1. "While the problem of horrendous evils is generally seen as a horrendous problem, the problem of trivial evils is seen as comparatively trivial. If all the evils in the world were small and minor, that wouldn’t automatically solve the problem of evil, but it would make it look a lot less impossible to solve."
No? That doesn't follow? If a being actually IS omnipotent, then causing small harms (and that is what God is doing by letting them happen) is just as disqualifying to be All Good as causing big harms.
2. This just isn't really a point. You're just throwing your hands into the air. It also (kinda) contradicts things you've said before, e.g. claiming that Slavery is obviously bad even though god condones it in the bible, claiming that we *can* know things about morality even when god appears to disagree with us.
3. The Infinite Value thing is a cop out. It also doesn't address the point. Even if the Value was Infinite, there would still no good reason for God to cause finite suffering if he was All Good.
4. This only works if God is not omnipotent. If god is omnipotent, he can do basically anything without causing suffering in the process.
If God cannot create free will without suffering, this seems to imply that at least one of the following statements is true: there is suffering in Heaven or there is no free will in Heaven. For if there is both free will and no suffering in Heaven, then it seems like God clearly could have created free will without suffering in the first place. Do you agree with this account?
I think this account is totally plausible but not quite airtight.
Heaven is supposed to be a different realm. So if God wanted to make heaven suffering-free without removing free will, He could restrict access to heaven only to those who would freely choose no suffering.
Trivially, we could define Heaven* as the set of all agents who are not suffering; there is no suffering in Heaven* but God cannot create free will without suffering because there is suffering in ~Heaven*. It's a bit of a gimmick counterexample, but remember it's canon that agents can leave Heaven, so maybe as soon as an agent makes a choice that will lead to suffering they leave.
PS God can trivially create free will without suffering by offering a genuine choice between a red button and a blue button, both of which lead to infinite bliss. My statement is supposed to be about free will with high stakes.
I guess then if we agree that God can create free will without suffering, then the suffering we see in the world is gratuitous, and this cannot be the work of a benevolent God.
If God can restrict access to Heaven only to those who would freely choose no suffering, then God should be able to only create those beings who would access Heaven. Creating any other type of beings is creating gratuitous suffering.
Finally, I think your Heaven* example boils down to claiming that Heaven in the usual sense doesn't exist. I don't think thesists usually want to commit to that though.
1. Free will probably doesn’t exist, given that no actual account can explain it
2. He absolutely can given that basically all accounts of free will would say a choice where he fiddled with your brain to make you always predisposed to pick one option was still free given certain other conditions.
3. Than he isn’t omnipotent actually, and that’s a legitimate way out of the problem, but the. Christianity (and many other religions) are false
1. Sorry I should clarify that no accounts explain deep free will, there are lots of accounts that explain free will. But none explain metaphysically deep free will.
The options are
Determinism is true- or indeterminism is true in both situations I do not appear to have metaphysically deep free will. Since there isn’t another picture of the way causality works, it seems like it can’t exist.
We can still have free will on accounts that don’t require something like causal independence.
2. It absolutely would be on most accounts compatabalist accounts provided in the right way, for example on a deep self view as long as it reflected your deep self (which he fiddled with ) it’s still free.
3. No it seems that you do that, if he’s actually all powerful he should be able to do everything, if he has specific limits on his power he isn’t all powerful by definition. (that doesn’t violate the law of non-contradiction, if he can do that all bets are off) you seem to have an idiosyncratic definition of the term.
1. With reference to your reply to Jeff Chaucy, I think you should amend your statement to "no accounts explain deep free will *that I find plausible and consistent with the data." You might be unconvinced by agent-causal accounts, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
2. If it fiddles with your deep self such that you have no other option, then on a libertarian account it is not free. If post-fiddling you retain genuine choice, then God is not forcing you.
3. A choice that is both free and forced (not free) violates the law of non-contradiction.
1. Yes that’s a fair point, I was being imprecise which is bad, the accounts do exist they simply do not seem to work very well.
2. Not suggesting mind control merely your weights and preferences. For example I really love lamb (which is a moral failing of mine) and will always choose it over salad. I could choose the salad though, god goes in and changes my preferences, in all meaningful respects this new preferences is mine, I identify with it, reflectively endorse it and so on. Now I will never choose the lamb, and so a poor lamb is saved from the slaughter. It doesn’t seem like this runs afoul of any theory of free will (that is plausible and doesn’t declare you to be causally independent of the surrounding world).
3. That’s my bad for being imprecise again, the choice is free in one sense and forced in another. It’s forced in a meta sense, it’s the inevitable resort of outside influences, but it’s still free in that I did choose that option from available alternatives. But as discussed you don’t seem to think forcing in the first sense is actually forcing at all.
It's well known how determinism excludes libertarian free will, but you didn't give an argument against indeterminism.
Physicalism means that the brain is the origin of decisions or actions, but does not mean "you" are under "it's control" in any sense .. rather you *are*it. You are not a ghost in a deterministic machine, trapped inside it and unable to control its operation. Or that you are an immaterial soul trapped inside an indeterministic machine. Science tells you that you are, for better or worse, the machine itself.
Microphysical indeterminism supplies the free in free will, the leeway, but not the will, the purpose and control, which come from the way the brain shapes and uses indeterminism. Indeterminism based free will does not say that indeterminism per se *is* free will. Indeterminism doesn't have to lead to any of the bad things that are associated with it -- such as deciding to do one thing and then doing another -- but only if features in the right places and is used in the right ways.
It's easy to think of ways in which indeterminism could affect the operation if the brain in undesirable ways, for instance, if it's interposed between decision and action, but it's also possible to conjecture a model without the drawbacks.
The brain is a complex distributed system. made of semi independent modules. Leveraging that, a possible mechanism is that the unconscious mind proposes various ideas and actions , which the conscious mind decides between, and finally puts the chosen one into action. That final decision is a form of control ... post selection, pre determination.
If the rest of the brain uses indeterminism to come up with a crazy idea, the executive function doesn't have to act in it. If the rest if the brain uses indeterminism to come up with an original, creative idea, the executive function can use it.
Even our craziest ideas come from our existing mental content, and are therefore related to our existing beliefs and desires. There's no other way it could work. We are not capable of coming up with ideas so random they are completely unrelated to us.
So indeterminism need not force you to do crazy things, or go against your wishes.
1. The argument against indeterminism is simply this. If causality is probabilistic then it seems to be a matter of arbitrary chance whether I do one thing or another. This is an argument that’s been made before but frankly I can’t remember where, and I don’t have time to go search through all my books atm. I wanna say it was Van Inwagen but that may be wrong.
2. Ok materialism doesn’t really matter here necessarily. It’s not core to the discussion of free will in this context. Assuming materialism maybe makes it easier to point to how your actions are caused but it’s not needed.
