Omniscience and omnibenevolence

Is there a God? If so, what is She like?

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Immanuel Can
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Re: Omniscience and omnibenevolence

Post by Immanuel Can »

Astro Cat wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 1:54 am Maybe I mean something like “never malevolent AND never negligent.”
I can see you've thought about this quite a bit.

Yes, you'd need something to cover both "sins of commission" and "sins of omission," so to speak...not just the doing of harm, but also the neglecting of preventing it. And then you'd need "harm" or "malevolence" defined.

That latter thing is not easy to do, as my earlier example illustrates. Is the father "malevolent" for allowing his daughter the limited "harm" of losing her "A" average, given that she may recoup it as a result of the lesson? And is the mother "malevolent" for preventing the same "harm" from happening, with the result that the daughter is temporarily shielded, but may be harmed by her own ignorance in the long run?

One would need to be quite omniscient to know exactly how omnipotence should be applied in order to prevent genuine harm...all that's no easy matter to sort out.
If the theist in question thinks that God willfully inflicts suffering for the sake of suffering and not as a means to an end, for instance, then the PoE that I typically give just doesn’t apply to that concept of God: its premises are moot/not met.
The type of Theism taught by the Bible insists that God allows proximal and temporary "harms" in order to generate and overwhelming long-term benefit of some kind. One could think of James 1:2-4, which says, "Consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." Or there's 1 Peter 5:9-10 "...[Stand] firm in your faith, knowing that the same experiences of suffering are being accomplished by your brothers and sisters who are in the world. After you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself perfect, confirm, strengthen, and establish you." Or one could think of Christ, speaking in the famous "Beatitudes," (Matthew 5) and saying, "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted..."and even "Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

You can see that, at least from a Christian perspective, the doctrine that a benevolent God allows suffering, and also even turns it into various positive goods for His people is a major pattern throughout. Benevolence is a much more far-sighted property, in the Christian telling of things, than to be myopically preoccupied with immediate pleasure, or to wince at superficial harm.

Interestingly, this sort of thinking is the one thing that both Nietzsche and Marx agreed with Christianity about. They both fully recognized that Christianity asks its adherents to forego short-term discomforts for long-term gains. Marx thought only of heaven (not of, say, character refinement as a goal) and despised Christianity for offering a consolation that Marx believed would never come, in place of revolutionary activism. Nietzsche despised the same quality for a different reason; he hated the fact that the morality it entailed suppressed the "life force," the "will to power," and took the eyes of potential ubermenschen off the "heroic" task of being bravely bad. But it's interesting to see how two of Christianity's most ardent and famous opponents fully recognized and commented on this particular feature of the Christian Theistic view of God...that it relativizes present sufferings (of particular kinds only, of course, and only for those concerned with the Kingdom of God) in view of eternal blessedness.
A lot of people have this intuition, though, that God is never malevolent. So the apparent incongruence with the physical suffering we see in the world is what my version of the PoE highlights in an attempt to get people with that sort of intuition to introspect.
Well, we'd need a first premise, that would go something like, "A good (or benevolent) God cannot ever allow suffering, even for long-term goods to be produced." There must be no conceivable circumstance allowed whereby any people, for any reason, can be benefitted by an experience of suffering or apparent harm...even as a matter of temporal character development, if not in view of some eternal state.

If somebody would grant us that, of if somebody's conception of God required that, then the "apparent incongruence" would count for something rather important. It would mean there was a real conflict between God's goodness and the "appearances" we can all see.

However, whoever's view of God that is, it very clearly wouldn't be the Christian view. We could ask Marx and Nietzsche, to confirm that much.
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iambiguous
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Re: Omniscience and omnibenevolence

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Astro Cat wrote: Fri Feb 03, 2023 7:34 pm
iambiguous wrote: Wed Jan 18, 2023 5:50 pm
Astro Cat wrote: Sun Jan 15, 2023 4:35 am It is logically impossible for God to have created people with omnipotence because there can only be one omnipotent being (lest you run into the immovable object/irresistible force paradox).

However, there isn’t anything illogical about making other omnibenevolent or omniscient beings.

Why did God not make humans omniscient and omnibenevolent to avoid the instantiation of evil and suffering? Why not make angels that way too (to avoid Satan existing as a deceiver)?
Logic: "reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity."

