There are significant gaps in reasoning here. Even if we assume that God (as you define it) exists, it does not necessarily follow that heaven exists, that there is an afterlife, or that every injustice will be rectified etc etc etc. These are additional claims that require their own justification beyond merely establishing God's existence. I’d be interested in seeing arguments for these specific points.
You might think I'm being overly skeptical, but remember—theists are the ones claiming that a perfect being created predation, or allowed Junko Furuta's case, for examples. Given this, it’s far from clear what the existence of a perfect being actually entails.
I agree. On BB's view, there will be unsetly many worlds worth creating where heaven exists, and unsetly many worlds worth creating where it doesn't (maybe because the aggregate utility of the universe over its lifespan is still positive even if there's no afterlife), so he should think that the probability of us going to heaven is undefined based on his other epistemic commitments about cardinalities. I think theism would still end up being very good news, but in a much more impersonal way.
Well, sending Lenin (and Trotsky) over to Heaven in 1916 would have done both them and the entire world a *huge* favor, and yet this was not done. A huge failure on the part of God, or the archons that were supposed to protect us! I doubt that even Lenin and Trotsky themselves would have actually approved of being kept alive longer than that once they realized what their survival ultimately ended up leading to.
I realize that's your view, but it seems like it shouldn't be your view if you think there are lots of heaven-less universes worth creating and you think what you do about undefined probabilities. Maybe you're saying you reject the former, and believe that a universe lacking an afterlife wouldn't be worth it at all? But that seems very implausible...
Yes, but wouldn't it be even better to create all the possible perfect-life people *and* to create extra people on top of that who have amazing but still slightly suboptimal lives, e.g., not getting an infinite afterlife?
What is your thinking about infants dying as soon as they are born being substantially better situation as opposed to living a life of 70 to 100 years here on earth ? Meaning, why bother with a nearly super small speck of time here on earth with all its potential for suffering and misery (as compared to quintillions of millenniums in unlimited-happiness-heaven). Why not exist as little time as possible on troublesome earth as opposed to the beauty of heaven you describe ? Humans existence on earth seems to be some totally unnecessary stepping stone to eternal happiness (if in fact there is a heavenly afterlife) ?
This reminded me of this C.S. Lewis quote (which I still think rings true, even if you don't accept that God is outside time):
Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another...Ten-thirty-- and every other moment from the beginning of the world--is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.
In Judaism, the verses from Isaiah 6 form the core of the Kedushah (Holiness). The Kedushah is included (with slight variations) in the daily davening or prayer service in Pesukei d'Zimra (songs of praise) and the Amidah (the standing prayer). And on Shabbat, it is included again in the short Musaf service at the end. The reason is exactly what you said -- a great poetic representation of God and his "court." Each of the three repetitions of the Kedushah is slightly different and has a different purpose. I'll leave that as an exercise for the interested reader, as they say in math textbooks.
Nice to see father Adelstein liking the post by son Adelstein. By the way, sir, I have been a fan of Matthew when his substack and his youtube channel were very very small and he was just arguing for utilitarianism.
haha... I expected no less! Are you a universalist (universal happiness or universal salvation) too, by the way? That is, all sentient beings shall eventually go to heaven?
I am more epistemologically modest. I tend not to take positions on things I don't know about and cannot really know about. And whatever our conception of heaven is, it is probably wrong.
Apologies for asking, but do you have any siblings? I’ve just got a younger sister who is eight years younger than me and who is extraordinarily smart. Like really smart. She got a perfect score on her ACT (36 out of 36) and an almost perfect score on her SAT (1590 out of 1600).
Wonderful! Now we just need you to become a Christian. :)
But in all seriousness, even if you’re not fully persuaded by the evidence for Jesus’s divinity or resurrection, I wonder if you’ve considered the arguments made by Ross Douthat in his new book, which makes a case for agnostics and the unaffiliated to join a religious tradition. In your case—since you’re already a theist—the argument would seem to be:
1. Even if Christianity is merely a social technology, it has likely evolved to be better at bringing humans closer to God and protecting us from negative spiritual forces than starting from scratch.
