Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Feb 07, 2023 1:38 am
Astro Cat wrote: ↑Mon Feb 06, 2023 5:16 pm
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?
Ok, so it's possible to do, but the question remains of whether it would be desirable, good, or other such descriptors. We'll get into that.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote: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."
When speaking for myself, I haven't said "physical suffering is evil." I've said that it isn't congruent with benevolence, which is true regardless of whether moral realism is true. If benevolence means not to inflict gratuitous suffering (for instance), and some example of physical suffering is gratuitous, then the one that inflicted it is not benevolent by definition: this works even without moral realism because it's simply a definitional contradiction.
In the quote above, I even said, "whatever any of that means," making it clear that I was just putting on a moral realist hat to talk like one for a moment to present the same problem in moral realist terms. I don't have to be one or accept that the terms are ultimately meaningful to know how they interact and how moral realists interpret them.
The PoE can be given without moral realism by simply noting suffering
appears incongruent with benevolence. The point of the PoE isn't to bemoan the existence of suffering and to say "this is bad," the point is to show there is an apparent contradiction with the properties of the version of God in the premises and the observed world.
Of course I do have my own personal feelings that the existence of suffering is bad. I'm saying I don't need to dig into that in order to present the PoE.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:
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.
I will make an argument regarding this; we were just nailing down the term.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote: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.
We're just nailing down what the term means.
For instance, we don't know whether extraterrestrial life exists, yet we can know what the term "extraterrestrial life" would mean if it does. Make sense?
That is all we're establishing right now is terminology. I promise an argument is coming once I'm sure we're on the same page.
So do you or do you not agree that we can call suffering which doesn't serve some greater purpose "gratuitous suffering?" Does it make sense why taking a needle for an inoculation is not gratuitous, but a slap to the face for no reason is gratuitous?
For instance according to philosopher William Rowe:
Rowe wrote:an instance of suffering is gratuitous ... if an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented it without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse
Now, I think Rowe's definition is lacking in that it totally ignores the Trolley Problem, so I feel like that needs to be addressed. For instance, if I pull a lever to redirect a trolley so that instead of killing five people it only kills one person, is the suffering that I perpetuated against that one person gratuitous? It's not that clear from some lesser (non-omnipotent, non-omniscient) version of Rowe's definition of gratuitousness because it might be up to debate whether saving five is a "greater good" such that actively killing one is "worth it" -- at least unless one assumes some kind of pragmatism over deontology.
I tried to point this out when I made the silly example of killing someone to give a gift of their skull as a mantlepiece ornament: it's nice to the person that receives the gift (I guess, if they're into that, lol!), but not so nice to the person that got killed: nothing about any of this was "worth it" to the one that got killed for the skull, so I think it is still a form of gratuitousness. I think you bring up some questions about that below, so I'll continue down there. For now, I just want to make sure we're at least close to being on the same page about gratuitousness, and that I ask for more consideration to victims and what they get out of the suffering than Rowe famously does.
This is your response to the skull example:
Immanuel Can wrote: 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?
I think the answer to that question depends on whether the audience of the argument sides with utilitarianism or deontology. We're effectively talking about the Trolley Problem at this point, as I mentioned recently above. Different people will answer differently whether to pull a lever that would kill one to save five. The deontologist is more likely (though not guaranteed, depending on the deontologist) to say that it's unacceptable to pull the lever and therefore actively participate in a killing even if it saves five; while the utilitarian is more likely to respond that it's acceptable to pull the lever to kill one (but save five).
I think it's important when we're pondering gratuitousness who suffers and whether they benefit from the suffering. For instance, if I get a vaccine, I'm the one that suffers, but I'm also getting the benefit of the suffering -- I don't think this feels like gratuitousness. However, if a vampire drinks the blood of a victim, the victim is the one that suffers while the vampire reaps the benefits -- I think this still has the right pieces for gratuitousness because even though some purpose was served by the suffering (the vampire's continued existence), the victim suffered gratuitously (they had nothing desirable or, in the trappings of the moral realist, good come out of their suffering: suffering that they didn't choose). Now compare that to a martyr that jumps in front of a bullet to save his daughter: again, this doesn't feel like gratuitousness because he elected to suffer for the purpose of saving his daughter's life; he benefited from the outcome in that it's the outcome he desired.
