant is to say "that seems reasonable, captain."

Indeed, and I explored that in a post over at ILP:

One of the sub-plots in the Star Trek IV film revolved around the perennial squabble between Kirk and Spock over the role of emotion in human interaction. I say human interaction because, as those who enjoy immersing themselves in the Star Trek universe know, Spock was half human and half Vulcan. The Vulcan half was basically bereft of emotional reactions. A Vulcan's reaction to the world was always logical, supremely rational. Thus the human half of Spock was, apparently, something he kept buried deep down in his psyche.

In the course of the movie, the Kirk [emotional], Spock [rational] conflict ebbed and flowed. But in a climactic scene near the end, the crew of the Enterprise are in a jam. One of their comrades, Pavel Chekhov, is isolated from the rest of them. He is in a hospital sure to die if not rescued. But if the crew goes after him they risk the possibility of not completing their mission. And if they don't complete their mission every man, woman and child on earth will die.

Spock's initial reaction is purely calculated: It is clearly more important [more rational, more ethical] to save the lives of all planet earth's inhabitants than to risk these lives in the effort to save just one man.

But Kirk intervenes emotionally and reminds everyone that Chekhov is one of them. So, naturally, this being a Hollywood movie, Spock ends up agreeing that saving Chekhov is now the #1 priority. And, naturally, this being a Hollywood film, they still have time to rescue planet earth from the whale-probe. Barely.

But think about the ethical dilemma posed in the film. Is it more rational [ethical] to save Chekhov, if it means possibly the destruction of all human life on earth?

What are the limits of ethical inquiry here in deciding this? Can it even be decided ethically?

Consider it in two ways:

In the first, we can rescue our beloved friend knowing there might still be time to rescue everyone else.

In the second, we can rescue our beloved friend knowing that, if we do, there is no time left to rescue everyone else.

So, how would someone [philosopher or not] differentiate using reason and using logic here?

You note that...

Reason is a process that minds do: you wouldn't have reason if you didn't have minds. But logic is just about consistency and adherence to reality. While you wouldn't have symbols and words to represent logic without minds, the things that the symbols and words are about would still be there without minds. So for instance consider logical self-identity, that A = A: minds don't have to be around to note that a thing, if it exists, exists as itself. Minds don't "invent" that. Minds do invent words and symbols to talk about it, but the thing itself (self-identity) is not created by minds; it's only referenced by minds.

But it is entirely intellectual. The words are not connected to the world of conflicting goods. In either a God or a No God world. How is your assessment applicable to the quandary faced by Kirk and Spock above? Or to the moral conflagration that revolves around abortion or capital punishment or the Ukraine conflict.

This also addresses your comments about capitalism, for instance: that's not a question about logic (it's not a question about internal and external consistency); it's a question about reasoning. I never said that reasoning is independent of minds (it's necessarily so), I'm saying that logic is. Not the symbols and the words we use when we study logic, obviously (those we do create), but logic is a referent for the references we make to it in the same way that a tree is a referent for the reference "tree" (we create the reference, but we do not create the referent).

Okay, but what do we use to reason about capitalism and socialism? Language/words. And if, say, next month, the Big One strikes Earth and wipes out all of humanity, what of logic then? Isn't that why many come around to an omniscient/omnipotent God here? That transcending font that links all of us to an essential, divine logic?

I don't see how this is on topic to the OP.

Yeah, I get that a lot.

I don't see how mere mortals who are clearly nowhere near to being either omniscient or omnipotent or omnibenevolent can come up with a logical assessment of God.

What God? The one that you "think up" in your head? The one you are indoctrinated to believe in as a child? The one that just happens to be in sync with your own historical and cultural context?

The PoE responds to particular premises about what God is proposed to be. If someone doesn't believe those premises, then the PoE does not apply to them: it can simply be dismissed since the premises are moot.

PoE? What does that encompass?

As for premises, my own main focus revolves less around what you believe about them "in your head" and more around how you go about demonstrating that all rational men and women are obligated to believe the same.

[Astro Cat]

Regardless of whether you find it implausible, do you think that it's logically possible to have a world where your body doesn't experience discomfort or pain?

Well, I'd say it's logically possible; but logically, would be a world of robots, essentially. They would also have to be utterly insensate robots, since even ordinary touch, neurologically, is a mild form of physical pain. Or possibly they'd be a kind of leper, with no active nerves left, so that whatever they touched they didn't feel.

And if the volition of such robots, lepers or zombies was free, but their physical bodies were not, then it would logically be a vale of tormented robots, as well, continually imagining what they were utterly powerless to actualize. I'm not sure that would be anything we would want to imagine.

I don't consider the sense of touch to be painful, though for instance my girlfriend has a nervous system problem where sometimes touch is painful (that wouldn't exist in a Toy World, though): do you?

Do you think it's logically possible for God to design bodies that are incapable of being maimed, burned, diseased, or inflicted with the physical sensation of pain while still allowing for neutral and pleasant sensations? Perhaps I should ask it that way.

Recall that God's power and knowledge mean that God could do this in novel ways other than the neurology we now possess before we go too deep into whether the kind of nerves we possess right now would be capable of that. I'm asking if God could in any way imaginable perform this feat, logically possibly.

Let's talk about some of the terminology:

1) Do you think God has the power to actualize any logically possible state of affairs? This precludes being able to do anything logically impossible such as making a Euclidean square-circle, making a rock so heavy He can't lift it, being God and not-God at the same time and in the same respect, and so on. Do you agree God has this level of power? If so, that is what's being called "omnipotence" for this scenario.

Okay, so we're not going to include moral character in any discussion of "omnipotence," say by asking, "Can God do evil?" (Of course, the answer would be "No," obviously, since God Himself would be the thermometer of any such judgment, objectively.) But we're only going to focus on what is logically possible? That's what you want from the word "omnipotence?"

I just have to make sure I understand the stipulations of the usage you wish to make of the term, before we go on. It's evident that "omnipotence" is not really understood that way in theology, but I'll give you whatever stipulative usage you wish.

If it is not logically possible for God to perform an action which is evil (whatever any of that means, we all know I'm a moral noncognitivist), then that means that God would still be omnipotent even if He can't perform an evil action (since it would be illogical for Him to do so). So omnipotence would still be applicable as a term to such a God. As I said somewhere before, this is because it would effectively be asking God not to be God (for A not to = A) if to be God necessarily entails never performing an evil action.

2) "Gratuitous suffering" is suffering which doesn't have some higher purpose behind it, it's just suffering.