2. You’re already aware of the utilitarian case for religion in general and Christianity in particular. So, beyond gaining access to the goods of a religious community, your moral arguments would also be grounded in a tradition that gives them greater depth and reach.
3. You’ve spoken about how God will eventually make things right regarding sin and suffering. But Christianity provides a mechanism for how that happens—through Jesus’s death and resurrection. Without this, you’re left with the question of how imperfect beings can be reconciled with God.
4. Since physical existence has goods that aren’t accessible in a purely non-material state, the final state of existence likely involves the physical restoration of reality (bodily resurrection, the renewal of the Earth, etc.). This concept has been central to Christianity all along.
A lot of these points could also apply to Judaism (as you mention in your great post on the subject) but I find the Christian concepts of sin and resurrection more compelling than their Jewish counterparts. And also, I find the person of Jesus to be the most compelling vision of divinity.
It's an interesting case. I'll have to read Ross's book. I will note that part of the reason not to do this, at least in my case, is that my family is Jewish and many people would be quite upset if I became Christian. So it's not the sort of thing I would dabble in unless quite confident it was true.
Would your family be upset if you said "I'm not a Christian, but I still believe that Christianity is more plausible than Judaism, though none of the above is more plausible than either Christianity or Judaism?"
I think that’s fair. From a utilitarian perspective, you should pick the religion that has the most social utility (usually the faith of your family) unless you have good reason to think another faith is true.
I'm always fascinated by someone who seems to understand the arguments and then just says, "forget all that, I prefer this other reality because reasons".
Just blindly saying the fine-tuning argument is a good one is just willfully ignorance, e.g. puddle says this hole is made perfect for me". We have no other universes to compare against. And to paraphrase Carl Sagan, what an awful waste of (unhositable) space.
If you don't care if something is true, and you want to just end the conversation, this is a perfect way.
You say I'm willfully ignorant and then you parrot objections that I've rebutted at considerable length that are rejected by roughly 100% of philosophers. It's fine not to know much about a subject, but profound ignorance combined with extreme overconfidence is a toxic combination. Regarding your objections, I've addressed them here https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-fine-tuning-argument-simply-works
I apologize, I meant only to provide a reflection of what it seems you are saying in your article, not to insult you or make an assessment of what you think you know, as you are in no position to make an assessment of what I know from a short comment.
It comes down to what we can possibly know, and what we cannot. Why is there something instead of nothing? The only rational answer is, we cannot possibly know.
I'm sorry if I found your gleeful appreciation of a deity - awesome if true - that we have no evidence for, lacking in appreciable value. I admit I got bored, and skimmed passed it as some point. As a writer that should tell you something.
However, your immediate and strong, flame-war-style response, speaks more to my point than anything else.
I serve in the role of a customer, consuming your content, and in that role it is my responsibility to serve as a mirror of how you are received. So you can do better. I'm not arguing with you. I'm simply telling you you have more work to do to convince me.
Trying to match the degree of hostility of a random guy on the internet is a mistake. Think about that.
"we often don’t take enough time to appreciate just how wonderful it would be if God exists.
This might be a reason to be suspicious of belief in God."
I think the converse applies too: sometimes we don't realise that under the atheistic interpretation of fine-tuning life (if you're lucky enough to live in a time and place where everything works out well) is far more agreeable than we have any right to expect.
There could so easily have been an infinite number of unborn spirits but only a finite number of brains to put them in, so your chance of being born would be zero.
But I do wonder about an omniscient, benificent, all-powerful god who knows the entire future but is constrained by his own benificence so can only ever take the best action. No surprise, no jeopardy, nothing to learn, no possibility of personal growth. Like having to watch an infinitely long movie where you know every frame. He must be so bored. I wouldn't wish this on any god.
Seems basically that if God exists as is posited by Christianity or Islam, then I and most of everyone I care about will be tortured in hell for eternity, which doesn't seem to be to be a positive outcome. You may argue that this isn't what you believe, but it is what a lot of people mean by theism, so it doesn't follow that theism is good for me at least, though it may follow that your specific conception of theism is inherently good.
I don't think that an eternal hell is remotely consistent with the goodness of God. Even if it is, most Christians these days who are sane don't think that all non-CHristians automatically go to hell forever.