So gratuitousness seems like it's hard to nail down ina succinct line of definition (I mean, maybe we can if we try); and I think gratuitousness is more complicated than Rowe famously made it out to be (hence these examples), but I think it has been rendered sensible. Is there anything still unclear about what it means in this argument?
Now, you ask (I snipped it for now) where a standard comes from that we should consider all peoples' suffering equally, I snipped this interesting question (don't want you to think it's not) because it's pretty far outside the scope of the current argument and I think is really parallel to the moral realism vs. noncognitivism argument because it's a value question. I'll honor the question briefly by saying I simply hold such a value (that all things considered peoples' suffering matters equally), but I think we should discuss where values come from and stuff like that under another topic than this one because that will just muddy the waters with a topic I think deserves its own topic. It's sufficient for now to just assume that someone isn't a racist for instance (and doesn't think "my 'race' deserves more consideration when it comes to suffering" or "some other race doesn't deserve the same consideration when it comes to suffering") and so on. That will get us really far off track. Make the other topic if you want.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote: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.
Okay, I'll hold you to that (that you won't punt to mystery), but you better start thinking about things like what possible purpose a child that dies after suffering leukemia or an infant with some birth defect that dies after only knowing misery serves such that it was benevolent for God to allow it. I imagine we'll eventually get to there being some unknowable reason God might possibly have, but you say it won't, so we'll see.
Immanuel Can wrote: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.
We may not have a way to definitely know if suffering is gratuitous, but we have thresholds of when it's more reasonable/rational to accept a possibility is more likely than another. For instance, I don't know whether or not extraterrestrial life exists, but given the information that I do know, I think it's rational to think it's likely to exist; for instance. Before the neutrino was discovered, based on things we did know, it was more rational than not to suppose there must exist such a particle.
This is the sort of rationality I will appeal to in my argument. We actually use it all the time: this is because nearly all of our knowledge isn't absolute. I've never been to Spain so can't
absolutely know it exists, but it's way more rational for me to think it does than not.
And, as I've tried to trot out a few times, it may be more rational than not given the evidence to suppose that the Martian blasting people in the street might not be your friend despite them broadcasting, "do not run, we are your friends." Even though it's
possible they are your friend, even though it's
possible they have a benevolent reason for doing what they're doing.
Do you see the seed of the argument I'm going to be making? There is a threshold where we can still make rational decisions based on non-omniscient data.
Immanuel Can wrote: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.
The PoE also skips that little wrinkle because in God's case, as a creator-being, His role is still more than passive even if He doesn't pull the trigger (he makes the gun possible in the first place; and it's not an accident that he makes the gun possible either, per omniscience and omnipotence, He had to have deliberately made the world such that the gun is possible). So, despite you saying we don't have to worry about that wrinkle about passivity, it still wouldn't be the case that we wouldn't have to worry about it because creators have special culpabilities where seemingly passive things are still active to a degree.
I might liken it to a programmer that designs The Matrix (if the Matrix is full of sapient, sentient minds). If the programmer programs in, say, the ability to direct your thoughts at someone and make them suffer intense pain by willing it alone (an exotic form of attack we don't even have in this reality), then even if the programmer isn't the one that "pulls the trigger" when someone uses this ability, they still share culpability in the act for having deliberately made it possible. Would you agree?
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote: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?
Let's say that I've created The Matrix and it's full of truly sapient/sentient AI. I program the world so that its inhabitants can't be physically harmed (it has "god mode" cheats turned on, baked in to the server). Its people have free will, and they even have significant freedom because they can make morally significant choices such as whether to keep or break a promise (an example Plantinga himself used for significant freedom). However, even if they pick up a gun and shoot someone else, the other person isn't harmed. They can use a knife to cut a tomato to make a salad, but as soon as they turn it on someone else, the inertia leaves the knife and that person is unharmed.