3. No you simply have arbitrary probabilistic relationships that you are at the mercy of. For what you are suggesting you are positing basically some kind of mysterious power to finance quantum states with your will in such a way that it has causal effects. You aren’t the first to do so but this seems like space magic you pulled out of nowhere. Why do we have such powers, how do they work, do only
Humans have them? Why would the will be able to interact either them this way. It seems more reasonable that the properties of the quantum stuff determines you then that you control them.
3. Ok sure but the architecture of the brain isn’t gonna get you out of causality. Just because the conscious mind consciously chooses doesn’t mean you had freedom in that choice in any deep sense. Maybe in a comparability sense, but I’m willing to grant that.
4. Why would you think that the conscious mind has this weird superpower to not be affected by indeterminate causation like the unconscious mind? It’s just space magic.
5. Yeah that’s not my point, the point is that you lack free will necessarily. I’m not saying that comparable can’t be true, or that indeterminism must make you do crazy stuff or stuff that you don’t want. I’m merely saying that you aren’t causally independent and you don’t have deep (or libertarian/ agent-causalist) free will
Re 2, do the predispositions I have currently mean I don’t have free will? You would agree that we all have certain predispositions (to eat when we’re hungry, etc)?
An omnipotent God would be able to give us free will and no suffering because He is omnipotent and can do anything. We can’t figure out how because we are not omnipotent.
I should specify metaphysically deep free will, where you have some kind of causal independence. So compatibilist accounts are fine, but its insufficent for a theist to escape the problem of evil and so not relevant. That would also be the kind of free will if it were what was needed for true free will that God couldn't manipulate under the hood. So it's the relevant kind if anyone says free will means God can't get rid of evil.
The fundamental problem is that non-compatibilist accounts need to explain what the picture of causality is, of which there are only two good accounts I've ever seen. Determinist and indeterminist. In determinism, obviously everything is determined by past things, so you have no causal independence; you can't really make anything happen freely (Van Inwagen). For indeterminists, it all comes down to random chance, so you also don't make any choice freely; you are just buffeted by probabilities ( someone makes a good case for this; I wanna say also Van Inwagen, but that may be wrong; it's been a minute).
So it just seems like on all possible accounts of how causality works (that I have ever seen) that we can't have the kind of causal independence needed for someone to have deep freedom much less get out of the problem of evil by invoking free will.
Now libertarian and agent-causal theories have a few issues.
1. They just don't seem to match the world; we are obviously heavily influenced by past events in ways we cannot control, and they really struggle with this basic fact of the matter.
2. For agent causalists, they need to posit why agents possess this mysterious (usually emergent) power that they just have. All explanations are highly implausible, and given 1, this seems like nonsense.
At the end of the day, these accounts are really poorly matched with the actual world and often have to wave their hands and invoke some kind of magic causal power that agents (and often only human or sentient agents) have.
I'll begin by stating that I think neither compatibilist nor libertarian accounts of free will can make a free will defense work. I'm quite convinced that God, if he exists, can cause even libertarianly free actions (as argued nicely in Grant's _Free Will and God's Universal Causality_, for example) and that he can create a world of free agents who never go wrong without violating anyone's freedom. So my response is going to mostly be a defense of libertarianism/incompatibilist accounts of free will as such, not their relevance to problems of evil :P
I don't agree that with indeterminism, it all comes down to chance. Indeterminism is simply the negation of determinism, which is the thesis that at each moment there is only one physically possible future, according to the past + laws of physics. So indeterminism just means multiple physically possible futures and need not say anything about how they may come about (e.g., chancy quantum dice rolls, seemingly free considered acts, etc.). This, combined with a denial of overly reductionist accounts of agency, serves to defuse most "luck objections" (whether it's van Inwagen's rollback worry or Mele's one involving possible worlds) and allows for some causal independence imo.
On issue #1 with libertarianism: Libertarians don't deny that we're influenced by past events beyond our control. What they do deny is that this influence necessitates just one choice at each moment one can make one. So e.g., they're fine with one's upbringing, education, skills, etc constraining one's options to a *range* of possibilities compatible with one's character.
On issue #2: I'm highly sympathetic to this worry. I think agent causation needs to be embedded in a broader metaphysics that allows for substance causation (like maybe some kind of neo-Aristotelianism), and in more things than just human agents. Helen Steward for example develops this top-down model of causation that's supposed to work with all animals, not just humans; I think it's pretty cool. I don't think agent causation works in your stereotypical reductive mechanistic naturalism; with that, some kind of event casual model (like maybe Franklin's minimal libertarianism, which is just compatibilist model + indeterminism in deliberation) goes better.
0. That may be that case but there do not seem to be any real accounts that explain indeterminist causality such that it isn’t probabilistic.
1. The issue with this is that it’s really unclear why it would only constrain to a range and not set quite fixedly the reasons for everything one does. If everything I do can directly be traced back to prior Influence. Once the range is allowed it seems I can influence you more and more dramatically and then constrain your potions down to 1 and It seems like I’ve now determined your actions. Say I hold a gun to someone’s head and force them to write philosophy arguments on Substack every waking hour. Seems like they really don’t have any other options, like I have necessitated their choice (provided the appropriate rating of their internal preferences such that they rly don’t wanna die).
2. I think the most plausible save for agent causation is some kind of panpsychist view. In fact I think this is the only plausible picture of deep free will. But it’s extremely wacky. In the context of god it would probably imply something almost like the universe being itself god. It’s interesting but as I am a political theorist and not a metaphysician I’m unlikely to get to develop that.
1. Under which definition? Free will can't fail to exist under the compatibilist definition, and could exist in a physicallist universe by a naturalist Libertarian definition as well.
Specifically non comparability views. Any view where we have metaphysically deep free will with some kind of causal independence.
Except it actually seems like you can’t have libertarian free will at all. At least not under the plausible versions of causation I’ve ever read about. If you have a good case for a version of causation that supports libertarian free will I’d love to hear it, but none seem to fit the facts as they stand.
Yeah I read those and responded to them already. They did not really explain that, at least not as far as I can tell. They explained something more like a compatabalist view using indeterminism.
Even presupposing this to be true (which I am entirely unconvinced of), that doesn't matter for the vast majority of bad things that happen in reality.
All good points, Mir. I think the Problem of Evil should be rephrased as the Problem of Gratuitous Suffering (I believe this idea originates with Alex O’Connor): why is there suffering in the world for apparently no good reason? Examples include billions of years of evolution before the first human, wild animal suffering etc. And the Problem of Gratuitous Suffering doesn't go away with Infinite Value type arguments nor comparing it to trivial cases of suffering. In particular, an omnipotent and benevolent being wouldn't allow gratuitious suffering, even if trivial!
Skeptical theism type responses like Point 2 almost always seem to be a cop out when raised by people who also want to make other claims about God, e.g. that the existence of humans is evidence for God, which requires us assigning a somewhat high probability to God creating humans conditional on existing. If Point 2 is true and we should be clueless with respect to gratuitous suffering, I don't see how it doesn't apply to the fine-tuning argument as well.