Here is a question: What is the point of trying to alleviate suffering in the real world from a standard theist worldview with unlimited postmortem happiness awaiting the faithful?
Isn't even the worst atrocity going on on planet Earth more meagre than a rounding error (even more meagre than one-googolplexth of a rounding error) in comparison to afterlife happiness? I know that you Matthew put the likelihood of Christianity being correct at 10%. As such, expected value-wise, shouldn't it then be the case that, one should allocate almost entirety of their advocacy to making sure as many people as possible believe in the Christian God, as the gains you bring to people with it is greater than anything you could possibly do in the real world (well, in the mortal world rather)?
That is of course, unless you believe, in the 10% case where Christianity is true, the Christian God is not as is described in the Bible.
Suffering is still bad even if the afterlife is infinitely good. In fact, theism makes our actions matter *more* because they have eternal consequences.
No. They are both the same amount of badness. Just like how getting stabbed twice zero times is just as bad at getting stabbed once zero times. Changing around one of the terms doesn’t matter when the other one dominates…
But then why in God’s omnibenevolence does he allow for some people, metaphorically speaking, to suffer two stabbings a day while allowing others to suffer only one? Or none? How does His omnibenevolence reconcile itself with the eternal difference in suffering between people that he’s responsible for?
I don't think he'll do that. I think he allows temporary suffering for future greater goods. I'd rather be stabbed once now rather than twice now if after the stabbing I'd live forever in paradise.
If the afterlife is going to be so infinitely glorious compared to our paltry lives of suffering, then why shouldn't we immediately kill ourselves to hasten our experience of it?
Because stuff in this life makes our afterlife better otherwise God wouldn't place us here. It's also not obvious our glorious afterlife state starts immediately after we die.
If the afterlife is infinitely good regardless, how could anything we do here make it “better”?
Also! If one does kill thenselves, then presumably God predicted that, knew it would happen, and ensured that the life where that person killed themselves to go to Heaven is the “best possible life” for that person.
So logically speaking, one would be infinitely better off immediately if they were to kill themselves.
I was contemplating suicide in my childhood for this kind of reasons.
Back then, I simply decided that I'll always be able to die, and until then I can just as well explore this mortal life more. But the thing is, my life was pretty good. There was no reason to think about killing myself beyond philosophical. Now, when I reflect on it, I suspect that if I was actively suffering, I could've killed myself, I didn't really have a strong block against it on an intellectual level.
Sometimes I wonder, how common this is among children who *actually* believe in omnibenevalent god.
> "The best atheistic argument, bar none, is the problem of evil—the problem of reconciling a God of limitless goodness with a seemingly blazingly apathetic and indifferent world, that disburses death, suffering, and misery by the trillions. Other top atheistic arguments include the problem of divine hiddenness, of explaining why God hides from us, why so many do not feel his comforting presence even in the times of greatest hardship."
Hmmm. I disagree. I think that the best atheistic argument is, in a universe without any God, intelligent species who became aware of their own mortality would invent parables about an afterlife in order to soothe their fears about death, and after thousands of years of development those parables would look identical to the hopeful narrative that is expressed in this essay.
The best thing about all of this is that there's no way to improve anything, God set every mistake and error up as part of a grand Rube Goldberg machine to Infinity-X Heaven, and every badly behaving person is just another cog in the grand machine. Cry your pain to God! He will smile down at you and say, "Yes, all is well in the best of all worlds, and your pain must continue, if it does not increase, for the Grand Design will solve all."
If there is a god, I really hope it's yours. He certainly seems the most benificent and godlike of the few I've seen on offer.
re anthropic principle: I've read the arguments why spirits couldn't find our universe in the multiverse (IGF etc), but these equally prove that spirits couldn't find our world (or our bodies on it) in this universe. But, apparently, there is a perfect spirit delivery system that delivers exactly one spirit per human (and...?) brain in our universe. And if it can work in our universe it can also work in the multiverse.
Also beware that if said spirits are taken from an infinite pool, your chance of being made flesh is N (ie the number of brains that need souls) divided by infinity, which is zero (perhaps you addressed this in your post about beth infinities - I haven't worked thru that yet, but your post was what sent me on this path, so thanks).