How would we detect "gratuitous" suffering? "Gratuitious" means "free." In this case, does it mean free of causes? Or does it mean free of consequences? I don't think so. I think you're trying to say, "Suffering for which no justification or purpose can ever be produced." But I think we'd need to be God in order to detect such a thing. There's a kind of "butterfly effect" problem here, at the very least...too many variables in play, over too long at time, for us ever to be able to say with any assurance, "That bit of suffering was entirely without warrant, purpose, consequences..."

Who's qualified to say they know that?

That is part of what's being discussed (that's the heart of the greater good theodicy: to point out that we can't know with certainty which suffering might be gratuitous). The important part we're establishing right here though is just that we both get the same understanding of the term. Whether or not gratuitous suffering exists and whether or not it's possible to know it when we see it, we can agree on what the term means for now, yes? Suffering for which there isn't warrant, purpose, or consequences seems as good a description as any.

I agree that we'd have to be omniscient to know for sure which suffering might be gratuitous (if any), but that's a conversation for down the line. Right now I just need to make sure I can use the term without any confusion.

3) It is really convenient for me to just use the word "benevolence," so let's try to come to an understanding by what I mean by that even if it's idiosyncratic to this conversation. When I say that "S is benevolent," I mean that S will attempt to avoid instantiating gratuitous suffering both by positive action (directly inflicting the gratuitous suffering) and by omission of action (allowing the gratuitous suffering to exist).

Well, we're back to the former problem: how do we detect that a particular suffering was "gratutious"? If the avoidance of "gratuity" were sufficient, then a strict Determinist or Calvinist would say that God is utterly benevolent, since nothing He does or allows is ever gratuitious. I'm not in their camp on that, but I see the problem that raises: it's the difference between what you and I see as gratutitous, and what actually might be gratutitous. The two are clearly not the same. I often do not understand the particular reasons for something coming about; that does not even remotely imply there were no such things as causes, purposes or consequences involved...it only shows I really don't know everything...not a surprise, even to me.

That I perceive something to be "gratuitious" is a statement about my epistemological powers and limitations.

That something IS "gratuitious" would, in contrast, be an ontological claim, and one my epistemological powers do not give me the means to judge reliably.

Yes. You're jumping into the pool early though (but you've successfully detected what the ultimate sorts of issues I'm after are going to be about). But as with above, let's ignore whether we have the power to detect actual gratuitous suffering for now and just make sure that in the future of this conversation we can use these terms reliably. I think you get what gratuitous suffering is supposed to be, let me make sure you're comfortable with my use of benevolence though (again, whether or not we can detect gratuitous suffering, benevolence can still be a descriptor): that to be benevolent, you don't actively or knowingly passively* perpetuate gratuitous suffering.

(* -- I say "knowingly passively" because you're only culpable for allowing it if you know that being passive about something will lead to gratuitous suffering. If I step on the ant and don't even realize it, it's not that I'm not benevolent because I don't even realize it happened. But if I see the ant and it would be effortless to just shift my step a little to the side, but I don't because I simply don't care, that would not be congruent with benevolence)

Note that you can be benevolent and actively or knowingly passively allow suffering that isn't gratuitous because that's like giving someone a vaccine with the purpose of boosting their immune response, for instance. Benevolence isn't incongruent with causing or allowing suffering (if it serves some greater purpose), it's incongruent with causing or allowing gratuitous suffering.

I feel like there should be a sidebar here, too, to discuss another wrinkle: let's say that I kill someone so I can gift my girlfriend a really nice polished skull as a conversation piece on the mantle. In this case, the suffering served some purpose, but I wouldn't say that the person that suffered got anything out of it. This wouldn't be in congruence with benevolence, either (it wasn't benevolent to the murder victim, even if I was being nice to my partner with a macabre gift). I would say that this is still a form of gratuitous suffering because the one that suffered gained nothing at all from the ostensible "purpose" of their suffering (unless, for whatever reason, they had a very idiosyncratic desire for their skull to be on a mantlepiece).

In fact, I think a great deal of harm, of the mental sort, anyway, is done by people's demand to have knowledge of things they clearly do not know. For example, you'll be familiar with the phenomenon of the allegedly-sympathetic friend who tells you, "I know exactly how you feel."

She knows no such thing. You know she knows no such thing. She has not been you. She did not experience exactly what you experienced. What she's saying is, "I draw on my own epistemological powers, and find something in my experience that makes me think I can analogize that to your experience." But she's wrong. The analogy may or may not approximate your feelings, but it never captures them absolutely.

Or think of the person who says to somebody else, "I know why you have cancer; it's because you smoked, or because you had a job in a toxic place, or because you didn't eat broccoli." Does she really "know" any such thing? What temerity, on her part, to presume to "know" why you got cancer! But is she any wiser if she says to you, "I know there's no reason for your cancer; it's gratuitious." Is she any better positioned to know either thing?

I want to step in real quick and say that gratuitousness in this context doesn't have anything to do with cause and effect: e.g., if an ant is stepped on because of a foot, having a cause for the suffering doens't make it not gratuitous. Gratuitousness in this context is just that the suffering doesn't serve a purpose such that it's "worth it" for the suffering in the first place. If I give my friend some "tough love" to get them to understand they need to change a bad habit, the suffering they endure isn't gratuitous because it serves a greater purpose. If I put a child in time out to teach them discipline, that's not gratuitous. However, if I slap someone for no reason at all or just so I can feel some perverse pleasure from their pain, and there is not some higher purpose for which I'm doing this (it isn't a means to some end that is so good that it's "worth it" to endure the original suffering), then that's gratuitous.

Let me bring back another example I gave earlier, too, because I feel we need to be careful. Remember when I brought up slapping a child and then giving them college tuition? That's still gratuitous because it's possible to just give them the college tuition without inflicting the initial suffering: the slap isn't logically necessary for the tuition to be given, even if I stipulate that I'll only give the tuition if I can perform the slap because I have some bizarre mean streak. To use the trappings of the moral realist, gratuitous suffering is suffering that doesn't have a redeeming good to it that necessitates the suffering to accomplish. That's why stabbing someone with a needle for a vaccine is such a good example of nongratuitous suffering: the suffering is necessitated for the redeeming good of the immunity boost.

Does God allow "gratuitous" suffering? What would be our evidence that He did?

It would surely not be enough for us to say, "I don't see the reason for X, therefore there can't be a reason for X." That's not at all logical. Many things I do not see, or do not yet see, have reasons for being of which I have no actual knowledge. That's a truism.