Suffering for no reason, and also suffering which doesn’t depend on or interact with free will (and thus could be ended without free will being reduced at all).
I take "gratuitous suffering" or "suffering for no good reason" as subsuming the "suffering which doesn't depend on free will". If some suffering is necessary for free will to exist, then this could be counted as sufficient reason for it on some view (although this requires valuing free will for its own sake, which conflicts with utilitarianism).
1) that’s fair, my intuition is that you have been forced but I don’t have an argument for that, so you are probably right.
2) but the issue with the free will god is that the free will god can have his cake and eat it too as per our discussion, he could give us free will and still make it such that we always choose rightly and have no suffering.
So it seems prudent to me to think that god simply isn’t good. I think a more plausible account is a teleological account where gods purpose in some sense is to make stuff. This also better explains why sia could be true but also there be so much empty space in the universe, we are not uniquely valuable compared to a star or exoplanet.
Unknown reasons is so, so lame. Appealing to "unknown reasons" deserves an F for epistemic practices. Unknown reasons provide grounds for skepticism of any and all positions and are therefore useless to appeal to.
When evil is only mildly strong but not decisive evidence against theism, the optimal strategy is usually not to explain it, but to explain it away...which is quite easy once you have an unbounded premise like God!
That's also why theistic responses to evil never satisfy an atheist, in my experience. They just sneer at arguments like this.
I'd like to think that theists shouldn't be scared of dropping omnibenevolence. Not only does it save us from the problem of evil, it also avoids the risk of anthropomorphization; and furthermore, if you think about it, a non-omnibenevolent God is really just a supreme being whose purposes are so alien to us that it's hard to pin (human) moral attributes on it--which is a few blocks down the line from your §2 unknown reason and §4 hidden reason.
It seems to me like the easy problem is that god is teleologically a creator, it just wants to make stuff and so it does. This gets you everything, infinite people, he just wants to make people, and so on.
But it gets you out of the problem of evil. This also better explains why he would make vast arrays of no life, if life is where value is. Why make nebulae and stars far away from life? Cause just likes to make things.
The problem is that so many of these theists are trying to smuggle Christianity in, they aren’t trying to just make you a theist but a Christian and so they can’t give up Omni benevolence because then they give up Christianity
Strong agree on dropping omnibenevolence. The idea that the universe was created intentionally by some entity seems possible to me, but when I look at the universe, I don't see any reason to think that being was particularly benevolent. (In fact, I'd say there's more evidence for omni-anti-benevolence than omnibenevolence.)
What troubles me is that no matter what great reasons God could have for allowing suffering, e.g. "soul building, connection building, deepening our relationship with God in some way" seem to imply that some mightier power forces him to allow suffering, that some Law Of Soul-Building forces God to create horrors.
What you say seems to put him in this predicament: he says "Okay, time to make soul-building opportunities for my creations. Can this be done without allowing them to suffer? Nope, looks like my hands are tied there. No getting around the suffering if I want my creations to be able to soul-build. But wait, I'm God! Why don't I just make it so there is a suffering-free way to soul-build? Nope, looks like that won't work either. Luckily I can give them all eternal happiness after the suffering, but I'm powerless to eliminate the suffering entirely. As much as it pains me that my creations must suffer, I'm out of options here. It's not up to me: they gotta suffer."
Exactly this is the huge problem with all of these arguments, in order for them to make sense you must limit gods omnipotence (which you can do but usually people don’t want to)
I don't want to be offensive, but here is my real perception: you're too young, and hasn't engaged with the suffers in this world seriously enough. In fact, it's very difficult to do so for anyone that lives in Western Europe and North America. Live for a single year in Ukraine, Iran, or Afghanistan, and we can be more on the same plane.
You may say that close engagement with suffer has only things to do with emotion, and one can still approach the problem intellectually without it. My answer is
- When you see real evil (in the sense I mentioned before), you realize dimensions of it that you weren't aware of before, sometimes because you had always subconsciously never allowed those scenarios to come to your mind. So in my view, you don't really know what you're trying to justify.
- Emotion is a very powerful instrument for computation. If you can't accept something emotionally, given that you genuinely want to be fair and unbiased, after many iterations one of these two happens: A) You can articulate your emotional resistance as a philosophical view, or B) Your emotional sense will be 'convinced' by your justifications. So I view the emotional sense as a valuable tool that homes one to wise states directly, without the hurdles of logical deduction.
Finally, we should distinguish between proofs against (and 'notes against') an atheist view that uses yet-to-be-agreed-upon features of God and Heaven, and those that don't.
I hopenit is clear that "Eternity of Heaven" is no good justification for God.
Respectfully - as someone older who has in fact seen real evil and experienced serious suffering myself - this point can be turned against you. We can’t emotionally understand or process the glory or goodness of heaven, because we haven’t experienced it. Maybe, as you suggest, BB is not understanding something about suffering because he is so young (who knows). But we are in just as much a position of ignorance with regards to heaven to understand whether or not anything in it could justify present suffering.
> We can’t emotionally understand or process the glory or goodness of heaven, because we haven’t experienced it.
The inability to understand, process, find evidence of, or detect in any way a thing is typically viewed as more a reason to doubt it than take it for granted.
First, I am really sorry to hear about your experience.
About your point, thanks for sharing it. I think we can move even further from "just as much a position of ignorance" to "a position of even greater ignorance", because we have some emotional access to this world's state but nothing to heaven, assuming it exists, via our lived experience (correct me if you think this is not so).
Yet the same limitation makes it of little pragmatic relevance. Let's take a look at these two candidate solutions:
A. Perhaps there is a heaven and something convincing in it that we don't yet know.
B. Perhaps we are all in Matrix, or God's dream, so there is no real evil at all.
Suppose there was ten trillion times as much suffering in the world as currently exists. Would this lower the probability of God's existence? (The infinite goods theodicy seems to suggest it would not, because we would still be compensated infinitely for any finite quantity of suffering).
Surely this is a pretty big problem for the view, right? If essentially no amount of finite suffering could ever lower the probability of God's existence by a meaningful amount, then a universe where every single conscious being was an animal being born into a factory farm would still point more strongly towards benevolent theism than naturalism?
This also seems to discount the possibility of an evil God or a God with incoherent moral preferences to us (eg. a God that cares exclusively about aesthetic value), which surely the presence of ubiquitous suffering makes a lot more likely.
I’m probably starting sound like a broken record at this point cause this is like my fifth comment about this
1. “If Earthly evils were a pale shadow, heaven would be a supernova. If suffering all your Earthly sorrows would make a single second of heaven 1% sweeter, it would be worth it.”
I kind of get this, and you don’t think it’s decisive but I really fail to see how this does anything to dull the fangs of the problem of evil. God could just rewrite us that suffering was not required to make the afterlife sweeter.