Do you think it is a super cool thing if the God who really exists tortures people in Hell for eternity, or annihilates them, or their loved ones, from existence entirely, in judgment for their this-worldly sins? Because that is what the vast majority of theists believe awaits us hereafter. Not a loving reunion with an understanding creator of incomprehensible perfection, but a court case followed by an eternal life sentence or an execution.
It’s also worth considering that even if you take hell out of the equation, but retain God, God tortures billions of beings on earth (people, shrimp, you name it) for reasons no one can adequately explain (He works in mysterious ways).
If there’s no God, at least we can believe in the human capacity to correct the universe’s blind mistake of agony through our moral action. But if there is a God, it implies the agony is a design feature of perfection that mortals are doomed to experience in the service of eternal, omnipotent divinity.
Right. Suffering is the secret sauce. Thus trying to eliminate it is a reduction of the greater good. I think this is sad and unsubstantiated and defeats the spirit to eliminate suffering.
There are significant gaps in reasoning here. Even if we assume that God (as you define it) exists, it does not necessarily follow that heaven exists, that there is an afterlife, or that every injustice will be rectified etc etc etc. These are additional claims that require their own justification beyond merely establishing God's existence. I’d be interested in seeing arguments for these specific points.
You might think I'm being overly skeptical, but remember—theists are the ones claiming that a perfect being created predation, or allowed Junko Furuta's case, for examples. Given this, it’s far from clear what the existence of a perfect being actually entails.
I agree. On BB's view, there will be unsetly many worlds worth creating where heaven exists, and unsetly many worlds worth creating where it doesn't (maybe because the aggregate utility of the universe over its lifespan is still positive even if there's no afterlife), so he should think that the probability of us going to heaven is undefined based on his other epistemic commitments about cardinalities. I think theism would still end up being very good news, but in a much more impersonal way.
No on my view everyone goes to heaven!
Well, sending Lenin (and Trotsky) over to Heaven in 1916 would have done both them and the entire world a *huge* favor, and yet this was not done. A huge failure on the part of God, or the archons that were supposed to protect us! I doubt that even Lenin and Trotsky themselves would have actually approved of being kept alive longer than that once they realized what their survival ultimately ended up leading to.
I realize that's your view, but it seems like it shouldn't be your view if you think there are lots of heaven-less universes worth creating and you think what you do about undefined probabilities. Maybe you're saying you reject the former, and believe that a universe lacking an afterlife wouldn't be worth it at all? But that seems very implausible...
The idea is that God makes every possible person and gives them each the best possible life!
A lot of people certainly didn't have the best possible life under Nazism and Communism, though!
Can you better describe what you mean by “every possible person”.
How could any human know that the god one believed in created every possible person ?
A possible person is just a person who could exist. As for your second question, see here https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-the-anthropic
Yes, but wouldn't it be even better to create all the possible perfect-life people *and* to create extra people on top of that who have amazing but still slightly suboptimal lives, e.g., not getting an infinite afterlife?
It makes sense to create every possible person and then give each of them a maximally good life!
What is your thinking about infants dying as soon as they are born being substantially better situation as opposed to living a life of 70 to 100 years here on earth ? Meaning, why bother with a nearly super small speck of time here on earth with all its potential for suffering and misery (as compared to quintillions of millenniums in unlimited-happiness-heaven). Why not exist as little time as possible on troublesome earth as opposed to the beauty of heaven you describe ? Humans existence on earth seems to be some totally unnecessary stepping stone to eternal happiness (if in fact there is a heavenly afterlife) ?
This reminded me of this C.S. Lewis quote (which I still think rings true, even if you don't accept that God is outside time):
Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another...Ten-thirty-- and every other moment from the beginning of the world--is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.
Surely God has his own time-stream which is orthogonal to ours. If he doesn't have time he can't act.
In Judaism, the verses from Isaiah 6 form the core of the Kedushah (Holiness). The Kedushah is included (with slight variations) in the daily davening or prayer service in Pesukei d'Zimra (songs of praise) and the Amidah (the standing prayer). And on Shabbat, it is included again in the short Musaf service at the end. The reason is exactly what you said -- a great poetic representation of God and his "court." Each of the three repetitions of the Kedushah is slightly different and has a different purpose. I'll leave that as an exercise for the interested reader, as they say in math textbooks.