This is effectively what that other, longer post was entirely about. Rather than get into it there, I will get into it here (albeit in a future post, because for right now, I just want to make sure we're on the same page with terminology -- when we are on the same page with terms, I think the posts will be more succinct). As something of an abstract, I'll give you the teaser that my argument will involve thresholds of when it is rational to say appearances are what they are vs. actually something else by appealing to something unknown. But again, I'll get into it after we confirm we're using the same language. You're already picking up where this is going though, kudos.

4) It is also convenient for me to be able to use the word "malevolence," so again, let's try to come to an understanding even if it's idiosyncratic to this conversation. When I say "S is malevolent," I mean that S will either attempt to cause gratuitous suffering by positive action

Same issue here.

Indeed, I know we can't just say this or that suffering is definitely gratuitous. But can you agree that malevolence is to actively or passively perpetuate gratuitous suffering regardless of whether we can definitely know that: that that's what malevolence would be? That we can say, "that appears malevolent," at least?

Your comments here remind me of Plantinga's "God, Freedom & Evil" where he performs a similar move: he demarcates "free will" from "relevantly free will," where S is "relevantly free" if S is able to make choices that inflict suffering on others.

I think something's not quite right there.

It doesn't seem to me that "relevantly free" means "able to inflict suffering." I could be relevantly free to try to burn down my neighbour's house, but fail to do it, while still being relevantly free, in that I can try it. It seems to me that it's not so much a question of what suffering happens, but whether or not I'm free to enact certain actions that I believe to be capable of issuing in such a result. And that seems to me to be "malevolent" as well, whether or not my plot succeeds.

So maybe we could say that "freedom" (relevantly considered) entails the ability to perform actions capable of causing harm to others, actualizing a mental intention to harm in concrete terms, even if not guaranteed by circumstance to achieve their end.

Sure, I'm fine with that use of relevant freedom. I'll note that even though I brought it up (well, Plantinga did), I actually disagree with "relevant," because I think that implies that it's required for freedom, which I disagree with lol. But we still need a term to describe it I guess, and Plantinga's is as good as any.

Actually, I just broke out my copy of God, Freedom, & Evil and found that it's not "relevant" freedom he said, it's "significant" freedom:

...I shall say that an action is morally significant, for a given person, if it would be wrong for him to perform the action but right to refrain or vice versa. Keeping a promise, for example, would ordinarily be morally significant for a person, as would refusing induction into the army. On the other hand, having Cheerios for breakfast (instead of Wheaties) would not normally be morally significant. Further, suppose we say that a person is significantly free, on a given occasion, if he is then free with respect to a morally significant action.

So, whoops, my bad, I mean "significant freedom," not "relevant freedom." That's just my memory at work, lol!

Now, I have thoughts and arguments for why significant freedom isn't a great thing to have in every context; but I will again save those: right now we're just establishing terms.

But why just "harm"? Why not "benevolence," too? Is it not equally the case that "free will" would entail that I am granted the power to perform actions which I calculate to be capable of benefitting, blessing or helping my neighbour? Why would we suppose "freedom" would only be actualized on the "malevolent" side? I see no reason to skew the discussion in the negative direction from the get-go, do you?

I am skewing it negatively on purpose, though. Do you suppose that God could create a world where our physical options are (neutral or good), rather than (evil, neutral, or good), for instance? I think such differences are relevant.

I am cutting out some points that I've already somewhat addressed or said I would address after we establish terms here to save space.

What about my observation that "mental" harms are still harms, and, far from being the insignificant thing you might suppose, can sometimes be as bad or worse than physical harms?

I think there's a strong case to be made for that. I know both men and women who from, say, a childhood of mental and verbal abuse, live as emotional cripples and victims. And some of them would actually prefer to be mentally disabled, if they could.

True story. I had a female friend who was bipolar. I went to visit her, and she offered me dinner. While she was stirring something on the stove, I looked down at her wrist. She had carved her name (three initials) into her own wrist.

I asked her, "How did that happen?"

She said, "I tore a pop can in half, and carved that there myself."

I said, "Why did you do it?"

She said, "Because the pain in my head was so great, that only when I hurt myself can I be distracted from it. With the pop can, I can start and stop the pain at will. I can't do that with the pain in my head."

That iilustrates just how bad mental suffering can be. It can be so bad that physical suffering is better.

Yes, I agree that mental suffering can be terrible. However, keep in mind that in a Toy World, a lot of such kinds of sufferings actually wouldn't exist. For instance bipolar disorder and clinical depression wouldn't exist (anything that exists because of some ailment with dopamine, serotonin, and other brain chemistry matters wouldn't exist in a Toy World). People could still be depressed perhaps if something sad happens to them, but they wouldn't suffer the sort of clinical depression that require medication to attempt to better balance these biochemical mechanisms.

And maybe you also have a similar experience. I've noted this: that young men, when they are being cruel to each other, generally tend to get into physical altercations and punch it out. It's short, violent and decisive, in many cases. But after that, things are often settled. The combatants may actually even end up as reluctant respecters or even friends, if the altercation resulted in a balanced and seemingly-fair outcome. By contrast, young women are unlikely to engage in fisticuffs. They mistreat each other by way of things like reputation-savaging and ostracism from the group. And they're vindictive, too...much longer in their antipathies, and much more obsessive with them than most men tend to be.

Are the cruelties young women visit on each other less or more egregious than the violent conflicts that often characterize young men? You tell me, from your experience; because I've been in fistfights, but I know nothing of the catty cruelty of women, except from the outside. Do young women do each other mental harm? Are they "malevolent"? Do they do evil?

If they do, is it any better than what the young men do? Is the mental injury really so distinct from the physical? And can we indict God for allowing the sudden violence of the young men, but completely exonerate Him of any complicity with the wickedness of the young women, simply because their cruelty was mental and the former was physical?

My point hasn't been to say mental suffering is lesser than physical suffering and more that in terms of losing free will, we would lose more if we were incapable of speaking our minds to those that disagree with us for instance than we would by being unable to punch those that disagree with us (at least punch them and actually hurt them; ostensibly we could still swing a fist at their faces in a Toy World, they just wouldn't be physically harmed by it. Maybe they'd be emotionally harmed that you tried, though!)