2. The third point you make is the same, it really doesn’t seem necessary. There is an implicit view that seems present here that the only way we could have been is this way. That because suffering together enhances our bounds this must necessarily be true. There seems to be no reason why this must be true, and an all powerful god could seemingly have organized us differently with trivial effort.
3. God allowing the world to be ruined is a problem because it shows god isn’t one of the big three of all powerful all good or all knowing. If it’s to do some task, he shouldn’t need help, knock against all powerful, if it’s for his entrainment or something not all good, if he cant figured out how to stop it not all knowing. This isn’t an argument that makes sense.
4. The problem that every discussion of the problem of evil has is that they do not grapple with how trivially god could fix all evil. Almost all example of arguments for why god doesn’t show him to be manifestly not all powerful. It would be trivial to alter the weights of all our psychological states so that we only make good choices, likewise it would be trivial to make it so we live our lives in bliss forever.
Given how trivial it is for god to fix these problems it’s really very hard evidence against gods goodness(or all powerfulness) that he doesn’t
5. The concept of the afterlife is really weird, it’s exceptionally unclear why a god would want or create an afterlife rather than simply internal living beings. I’ve not really seen this addressed though I’m sure many have.
1 and 3 seem to be relatively similar to me in that its saying any finite suffering effectively reduces to zero in the face of infinite joy, but I'm inherently skeptical of any claims that get into the realm of discussing infinities. For one, it implies that if the material world just consisted entirely of an absurdly large-but-finite number of entities being tortured horribly for an absurdly large-but-finite amount of time, it would still be a complete non-factor with regards to whether or not God is good.
If we're talking about Christianity specifically (not that I think we are), then it also ignores the idea of hell as eternal conscious torment. While that specific interpretation of hell is definitely debatable, there's a very good argument from scripture that hell is the more common result than heaven, meaning that for people who believe ECT is true, there's a big discussion to be had.
2 and 4 are still setting off my "mysterious ways" platitude alarm, but admittedly are still very reasonable critiques. I do think there's a lot to be said for simulation and omission theodicies in particular. My gripes are that:
- These ultimately rely on the free will theodicy being plausible. Many people, myself included, feel very comfortable rejecting that.
- These ideas are pretty far removed from any current religion, meaning even if I DO find them convincing, I have no incentive to change anything about my life. Sure, I'll believe God exists but its extremely hard to extrapolate what (if anything) this God wants me to do or what their preferences even are. At that point, God's existence just becomes a pointless trivia question.
This 2nd point is really my ultimate problem with claims about God's existence. There's plenty of strong arguments for God but the best ones tell us almost nothing about God's nature or expectations. We aren't completely in the dark here (odds are, God is very pro-natalist), but for the most part, claims about God's nature and expectations of us are in the realm of the weaker arguments (ie, the moral argument) or of modern religious groups. The Problem of Evil (in conjunction many other things) effectively takes most well-known modern religions off the table for me, so although I wouldn't be particular surprised to find out that God exists, I'm not sure God's existence would have much significance.
There's no clear connection between creating the universe and having goals that I share, whereas in the Carlsen or Tao examples there's a presumed shared goal of chess or math.
In some ways this is like the alignment problem in miniature.
Why, it really seems extremely weird to think a god would make some other realm either moral correctives rather than create immortal beings and apply corrective in real time.
While the Problem of Evil may not refute theism, it sure seems to refute the possibility of an omnipotent being that is benevolent —either that, or the very idea of benevolence, of (moral) good and bad, loses its meaning across the board: who's to say that any given good or evil act —ever —is not actually otherwise?
That addresses the first part of Dashk’s comment, not the second. If we’re going to grant “maybe I don’t see how child cancer is really benevolent,” then there’s no way we could weigh in on what “benevolent” means—maybe ECT, or oblivion after death, are also benevolent, in ways only God can understand.
Evil/suffering is evidence against God, but an infinitely good afterlife for all sentient beings overcomes this. The obvious objection is that this is question begging. But I assume you'd say that theism entails an infinitely good afterlife for all sentient beings. If that's the case:
1. Should we be surprised that no major theistic traditions teach this? There are small universalist tendencies here and there, and still smaller ones that include animals. But not what you'd expect if theism necessarily means an infinite afterlife for humans and non-human animals.
2. The anthropic, fine tuning, and psychophysical harmony arguments, if we accept them 100%, don't point toward theism as you're idiosyncratically defining it (universalism for humans + animals, contra all major theistic traditions).
3. Defining God's infinite goodness in such a way that it necessitates an infinitely good afterlife seems to be based on the fact that this seems to you what infinite goodness would require, and theists believe in infinite goodness, QED?
4. The available evidence we have about God's goodness is that he created creatures that, except for a rounding error, live in a horror movie. The other evidence we have for God's existence can't be smuggled in to support God's infinite goodness, and I don't think you have provided such evidence. I do read the blog pretty regularly but I might have missed something!
Question that might sound crazy and which I am not endorsing at all: is it possible that suffering isn’t real? Like, we have memories of suffering and can think of moments where we presently believe we are suffering, yet could these memories / experiences be artificial? One could presumably achieve the aims of suffering by belief that one has suffered without having to actually suffer. If not, why wouldn’t God design it that way (e.g., false memories or temporary P zombie status)?
That doesn’t solve the problem of systemic suffering (e.g., why does life suck day to day if I’m in a bad situation, why do I daily not have a person that I love who has died) but seems like a Pareto improvement for minor evils that doesn’t actually impinge on free will
Yeah seems kind of skeptical. And once you recognize the world is screwed up in a bunch of ways, seems we should think it's probably screwed up that way too.
One concerned that I have is for your appeal to an "afterlife" in sections 1 and 3. While an afterlife is prevalent in many theological traditions, it's not typically the kind of thing that is prevalent in Philosophical Theism. So, to me, appealing to it isn't nearly as available as, say, an appeal to skeptical theism, which typically isn't as motivated by theological traditions. So, at minimum, I agree with you and Alexander Pruss that if theism is true, it's *possible* for life to continue post mortem, I think that would need its own independent justification if it's being employed outside of a theological tradition (e.g., Christianity).
Get rid of free will, and you get rid of evil. Existence might get lonely without beings with free will. If that’s God’s choice, God literally must take the good with the bad.
But free will doesn’t seem to have any bearing on whether, for instance, an infant gets cancer and lingers in agony for months before dying. Let alone (eg) a deer getting eaten alive by a bear, neither of whom have anything approaching free will in the matter.
1. "While the problem of horrendous evils is generally seen as a horrendous problem, the problem of trivial evils is seen as comparatively trivial. If all the evils in the world were small and minor, that wouldn’t automatically solve the problem of evil, but it would make it look a lot less impossible to solve."
No? That doesn't follow? If a being actually IS omnipotent, then causing small harms (and that is what God is doing by letting them happen) is just as disqualifying to be All Good as causing big harms.
2. This just isn't really a point. You're just throwing your hands into the air. It also (kinda) contradicts things you've said before, e.g. claiming that Slavery is obviously bad even though god condones it in the bible, claiming that we *can* know things about morality even when god appears to disagree with us.
