I think it is fairly clear what sort of suffering is physical vs. what sort of suffering is mental. A simple way to parse them is to ask, "if my body were invincible, would I experience this kind of suffering?" Consider a video game such as Doom where you can type "iddqd" and then take a bullet without taking damage: effectively, physical suffering has been removed from the Doom's simplified universe with a keystroke.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Feb 05, 2023 8:42 pmI 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."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.")
In a toy world, it's not possible to stub your toe or to catch a disease. You don't have to endure physical discomfort to tone your body because becoming overweight or whatever isn't a risk. A toy world is like some peoples' intuitive conception of what Heaven might be like in a lot of ways: do people have to weight train in Heaven? I somehow doubt that fits with peoples' intuitive conception of Heaven. Perhaps someone just really likes weight training for whatever reason, but it's easy to conceive of a universe where God makes it so that they can achieve their results that way whereas people that don't like it can just will their body into being the shape they want. Often in these kinds of discussions we need to remember just how wild the omnipotence/omniscience combo can really get.
I think a good rule of thumb for deciding what's physical suffering and what isn't is to ask "if I typed iddqd in real life, would this kind of suffering affect me?" Then a little thinking past that (such as with the weight training example) should be easily thought out from there, it seems. I do not, for instance, see how learning could be considered "physical pain." Nor boredom. Those seem to obviously be mental discomforts.
But our choices are already limited and we consider ourselves free (also, you could kick the doorframe full force if you want; the physics of the universe might just subtract inertia from the blow towards your toe). You and I can't walk on our ceilings, we can't teleport to Mars, we can't summon the TV remote from the coffee table telekinetically to our hands. We could say, "You can't choose to be subject to gravity, it's forced on you," and it still wouldn't mean we're not free.Immanuel Can wrote: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.Astro Cat wrote:Your will would be free if you couldn't stub your toe because physics doesn't allow for it;
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.
Let us say that the total number of physical freedoms is a big deal (I don't think that it is, but let's consider it). Well, for every physical freedom removed by being unable to hurt ourselves or others, it's a trivial matter for God to add a freedom to "make up for it" that doesn't instantiate physical suffering: if God removes the capacity to stub toes on door frames, God could add the ability to walk on the ceiling. As I said, the omnipotence/omniscience combo means we can get quite creative with possibilities. So, if the objection is "but the number of freedoms would be less," the answer is both "I don't think that matters that much since we already lack some freedoms yet still consider ourselves free" but also "if the total number does matter, then God could trivially add a freedom we don't currently have for each physical suffering-causing freedom taken away such that the total number of freedoms remains the same."
In a world without physical suffering, there are still character-building choices. Just because you can't stab your neighbor doesn't mean you can't break a promise to them or say jerkish things to them: God isn't culpable for that, only you are. God is culpable for your ability to stab them though, so that is why my version of the PoE focuses on physical suffering.Immanuel Can wrote: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.Astro Cat wrote:...a lot of people intuitively think Heaven is a place without physical suffering yet with free will.
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?
Being a jerk is a necessary potentiality in order to have free will. Physical suffering is not. You can still get your soul-building theodicy through exclusively non-physical suffering because people have to still decide whether they're going to be nice to one another, whether to keep their promises, whether to not spread false rumors about someone, how they want to deal with unrequited love and things like that.
The term "innocent victim" wouldn't exist in a toy world because the only kind of suffering someone could experience is as a result of their own choices: if physical suffering exists, you can get stabbed or get born with a debilitating birth defect and may have never done anything to "deserve" it. Yet in a toy world, if someone says something mean about you, you may choose to ignore it. It's on you if you let it get to you. It's on you to keep a promise or break a promise, that sort of thing (and it's on you whom you trust with a promise). There's no such thing as something just happening to you completely out of your control and completely outside of something you did to "deserve." There are no innocent victims in a toy world. That's part of the point: why are there ostensibly innocent victims?
Either there are no innocent victims (and just world hypothesis is true; and somehow that baby with leukemia did something to deserve it -- I don't think either of us wants to seriously explore this, or do we?), or there are; and God is culpable for the very concept of its existence since the world could have been made otherwise.