If God were to prevent mental suffering, drastic damage to free will would take place: we'd be unable to disagree with our friend that her dress is flattering, for instance (or at least unable to voice our disagreement). Our minds couldn't be made known to others. If we make a promise, somehow God would have to arrange the universe such that we're unable to break it to avoid a broken promise. With multiple people involved, that can actually lead to contradictions (and if it leads to contradictions, even an omnipotent being can't do it). That's not true with physical suffering. God could remove the capacity for physical suffering from the world and there would be no logical contradictions, and we would still feel very free: still able to make all kinds of decisions and make our minds known to others and so on. We could still take a swing at someone's face if we really want to make it known we'd like to punch them, physical harm just wouldn't be possible (like turning on a cheat code, they would not be harmed). Interestingly, if we're concerned with God judging us for our actions, taking a swing at someone with the intent to hurt them could still count against us (in the same way as trying to burn a house down but failing) even if the intent is doomed to be fruitless.

Oh, I never said anything close to the idea that "relevantly free will...when it comes to physical suffering is a good thing." I said that physical suffering is an entailment of "relevantly free will," and as such, is an inevitable part of the latter. But it's a regrettable part...not something we would wish, if we could have it otherwise.

Ah, but I think you have a problem, then.

Is it better to have significant freedom ("a person is significantly free, on a given occasion, if he is then free with respect to a morally significant action") than not when it comes to physical suffering?

You see, significant freedom is only distinguished from just regular ol' free will (being able to make a choice from at least two choices, or similar, from what you said) by specifically having that choice be moral. What makes a choice moral? Doesn't it usually involve someone suffering? Might I be so bold as to say that suffering is the distinction of what makes a choice moral as opposed to amoral for many people?

But if suffering is the distinction between significant freedom and simple freedom, then by saying "significant freedom is good to have" we are actually saying "the ability to cause suffering is good to have," because it means the same thing. But I will wait to see your response on what makes a choice moral. Plantinga's definition just says that a choice is morally significant if it would be right to do something and wrong to abstain or vice versa, but that doesn't tell us much. (We might also be extra clash-y here considering I'm a moral noncognitivist and I'm only using these words for brevity or because I'm quoting someone).

That's quite different from saying, "It's a good thing" when people suffer. It's just a better thing that they are free that not.

To nitpick, I asked whether "significantly free will...when it comes to physical suffering is a good thing." I didn't ask "is suffering a good thing."

I basically asked, "is it really good that we're able to choose to cause physical suffering?"

Is the existence of that choice really such a good thing that all of violence is possible? Because I don't think that's the case. But I'm getting ahead of myself, again, my argument will be forthcoming after we agree on terms.

The term "heaven" is problematic, and comes with a bunch of pop-culture baggage I don't want. But that's a secondary point. More importantly, what is sufficient for free will (in the domain of choosing the good), is to have, at one time, sufficient opportunity to make a genuine choice. After that, the choice is forever a free one, regardless of whether or not the option to reverse that choice remains.

So I gave the example of marriage. In marriage, we pledge to be, in a sense, "unfree." We bind ourselves to another, in such a way that we "forsake all others, as long as we both shall live," in the famous coinage. We swear an oath to that effect, in fact. But after we do, nobody comes up to us and says, "Do you realize your choice was not free? Because now, you can't sleep with everybody anymore." That would be silly. We'd reply, "I have freely chosen to bind myself to this one person forever; and it is a perfect exercise of my freedom to do so, because I am willingly relinquishing the false freedom of multiple partners for the permanent freedom of loving somebody forever."

Heaven (to employ your term) is that. It's the permanent consequence of having freely bound oneself to another Person in love. As such, one no longer needs to revisit the choice; it was, and is, fully free. But being "married" to the new nature, one is not any longer a slave to sin. One does not any longer desire the allurements of the alternative to the Good. It is as if one has given up promiscuous evil in order to be committed to absolute good. There's nothing at all unfree about such a decision.

Ok, fair enough. I wonder though why God couldn't have just zooped the knowledge required to make an informed choice into every human's head and had them make the choice in an informed way without having to endure suffering first. Seems like God could probably do that, and I think it's a good question why God ostensibly didn't do that.

Could I revise? What if the "Alien" were to happen on a land of robots. And suppose he were to desire that they should be freed to become persons, individuals, autonomous agents, with choices, creativity, personalities, and so forth. And suppose the Alien's intentions were benevolent toward the robots, desiring that the should not become merely free, but also his friends and companions, to whom the Alien would then open up all the voyaging, exploring, and creative possibilities of the entire universe, to be enjoyed mutually forever?

But suppose he were to know that in doing so, he would logically also have to open up to them the possibility that they would choose badly? And what if he realized that if they were going to choose the good, they would also logically have to be able to choose something quite bad; and that there was rationally no possibility of avoiding this situation?

Should the Alien free the robots? Your call.

Couldn't the alien bestow personhood, individuality, autonomy, creativity, and personalities without also bestowing the capacity for violence? (Let us ignore that they might need to defend themselves, this is a universe where there are no threats to the robots). Is the alien really a nice person if the alien makes the robots able to disassemble each other against their will if they previously could not? Couldn't the alien still give them the ability to write poetry and dream up exciting action movies and things like that without actually being able to physically destroy one another? Is it really necessary for the alien to create a computer virus that goes around making the robots sick, is the alien benevolent if she does that?

I'm saying that in terms of removing an entire category of suffering, if God removed physical suffering, will would still be free as people would still be able to do and think and say as they like.

And that's what I'm interrogating. I suspect it's just not true. I think desire and action are of-a-piece, when it comes to the business of human volition. One cannot merely have desires upon which one is utterly prevented from acting, and say that one's cognitions are being granted "freedom," or one's personal agency is being upheld. One is, instead, a tortured robot.

I often have desires that I'm prevented from acting on. I'd love to get a bird's eye view of the galaxies I'm studying. I've tried more than once in secret (don't you tell anybody!) to get the TV remote to jump into my hand like using the Force (hey, you never know until you try, right?) I could come up with baziliions of examples like this, yet I still feel like I'm free. If I couldn't stab someone, I'd still feel like I'm free. However if I couldn't tell my friend that her shoes don't really go with her outfit (even if it might hurt her feelings a little bit), I wouldn't feel very free. If God took away physical suffering, I would still feel very free. If God took away mental suffering, I feel like that wouldn't work, wouldn't be as free, and might even lead to contradictions (e.g., holding multiple mutually contradictory promises to be fulfilled). It seems like God didn't have to allow physical suffering in order to allow free will (while God has to allow mental suffering to allow free will): if any suffering might be gratuitous as a category, it's physical suffering. That's part of the argument.

I have also considered framing the argument in terms of innocent victims and asking why God couldn't prevent innocent victimhood such that the only times you suffer are as a result of a choice you've made (rather than being at the whims of someone else's choice, or acts of nature).