3. The Infinite Value thing is a cop out. It also doesn't address the point. Even if the Value was Infinite, there would still no good reason for God to cause finite suffering if he was All Good.
4. This only works if God is not omnipotent. If god is omnipotent, he can do basically anything without causing suffering in the process.
man, i usually like your stuff, shame
4. There's a lot of stuff God cannot due despite being omnipotent, like causing me to make a free choice.
If God cannot create free will without suffering, this seems to imply that at least one of the following statements is true: there is suffering in Heaven or there is no free will in Heaven. For if there is both free will and no suffering in Heaven, then it seems like God clearly could have created free will without suffering in the first place. Do you agree with this account?
I think this account is totally plausible but not quite airtight.
Heaven is supposed to be a different realm. So if God wanted to make heaven suffering-free without removing free will, He could restrict access to heaven only to those who would freely choose no suffering.
Trivially, we could define Heaven* as the set of all agents who are not suffering; there is no suffering in Heaven* but God cannot create free will without suffering because there is suffering in ~Heaven*. It's a bit of a gimmick counterexample, but remember it's canon that agents can leave Heaven, so maybe as soon as an agent makes a choice that will lead to suffering they leave.
PS God can trivially create free will without suffering by offering a genuine choice between a red button and a blue button, both of which lead to infinite bliss. My statement is supposed to be about free will with high stakes.
I guess then if we agree that God can create free will without suffering, then the suffering we see in the world is gratuitous, and this cannot be the work of a benevolent God.
If God can restrict access to Heaven only to those who would freely choose no suffering, then God should be able to only create those beings who would access Heaven. Creating any other type of beings is creating gratuitous suffering.
Finally, I think your Heaven* example boils down to claiming that Heaven in the usual sense doesn't exist. I don't think thesists usually want to commit to that though.
1. Free will probably doesn’t exist, given that no actual account can explain it
2. He absolutely can given that basically all accounts of free will would say a choice where he fiddled with your brain to make you always predisposed to pick one option was still free given certain other conditions.
3. Than he isn’t omnipotent actually, and that’s a legitimate way out of the problem, but the. Christianity (and many other religions) are false
1. Lots of actual accounts explain free will; for a sample of such accounts see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
2. Then the choice would not be free.
3. You hold to an idiosyncratic definition of omnipotence.
1. Sorry I should clarify that no accounts explain deep free will, there are lots of accounts that explain free will. But none explain metaphysically deep free will.
The options are
Determinism is true- or indeterminism is true in both situations I do not appear to have metaphysically deep free will. Since there isn’t another picture of the way causality works, it seems like it can’t exist.
We can still have free will on accounts that don’t require something like causal independence.
2. It absolutely would be on most accounts compatabalist accounts provided in the right way, for example on a deep self view as long as it reflected your deep self (which he fiddled with ) it’s still free.
3. No it seems that you do that, if he’s actually all powerful he should be able to do everything, if he has specific limits on his power he isn’t all powerful by definition. (that doesn’t violate the law of non-contradiction, if he can do that all bets are off) you seem to have an idiosyncratic definition of the term.
1. With reference to your reply to Jeff Chaucy, I think you should amend your statement to "no accounts explain deep free will *that I find plausible and consistent with the data." You might be unconvinced by agent-causal accounts, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
2. If it fiddles with your deep self such that you have no other option, then on a libertarian account it is not free. If post-fiddling you retain genuine choice, then God is not forcing you.
3. A choice that is both free and forced (not free) violates the law of non-contradiction.
1. Yes that’s a fair point, I was being imprecise which is bad, the accounts do exist they simply do not seem to work very well.
2. Not suggesting mind control merely your weights and preferences. For example I really love lamb (which is a moral failing of mine) and will always choose it over salad. I could choose the salad though, god goes in and changes my preferences, in all meaningful respects this new preferences is mine, I identify with it, reflectively endorse it and so on. Now I will never choose the lamb, and so a poor lamb is saved from the slaughter. It doesn’t seem like this runs afoul of any theory of free will (that is plausible and doesn’t declare you to be causally independent of the surrounding world).
3. That’s my bad for being imprecise again, the choice is free in one sense and forced in another. It’s forced in a meta sense, it’s the inevitable resort of outside influences, but it’s still free in that I did choose that option from available alternatives. But as discussed you don’t seem to think forcing in the first sense is actually forcing at all.
It's well known how determinism excludes libertarian free will, but you didn't give an argument against indeterminism.
Physicalism means that the brain is the origin of decisions or actions, but does not mean "you" are under "it's control" in any sense .. rather you *are*it. You are not a ghost in a deterministic machine, trapped inside it and unable to control its operation. Or that you are an immaterial soul trapped inside an indeterministic machine. Science tells you that you are, for better or worse, the machine itself.
Microphysical indeterminism supplies the free in free will, the leeway, but not the will, the purpose and control, which come from the way the brain shapes and uses indeterminism. Indeterminism based free will does not say that indeterminism per se *is* free will. Indeterminism doesn't have to lead to any of the bad things that are associated with it -- such as deciding to do one thing and then doing another -- but only if features in the right places and is used in the right ways.
It's easy to think of ways in which indeterminism could affect the operation if the brain in undesirable ways, for instance, if it's interposed between decision and action, but it's also possible to conjecture a model without the drawbacks.
The brain is a complex distributed system. made of semi independent modules. Leveraging that, a possible mechanism is that the unconscious mind proposes various ideas and actions , which the conscious mind decides between, and finally puts the chosen one into action. That final decision is a form of control ... post selection, pre determination.
If the rest of the brain uses indeterminism to come up with a crazy idea, the executive function doesn't have to act in it. If the rest if the brain uses indeterminism to come up with an original, creative idea, the executive function can use it.
Even our craziest ideas come from our existing mental content, and are therefore related to our existing beliefs and desires. There's no other way it could work. We are not capable of coming up with ideas so random they are completely unrelated to us.
So indeterminism need not force you to do crazy things, or go against your wishes.
1. The argument against indeterminism is simply this. If causality is probabilistic then it seems to be a matter of arbitrary chance whether I do one thing or another. This is an argument that’s been made before but frankly I can’t remember where, and I don’t have time to go search through all my books atm. I wanna say it was Van Inwagen but that may be wrong.
2. Ok materialism doesn’t really matter here necessarily. It’s not core to the discussion of free will in this context. Assuming materialism maybe makes it easier to point to how your actions are caused but it’s not needed.
3. No you simply have arbitrary probabilistic relationships that you are at the mercy of. For what you are suggesting you are positing basically some kind of mysterious power to finance quantum states with your will in such a way that it has causal effects. You aren’t the first to do so but this seems like space magic you pulled out of nowhere. Why do we have such powers, how do they work, do only
Humans have them? Why would the will be able to interact either them this way. It seems more reasonable that the properties of the quantum stuff determines you then that you control them.