Given, say, a particular context?

The only reason logic came to exist at all is because the human species was around to invent it. And it was invented because language was invented by the human species and rules had to be thought up to differentiate what was rational -- epistemologically sound -- to say and what was not. That being important because what we think, feel, and say is often of fundamental importance in regard to what we do. And it is in regard to what we do that actual consequences unfold.

In other words, when we connected our words to the world that we lived in. And then interacted with others such that they connected the words to the same world differently. What then? Well, among other things, the birth of morality.
Humans don't invent logic, though: logic is about the rules of reality (yes, conducted through language when humans do it, but humans are only inventing the terms and symbols with which to describe logic). For instance, consider the Aristotlian laws of logic, that A = A, that A or not-A, and that not-(A and not-A) at the same time and in the same respect. Humans and language aren't inventing this, they're just describing it in the same way that we don't invent trees, we just describe them with the word "tree."
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.
Astro Cat wrote: Fri Feb 03, 2023 7:34 pmTwo different minds across the universe would be able to independently describe the same logic because it is discovered and not created. It's not because of humans that things, if they exist, exist as themselves, and must exist without contradiction at the same time and in the same respect, etc. We just invent ways to talk about that and to relay it as a concept via language, but that's not inventing the thing being described itself.
Here I always come back to this: we'll need a context.

Logic in regard to what in particular? What is it logically, rationally, epistemologically sound to think in regard to, say, capitalism? As an economic system on the one hand and in terms of social justice on the other hand. Is capitalism necessarily a more logical, rational and epistemologically sound system than socialism?

And who invented the language needed to describe the historical, organic evolution of capitalism out of the guild system and mercantilism? Or socialism out of capitalism once the industrial revolution went full throttle? Again, what other animals come even remotely close to us here?
iambiguous wrote:But you tell me:

Where does human logic come into play in regard to questions such as this:

Why does something exist instead of nothing?
Why does this something exist instead of something else?
Where does the human condition fit into a definitive understanding of this particular something itself?
What of solipsism, sim worlds, dream worlds, the Matrix?
What of the multiverse?
Astro Cat wrote: Fri Feb 03, 2023 7:34 pmI 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?
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Re: Omniscience and omnibenevolence

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Astro Cat wrote: Sun Jan 15, 2023 4:35 am It is logically impossible for God to have created people with omnipotence because there can only be one omnipotent being (lest you run into the immovable object/irresistible force paradox).

However, there isn’t anything illogical about making other omnibenevolent or omniscient beings.

Why did God not make humans omniscient and omnibenevolent to avoid the instantiation of evil and suffering? Why not make angels that way too (to avoid Satan existing as a deceiver)?
If God is Nature then God is omnipotent in the sense that Nature is cause of itself and is not contingent on any cause or causes. Nature's way is change and therefore Nature necessarily involves modes of itself in suffering.

If God is a human projection of the human need to avoid suffering then God's omnibenevolence and God's omniscience are also projections of human need to encourage us in our search to prevent or alleviate suffering.

These two interpretations of the causes of God belief are dissonant unless we also include under Nature that human nature is basically benevolent.

The clinical model that health is normal and disease and lesions are departures from normal is optimistic about human nature.
The Romantic tradition that human nature is animal and good is basically optimistic.

The religious doctrine that human nature is fallen and basically sinful, together with all the trappings of guilt, is pessimistic and because it's clearly a rationalisation of power grabs, is probably wrong.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Omniscience and omnibenevolence

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Belinda wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 11:08 am If God is Nature then God is omnipotent in the sense that Nature is cause of itself and is not contingent on any cause or causes.
That's actually not sufficient to declare "omnipotence." There are things Nature cannot do, being bound, as it is, by what we call "natural laws." Nature itself is obviously contingent, since there is no absolute reason that anything had to exist at all. It's also obviously contingent because it operates entropically, through loss of complexity and deterioration. That's why we know heat death is its ultimate trajectory.