Nice to see father Adelstein liking the post by son Adelstein. By the way, sir, I have been a fan of Matthew when his substack and his youtube channel were very very small and he was just arguing for utilitarianism.
Thanks. I have been a fan of his even longer. :
haha... I expected no less! Are you a universalist (universal happiness or universal salvation) too, by the way? That is, all sentient beings shall eventually go to heaven?
I am more epistemologically modest. I tend not to take positions on things I don't know about and cannot really know about. And whatever our conception of heaven is, it is probably wrong.
How do you know that he is BB's father?
Can verify!
Glad to hear! :)
Apologies for asking, but do you have any siblings? I’ve just got a younger sister who is eight years younger than me and who is extraordinarily smart. Like really smart. She got a perfect score on her ACT (36 out of 36) and an almost perfect score on her SAT (1590 out of 1600).
I have an older brother.
No sisters? Not even half-sisters?
You wrote you "can" verify, but not that you "did" verify. : )
I am.
Excellent! Your son is very smart, bright, and polite, sir! :)
Sounds like a pretty great world! ;)
Wonderful! Now we just need you to become a Christian. :)
But in all seriousness, even if you’re not fully persuaded by the evidence for Jesus’s divinity or resurrection, I wonder if you’ve considered the arguments made by Ross Douthat in his new book, which makes a case for agnostics and the unaffiliated to join a religious tradition. In your case—since you’re already a theist—the argument would seem to be:
1. Even if Christianity is merely a social technology, it has likely evolved to be better at bringing humans closer to God and protecting us from negative spiritual forces than starting from scratch.
2. You’re already aware of the utilitarian case for religion in general and Christianity in particular. So, beyond gaining access to the goods of a religious community, your moral arguments would also be grounded in a tradition that gives them greater depth and reach.
3. You’ve spoken about how God will eventually make things right regarding sin and suffering. But Christianity provides a mechanism for how that happens—through Jesus’s death and resurrection. Without this, you’re left with the question of how imperfect beings can be reconciled with God.
4. Since physical existence has goods that aren’t accessible in a purely non-material state, the final state of existence likely involves the physical restoration of reality (bodily resurrection, the renewal of the Earth, etc.). This concept has been central to Christianity all along.
A lot of these points could also apply to Judaism (as you mention in your great post on the subject) but I find the Christian concepts of sin and resurrection more compelling than their Jewish counterparts. And also, I find the person of Jesus to be the most compelling vision of divinity.
It's an interesting case. I'll have to read Ross's book. I will note that part of the reason not to do this, at least in my case, is that my family is Jewish and many people would be quite upset if I became Christian. So it's not the sort of thing I would dabble in unless quite confident it was true.
Would your family be upset if you said "I'm not a Christian, but I still believe that Christianity is more plausible than Judaism, though none of the above is more plausible than either Christianity or Judaism?"
I think that’s fair. From a utilitarian perspective, you should pick the religion that has the most social utility (usually the faith of your family) unless you have good reason to think another faith is true.
Disappointingly infantile.
Infantiley disappointing.
i also had a disappointing experience with your mom.
I'm always fascinated by someone who seems to understand the arguments and then just says, "forget all that, I prefer this other reality because reasons".
Just blindly saying the fine-tuning argument is a good one is just willfully ignorance, e.g. puddle says this hole is made perfect for me". We have no other universes to compare against. And to paraphrase Carl Sagan, what an awful waste of (unhositable) space.
If you don't care if something is true, and you want to just end the conversation, this is a perfect way.
You say I'm willfully ignorant and then you parrot objections that I've rebutted at considerable length that are rejected by roughly 100% of philosophers. It's fine not to know much about a subject, but profound ignorance combined with extreme overconfidence is a toxic combination. Regarding your objections, I've addressed them here https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-fine-tuning-argument-simply-works
https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-argument-from-scale-is-an-own/comments
I apologize, I meant only to provide a reflection of what it seems you are saying in your article, not to insult you or make an assessment of what you think you know, as you are in no position to make an assessment of what I know from a short comment.