3. Ok sure but the architecture of the brain isn’t gonna get you out of causality. Just because the conscious mind consciously chooses doesn’t mean you had freedom in that choice in any deep sense. Maybe in a comparability sense, but I’m willing to grant that.
4. Why would you think that the conscious mind has this weird superpower to not be affected by indeterminate causation like the unconscious mind? It’s just space magic.
5. Yeah that’s not my point, the point is that you lack free will necessarily. I’m not saying that comparable can’t be true, or that indeterminism must make you do crazy stuff or stuff that you don’t want. I’m merely saying that you aren’t causally independent and you don’t have deep (or libertarian/ agent-causalist) free will
Re 2, do the predispositions I have currently mean I don’t have free will? You would agree that we all have certain predispositions (to eat when we’re hungry, etc)?
We all have certain predispositions, but they do not preclude our having free will.
Okay. So why could that not apply in the proposed case?
An omnipotent God would be able to give us free will and no suffering because He is omnipotent and can do anything. We can’t figure out how because we are not omnipotent.
No account can explain free will? What's wrong with e.g., Kane or Balaguer or Franklin's accounts (libertarian), or, say, Vihvelin's (compatibilist)?
I should specify metaphysically deep free will, where you have some kind of causal independence. So compatibilist accounts are fine, but its insufficent for a theist to escape the problem of evil and so not relevant. That would also be the kind of free will if it were what was needed for true free will that God couldn't manipulate under the hood. So it's the relevant kind if anyone says free will means God can't get rid of evil.
The fundamental problem is that non-compatibilist accounts need to explain what the picture of causality is, of which there are only two good accounts I've ever seen. Determinist and indeterminist. In determinism, obviously everything is determined by past things, so you have no causal independence; you can't really make anything happen freely (Van Inwagen). For indeterminists, it all comes down to random chance, so you also don't make any choice freely; you are just buffeted by probabilities ( someone makes a good case for this; I wanna say also Van Inwagen, but that may be wrong; it's been a minute).
So it just seems like on all possible accounts of how causality works (that I have ever seen) that we can't have the kind of causal independence needed for someone to have deep freedom much less get out of the problem of evil by invoking free will.
Now libertarian and agent-causal theories have a few issues.
1. They just don't seem to match the world; we are obviously heavily influenced by past events in ways we cannot control, and they really struggle with this basic fact of the matter.
2. For agent causalists, they need to posit why agents possess this mysterious (usually emergent) power that they just have. All explanations are highly implausible, and given 1, this seems like nonsense.
At the end of the day, these accounts are really poorly matched with the actual world and often have to wave their hands and invoke some kind of magic causal power that agents (and often only human or sentient agents) have.
I'll begin by stating that I think neither compatibilist nor libertarian accounts of free will can make a free will defense work. I'm quite convinced that God, if he exists, can cause even libertarianly free actions (as argued nicely in Grant's _Free Will and God's Universal Causality_, for example) and that he can create a world of free agents who never go wrong without violating anyone's freedom. So my response is going to mostly be a defense of libertarianism/incompatibilist accounts of free will as such, not their relevance to problems of evil :P
I don't agree that with indeterminism, it all comes down to chance. Indeterminism is simply the negation of determinism, which is the thesis that at each moment there is only one physically possible future, according to the past + laws of physics. So indeterminism just means multiple physically possible futures and need not say anything about how they may come about (e.g., chancy quantum dice rolls, seemingly free considered acts, etc.). This, combined with a denial of overly reductionist accounts of agency, serves to defuse most "luck objections" (whether it's van Inwagen's rollback worry or Mele's one involving possible worlds) and allows for some causal independence imo.
On issue #1 with libertarianism: Libertarians don't deny that we're influenced by past events beyond our control. What they do deny is that this influence necessitates just one choice at each moment one can make one. So e.g., they're fine with one's upbringing, education, skills, etc constraining one's options to a *range* of possibilities compatible with one's character.
On issue #2: I'm highly sympathetic to this worry. I think agent causation needs to be embedded in a broader metaphysics that allows for substance causation (like maybe some kind of neo-Aristotelianism), and in more things than just human agents. Helen Steward for example develops this top-down model of causation that's supposed to work with all animals, not just humans; I think it's pretty cool. I don't think agent causation works in your stereotypical reductive mechanistic naturalism; with that, some kind of event casual model (like maybe Franklin's minimal libertarianism, which is just compatibilist model + indeterminism in deliberation) goes better.
0. That may be that case but there do not seem to be any real accounts that explain indeterminist causality such that it isn’t probabilistic.
1. The issue with this is that it’s really unclear why it would only constrain to a range and not set quite fixedly the reasons for everything one does. If everything I do can directly be traced back to prior Influence. Once the range is allowed it seems I can influence you more and more dramatically and then constrain your potions down to 1 and It seems like I’ve now determined your actions. Say I hold a gun to someone’s head and force them to write philosophy arguments on Substack every waking hour. Seems like they really don’t have any other options, like I have necessitated their choice (provided the appropriate rating of their internal preferences such that they rly don’t wanna die).
2. I think the most plausible save for agent causation is some kind of panpsychist view. In fact I think this is the only plausible picture of deep free will. But it’s extremely wacky. In the context of god it would probably imply something almost like the universe being itself god. It’s interesting but as I am a political theorist and not a metaphysician I’m unlikely to get to develop that.
1. Under which definition? Free will can't fail to exist under the compatibilist definition, and could exist in a physicallist universe by a naturalist Libertarian definition as well.
Specifically non comparability views. Any view where we have metaphysically deep free will with some kind of causal independence.
Except it actually seems like you can’t have libertarian free will at all. At least not under the plausible versions of causation I’ve ever read about. If you have a good case for a version of causation that supports libertarian free will I’d love to hear it, but none seem to fit the facts as they stand.
In other comments , I have explained how you can have both libertarian free will and nondeterministic causality.
Yeah I read those and responded to them already. They did not really explain that, at least not as far as I can tell. They explained something more like a compatabalist view using indeterminism.
Even presupposing this to be true (which I am entirely unconvinced of), that doesn't matter for the vast majority of bad things that happen in reality.
All good points, Mir. I think the Problem of Evil should be rephrased as the Problem of Gratuitous Suffering (I believe this idea originates with Alex O’Connor): why is there suffering in the world for apparently no good reason? Examples include billions of years of evolution before the first human, wild animal suffering etc. And the Problem of Gratuitous Suffering doesn't go away with Infinite Value type arguments nor comparing it to trivial cases of suffering. In particular, an omnipotent and benevolent being wouldn't allow gratuitious suffering, even if trivial!
Skeptical theism type responses like Point 2 almost always seem to be a cop out when raised by people who also want to make other claims about God, e.g. that the existence of humans is evidence for God, which requires us assigning a somewhat high probability to God creating humans conditional on existing. If Point 2 is true and we should be clueless with respect to gratuitous suffering, I don't see how it doesn't apply to the fine-tuning argument as well.