But there's also a further problem. "Omnipotence" inevitably implies that the thing of which one predicates it has intentions. It's "potency" in the achievement of some telos, deliberate action, or intended outcome. Nature, unless we make it out to be a kind of "god" in a personal sense, has no intentions, and cannot "fail" or "succeed" in doing anything it "intends." Thus, the whole question of what it is "potent for" is not answered.
Nature's way is change and therefore Nature necessarily involves modes of itself in suffering.
That seems not to answer the question as to why change has to entail suffering. That doesn't seem obvious.
If God is a human projection of the human need to avoid suffering then God's omnibenevolence and God's omniscience are also projections of human need to encourage us in our search to prevent or alleviate suffering.

These two interpretations of the causes of God belief are dissonant unless we also include under Nature that human nature is basically benevolent
That doesn't seem to follow at all, for two reasons.

One, again we cannot call something "benevolent" if it has no intentions. Nature has none, allegedly. So it does not mean us harm or help. It means us nothing at all.

Secondly, why would human nature have to be "benevolent"? That flies in the face of all the evidence. If human nature is merely "benevolent," from where came the Holomodor, the Holocaust, the trenches of WW1, the pogroms, the massacres, the enslavements and the torture chambers? If nature is "benevolent," then it's not the creator of these things; and if humans are, then they aren't either. So whence evil?
The clinical model that health is normal and disease and lesions are departures from normal is optimistic about human nature.
I don't think those things have anything to say about "human nature," if by "human nature" we mean whether or not people are "benevolent." The therapeutic model to which you refer is a normalizing model, which means that it asserts the existence of two categories: health and disease. It's hard to see what makes that "optimistic" at all. It looks rather neutral, since people can be found in either state...and more often in the latter than the former, if we believe clinicians.
The Romantic tradition that human nature is animal and good is basically optimistic.
In Disneyworld, maybe? There, the animals are all friendly, and the birds all alight on Snow White's hands. But watch a video of a weasel dispatching a rabbit, and you may take a different view. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv0Gf9YeelY Would you really call nature "good and optimistic" after that?
The religious doctrine that human nature is fallen and basically sinful, together with all the trappings of guilt, is pessimistic and because it's clearly a rationalisation of power grabs, is probably wrong.
Those are two different issues.

The "power grab" issue is what Nietzsche alleged. And no doubt, he was sometimes right: some religions are indeed power grabs. Cults would be excellent examples of that. But Nietzsche was trying to speak of "Judeo-Christianity," and about that, he was only half right. Like any other "religion," it can be abused into that role; but unlike others, it's not really equipped for that. In fact, the more seriously one takes "Judeo-Christian" morality, the harder it is to find leverage to grab power. The teachings of Christ, such as the Beatitudes, are a difficult thing to use to obtain power, for example. The more seriously you take them, the less self-will and belligerence one is allowed. "Dying to self" (Matt. 16:25, e.g.) is a really poor way for self to grab control.

But is the Christian view "pessimistic"? Yes, and no. Is it negative about current, common human nature? Yes. It points out that it is sinful. Is that pessimistic? No, not if it's realistic; then, it's just realistic. But is "Judeo-Christianity" pessimistic about the salvageability of human beings? Manifestly not. It's a "salvation" religion. It actually teaches the human beings, while temporarily fallen, are "made in the image of God" (Genesis) and are inherently eternal creatures designed for fellowship with God...and a more optimistic view of human potentials, I think you will never find.
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Re: Omniscience and omnibenevolence

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Belinda wrote: Sat Feb 04, 2023 12:00 pm
Gary Childress wrote: Sat Feb 04, 2023 8:35 am
Astro Cat wrote: Sun Jan 15, 2023 4:35 am It is logically impossible for God to have created people with omnipotence because there can only be one omnipotent being (lest you run into the immovable object/irresistible force paradox).

However, there isn’t anything illogical about making other omnibenevolent or omniscient beings.

Why did God not make humans omniscient and omnibenevolent to avoid the instantiation of evil and suffering? Why not make angels that way too (to avoid Satan existing as a deceiver)?
Because Christianity is an evil religion. Born of evil, for the evil-minded. No sane person in this day and age should worship a god who allegedly drowned/murdered literally almost all the world's population in a flood according to the holy babble. No sane person should follow the likes of Paul, Moses, et al. No sane person should follow Jesus who saves the wretched and condemns the noble. No sane person should believe that God is a resentful, angry, psychopath. If there is a God, then I prefer a good God or else no God at all. The desert religions are not based on the notion of a good god, rather on a god who takes sides and condones genocide. I call BS!