Would you say these aren't persons? Would you say they don't have free will (they do)? Would you say they don't have significant freedom (they do, just not physical significant freedom)? Would you say they don't have the ability to develop moral cognitions (they can, because they must learn not to lie, not to break promises; they might even understand what physical suffering is by dreaming it up as a fictional device in their superhero movies depicting another universe for entertainment)?
Now let's say that you visit my Matrix. Have you been robbed of your human dignity because you can't stab the first person you see? Are you able to spend a week in a Matrix vacation, going to a perfect recreation of the Virgin Islands and enjoying a tour, spending your evenings making new friends and deciding with your family that you brought with you what you want to do on a given day?
Somewhere below, you praise "...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." Isn't it the case that the people in my Matrix, including you if you visit it, have "volition, identity, creativity, autonomy, ability to love, the option to act charitably and with mercy, individuality, moral awareness, and all those other things?" Seems like my Matrix-people can check every single one of those boxes.
Is it so horrible? Is it really? When you emerge back to our reality, would you gasp and say, "Thank God, I can finally strangle the first person I see if I so felt like it? Hallelujah, I could find out tomorrow I have cancer?" That's such an incredible good that you'd be glad to have it back?
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote: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.
Yes, not all mental disorders are chemical. I was just saying as a sidebar that a toy world wouldn't include the ones that are. Again, I am not diminishing mental suffering's impact. I was just pointing out that there would not be a bipolar disorder, there would not be clinical (as opposed to triggered) depression, etc. Just worth noting.
Immanuel Can wrote: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.
I've given a couple of reasons.
1) Mental suffering has more evidence that it isn't gratuitous suffering: if being able to love someone of our choosing is good, then unrequited love has to be a possibility, for instance. (Conversely, there is less evidence that physical suffering isn't gratuitous and more evidence that it might be.)
2) Preventing mental suffering while retaining free will may entail contradictions. For instance, if God has to rearrange the universe so that no promises are ever broken, it might be the case that mutually exclusive promises exist; and that would be impossible to maintain even for an omnipotent being. (Conversely, there are no contradictions in removing physical suffering while retaining free will, even significant free will [just not physical significant free will].)
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote: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.
Good points, but I was also considering that most actions thought to be morally bad seem to cause suffering elsewhere, too (e.g. you punch someone, they feel pain; you steal from someone, they have lost something they value, and so on). Intentions seem to play a role as well (a desperately starving person living in abject privation that steals a loaf of bread to stay alive is frowned on less than an affluent person stealing candy from a baby even if both are stealing).
In any case my point is that if the difference between "freedom" and "significant freedom" is that "significant freedom" is the ability to take both sides of a moral action, then saying "significant freedom is good to have" is literally the same thing as saying "being able to take both sides of a moral action is good," and if a moral action is a moral action because someone suffers (whereas no one suffers when you choose Cheerios instead of Wheaties so it isn't considered a moral action), then it's the same thing as saying "being able to cause suffering is good." Note that's not the same thing as saying "causing suffering is good," it's that "being
able to cause suffering is good."
I think it's hard to answer that question though: why is being able to cause suffering good? But we are already talking about that somewhere above and probably below.
Immanuel Can wrote: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.
Where is the threshold on being able to do something being good (but if you
did do it, it would be bad)?
Consider I present you a box with a big red button on it. If you press that big red button, then all the kittens and puppies on Earth explode in front of children that have to watch.
Well, you're now
able to press the big red button, but it would be
bad if you did.
Is the world where this exists better than the world you're in right now, where you don't have this big red button? If
having the choice is so good (even if
using it is bad), do you feel like you're really missing out on not having this big red button? Has God done you a disfavor by not presenting you with the big red button?
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote: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.
I don't think it seems that way at all, so we might have to hammer this out more.
For instance, God ostensibly has maturity and spiritual development without ever having had to "learn" it. We might excuse this by saying "well, God is perfect." But what does that even mean, and why couldn't God make a human perfect in similar ways? This was one of the main notions of my OP: it's a logical impossibility for God to make another being omnipotent, but I see no reason why God couldn't make another being omniscient.