It comes down to what we can possibly know, and what we cannot. Why is there something instead of nothing? The only rational answer is, we cannot possibly know.
I'm sorry if I found your gleeful appreciation of a deity - awesome if true - that we have no evidence for, lacking in appreciable value. I admit I got bored, and skimmed passed it as some point. As a writer that should tell you something.
However, your immediate and strong, flame-war-style response, speaks more to my point than anything else.
You say we have no evidence for God's existence. But I don't agree with that. I've written probably roughly the length of a book on the arguments for God's existence--some are linked above, see also https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-the-anthropic.
I think my response was less hostile than yours. I tend to match the degree of hostility that people display.
I serve in the role of a customer, consuming your content, and in that role it is my responsibility to serve as a mirror of how you are received. So you can do better. I'm not arguing with you. I'm simply telling you you have more work to do to convince me.
Trying to match the degree of hostility of a random guy on the internet is a mistake. Think about that.
Please be well, and do good.
"we often don’t take enough time to appreciate just how wonderful it would be if God exists.
This might be a reason to be suspicious of belief in God."
I think the converse applies too: sometimes we don't realise that under the atheistic interpretation of fine-tuning life (if you're lucky enough to live in a time and place where everything works out well) is far more agreeable than we have any right to expect.
There could so easily have been an infinite number of unborn spirits but only a finite number of brains to put them in, so your chance of being born would be zero.
But I do wonder about an omniscient, benificent, all-powerful god who knows the entire future but is constrained by his own benificence so can only ever take the best action. No surprise, no jeopardy, nothing to learn, no possibility of personal growth. Like having to watch an infinitely long movie where you know every frame. He must be so bored. I wouldn't wish this on any god.
Seems basically that if God exists as is posited by Christianity or Islam, then I and most of everyone I care about will be tortured in hell for eternity, which doesn't seem to be to be a positive outcome. You may argue that this isn't what you believe, but it is what a lot of people mean by theism, so it doesn't follow that theism is good for me at least, though it may follow that your specific conception of theism is inherently good.
Christians should be universalists https://benthams.substack.com/p/universalism-a-comprehensive-defense?utm_source=publication-search.
I don't think that an eternal hell is remotely consistent with the goodness of God. Even if it is, most Christians these days who are sane don't think that all non-CHristians automatically go to hell forever.
Here is a question: What is the point of trying to alleviate suffering in the real world from a standard theist worldview with unlimited postmortem happiness awaiting the faithful?
Isn't even the worst atrocity going on on planet Earth more meagre than a rounding error (even more meagre than one-googolplexth of a rounding error) in comparison to afterlife happiness? I know that you Matthew put the likelihood of Christianity being correct at 10%. As such, expected value-wise, shouldn't it then be the case that, one should allocate almost entirety of their advocacy to making sure as many people as possible believe in the Christian God, as the gains you bring to people with it is greater than anything you could possibly do in the real world (well, in the mortal world rather)?
That is of course, unless you believe, in the 10% case where Christianity is true, the Christian God is not as is described in the Bible.
This is my question, too. I wrote about it briefly here: https://woolery.substack.com/p/beginners-question-about-theistic
Suffering is still bad even if the afterlife is infinitely good. In fact, theism makes our actions matter *more* because they have eternal consequences.
If the afterlife is infinitely good I don’t understand what the eternal consequences are.
I also don’t understand how any of this is elementary.
It's worse to be stabbed twice a day forever than once a day forever. Both are infinitely bad but one is worse.
No. They are both the same amount of badness. Just like how getting stabbed twice zero times is just as bad at getting stabbed once zero times. Changing around one of the terms doesn’t matter when the other one dominates…
I see what you mean.
But then why in God’s omnibenevolence does he allow for some people, metaphorically speaking, to suffer two stabbings a day while allowing others to suffer only one? Or none? How does His omnibenevolence reconcile itself with the eternal difference in suffering between people that he’s responsible for?
I don't think he'll do that. I think he allows temporary suffering for future greater goods. I'd rather be stabbed once now rather than twice now if after the stabbing I'd live forever in paradise.
If the afterlife is going to be so infinitely glorious compared to our paltry lives of suffering, then why shouldn't we immediately kill ourselves to hasten our experience of it?