Suffering for no reason, and also suffering which doesn’t depend on or interact with free will (and thus could be ended without free will being reduced at all).
I take "gratuitous suffering" or "suffering for no good reason" as subsuming the "suffering which doesn't depend on free will". If some suffering is necessary for free will to exist, then this could be counted as sufficient reason for it on some view (although this requires valuing free will for its own sake, which conflicts with utilitarianism).
1) that’s fair, my intuition is that you have been forced but I don’t have an argument for that, so you are probably right.
2) but the issue with the free will god is that the free will god can have his cake and eat it too as per our discussion, he could give us free will and still make it such that we always choose rightly and have no suffering.
So it seems prudent to me to think that god simply isn’t good. I think a more plausible account is a teleological account where gods purpose in some sense is to make stuff. This also better explains why sia could be true but also there be so much empty space in the universe, we are not uniquely valuable compared to a star or exoplanet.
Unknown reasons is so, so lame. Appealing to "unknown reasons" deserves an F for epistemic practices. Unknown reasons provide grounds for skepticism of any and all positions and are therefore useless to appeal to.
When evil is only mildly strong but not decisive evidence against theism, the optimal strategy is usually not to explain it, but to explain it away...which is quite easy once you have an unbounded premise like God!
That's also why theistic responses to evil never satisfy an atheist, in my experience. They just sneer at arguments like this.
I'd like to think that theists shouldn't be scared of dropping omnibenevolence. Not only does it save us from the problem of evil, it also avoids the risk of anthropomorphization; and furthermore, if you think about it, a non-omnibenevolent God is really just a supreme being whose purposes are so alien to us that it's hard to pin (human) moral attributes on it--which is a few blocks down the line from your §2 unknown reason and §4 hidden reason.
It seems to me like the easy problem is that god is teleologically a creator, it just wants to make stuff and so it does. This gets you everything, infinite people, he just wants to make people, and so on.
But it gets you out of the problem of evil. This also better explains why he would make vast arrays of no life, if life is where value is. Why make nebulae and stars far away from life? Cause just likes to make things.
The problem is that so many of these theists are trying to smuggle Christianity in, they aren’t trying to just make you a theist but a Christian and so they can’t give up Omni benevolence because then they give up Christianity
Strong agree on dropping omnibenevolence. The idea that the universe was created intentionally by some entity seems possible to me, but when I look at the universe, I don't see any reason to think that being was particularly benevolent. (In fact, I'd say there's more evidence for omni-anti-benevolence than omnibenevolence.)
What troubles me is that no matter what great reasons God could have for allowing suffering, e.g. "soul building, connection building, deepening our relationship with God in some way" seem to imply that some mightier power forces him to allow suffering, that some Law Of Soul-Building forces God to create horrors.
What you say seems to put him in this predicament: he says "Okay, time to make soul-building opportunities for my creations. Can this be done without allowing them to suffer? Nope, looks like my hands are tied there. No getting around the suffering if I want my creations to be able to soul-build. But wait, I'm God! Why don't I just make it so there is a suffering-free way to soul-build? Nope, looks like that won't work either. Luckily I can give them all eternal happiness after the suffering, but I'm powerless to eliminate the suffering entirely. As much as it pains me that my creations must suffer, I'm out of options here. It's not up to me: they gotta suffer."
Exactly this is the huge problem with all of these arguments, in order for them to make sense you must limit gods omnipotence (which you can do but usually people don’t want to)
I don't want to be offensive, but here is my real perception: you're too young, and hasn't engaged with the suffers in this world seriously enough. In fact, it's very difficult to do so for anyone that lives in Western Europe and North America. Live for a single year in Ukraine, Iran, or Afghanistan, and we can be more on the same plane.
You may say that close engagement with suffer has only things to do with emotion, and one can still approach the problem intellectually without it. My answer is
- When you see real evil (in the sense I mentioned before), you realize dimensions of it that you weren't aware of before, sometimes because you had always subconsciously never allowed those scenarios to come to your mind. So in my view, you don't really know what you're trying to justify.
- Emotion is a very powerful instrument for computation. If you can't accept something emotionally, given that you genuinely want to be fair and unbiased, after many iterations one of these two happens: A) You can articulate your emotional resistance as a philosophical view, or B) Your emotional sense will be 'convinced' by your justifications. So I view the emotional sense as a valuable tool that homes one to wise states directly, without the hurdles of logical deduction.
Finally, we should distinguish between proofs against (and 'notes against') an atheist view that uses yet-to-be-agreed-upon features of God and Heaven, and those that don't.
I hopenit is clear that "Eternity of Heaven" is no good justification for God.
Respectfully - as someone older who has in fact seen real evil and experienced serious suffering myself - this point can be turned against you. We can’t emotionally understand or process the glory or goodness of heaven, because we haven’t experienced it. Maybe, as you suggest, BB is not understanding something about suffering because he is so young (who knows). But we are in just as much a position of ignorance with regards to heaven to understand whether or not anything in it could justify present suffering.
> We can’t emotionally understand or process the glory or goodness of heaven, because we haven’t experienced it.
The inability to understand, process, find evidence of, or detect in any way a thing is typically viewed as more a reason to doubt it than take it for granted.
First, I am really sorry to hear about your experience.
About your point, thanks for sharing it. I think we can move even further from "just as much a position of ignorance" to "a position of even greater ignorance", because we have some emotional access to this world's state but nothing to heaven, assuming it exists, via our lived experience (correct me if you think this is not so).
Yet the same limitation makes it of little pragmatic relevance. Let's take a look at these two candidate solutions:
A. Perhaps there is a heaven and something convincing in it that we don't yet know.
B. Perhaps we are all in Matrix, or God's dream, so there is no real evil at all.
P.S. If you want, I can provide a few sources to read or watch, to gain a better sense about the reality of suffer on Earth.
Suppose there was ten trillion times as much suffering in the world as currently exists. Would this lower the probability of God's existence? (The infinite goods theodicy seems to suggest it would not, because we would still be compensated infinitely for any finite quantity of suffering).
A bit, not a ton.
Surely this is a pretty big problem for the view, right? If essentially no amount of finite suffering could ever lower the probability of God's existence by a meaningful amount, then a universe where every single conscious being was an animal being born into a factory farm would still point more strongly towards benevolent theism than naturalism?
This also seems to discount the possibility of an evil God or a God with incoherent moral preferences to us (eg. a God that cares exclusively about aesthetic value), which surely the presence of ubiquitous suffering makes a lot more likely.
Wicked essay, dude.
I assume wicked means good? If so, thanks! :)
I’m probably starting sound like a broken record at this point cause this is like my fifth comment about this
1. “If Earthly evils were a pale shadow, heaven would be a supernova. If suffering all your Earthly sorrows would make a single second of heaven 1% sweeter, it would be worth it.”