Yes, so have I.

But it entails at least one obvious problem. Probably more.

I'm not speaking of the difficulty of locating the term "innocent victim," though that's significant, for sure. I'm speaking instead of the coercive properties of being prevented from actualizing one's decisions, whether they entail victims or not. If you are going to be allowed to choose evil, then evil being what it is, it takes victims. It's not a tame thing. It's not a form of good. It doesn't restrain or respect anybody, and it especially has no regard for justice. So victims are exactly what evil delights to take. And the more "innocent," the better, so far as evil assesses things.

This is why we regard pedophiles with special horror. This is why Satanists celebrate the defiling of virgins. This is why predators seek out the weak and vulnerable and the more pure, and defile it. Evil really is evil. Don't expect it to leave the victims alone.

Moreover, if free choice is to be a reality, it can only be so in a world in which there is no automatic and evident connection between things like doing the good and getting good results, or doing evil and getting harmed for it. If people are to be free, then the immediate consquences of their choices must be at least roughly equal, so far as they can know in advance. The evil must look roughly as desirable as the good, if for different reasons. So it must not be the case that the right hand of every thief immediately falls off, or the tongue of every wicked gossip immediately explodes into flame. There must at least seem to be some chance of proximal gains for thieves, and some chance of stirring up some delicious drama for the gossip, and no certain prospect of immediate punishment. Otherwise, what happens is that the environment itself operates like a "classical conditioning" experiment, dealing out rewards and punishments for good and evil choices, respectively; and the human subject is coerced into choosing only good behavior by the impossiblity of succeeding at bad behaviour, and by the threat of immanent punishment.

I am really lost by this last part of your comment. Why must that not be the case? People wouldn't choose evil if ... they knew that it was bad and had consequences? How is that a bad thing? I don't understand this one.

What if God gave everyone knowledge of exactly what would happen if they were to make a poor choice? Perhaps God yanks them out of their body into a mini-universe where they might even live out the events from the other side, experiencing the consequences of their bad choice (but nobody is actually harmed in the making of this video, just the person experiencing the consequences of their own actions). When they get placed back in their own body, they remember the experience. That seems like something God could do. Why not do that? If someone chooses not to stab that person after all because oh god, the horror -- well, why would that be bad?

You might mention someone like psychopaths, but psychopathy doesn't have to exist (God could make it not exist, that is a physical brain problem): God could make it so everyone understands exactly what the consequences of their actions would be and it wouldn't even cost God any effort to do so. Why not something like that, while we're at it? What if the world worked such that any poor action you take only affects you and not other people? Why do there have to be innocent victims when it seems possible not to have them?

So I wondered, "well, why wouldn't God arm them with knowledge against deception from the first place then?"

He did, according to Milton et al. But they still were volitionally free.

And do you remember what I said earlier about evil, that it sometimes needs an adornment in order to sell itself? Well, the adornment for the fall was the promise of total autonomy, of "being like God," rather than simply of "being with God." (Gen. 3:5 ) That adornment sold the package.

Ok. Well, why didn't God inform them ahead of ime that it was a lie they'd "be like God?" Arm them with the knowledge so as not to be deceived? Show them exactly what it would mean to make the choice they made with full knowledge of the consequences of that choice (and I mean full knowledge of the consequences), making it a truly fair informed choice? Why not that?

If people have "hateful and harmful" impulses, why do you think that is, IC? Is that the way that God made them; and if so, isn't that sort of on God?

Well, the Biblical answer is that mankind is no longer walking in step with God. He/she is alienated, in rebellion, rejecting, and going his/her own way. And what happens when one moves away, and breaks one's relationship with the Ultimate Source of all goodness, life, light, joy, health, wisdom, truth, hope, and so on? One gets (and one becomes) the opposite of all those things.

Who would choose the opposite of goodness, life, light, joy, health, wisdom, truth, hope, and so on? Who would choose that?

I think the answer is only someone that doesn't know that's what their choice amounted to. Do you disagree?

So I still think my question is relevant: why weren't they given full knowledge of what the choice entails? Isn't it sort of God's fault for not doing that, if God didn't? How can they be blamed for making a choice with incomplete knowledge -- that's not an informed choice?

What's obvious to both of us, I think, AC, is just what you identify here: that people DO have "hateful and harmful impulses." That's empirically obvious, isn't it? But why don't we step back one step, and ask ourselves this, as well:

How is it that we are able to recognize certain impulses as "hateful and harmful," or "evil"? I mean, given the assumption that you and I live in a universe that is actually just a product of time plus chance, a place that exists purely by accident and changes purely by physical processes, moving in no particular direction and without intended purpose of any kind, how is it that you and I don't see everything that happens as merely neutral? How is it we are able to assess some things as "good" and others as "evil," and even pose such questions as require us to adopt the view that evil is an objective property, as we do when we ask, "Can God allow evil"? (You can see, we have to be meaning objective evil, or there's no actual question there at all.) How did we, contingent, accidental beings that we are, come up with such a concept as morality? And when we think we "recognize" good and evil, are we "recognizing" them as being actually there, or only as epiphenomenal delusions in our contingent minds?

So if, AC, you're saying to me, "It's wrong of God to allow innocent victims to be hurt," you're already drawing heavily on the presuppositions of objective morality -- presuppositions to which you would have no right at all, and no logical entitlement, if we did not actually live in a universe that had objective moral properties in it.

But how did such things get there? That's the question the skeptic can never sufficiently answer.

We talked about this re: moral noncognitivism. We have values, a lot of which humans share for evolutionary and societal reasons. A lot of our values are impunctions against causing or allowing suffering (we don't like stealing, we don't like murder, we don't like violence) in general, so we see these same kinds of laws pop up in different societies, even pre-Biblical ones. Most humans have values that are derived from a general sense of altruism, though they have caveats a lot (e.g. tribalism, I'll be altruistic to my tribe but not to "the others"), it's still the case that altruism is a common thread in human values. Unfortunately, so is selfishness.

This is a note to myself so I don't forget later:
Arguments I'll present:

1) That there is a threshold where we could be rational in supposing apparent gratuitous suffering is more likely to be actual gratuitous suffering than it is to be for some redeeming good
2) That significant freedom isn't always more desirable to have than not (e.g., imagine exotic forms of suffering and exotic significant freedom: if significant freedom is good, wouldn't exotic significant freedom be really good?)

[Immanuel Can]

Do you think it's logically possible for God to design bodies that are incapable of being maimed, burned, diseased, or inflicted with the physical sensation of pain while still allowing for neutral and pleasant sensations? Perhaps I should ask it that way.

