An interesting explanation of why God would place us in an indifferent universe came to me by way of a Krishna devotee: in the spiritual reality, the hereafter, the only possible relationship with God is one of servitude. But you, me, everyone here, didn't want to serve, we wanted to be our own master. So we got sent here, where there is no God we can detect, and we get to play at being our own lord. But it also means God is not interferring, and we experience what an absence of God means.
I thought this was interesting, even if he couldn't quite convince me that Krishna specifically is the supreme God.
> IN ONE OF THEM HE NOTES THAT AFTERLIFE GOODS THAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT CAN BE OF ANY ARBITRARILY GREAT VALUE. IF THERE ARE EVILS THAT OUTSTRIP TORTURE AS THOROUGHLY AS TRUE LOVE OUTSTRIPS A MOSQUITO BITE, THEN IT’S HARD TO SEE HOW ONE IS GOING TO BE IN A POSITION TO GUESS THAT VARIOUS EVILS OF THE WORLD CAN’T BE OUTWEIGHED.
Assuming the approximately zero empirical evidence afterlife exist, why not place us in that afterlife directly?
> IN ADDITION, HE NOTES THAT THE BENEFITS OF SOUL-BUILDING AND SUCH LAST FOREVER, SO THEIR BENEFIT WILL NEVER END AND WILL OUTSTRIP EARTHLY SUFFERING.
Many evils do not build character, but instead psychologically break people.
> FINALLY, EVILS MIGHT BE NECESSARY TO EXPERIENCE THE BEATIFIC VISION MORE INTENSELY.
This argument doesn't correspond with my phenomenology. I like eating pasta, I think it's a good experience, would eating a pile of poo make me appreciate pasta more? Even if it did, would it be worth it?
//Assuming the approximately zero empirical evidence afterlife exist, why not place us in that afterlife directly?//
Well, the goods described mean this life improves the afterlife.
//Many evils do not build character, but instead psychologically break people.//
The theodicy claims not that all goods make things better but instead that a broadly indifferent universe produces various great goods. And you can't predict how things will affect us psychologically in a trillion years.
//Many evils do not build character, but instead psychologically break people.//
It might! And if you ate pasta forever and it made every experience of pasta better it'd be worth it.
I'm a little perplexed to see Pruss talk about all earthly evils being outweighed in some future state. He's a Catholic, right? The infallible teaching of the Catholic church is very clear that the damned suffer eternally in unimaginable torment and certainly experience no outweighing goods after death: http://www.cin.org/users/james/ebooks/master/trent/tcreed07.htm Does Pruss explicitly reject this doctrine, which would put him in a state of formal heresy? Or is he just ignoring and/or actively misleading people about his actual religious commitments to make the most plausible possible arguments for a theism he doesn't really believe in? This is a pretty common pattern among many theist philosophers - the actual teachings of their religious traditions are pretty obviously implausible and/or morally hideous, so they turn to defending a sort of boutique theism that bears no meaningful relation to the established traditions they're actually operating in. Don't people think that's kinda weird?
I guess this is just where my good faith runs out, to be honest. I think Catholics "can" be universalists, in the sense that they can construct tortured hermeneutics that give them post hoc justification for sliding around the plain teaching of the magisterium, but I don't think anyone who honestly comes to Catholic teaching without a prior position on this would decide it encourages or even intends to allow for universalism. If you can say the council of Trent is infallible but argue that "This torment is eternal and contains every type of suffering" actually means universalism is true, then... I don't know, man. If nothing else, it just seems like the alternate explanation - that the Catholic church's teachings are simply false, because they were developed by an array of morally deficient post-classical and medieval men who were not actually in touch with any theological reality at all - is *unimaginably* more probable than the idea that God decided to let his one true church fall into the most immoral possible view without correction for hundreds and hundreds of years? That alone is such a bizarre assertion in tension with various other Catholic commitments that I don't understand how anyone could affirm it.
An interesting explanation of why God would place us in an indifferent universe came to me by way of a Krishna devotee: in the spiritual reality, the hereafter, the only possible relationship with God is one of servitude. But you, me, everyone here, didn't want to serve, we wanted to be our own master. So we got sent here, where there is no God we can detect, and we get to play at being our own lord. But it also means God is not interferring, and we experience what an absence of God means.
