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.
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?