Forgive me if I’m being dense or anti-intellectual… but theodicies just seem like philosophically wrapped coping mechanisms.
“Why does evil exist if a perfectly good and all powerful god exists?”
“Well if you assume that a bunch of severely undersupported facts (that amount to a nice, cozy, and warm story) are true, then that’s why!”
… this kind of argument seems primarily designed to assuage tension in the minds of believers, not to convince proponents of the problem of evil of anything.
Well, ideally a theodicy won't be severely unsupported, but will instead be plausible given theism. If you can come up with a plausible explanation of why a world with God would have lots of evil then that should undercut the force of the problem of evil,.
If you have good reason to believe theism is true, but the problem of evil makes theism less likely to be true, then whether there are plausible solutions to the problem of evil are relevant. Nobody becomes a theist because of theodicy, they do so for other reasons.
As a simple example, lets say I read in a book that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and I am inclined to believe the book because I trust it as an authority. Yet I have a problem: my direct observation of the Sun shows it traveling through the sky, appearing to go around the Earth. Yet there is a plausible explanation for this: if the Earth is rotating then the sun would appear to travel around the Earth, even if it wasn't. This "theodicy" for heliocentrism is plausible, so I continue to believe the book.
You can argue that I can prove heliocentrism for myself through experiment, but this isn't the case: I do not have the equipment or knowledge necessary to prove such a thing. Yet I feel confident in taking it on authority because there is a plausible solution to the problem of the sun appearing to travel around the earth.
And every extra level of bells and whistles you add on top of it, like any specific details about angels, decrease the overall probability mass even further.
It does not, in fact, violate the conjunction fallacy to say that your difficulty solving some puzzle conditional on a view goes down if you find some plausibly hypothesis conditional on the view that solves the problem.
Of course it doesn't - it's a prime example of conjunction fallacy.
The fact that things that appear more plausible to our intuitions are not actually less improbable is the whole point:
"Adding more detail or extra assumptions can make an event *seem more plausible*, even though the event necessarily becomes less probable"
When your intuitions are miscalibrated like that, you may feel as if adding archons to your theodicy somehow improves it, makes the problem less difficult, while, in fact, the overall improbability only increases. You may feel that you've mostly solved the problem of Evil, but in probability theoretic terms your theory is worse than just saying "God has His reasons".
And when you unlearn this fallacy, the former does not appear more plausible than the latter.
To clarify: You're suggesting that the more variables (archons, an afterlife, et cetera) are added for a particular hypothesis, especially when these variables are speculative as opposed to conclusively proven, the more likely it is that this hypothesis will violate Occam's razor?
Basically yes. The more specific details - the more complex the hypothesis is. The more complex the hypothesis - the more improbable it is. This is just a consequence of the fact that value of probability function can't exceed 1.
P(A)P(B) ≤ P(A)
And unless B is a subset of A, therefore isn't an extra detail to begin with, the only way for P(A)P(B) = P(B) is when (B) =1. Meaning that it's conclusively proven.
So adding new speculative details always makes the overal theory less probable. The only way to increase probability of a theory is to find some evidence in favor of it, which isn't done through speculation but through experiment.
I love engaging with philosophy of religion because I do think its a valuable domain (and, above all, it offers an exercise for the mind). There are also many philosophically questionable aspects of the atheist worldview (I say this as an theist).
However, some of these theodicies just seem like the product of creative fiction competitions... I mean, come on, I'm expected to casually endorse the existence of "archons"? Seriously? Such things are *exceedingly* difficult to believe. The bigger your claims, the greater your assumptions; the greater your assumptions, the more burdensome it is to substantiate them and make them compelling. As you said, these theodicies just come off as elaborate coping mechanisms peppered with appeals to "plausibilities".
Don't get me wrong, I'm not wholly opposed to abductive argumentation, and Bentham, if you're reading this, I should assure you that I love your work. I just find it fantastical that the existence of "archons", their failure to execute their divinely assigned role, and "connection-building" with a God who puts his heart and soul into hiding himself from us humans, are the reasons why evil and suffering exist.
In this comment section, a user named "nelson" commented on the circularity of these theodicies being plausible given theism but necessary to *maintain* theism. I find that to be a decisive putting down of such theodicies.
Yeah, I'm still confused as to why exactly God would design flawed archons, or at least archons that are flawed to such an extraordinarily massive extent, as evidenced by our real world. God can see the past, present, and future, after all, so why not design (much) better archons?
And there would also be other ways for archons to achieve connection-building with humans, such as by bringing their dead friends and family members/relatives back to life, but somehow we don't see archons ever do this, at least not in our real world. What's the point of depriving people of such a valuable connecting-building opportunity by refusing to do this?