Sure. Why not? But is that the right goal...the elimination of various unpleasant possibilities, for their own sake?

What if doing so cost you the one opportunity to have actual freedom of will, actual personhood, and actual choice over yourself? Would you take that bargain?

If it is not logically possible for God to perform an action which is evil (whatever any of that means, we all know I'm a moral noncognitivist),

Wait. As a non-cognitivist, you would have to say there is no objective evil. So there is nothing on the basis of which you could launch a question regarding the current disposition of the universe, or God's choice in it.

That simplifies our task considerably. All we have to ask is what you mean when you say something like "physical suffering is evil." Apparently, that's not objectively true. Suffering is just "a thing AC doesn't happen to prefer." However, if that's all it is, then we have no basis for the question about God being benevolent. There's no objectivity to any such assessment...and no duty in the universe to provide us with "what we happen to prefer."

That is part of what's being discussed (that's the heart of the greater good theodicy: to point out that we can't know with certainty which suffering might be gratuitous).

Well, then we're at a very obvious problem. We're not qualified to know. The term may have no reference to reality at all, so far as we can be sure.

Yes. You're jumping into the pool early though (but you've successfully detected what the ultimate sorts of issues I'm after are going to be about).

Oh, okay.

But as with above, let's ignore whether we have the power to detect actual gratuitous suffering for now

But how can we? If the term "gratuitious suffering" does not correspond to an objective reality we can detect in the world, then we're asking a question about nothing we can be sure is real at all. We can only observe that sometimes certain phenomena appear to our limited perspective to be "gratuitious." But given that we have limited perspective, that doesn't allow any substantive future moves. We don't know if the darn thing even exists.

Benevolence isn't incongruent with causing or allowing suffering (if it serves some greater purpose), it's incongruent with causing or allowing gratuitous suffering.

...which we can't say for sure exists at all. So now we're trying to work out one definition by way of another definition we haven't even been able to show is real.

But we've now realized that, at least logically, "benevolence isn't incongruent with causing or allowing suffering (if it serves some greater purpose)." So now we can ask if the suffering we see could even possibly be directed toward some greater purpose -- and given our lack of ability to identify as genuine what may appear to us to be "gratuitious suffering," we are no longer even in a position to say whether or not such a greater purpose could be in play. We're really in trouble, now.

I feel like there should be a sidebar here, too, to discuss another wrinkle: let's say that I kill someone so I can gift my girlfriend a really nice polished skull as a conversation piece on the mantle. In this case, the suffering served some purpose, but I wouldn't say that the person that suffered got anything out of it. This wouldn't be in congruence with benevolence, either (it wasn't benevolent to the murder victim, even if I was being nice to my partner with a macabre gift). I would say that this is still a form of gratuitous suffering because the one that suffered gained nothing at all from the ostensible "purpose" of their suffering (unless, for whatever reason, they had a very idiosyncratic desire for their skull to be on a mantlepiece).

A ghoulish and amusing example, to be sure. Can we make a drinking vessel out of it?

Seriously, though, this raises a further issue: who "counts" in the question of benevolence? You're certainly acting nicely toward your girlfriend (presuming skull drinking vessels are her thing). Does the victim "count" in our benevolence-equation? She might not, if not all people are equal...say if, like some Feminist ethicists (like some Care Ethicists) have proposed, our duties to people close to us can sometimes supercede our duties to people we know less, and with whom we have less relationship. Maybe there is no universal duty to ALL people. Do we owe it to her to "care" about her, or is our "care" for your girlfriend sufficient warrant for us to be "benevolent" with our beheading?

Well, if she does count, we'd have to have a prior axiom that says something like, "all people count equally," or something like that. And from where do we get such an axiom? How binding is it, given where we get it from?

Gratuitousness in this context is just that the suffering doesn't serve a purpose such that it's "worth it" for the suffering in the first place. If I give my friend some "tough love" to get them to understand they need to change a bad habit, the suffering they endure isn't gratuitous because it serves a greater purpose. If I put a child in time out to teach them discipline, that's not gratuitous. However, if I slap someone for no reason at all or just so I can feel some perverse pleasure from their pain, and there is not some higher purpose for which I'm doing this (it isn't a means to some end that is so good that it's "worth it" to endure the original suffering), then that's gratuitous.

Does God slap people for no reason? We would have to know the answer to that. But I suspect He neither "slaps," nor allows things "for no reason." And until we have grounds to think otherwise, our indictment of God on the basis of allowing "gratuitious suffering" is still foundering.

This is effectively what that other, longer post was entirely about.

No, I don't think so. Because whereas in that post you assumed that the Theist would simply "punt to mystery," when cornered on the question of suffering, I've not done that, and I won't.

I do believe that we sometimes DO know reasons for suffering. I supplied some Biblical passages that clearly say that we do. But we stiil do end up with this: we don't know ALL cases. Yet, because we're limited, contingent, temporal beings, that's unsurprising, and cannot really be used to argue for anything.

The dilemma you seem to be posing is the thing that requires us to know, of a certainty, that "gratuitious" suffering occurs. I just can't see how we can meet the challenge posed by the dilemma itself.

You're already picking up where this is going though, kudos.

Thanks. We are, so to speak, "swimming in my pool" at the moment, so maybe that's why. I've thought about this a great deal, so I can jump steps when necessary. But I'll try not to, in order not to create needless misunderstandings on any side, okay?

Indeed, I know we can't just say this or that suffering is definitely gratuitous. But can you agree that malevolence is to actively or passively perpetuate gratuitous suffering regardless of whether we can definitely know that: that that's what malevolence would be? That we can say, "that appears malevolent," at least?

Yes, I can give you that, for sure. IF we knew that there was "gratuitious" suffering, and IF we knew that somebody was actively perpetuating it, it would be "malevolent," by definition. The jury's still out a bit on "passively," though, because some ethical systems hold that we have no duty to intervene, only not to actively contribute suffering. But from the Christian view, we have both an active and passive duty to prevent suffering, where possible. Fair enough.

Sure, I'm fine with that use of relevant freedom. I'll note that even though I brought it up (well, Plantinga did), I actually disagree with "relevant," because I think that implies that it's required for freedom, which I disagree with lol. But we still need a term to describe it I guess, and Plantinga's is as good as any.

Actually, I just broke out my copy of God, Freedom, & Evil and found that it's not "relevant" freedom he said, it's "significant" freedom:

Ah, that's better. I was perplexed by that, too.

So, whoops, my bad, I mean "significant freedom," not "relevant freedom." That's just my memory at work, lol!