But Jesus was one of those who moderated the old tribal Jahweh so he became more universal.
Yes, he took someone else's fucked up tribal religion and made it universal. No thanks. Doesn't he have anything better to offer?
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Re: Omniscience and omnibenevolence

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Gary Childress wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 3:48 pm
Belinda wrote: Sat Feb 04, 2023 12:00 pm But Jesus was one of those who moderated the old tribal Jahweh so he became more universal.
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.
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Re: Omniscience and omnibenevolence

Post by Gary Childress »

Sculptor wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 4:32 pm
Gary Childress wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 3:48 pm
Belinda wrote: Sat Feb 04, 2023 12:00 pm But Jesus was one of those who moderated the old tribal Jahweh so he became more universal.
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.
Well if Jesus wasn't actually God incarnate, then that would explain a lot more. Otherwise, I kind of wonder why God would go about things in such a seemingly sloppy fashion to begin with.
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Re: Omniscience and omnibenevolence

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Sculptor wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 4:32 pm
Gary Childress wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 3:48 pm
Belinda wrote: Sat Feb 04, 2023 12:00 pm But Jesus was one of those who moderated the old tribal Jahweh so he became more universal.
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.
How do you know this?
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Re: Omniscience and omnibenevolence

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bahman wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 4:43 pm
Sculptor wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 4:32 pm
Gary Childress wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 3:48 pm

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.
How do you know this?
It's a matter of historical truth. A complete no brainer.
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Re: Omniscience and omnibenevolence

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Gary Childress wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 4:34 pm
Sculptor wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 4:32 pm
Gary Childress wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 3:48 pm

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.
Well if Jesus wasn't actually God incarnate, then that would explain a lot more. Otherwise, I kind of wonder why God would go about things in such a seemingly sloppy fashion to begin with.
The idea that Jesus was god seems unlikely. And of course him NOT being god explains everthing.
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Re: Omniscience and omnibenevolence

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Immanuel Can wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 5:13 am
Astro Cat wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 1:54 am Maybe I mean something like “never malevolent AND never negligent.”
I can see you've thought about this quite a bit.

Yes, you'd need something to cover both "sins of commission" and "sins of omission," so to speak...not just the doing of harm, but also the neglecting of preventing it. And then you'd need "harm" or "malevolence" defined.

That latter thing is not easy to do, as my earlier example illustrates. Is the father "malevolent" for allowing his daughter the limited "harm" of losing her "A" average, given that she may recoup it as a result of the lesson? And is the mother "malevolent" for preventing the same "harm" from happening, with the result that the daughter is temporarily shielded, but may be harmed by her own ignorance in the long run?

One would need to be quite omniscient to know exactly how omnipotence should be applied in order to prevent genuine harm...all that's no easy matter to sort out.
Yes, things can get complicated. However, that is also why I focus my PoE on the existence of physical suffering rather than more abstract forms of suffering such as emotional or mental suffering. One issue is that you're responding to a subargument of the main PoE so we're missing a lot of context from which I give it.

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.")

Physical suffering isn't required for free will to exist (if another premise of our argument is that it is good to have free will). Your will would be free if you couldn't stub your toe because physics doesn't allow for it; same with if you couldn't get leukemia, same with being unable to be born with a defect, same with being unable to violently stab your neighbor. (With this last example we might say, "wait a minute, but if you can't stab your neighbor, how are you free? In the same way that you can't walk on your ceiling yet are still free: if you went to try to stab your neighbor but the physics of the universe removed all inertia from the knife during the act of stabbing, you are still free in that you can still decide whether you want to try to stab your neighbor, you can decide what you want to do today or tomorrow, you can decide whom you want to spend the day with and doing what, and so on).

Furthermore, a lot of Christians are predisposed to some of the premises of this "toy world" concept where physics doesn't allow physical suffering (yet there is free will): a lot of people intuitively think Heaven is a place without physical suffering yet with free will.