I kind of get this, and you don’t think it’s decisive but I really fail to see how this does anything to dull the fangs of the problem of evil. God could just rewrite us that suffering was not required to make the afterlife sweeter.
2. The third point you make is the same, it really doesn’t seem necessary. There is an implicit view that seems present here that the only way we could have been is this way. That because suffering together enhances our bounds this must necessarily be true. There seems to be no reason why this must be true, and an all powerful god could seemingly have organized us differently with trivial effort.
3. God allowing the world to be ruined is a problem because it shows god isn’t one of the big three of all powerful all good or all knowing. If it’s to do some task, he shouldn’t need help, knock against all powerful, if it’s for his entrainment or something not all good, if he cant figured out how to stop it not all knowing. This isn’t an argument that makes sense.
4. The problem that every discussion of the problem of evil has is that they do not grapple with how trivially god could fix all evil. Almost all example of arguments for why god doesn’t show him to be manifestly not all powerful. It would be trivial to alter the weights of all our psychological states so that we only make good choices, likewise it would be trivial to make it so we live our lives in bliss forever.
Given how trivial it is for god to fix these problems it’s really very hard evidence against gods goodness(or all powerfulness) that he doesn’t
5. The concept of the afterlife is really weird, it’s exceptionally unclear why a god would want or create an afterlife rather than simply internal living beings. I’ve not really seen this addressed though I’m sure many have.
1 and 3 seem to be relatively similar to me in that its saying any finite suffering effectively reduces to zero in the face of infinite joy, but I'm inherently skeptical of any claims that get into the realm of discussing infinities. For one, it implies that if the material world just consisted entirely of an absurdly large-but-finite number of entities being tortured horribly for an absurdly large-but-finite amount of time, it would still be a complete non-factor with regards to whether or not God is good.
If we're talking about Christianity specifically (not that I think we are), then it also ignores the idea of hell as eternal conscious torment. While that specific interpretation of hell is definitely debatable, there's a very good argument from scripture that hell is the more common result than heaven, meaning that for people who believe ECT is true, there's a big discussion to be had.
2 and 4 are still setting off my "mysterious ways" platitude alarm, but admittedly are still very reasonable critiques. I do think there's a lot to be said for simulation and omission theodicies in particular. My gripes are that:
- These ultimately rely on the free will theodicy being plausible. Many people, myself included, feel very comfortable rejecting that.
- These ideas are pretty far removed from any current religion, meaning even if I DO find them convincing, I have no incentive to change anything about my life. Sure, I'll believe God exists but its extremely hard to extrapolate what (if anything) this God wants me to do or what their preferences even are. At that point, God's existence just becomes a pointless trivia question.
This 2nd point is really my ultimate problem with claims about God's existence. There's plenty of strong arguments for God but the best ones tell us almost nothing about God's nature or expectations. We aren't completely in the dark here (odds are, God is very pro-natalist), but for the most part, claims about God's nature and expectations of us are in the realm of the weaker arguments (ie, the moral argument) or of modern religious groups. The Problem of Evil (in conjunction many other things) effectively takes most well-known modern religions off the table for me, so although I wouldn't be particular surprised to find out that God exists, I'm not sure God's existence would have much significance.
> Insofar as there is good reason to think God exists, then we should similarly trust him.
This doesn't follow.
God means a perfect being!
There's no clear connection between creating the universe and having goals that I share, whereas in the Carlsen or Tao examples there's a presumed shared goal of chess or math.
In some ways this is like the alignment problem in miniature.
Another point: don't you beg the question in assuming an eternal realm in which moral correctives may proliferate?
That’s likely given theism.
Why, it really seems extremely weird to think a god would make some other realm either moral correctives rather than create immortal beings and apply corrective in real time.
While the Problem of Evil may not refute theism, it sure seems to refute the possibility of an omnipotent being that is benevolent —either that, or the very idea of benevolence, of (moral) good and bad, loses its meaning across the board: who's to say that any given good or evil act —ever —is not actually otherwise?
The whole article is about reasons to think that isn't so.
That addresses the first part of Dashk’s comment, not the second. If we’re going to grant “maybe I don’t see how child cancer is really benevolent,” then there’s no way we could weigh in on what “benevolent” means—maybe ECT, or oblivion after death, are also benevolent, in ways only God can understand.
Evil/suffering is evidence against God, but an infinitely good afterlife for all sentient beings overcomes this. The obvious objection is that this is question begging. But I assume you'd say that theism entails an infinitely good afterlife for all sentient beings. If that's the case:
1. Should we be surprised that no major theistic traditions teach this? There are small universalist tendencies here and there, and still smaller ones that include animals. But not what you'd expect if theism necessarily means an infinite afterlife for humans and non-human animals.
2. The anthropic, fine tuning, and psychophysical harmony arguments, if we accept them 100%, don't point toward theism as you're idiosyncratically defining it (universalism for humans + animals, contra all major theistic traditions).
3. Defining God's infinite goodness in such a way that it necessitates an infinitely good afterlife seems to be based on the fact that this seems to you what infinite goodness would require, and theists believe in infinite goodness, QED?
4. The available evidence we have about God's goodness is that he created creatures that, except for a rounding error, live in a horror movie. The other evidence we have for God's existence can't be smuggled in to support God's infinite goodness, and I don't think you have provided such evidence. I do read the blog pretty regularly but I might have missed something!
Question that might sound crazy and which I am not endorsing at all: is it possible that suffering isn’t real? Like, we have memories of suffering and can think of moments where we presently believe we are suffering, yet could these memories / experiences be artificial? One could presumably achieve the aims of suffering by belief that one has suffered without having to actually suffer. If not, why wouldn’t God design it that way (e.g., false memories or temporary P zombie status)?
That doesn’t solve the problem of systemic suffering (e.g., why does life suck day to day if I’m in a bad situation, why do I daily not have a person that I love who has died) but seems like a Pareto improvement for minor evils that doesn’t actually impinge on free will
Yeah seems kind of skeptical. And once you recognize the world is screwed up in a bunch of ways, seems we should think it's probably screwed up that way too.
One concerned that I have is for your appeal to an "afterlife" in sections 1 and 3. While an afterlife is prevalent in many theological traditions, it's not typically the kind of thing that is prevalent in Philosophical Theism. So, to me, appealing to it isn't nearly as available as, say, an appeal to skeptical theism, which typically isn't as motivated by theological traditions. So, at minimum, I agree with you and Alexander Pruss that if theism is true, it's *possible* for life to continue post mortem, I think that would need its own independent justification if it's being employed outside of a theological tradition (e.g., Christianity).
Get rid of free will, and you get rid of evil. Existence might get lonely without beings with free will. If that’s God’s choice, God literally must take the good with the bad.
But free will doesn’t seem to have any bearing on whether, for instance, an infant gets cancer and lingers in agony for months before dying. Let alone (eg) a deer getting eaten alive by a bear, neither of whom have anything approaching free will in the matter.