No problem. I've had my gears slip many times. You're always free to reword. At least you found the problem before we both ended up in knots.

I am skewing it negatively on purpose, though. Do you suppose that God could create a world where our physical options are (neutral or good), rather than (evil, neutral, or good), for instance? I think such differences are relevant.

Could He do so, and yet retain our definite option for autonomy? I don't think so. Because then, there'd be no genuine alternative to the Good. The "neutral," (a category I don't actually believe in -- I think it's just a placeholder for "things of which we don't happen to know the moral status yet) is certainly not a genuine alternative to the Good; it would be at worst, a sort of weak subcategory of the Good.

So then, where is our moral autonomy at? Where is our personhood, our individuality, our free wills, our volition, our ability to develop moral cognitions, and so on?

Yes, I agree that mental suffering can be terrible. However, keep in mind that in a Toy World, a lot of such kinds of sufferings actually wouldn't exist.

Wait. That's not the world you were positing. You were positing a world in which physical harms would be eliminated; but you already said that if mental harms were eliminated, then there would be something important lost to volition and such, did you not? So you were thinking of a world in which mental suffering or mental evildoing, if you prefer, can persist.

Not all mental disorders are chemical. A great many are cognitive. And anybody who can perform mental acts of cruelty, or experience mental suffering, is still in a bad way, even if the physical is not implicated.

I also have to repeat the question: why would we think we can condemn God for physical suffering, and then give Him a free pass on the mental stuff? I don't see the reasoning for that. It might be the case that in our self-interest, we wouldn't want God interfering with our cognitions; but in the interest of impartial justice, which has nothing to do with what we might prefer, what basis are we going to use for accusing God of allowing physical suffering, and then not even saying a thing about mental suffering?

I'm not seeing any justification for that.

My point hasn't been to say mental suffering is lesser than physical suffering and more that in terms of losing free will, we would lose more if we were incapable of speaking our minds to those that disagree with us for instance than we would by being unable to punch those that disagree with us (at least punch them and actually hurt them; ostensibly we could still swing a fist at their faces in a Toy World, they just wouldn't be physically harmed by it. Maybe they'd be emotionally harmed that you tried, though!)

Right. I agree that our self-interest would be offended by such an arrangement; but it doesn't help us, when we realize that the very arrangement we seem to be wanting is ultimately unjust. We're giving God a "pass" on mental pain. What's the justice in that?

Our self-interest is not justice. Our self-interest is only self-interest.

If God were to prevent mental suffering, drastic damage to free will would take place:

Agreed. But I think the same would happen if our physical freedoms were curtailed in order to eliminate the negative consequences. We would be come people who could lust, but not act, who could hate, but only simmer in helpless rage, could covet, but could not get our hands on things, could blaspheme, but only inside our impotent brains.

Not a good prospect, from a self-interest point of view.

Interestingly, if we're concerned with God judging us for our actions, taking a swing at someone with the intent to hurt them could still count against us (in the same way as trying to burn a house down but failing) even if the intent is doomed to be fruitless.

Yes.

And if we take Christ seriously, the mental malevolence is taken just as seriously as the physical acting on it. For as Christ said,

"You have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not murder,’ and ‘Whoever commits murder shall be answerable to the court.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be answerable to the court; and whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be answerable to the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell." (Matthew 5:21-22)

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart." (27-28)

Those are both from the famous, Sermon on the Mount, by the way. What Christ is proposing is that God is as concerned with our inner states and motives as He is with our subequent actions. In fact, He goes even farther. He says,

"But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and those things defile the person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, acts of adultery, other immoral sexual acts, thefts, false testimonies, and slanderous statements. These are the things that defile the person..." (Matthew 15:18-20)

It looks like God takes very seriously in the mental states of mankind, in their moral dimension. It's not just the actions that are the problem. They're the second of two problems, really.

Ah, but I think you have a problem, then.

Is it better to have significant freedom ("a person is significantly free, on a given occasion, if he is then free with respect to a morally significant action") than not when it comes to physical suffering?

That is precisely the dilemma I am proposing. I'm asking, "Just how important is morally significant freedom?"

And my own answer would be, "Surpassingly." I feel certain that the blessings of volition, identity, creativity, autonomy, ability to love, the option to act charitably and with mercy, individuality, moral awareness, and all those other things outweighs all temporal pains, especially because those sufferings are only temporal, and eternity is a very, very, very, very, very, very, long time.

What makes a choice moral?

The ability to select between good and evil. Or do you mean, "What makes a choice good?" That's a slightly different question, of course.

Doesn't it usually involve someone suffering? Might I be so bold as to say that suffering is the distinction of what makes a choice moral as opposed to amoral for many people?

There's some real wisdom in that. I'm impressed you've seen this.

Yes, there is a "suffering" entailment in moral decisions...good ones, I mean. Morality only comes into play when there's a disjuncture between what I want and what I ought to want. If what I want to do, on the one hand, and what I ought to do, on the other, are the same, I don't even trouble myself as to the morality of it.

To illustrate (and I'm sure you'll see this point immediately), if what I want to do is to, say, give ice cream to orphans, then I have no reason to ask myself, "Is that moral?" Of course it is. And good thing, too...I want to give ice cream to orphans, plausibly. But morality comes screaming back into play when what I really want is not what I ought to do. For example, when it's not giving, but taking something that's not mine, like embezzling from my employer, or taking my friend's wife. It's in the moments when I'm contemplating those sorts of things that morality puts its pinch on me.

This is why morality always entails pain. Perhaps I really want and need the money I could embezzle. Without it, I'll be in a jam. With it, I would be much better off. Or maybe my friend's wife is really hot, and I'm pretty sure she's into me. It's a kind of torture fending off my lustful desires, and I'm really going to suffer for doing the right thing. There are things I desire or even need, which I am not going to be allowed to have: and the only reason is this thing called "morality."

So suffering's definitely part of being a moral person in a morally confused world. No question.

But if suffering is the distinction between significant freedom and simple freedom, then by saying "significant freedom is good to have" we are actually saying "the ability to cause suffering is good to have," because it means the same thing.

Not quite. What we're saying -- and what the Bible's saying -- is that sometimes suffering for a time is soul-refining, and leads to greater morality. As for the suffering our actions cause to others, they might well be a product of living in a fallen, morally-ambiguous world environment, as well as any direct result of my intentions. But plausibly, even those might not be "gratuitious." We wouldn't know, would we?

To nitpick, I asked whether "significantly free will...when it comes to physical suffering is a good thing." I didn't ask "is suffering a good thing."