The argument goes that since God is omnipotent and omniscient, and since it's possible to create a toy world (that being a world without physical suffering yet with free will), then God is culpable for the existence of any and all physical suffering in the actual created world since He could have done it otherwise, but deliberately chose not to. So, God is culpable for stubbed toes, God is culpable for leukemia, God is culpable for privation, starvation, and earthquakes; and God is even culpable for violence and innocent victims: not because He pulled the trigger, but because He set the rules that allowed it to be possible, and per omniscience/omnipotence, did so knowing what would happen (and did so despite being able to create the world otherwise such that it was not possible while still allowing free will).

Conversely, God is not culpable for emotional and mental suffering. You can have free will without stubbed toes, but 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.

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. But when it comes to physical suffering it's just about "why does this hurt or maim or kill." 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: the theist will often say, "well, we are mere humans and can't know why God allowing child leukemia is good, but God must have some good, unknowable reason for it."

I made a post about that which I encourage you to read, I think you'll like it: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=39403
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:If the theist in question thinks that God willfully inflicts suffering for the sake of suffering and not as a means to an end, for instance, then the PoE that I typically give just doesn’t apply to that concept of God: its premises are moot/not met.
The type of Theism taught by the Bible insists that God allows proximal and temporary "harms" in order to generate and overwhelming long-term benefit of some kind. One could think of James 1:2-4, which says, "Consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." Or there's 1 Peter 5:9-10 "...[Stand] firm in your faith, knowing that the same experiences of suffering are being accomplished by your brothers and sisters who are in the world. After you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself perfect, confirm, strengthen, and establish you." Or one could think of Christ, speaking in the famous "Beatitudes," (Matthew 5) and saying, "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted..."and even "Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

You can see that, at least from a Christian perspective, the doctrine that a benevolent God allows suffering, and also even turns it into various positive goods for His people is a major pattern throughout. Benevolence is a much more far-sighted property, in the Christian telling of things, than to be myopically preoccupied with immediate pleasure, or to wince at superficial harm.
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). I think it would be helpful to contain our conversation to one post, but in this case I will ask you again to just read the OP in the post I linked above as it directly responds to this line of argument. 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 (and how problematic it is to accept there is since it's an invincible position: once accepted, it may never be un-accepted; and that is a meta-problem). You can respond there or here, but I think that post I linked (sorry, it's kinda long) explains my thoughts well such that I don't want to try to repeat it and forget aspects that are important to mention.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:A lot of people have this intuition, though, that God is never malevolent. So the apparent incongruence with the physical suffering we see in the world is what my version of the PoE highlights in an attempt to get people with that sort of intuition to introspect.
Well, we'd need a first premise, that would go something like, "A good (or benevolent) God cannot ever allow suffering, even for long-term goods to be produced." There must be no conceivable circumstance allowed whereby any people, for any reason, can be benefitted by an experience of suffering or apparent harm...even as a matter of temporal character development, if not in view of some eternal state.
Essentially I think the greater good theodicy has to be talked about (which the thread I posted a link to does), also the soul-making theodicy. We should probably go down that path if you're willing, but I first want you to be familiar with the points I made in that other post as well.

Edit: I think that ultimately a theist can maintain that God is incapable of being malevolent or negligent such that any apparent malevolence or negligence can be explained away, albeit for reasons that can't be known. The response to that is to suggest there's a threshold somewhere where the evidence we see (evidence of malevolence and negligence) makes it more reasonable to doubt that God is actually incapable of malevolence/negligence than it is to accept it. In other words, "how do we know God is incapable of malevolence/negligence? Because He says so?" But the evidence says otherwise, and it seems reasonable to accept the evidence. Furthermore, rejecting the evidence for an unknowable reason is a "trap" that once entered might never be left since God could do literally anything and it would "follow" that it's not malevolent or negligent. A meta-argument is made: isn't the fact that the position is invincible a problem?

Edit 2: We can amend the alien example from the post I linked to be more in line with your particular conception of God. Suppose that the alien claims that their nature is such that they're incapable of acting malevolently and negligently, yet runs through the street shooting people with ray guns and saying, "do not run, I am your friend!" Isn't there a point where it's more reasonable to think that the alien is lying about being incapable of malevolence than it is to accept that they're telling the truth, and that shooting people in the street (while laughing maniacally) serves an unknowable good purpose?