You might say, "well, brains can only hold so much information." But as far as I see it, in a worldview that believes in souls, why does a brain matter (God didn't
have to use brains)? It does seem within the purview of omnipotence for God to be able to make another being that knows all true propositions and believes no false propositions: there's nothing logically contradictory about that, so omnipotence means God should be able to do it.
I haven't said that God would zoop them into prefering friendship with God, just zooped them with knowledge so they can make an
informed choice about that. God doesn't even have to give them omniscience, He just has to give them the entirety of knowledge they need to make an informed choice. There's nothing illogical here. Do you disagree?
For instance, if you had to decide whether you wanted to be my friend and I had God's power, I could probably zoop into you a
complete understanding of who I am, what I'm about, and what the consequences of seeking friendship with me would be, and what the consequences of not seeking friendship with me would be. The decision is still on you, I've just armed you to make a truly
informed decision.
If you still insist that's not logically possible, then what about this. I could zoop you into a dimension where you live out each possibility, each iteration of deciding to be my friend or not (but in this pocket dimension, the other people are philosophical zombies and not actual sapient beings, unknown to you -- so nobody else actually suffers no matter what you do in them). Then when you're finished collating all the data (maybe you don't even realize that's what's happening at the time), I zoop you back to the real world and combine all that experience in your mind so now you can make a truly informed choice in a way that no one ever had to suffer in order to gather the information to make the choice. How about that? I feel like the "zooping" option is fine and not logically contradictory, but I wanted to provide an alternative just in case.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote: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.
We need to be careful. Free will is just to have a choice between at least two options. That doesn't necessitate one of those options causing suffering or gratuitous suffering.
Significant free will is the ability to freely choose between morally significant options. That is more apt to contain a choice that might cause suffering.
So, the point is that the alien can bestow the robots with free will: they can have personhood, individuality, autonomy, creativity, and personalities even if they aren't able to smash their fellow robots into bits. The alien can even bestow the robots with significant free will: perhaps the alien decides it's good for the robots to be able to form friendships with each other freely, but this necessitates the possibility of
unrequited friendship. It's not possible to enable free friendship-making without also enabling unrequited friendship. So unrequited friendship is not a gratuitous suffering: it is a result of the greater purpose of having freely made friendships.
They are still free, and even still significantly free without the ability to physically maim and destroy their fellow robots. They just aren't significantly physically free, but so what? Why is that bad? Do you think they're sad about it? Would you be?
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote: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?
What is the threshold for how long a reward from doing evil needs to last? Doesn't the Christian think that all evil is ultimately not rewarded, and unfailingly punished -- exactly the scenario you describe here?
I understand that a person has to die and enter the afterlife before they're punished according to most Christians, but why is it good that they get a little brief window (e.g. the rest of their mortal life) where they thought evil rewarded them? Why is that good? I seriously don't understand this and I'm not trying to be obtuse. They
do ultimately fail if they do not-the-good according to the worldview. Why does it matter there's a little window where they think they don't?
What if your tongue only falls off, say, a month after telling a lie? Too soon? (I'll ignore for now arguments of proportionality, lol; I doubt either of us agree a tongue falling off is proportional to telling a lie, I guess depending on the lie)
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote: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.
This doesn't explain why God lets evil do that, if I go along with the moral realist language. God could have designed a world where physicality can't be used to make innocent victims. God chose to make a world where it can. God is culpable for innocent victimhood in a physical sense: God is culpable for beatings, for rape, for any kind of violence. Why did God make a world with physical innocent victims and not a world without them?
If the answer is soul-building, as I've said, God could make a world where people soul-build without innocent victims. E.g., you make a bad choice, you get zooped to a pocket dimension and
you suffer the results of your bad choice, not your intended victim, and then get zooped back. Easy peasy. Why not that? Why did God
want innocent victims to exist, which God
has to have wanted per God being omnipotent and omniscient (had the power and knowledge to make it otherwise, but chose instead to deliberately make a world with physical innocent victims)?