I basically asked, "is it really good that we're able to choose to cause physical suffering?"

And I'm trying to respond to that by saying, that we're able to choose is a surpassing good. That suffering is entailed is not. But one cannot have the first without the second.

Ok, fair enough. I wonder though why God couldn't have just zooped the knowledge required to make an informed choice into every human's head and had them make the choice in an informed way without having to endure suffering first.

It seems to me it might well be a logical impossibility. It seems to me to be a question like, "Could God create a rock so big even He couldn't lift it?"

Could God "zoop" free will into people? Could he make them instantly into the mature, developed, spiritual beings He wants them to become, without them first being subjected to experiences like rejecting Him, falling, suffering, hurting others, and so on? I think the problem there is one of identity. How can a creature that's made no independent choices be "zooped" into being a full individual? How can the choice of friendship with God be a genuine expression of love by free hearts, if God has simply "zooped" them into it?

There seems to me to be something basically contradictory in the question.

Couldn't the alien bestow personhood, individuality, autonomy, creativity, and personalities without also bestowing the capacity for violence?

I'd suggest that there are at least two aspects to free will: freedom of volition and ability to act on that volition. Unfortunately, if one uses one's free volition to tend in the way of malevolence, then the companion action to that is violence of some kind.

So a genuinely free will entails one having the possibility of acting in immoral and ungodly ways, of which violence would be one.

As you can see above, Jesus concerned Himself with both aspects of the human will, and regarded both as moral issues.

I often have desires that I'm prevented from acting on.

Moral ones? What's preventing you?

I am really lost by this last part of your comment. Why must that not be the case? People wouldn't choose evil if ... they knew that it was bad and had consequences? How is that a bad thing? I don't understand this one.

Let me try to explain. I thought about this one very carefully.

To understand it, let's imagine a world that works this way: good is 100% rewarded, and all forms of evil are 100% instantly guaranteed to fail.

Can you choose evil? Not really. Even if you decide you want to do it, it is not permitted. You cannot. Every time you reach out your arm in anger, it breaks at the elbow. Every time you speak cruelly, your tongue falls out. The choice of evil never, never ever succeeds.

What is this universe teaching you? It's showing you that while good is a possible choice, wanting evil is a null choice. You can never get it. You may as well not even hope to get it. Like an experiment in classical conditioning, reality is employing rewards and punishments to induce you solely in the direction of the good, every time. You are being controllingly coerced.

Where then is your free will? Do you even really have a free choice of good, since nothing but good is ever allowed to happen, anyway? And what about your volition, whenever you want to do something not-so-good? Is your choice being respected or upheld in any way? Or are you really straight-jacketed into forced goodness?

And where is the moral virtue in that?

Why do there have to be innocent victims when it seems possible not to have them?

Well, because evil, being genuinely evil, takes victims...and delights in so doing.

Ok. Well, why didn't God inform them ahead of ime that it was a lie they'd "be like God?"

He told them that they should not take of the tree. Did you ever notice it's name? It was called, "The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." God warned them that this thing, "evil" was nothing they should ever risk messing with. True, the tree would impart a kind of knowledge -- but the cost would be that they would not just know good, but evil as well.

As Milton says, they should have known better. And they could have done otherwise. But the rest is history.

God doesn't prevent free beings from making bad choices. Because that's what "morally free" means. But Adam and Eve could have freely chosen the good, precisely because the tree existed. Its existence, that existence of the one forbidden thing, gave them the opportunity to freely, volitionally choose to do good, not to seek evil. Less than one forbidden thing, and such a choice would not even be possible. But with that one choice came the possibility of falling, of making a bad choice and suffering the consequences, as well as visiting those consequences on the entire realm of which God had made them joint regents, and all their subsequent progeny.

Who would choose the opposite of goodness, life, light, joy, health, wisdom, truth, hope, and so on? Who would choose that?

Oh, my. So many people do.

I often wonder why anybody would be a pornographer, a pervert, a totalitarian, a torturer, a predator, an abuser, an addict, a criminal...but I forget to ask myself why I sometimes choose to be a liar, a gossip, a coveter, a luster, a resentful and ungrateful brat, and so forth. Unfortunately, I find the human race is much drawn away from all the things I listed above..and if I'm honest, I even find such impulses within myself. And I come to realize that I'm not better, not a special type of human being. "There, but for the grace of God, go I," as the saying goes.

I think the answer is only someone that doesn't know that's what their choice amounted to. Do you disagree?

Sometimes. But sometimes we pretty much know, and do it anyway.

We talked about this re: moral noncognitivism. We have values, a lot of which humans share for evolutionary and societal reasons. A lot of our values are impunctions against causing or allowing suffering (we don't like stealing, we don't like murder, we don't like violence) in general, so we see these same kinds of laws pop up in different societies, even pre-Biblical ones. Most humans have values that are derived from a general sense of altruism, though they have caveats a lot (e.g. tribalism, I'll be altruistic to my tribe but not to "the others"), it's still the case that altruism is a common thread in human values. Unfortunately, so is selfishness.

Well, yes. And all the evils.

But that doesn't really deal with the question. If "moral" is just a culturally subjective state, then bride-burnings are fine in Pakistan, child slavery is fine in Sudan. Chattel slavery was just dandy in the pre-war southern states of the US. Wife beating is perfectly fine in Islamic states. And so on.

One thing moral non-cognitivism certainly can't do is judge God. I'm not saying that because it's blasphemous to try, though plausibly, it is; I'm saying it because a "culture" and its moral "values" are contingent, local, non-universal, and unrelated to any objective property in the universe, according to non-cognitivism itself. So it's surely incapable of generating the objective, universal kind of condemnation to enable the non-cognitivist to say to God, "What does thou?"

His answer: my own thing. I have my own culture, and give not fig for yours.

Of course, I don't mean that God actually says that. Quite the contrary: God's a great advocate of universal, objective morality.

But if the non-cognitivists were right, that would be a show-stopper of an answer.

This is a note to myself so I don't forget later:
Arguments I'll present:

1) That there is a threshold where we could be rational in supposing apparent gratuitous suffering is more likely to be actual gratuitous suffering than it is to be for some redeeming good

Interesting. I'd like to see that.

2) That significant freedom isn't always more desirable to have than not (e.g., imagine exotic forms of suffering and exotic significant freedom: if significant freedom is good, wouldn't exotic significant freedom be really good?)

I'm not sure I understand that one: "exotic"? But I'll look forward to seeing you thrash it out, if you decide to.