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. For instance, perhaps God is actually malevolent, yet the apparent good we see in the world is actually a setup for some greater evil in a way that we just can't know. All of the theodicies that try to save God's benevolence also work towards saving God's malevolence. Someone might say, "well, God creating the world is a good thing, God wouldn't do that if God is malevolent," but wouldn't it be the case that in order to maximize evil or suffering God would have to create the world, for instance? Basically, the point being made here is that either way, the world appears to be incongruent with either God being maximally non-malevolent/non-negligent OR God being maximally malevolent, and the only way either can be saved is by appealing to agnosticism (that God is wholly-benevolent or wholly-malevolent despite appearances to the contrary because of unknown reasons). But if unknown reasons are being appealed to, then there's no way to distinguish whether we should accept the benevolent version or the malevolent version: they are both equally plausible since the unknown is being appealed to anyway!
Last edited by Astro Cat on Sun Feb 05, 2023 7:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Omniscience and omnibenevolence

Post by Astro Cat »

iambiguous wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 5:55 am 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."

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."

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.

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).
iambiguous wrote:
Astro Cat wrote: Fri Feb 03, 2023 7:34 pmI 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.
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Re: Omniscience and omnibenevolence

Post by Immanuel Can »

Astro Cat wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 7:15 pm 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."
Physical suffering isn't required for free will to exist
Possibly not. But it might still be entailed.
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.
Furthermore, a lot of Christians are predisposed to some of the premises of this "toy world" concept where physics doesn't allow physical suffering (yet there is free will):
I don't know any Christians that are, actually.
...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?
...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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I made a post about that which I encourage you to read, I think you'll like it: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=39403
Oh...I'll check it out. Thanks.
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.
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.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:A lot of people have this intuition, though, that God is never malevolent. So the apparent incongruence with the physical suffering we see in the world is what my version of the PoE highlights in an attempt to get people with that sort of intuition to introspect.
Well, we'd need a first premise, that would go something like, "A good (or benevolent) God cannot ever allow suffering, even for long-term goods to be produced." There must be no conceivable circumstance allowed whereby any people, for any reason, can be benefitted by an experience of suffering or apparent harm...even as a matter of temporal character development, if not in view of some eternal state.
Essentially I think the greater good theodicy has to be talked about (which the thread I posted a link to does), also the soul-making theodicy. We should probably go down that path if you're willing, but I first want you to be familiar with the points I made in that other post as well.
I'll check it out.
Edit: I think that ultimately a theist can maintain that God is incapable of being malevolent or negligent such that any apparent malevolence or negligence can be explained away, albeit for reasons that can't be known. The response to that is to suggest there's a threshold somewhere where the evidence we see (evidence of malevolence and negligence) makes it more reasonable to doubt that God is actually incapable of malevolence/negligence than it is to accept it.
No, there would have to be a further premise here: the premise that God is the only genuine agent in the universe. Theistic Determinism, in other words. But if human beings have any free will at all, they can both think and do harm. And it is not the case that all that they choose to do is according to the divine will (unless you're a Calvinist, of course; in which case, it is the case).

However, since I think both of us believe that human beings have free will, I don't think that's any route we're inclined to take.
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?
For instance, perhaps God is actually malevolent, yet the apparent good we see in the world is actually a setup for some greater evil in a way that we just can't know.
Well, as I pointed out, the Biblical God does tell people what the purposes of at least some suffering is. Not all, of course; but that hardly seems required, or even possible. So apparently we can know some of it. So I don't think we need that strategy at all.
...the only way either can be saved is by appealing to agnosticism
It's not "the only way," of course. I haven't appealed to it, have I?
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Re: Omniscience and omnibenevolence

Post by Belinda »

Immanuel Can wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 2:25 pm
Belinda wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 11:08 am If God is Nature then God is omnipotent in the sense that Nature is cause of itself and is not contingent on any cause or causes.
That's actually not sufficient to declare "omnipotence." There are things Nature cannot do, being bound, as it is, by what we call "natural laws." Nature itself is obviously contingent, since there is no absolute reason that anything had to exist at all. It's also obviously contingent because it operates entropically, through loss of complexity and deterioration. That's why we know heat death is its ultimate trajectory.