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote: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.
They
should have known better: why didn't they?
If the tree would give them knowledge that they
did not have, then they weren't making an informed choice. For instance, if they don't know what "evil" is, then ostensibly they don't know what a "lie" is, so how could they defend themselves against one?
Why didn't God give them the necessary knowledge to know what would happen if they ate the fruit, the knowledge to know that deceivers exist and what deception is, and so on? Isn't God still quite culpable here?
Parents teach young children not to talk to strangers, but most of them I know also tell their children not to listen to strangers because strangers can lie. If I tell a child, "don't open the front door for a stranger," but then I'm sleeping or something and a stranger knocks and tells the child, "actually you can open the front door, your mom said it was OK," and I haven't prepared my child for what deception is, what do you think is going to happen? Isn't it kind of on me to prepare my child for that?
There is no reason God couldn't have given Adam and Eve sufficient knowledge to make a truly informed choice, truly informed about consequences, truly informed about all the factors that go into making the choice.
More below here:
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote: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.
Do you think anyone would make a bad choice if they truly knew the repurcussions of making that choice, both for themselves and others? If the totalitarian knew that they could maybe get 20 years of relative affluence on Earth only to actually burn in Hell or whatever for an eternity that he would still choose to be a totalitarian (and I'm not saying that someone just vaguely mentions to them "yeah you'll burn," but I mean they
truly understand,
truly appreciate what that means in a full and vivid sense to burn forever or whatever)? Of course not. Nobody's going to make such a stupid choice like that if they actually have the knowledge to make an informed choice.
Or at least, 99.9999999% of people wouldn't, I don't know, maybe some idiot would (I really think though, if they
truly and I mean
really understood the factors around the decision and the consequences of the decision that not a single human would choose Hell or whatever just for a few years of affluence or whatever the example might be). But God could still make it so that their choices don't cause innocent victims, and for the rest, it's still a very good question why God doesn't give them the knowledge to make
informed choices. Why doesn't He?
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote: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.
No, it's not sufficient to say any of us "pretty much know." It's true that we often know enough, e.g. if I steal this candy bar then the store's bottom line will be affected or whatever. But the murderer can compartmentalize their feelings and never truly know what their victim went through for instance, or never truly know what they're missing out on or will be subjected to on versions of theism with an afterlife, etc.
Even the most devout believer often has doubts for instance regarding what will happen to them in the afterlife. A murderer might constantly whisper in the back of their mind "I won't really burn for this," or whatever one might think. Nobody truly knows the totality of consequences for their actions and "pretty much know" doesn't cut it, it's obviously entirely insufficient for the reason you point out (because they do it anyway, because they find wiggle room).
If Joe Jerk really knew what's in store for him for embezzling from that children's charity fund, if he
really knew to the fullest extent of knowing, do you really think he'd still do it?
If we say "but that would be bad to have such knowledge because then nobody would do anything bad," then
so what? It'd be an informed choice!
Immanuel Can wrote: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.
Well, we've already talked about this in the moral realism thread and I feel like we should take it elsewhere so as not to complicate this one. As mentioned above, the PoE still works on noncognitivism because it's simply that benevolence is incongruent with gratuitous suffering as a logical matter (like a Euclidean square is incongruent with a being a Euclidean circle as a logical matter). The point of the PoE is not to cry, "but why does suffering exist, it's icky and gross and I don't like it." It's to point out "since suffering exists, it appears at least less likely that God has the properties ascribed to Him such as benevolence." It isn't a condemnation of suffering, it is pointing out an apparent disparity in properties of a creator and observation of the world.
Now, I do have personal feelings about suffering. But I'm saying for this conversation it really doesn't matter. If you want to continue our discussion about moral realism, start a thread and I'll join, but we should spare this thread from being even more complicated with something that really doesn't even impact it.
Whew! Made it to the bottom. I think once we confirm all of those terms we defined are sensible to both of us, I can launch into a couple of actual arguments.