I thought this was interesting, even if he couldn't quite convince me that Krishna specifically is the supreme God.
Yeah, this is sort of what Van Inwagen says.
Lol the last ones
> IN ONE OF THEM HE NOTES THAT AFTERLIFE GOODS THAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT CAN BE OF ANY ARBITRARILY GREAT VALUE. IF THERE ARE EVILS THAT OUTSTRIP TORTURE AS THOROUGHLY AS TRUE LOVE OUTSTRIPS A MOSQUITO BITE, THEN IT’S HARD TO SEE HOW ONE IS GOING TO BE IN A POSITION TO GUESS THAT VARIOUS EVILS OF THE WORLD CAN’T BE OUTWEIGHED.
Assuming the approximately zero empirical evidence afterlife exist, why not place us in that afterlife directly?
> IN ADDITION, HE NOTES THAT THE BENEFITS OF SOUL-BUILDING AND SUCH LAST FOREVER, SO THEIR BENEFIT WILL NEVER END AND WILL OUTSTRIP EARTHLY SUFFERING.
Many evils do not build character, but instead psychologically break people.
> FINALLY, EVILS MIGHT BE NECESSARY TO EXPERIENCE THE BEATIFIC VISION MORE INTENSELY.
This argument doesn't correspond with my phenomenology. I like eating pasta, I think it's a good experience, would eating a pile of poo make me appreciate pasta more? Even if it did, would it be worth it?
//Assuming the approximately zero empirical evidence afterlife exist, why not place us in that afterlife directly?//
Well, the goods described mean this life improves the afterlife.
//Many evils do not build character, but instead psychologically break people.//
The theodicy claims not that all goods make things better but instead that a broadly indifferent universe produces various great goods. And you can't predict how things will affect us psychologically in a trillion years.
//Many evils do not build character, but instead psychologically break people.//
It might! And if you ate pasta forever and it made every experience of pasta better it'd be worth it.
I'm a little perplexed to see Pruss talk about all earthly evils being outweighed in some future state. He's a Catholic, right? The infallible teaching of the Catholic church is very clear that the damned suffer eternally in unimaginable torment and certainly experience no outweighing goods after death: http://www.cin.org/users/james/ebooks/master/trent/tcreed07.htm Does Pruss explicitly reject this doctrine, which would put him in a state of formal heresy? Or is he just ignoring and/or actively misleading people about his actual religious commitments to make the most plausible possible arguments for a theism he doesn't really believe in? This is a pretty common pattern among many theist philosophers - the actual teachings of their religious traditions are pretty obviously implausible and/or morally hideous, so they turn to defending a sort of boutique theism that bears no meaningful relation to the established traditions they're actually operating in. Don't people think that's kinda weird?
I don't really know what Pruss thinks--I faintly remember a friend saying he's almost a universalist, thinking only a few like Satan will suffer eternally in hell. Though I think Catholics can be universalists. https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2019/09/22/may-catholics-endorse-universalism/
I guess this is just where my good faith runs out, to be honest. I think Catholics "can" be universalists, in the sense that they can construct tortured hermeneutics that give them post hoc justification for sliding around the plain teaching of the magisterium, but I don't think anyone who honestly comes to Catholic teaching without a prior position on this would decide it encourages or even intends to allow for universalism. If you can say the council of Trent is infallible but argue that "This torment is eternal and contains every type of suffering" actually means universalism is true, then... I don't know, man. If nothing else, it just seems like the alternate explanation - that the Catholic church's teachings are simply false, because they were developed by an array of morally deficient post-classical and medieval men who were not actually in touch with any theological reality at all - is *unimaginably* more probable than the idea that God decided to let his one true church fall into the most immoral possible view without correction for hundreds and hundreds of years? That alone is such a bizarre assertion in tension with various other Catholic commitments that I don't understand how anyone could affirm it.
Yeah to be clear I haven’t looked much into the dispute—I just know some think universalism is permitted.