But there's also a further problem. "Omnipotence" inevitably implies that the thing of which one predicates it has intentions. It's "potency" in the achievement of some telos, deliberate action, or intended outcome. Nature, unless we make it out to be a kind of "god" in a personal sense, has no intentions, and cannot "fail" or "succeed" in doing anything it "intends." Thus, the whole question of what it is "potent for" is not answered.
Nature's way is change and therefore Nature necessarily involves modes of itself in suffering.
That seems not to answer the question as to why change has to entail suffering. That doesn't seem obvious.
If God is a human projection of the human need to avoid suffering then God's omnibenevolence and God's omniscience are also projections of human need to encourage us in our search to prevent or alleviate suffering.

These two interpretations of the causes of God belief are dissonant unless we also include under Nature that human nature is basically benevolent
That doesn't seem to follow at all, for two reasons.

One, again we cannot call something "benevolent" if it has no intentions. Nature has none, allegedly. So it does not mean us harm or help. It means us nothing at all.

Secondly, why would human nature have to be "benevolent"? That flies in the face of all the evidence. If human nature is merely "benevolent," from where came the Holomodor, the Holocaust, the trenches of WW1, the pogroms, the massacres, the enslavements and the torture chambers? If nature is "benevolent," then it's not the creator of these things; and if humans are, then they aren't either. So whence evil?
The clinical model that health is normal and disease and lesions are departures from normal is optimistic about human nature.
I don't think those things have anything to say about "human nature," if by "human nature" we mean whether or not people are "benevolent." The therapeutic model to which you refer is a normalizing model, which means that it asserts the existence of two categories: health and disease. It's hard to see what makes that "optimistic" at all. It looks rather neutral, since people can be found in either state...and more often in the latter than the former, if we believe clinicians.
The Romantic tradition that human nature is animal and good is basically optimistic.
In Disneyworld, maybe? There, the animals are all friendly, and the birds all alight on Snow White's hands. But watch a video of a weasel dispatching a rabbit, and you may take a different view. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv0Gf9YeelY Would you really call nature "good and optimistic" after that?
The religious doctrine that human nature is fallen and basically sinful, together with all the trappings of guilt, is pessimistic and because it's clearly a rationalisation of power grabs, is probably wrong.
Those are two different issues.

The "power grab" issue is what Nietzsche alleged. And no doubt, he was sometimes right: some religions are indeed power grabs. Cults would be excellent examples of that. But Nietzsche was trying to speak of "Judeo-Christianity," and about that, he was only half right. Like any other "religion," it can be abused into that role; but unlike others, it's not really equipped for that. In fact, the more seriously one takes "Judeo-Christian" morality, the harder it is to find leverage to grab power. The teachings of Christ, such as the Beatitudes, are a difficult thing to use to obtain power, for example. The more seriously you take them, the less self-will and belligerence one is allowed. "Dying to self" (Matt. 16:25, e.g.) is a really poor way for self to grab control.

But is the Christian view "pessimistic"? Yes, and no. Is it negative about current, common human nature? Yes. It points out that it is sinful. Is that pessimistic? No, not if it's realistic; then, it's just realistic. But is "Judeo-Christianity" pessimistic about the salvageability of human beings? Manifestly not. It's a "salvation" religion. It actually teaches the human beings, while temporarily fallen, are "made in the image of God" (Genesis) and are inherently eternal creatures designed for fellowship with God...and a more optimistic view of human potentials, I think you will never find.
Laws of Nature define Nature. 'God is Good' defines God for whoever believes.
The verb 'to be' in English can define and it can attribute.
Killing rabbits is part of what defines weasel and is neither good or bad.

The biological human is buried under centuries of acculturation. It's unlikely that the biological human is any more bad than the weasel or the rabbit. The human does bad things because of his cultural ideology.
Evil is relative absence of good; good is the default.

Humans are not made in the image of God: God is made in the image of humans.
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Re: Omniscience and omnibenevolence

Post by Belinda »

Sculptor wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 4:32 pm
Gary Childress wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 3:48 pm
Belinda wrote: Sat Feb 04, 2023 12:00 pm But Jesus was one of those who moderated the old tribal Jahweh so he became more universal.
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.
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