Because stuff in this life makes our afterlife better otherwise God wouldn't place us here. It's also not obvious our glorious afterlife state starts immediately after we die.
If the afterlife is infinitely good regardless, how could anything we do here make it “better”?
Also! If one does kill thenselves, then presumably God predicted that, knew it would happen, and ensured that the life where that person killed themselves to go to Heaven is the “best possible life” for that person.
So logically speaking, one would be infinitely better off immediately if they were to kill themselves.
I was contemplating suicide in my childhood for this kind of reasons.
Back then, I simply decided that I'll always be able to die, and until then I can just as well explore this mortal life more. But the thing is, my life was pretty good. There was no reason to think about killing myself beyond philosophical. Now, when I reflect on it, I suspect that if I was actively suffering, I could've killed myself, I didn't really have a strong block against it on an intellectual level.
Sometimes I wonder, how common this is among children who *actually* believe in omnibenevalent god.
> "The best atheistic argument, bar none, is the problem of evil—the problem of reconciling a God of limitless goodness with a seemingly blazingly apathetic and indifferent world, that disburses death, suffering, and misery by the trillions. Other top atheistic arguments include the problem of divine hiddenness, of explaining why God hides from us, why so many do not feel his comforting presence even in the times of greatest hardship."
Hmmm. I disagree. I think that the best atheistic argument is, in a universe without any God, intelligent species who became aware of their own mortality would invent parables about an afterlife in order to soothe their fears about death, and after thousands of years of development those parables would look identical to the hopeful narrative that is expressed in this essay.
If I understood it correctly, your argument goes something like this:
Step 1: The gravitational constant is just right therefore God exists.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: therefore we will experience great joy and be united with our dead loved ones.
I’m struggling with step 2.
Well the arguments establish a perfect God. If he's perfect, he won't snuff us out after 70 years.
The argument only establishes that God is good at choosing constants. It says nothing about what God will do when we die.
https://benthams.substack.com/p/god-best-explains-the-world?utm_source=publication-search
The best thing about all of this is that there's no way to improve anything, God set every mistake and error up as part of a grand Rube Goldberg machine to Infinity-X Heaven, and every badly behaving person is just another cog in the grand machine. Cry your pain to God! He will smile down at you and say, "Yes, all is well in the best of all worlds, and your pain must continue, if it does not increase, for the Grand Design will solve all."
Well I think that many evils are unfortunate side effects of good things rather than good in themselves.
If there is a god, I really hope it's yours. He certainly seems the most benificent and godlike of the few I've seen on offer.
re anthropic principle: I've read the arguments why spirits couldn't find our universe in the multiverse (IGF etc), but these equally prove that spirits couldn't find our world (or our bodies on it) in this universe. But, apparently, there is a perfect spirit delivery system that delivers exactly one spirit per human (and...?) brain in our universe. And if it can work in our universe it can also work in the multiverse.
Also beware that if said spirits are taken from an infinite pool, your chance of being made flesh is N (ie the number of brains that need souls) divided by infinity, which is zero (perhaps you addressed this in your post about beth infinities - I haven't worked thru that yet, but your post was what sent me on this path, so thanks).
Do you think it is a super cool thing if the God who really exists tortures people in Hell for eternity, or annihilates them, or their loved ones, from existence entirely, in judgment for their this-worldly sins? Because that is what the vast majority of theists believe awaits us hereafter. Not a loving reunion with an understanding creator of incomprehensible perfection, but a court case followed by an eternal life sentence or an execution.
But that’s not what I believe!
It’s also worth considering that even if you take hell out of the equation, but retain God, God tortures billions of beings on earth (people, shrimp, you name it) for reasons no one can adequately explain (He works in mysterious ways).
If there’s no God, at least we can believe in the human capacity to correct the universe’s blind mistake of agony through our moral action. But if there is a God, it implies the agony is a design feature of perfection that mortals are doomed to experience in the service of eternal, omnipotent divinity.
But God only allows this because it ultimately serves the greater good.
Right. Suffering is the secret sauce. Thus trying to eliminate it is a reduction of the greater good. I think this is sad and unsubstantiated and defeats the spirit to eliminate suffering.