But this is like saying, "People that are subject to gravity and spent their whole lives walking at the bottom of a gravitational well never had any free will at all, they never had anything but being subject to gravity to choose." Because that's the way it is: we don't have a choice in that regard, we are stuck on a planetary surface due to gravity; we can't decide to float away if we choose. Yet we still regard ourselves as free, don't we?Immanuel Can wrote: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.Astro Cat wrote:...it's possible to create a toy world (that being a world without physical suffering yet with free will),
Well, if I weren't able to shoot my neighbor, I would still be free. I'd be able to decide whether I'm going to play board games with friends today or whether I want to take my partner to see a movie. I'm able to decide whether to debate philosophy on the internet or whether I want to play a video game. I'm able to decide whether I want to be an engineer or a scientist with some of my time. I'm able to decide, if I were so inclined, that I don't like the way that guy wears his hat and I'm going to tell him (rudely) that I think it's ugly. I just can't stab him over it. I'm still I think very obviously free. I can't stab the guy with the ugly hat and I can't walk on the ceiling, but so what?
I mean that if one of the premises is that free will is good to have, then having free will requires the ability to do some things where will actually wouldn't be free if we couldn't do it. I'm still free if I can't stab a guy, but I'm not still free if I can't think the guy's hat is ugly. I'm still free if diseases don't exist, but I'm not still free if I can't choose to break a promise. So free will does entail some kinds of suffering existing; I'm saying that physical suffering is not among those necessarily entailed by having free will. We can do away with all of physical suffering and still be free, but we can't do away with all of emotional/mental suffering and still be free. So God is not culpable for emotional/mental suffering (on the premise that God couldn't help but to have it exist as a side effect of having free will at all), but God is culpable for physical suffering (in that we could still be free without it, so free will existing is not an excuse to have physical suffering exist).Immanuel Can wrote: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."Astro Cat wrote:Conversely, God is not culpable for emotional and mental suffering.
You can still remove the physical suffering from this scenario and have a completely sensible scenario (I have already addressed the "reduced number of free actions" issue in a section above, so I think that responds to "One has, again, lost one aspect of free will."Immanuel Can wrote: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.Astro Cat wrote: 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.
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.
In a toy world, if a friend says unkind words to you, perhaps you may have a choice to cry (if you find it cathartic) or not; but you would of course suffer emotionally because of your friend's betrayal. God isn't culpable for that, that's an unavoidable condition of having free will that your friend can choose to betray you. However, God is culpable for your friend being able to strike your face. There's no reason your friend needs to be able to strike your face. They're still free if they can't strike your face.
So yes, in the world we're familiar with, physical and mental suffering are often intertwined, that doesn't mean it has to be the case. Physical suffering's existence still demands an explanation. Mental suffering's existence can be explained if we simply posit that having free will is "worth it" to have it.
Sometimes words are used for brevity; I slip often back into just saying "benevolence" when, as mentioned, I mean something more like "never malevolent and never negligent." I think it is just a matter of carefully and meticulously outlining everything that's meant. Ultimately, "benevolence is not congruent with causing or allowing gratuitous physical suffering" is an intelligible sentence; it perhaps just takes being a little pedantic to parse it out. But it can be done. The greater good theodicy basically attacks the "gratuitous" part by suggesting physical suffering isn't gratuitous. But we talk about the greater good theodicy elsewhere.Immanuel Can wrote: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.Astro Cat wrote: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.
They don't seem to be very explicitly named to me -- general things like bliss and comfort. If I take that at face value, it doesn't make much sense.Immanuel Can wrote:Not in the passages I quoted, of course. In them, the goods to be achieved are actually named.Astro Cat wrote: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:
If I slap a toddler in the face and then give them a candy bar, am I a nice person -- is that congruent with being never-malevolent? Even if I did something really nice afterwards, like slapped them in the face and then paid their future college tuition, isn't that obviously still incongruent with never-malevolence? The very question is whether or not physical suffering is required to attain bliss or comfort, and that's the greater good theodicy at work. But the "hows" of it, even in those verses, are still left to be implied as unknowable or at least unknown. That is a problem.
In the world we experience where suffering is unavoidable, some things are commendable because they seek to alleviate, reduce, or prevent other kinds of suffering. I would argue, though, that this line of argument leads to silly things. I think we've touched on this before, long ago: is it "worth it" to have house fires just so we can have heroism (firemen)? I can't speak for everyone else, but that's prima facie ludicrous. It seems like it would be better simply not to have house fires or firemen, we wouldn't miss them since the thing they alleviate couldn't trouble us.Immanuel Can wrote: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.Astro Cat wrote: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 would be like saying it's wonderful smallpox existed because it meant someone was able to come along and make the vaccine (something most of us would intuitively think is good). I can't help but to think that it's better to simply have had a world where smallpox never ravaged the masses than it is to have a world where so many suffered just so someone can cure it. Yet that's what it sounds like when some theodicists say that it's good we can murder because a selfless martyr taking a bullet to protect their lover for instance wouldn't be possible without murder. But isn't it better to simply not have either? What's so bad about a world without martyrs if the bullets they might take for us are never a threat in the first place? I sincerely have trouble following the sentiment of those particular theodicies.
I agree, though. Perhaps the appearance of malevolence is really benevolence for some reason unknowable to us right now. I've never denied that's possible. What I'm saying, though, is that we still have to make rational decisions based on what we do know. That was also the reason for my third edit, too: perhaps the appearance of benevolence is really malevolence for some reason unknowable to us. We can't actually distinguish which is the case so long as we're just appealing to the unknown: both are equally unknowable and so have equal epistemic weights to us! Why should we assume that God is wholly benevolent when there is evidence of malevolence? (Well, because of some unknowable reason!) Why should we assume that God is wholly malevolent when there is evidence of benevolence? (Well, because of some unknowable reason!) Since they're both unknowable, we actually have no reason to suppose one is the case and the other is not other than flipping a coin or just having a personal fancy for one over the other.Immanuel Can wrote:I would ask, "Unknowable to whom?"Astro Cat wrote: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
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.
Other than that, we have to make rational decisions on limited information all the time. That's why I made the alien analogy in that other post. If there is an alien that is mentally superior to humans (and so is capable of conceiving of things that we can't conceive of), and that alien says they're perfectly benevolent (we can define that however we need to: perfectly never-malevolent, perfectly never-negligent, or perhaps something like perfectly incapable of acting evilly if you prefer, whatever), then a greater good theodicy can be made to excuse anything at all that the alien does: if the alien runs through the streets shooting people with death rays, screaming "do not run, I am your friend," the greater good theodicists may of course say the alien, being perfectly benevolent and mentally superior (and so, able to conceive of reasons to do things that we can't), must have a good reason for blasting people in the streets. But can't we agree that despite being epistemically limited, there is a threshold where it's reasonable and rational to suppose that maybe, just maybe, the alien is not our friend, that the alien is not perfectly benevolent even if the alien can demonstrate their mental superiority?
That is what I'm getting at with the PoE: there is a threshold where it's more rational than not to doubt that a creator, if it exists omnipotently and omnisciently, is actually benevolent no matter what it claims. The same with the alien claiming to be benevolent (and our friend!) as it blasts people: it's perfectly reasonable to say "maybe they're not actually our friend." Even though we're epistemically limited and perhaps the alien does have a good reason, the argument is that we're still being reasonable/rational by doubting the alien based on the evidence we're able to process.
I think some of this is leaving into a different discussion (moral realism), which we've done some elsewhere. I think that we don't have to consider moral realism to still agree that to behave benevolently is not to cause gratuitous physical suffering. We don't have to define good and evil (terms that mean something different to me than they do to you) and I do that on purpose for that very reason. Physical suffering is objective, if S suffers physically then S experiences pain, maiming, bodily disfunction, death, or similar. A moral spin doesn't even have to be put on those words if benevolence is simply defined in some way as to not gratuitously cause those things: there can still be an incongruence between what is perceived about the world and what is proposed about the creator without having to use moral realism.Immanuel Can wrote:Not a very good argument, I have to say.Astro Cat wrote: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.
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?
That is all a sidebar though, and I hope not to mire the greater discussion too much with our separate debate about moral realism. I've been typing for a while now so thoughts are getting fuzzy (LOL!), so I'll just summarize by saying that benevolence is incongruent with causing or allowing gratuitous suffering both with and without moral realism.
Edit: sorry for the length of this post. I’m sleep deprived so organizing thought is hard right now. In my next response I’ll condense things in a better way.
Also I forgot to wrap around to the purpose of this OP (asking why God didn’t make people omniscient and omnibenevolent). A side question to that is why God doesn’t make the reasons why leukemia is actually good to exist (if it is) known to us.