And all of this assumes that archons and the afterlife both exist. What if they don't? Even if one believes in God (a subject which I am agnostic about), this does not necessitate any obligation to believe in either archons or an afterlife. Personally, I'm extremely skeptical in beliving that human minds can ever be separated from human brains.
CS Lewis propounds a theodicy very similar to this one in his science fiction trilogy. There, be suggests that there are many angels (eldila), but each world has a governing archangel (Oyarsa). Most of the Oyarsa are very good, but ours is Satan, and he corrupted earth pretty badly. Eventually, God will redeem earth (through Christ), but in the meantime a lot of suffering and evil happens because our angels are evil.
Lewis also theorized that the indifference of the natural world is a direct result of the Fall of Man: that we were made to rule over the natural world, and having rebelled against God the natural world has rebelled against us as well. In other words, before the Fall of Man nature was subservient rather than indifferent. In "The Problem of Pain" he writes
"The modern Yogi claims — whether falsely or truly — to have under control those functions which to us are almost part of the external world, such as digestion and circulation. This power the first man had in eminence. His organic processes obeyed the law of his own will, not the law of nature. His organs sent up appetites to the judgement seat of will not because they had to, but because he chose. Sleep meant to him not the stupor which we undergo, but willed and conscious repose — he remained awake to enjoy the pleasure and duty of sleep. Since the processes of decay and repair in his tissues were similarly conscious and obedient, it may not be fanciful to suppose that the length of his life was largely at his own discretion. Wholly commanding himself, he commanded all lower lives with which he came into contact. Even now we meet rare individuals who have a mysterious power of taming beasts. This power the Paradisal man enjoyed in eminence....
"...Up to that moment (the Fall) the human spirit had been in full control of the human organism. It doubtless expected that it would retain this control when it had ceased to obey God. But its authority over the organism was a delegated authority which it lost when it ceased to be God’s delegate. Having cut itself off, as far as it could, from the source of its being, it had cut itself off from the source of power. For when we say of created things that rules this must mean that God rules through. I doubt whether it would have been intrinsically possible for God to continue to rule the organism through the human spirit when the human spirit was in revolt against Him. At any rate He did not. He began to rule the organism in a more external way, not by the laws of spirit, but by those of nature. Thus the organs, no longer governed by man’s will, fell under the control of ordinary biochemical laws and suffered whatever the inter-workings of those laws might bring about in the way of pain, senility and death. And desires began to come up into the mind of man, not as his reason chose, but just as the biochemical and environmental facts happened to cause them. And the mind itself fell under the psychological laws of association and the like which God had made to rule the psychology of the higher anthropoids. And the will, caught in the tidal wave of mere nature, had no resource but to force back some of the new thoughts and desires by main strength, and these uneasy rebels became the subconscious as we now know it. The process was not, I conceive, comparable to mere deterioration as it may now occur in a human individual; it was a loss of status as a species. What man lost by the Fall was his original specific nature."
Theologian Greg Boyd does a great job expanding on a theodicy similar to this in his book “Satan and the Problem of Evil” (as well as the previous title “God at War”). Some of the philosophical verbiage he uses goes over my head but I think you’d enjoy it.
While I did laugh reading the blow-by against bounded aggregation, it actually seems to me that bounded aggregation could help this theodicy! Not only because, as you suggest with reply 1, the goods in heaven are plausibly good enough to not be the kinds with low bounds (like eating a chocolate bar), but actually because it seems plausible that goods in heaven might even be *lexically superior* to a whole lot of earthly goods and bads. Bounded aggregation is a friend :)
Also — potential worry: do you think the good of connections are dependent on the *actual* amount of good someone does for me? Or just my *belief* in the amount of good someone does for me? Like, if I believe you save my life, and so do you, but it turns out in fact all along someone else would’ve intervened if you failed, or if all along I actually wasn’t at danger because the laws of nature were about to change, or we’re in some skeptical scenario, etc., does this make my connection to you any less great? I mean, suppose I never find out you didn’t *actually* save my life. Seems I’d be equally grateful to you and our connection would be equally strong.
Hmm…then if God can keep us sufficiently fooled, and thus prevent a whole lot of evil, at the cost of only “half” the goods of connections, seems maybe He should? Maybe the infinity stuff saves here
On certain theories of well-being, sure. But even so — if we grant we can still have (somewhat) valuable connections to archons even if God would’ve intervened, not so clear God shouldn’t have that as a policy.
I can see someone who is absolutely convinced of theism otherwise deciding this is the least bad way to explain the problem of evil, or at least that it's one way out of the bind. But when held against a naturalistic explanation of evil, you'd have to acknowledge it's radically less plausible in terms of simplicity, elegance, prior probability and so on, right? I guess this is my issue with throwing everything into the Big Bayes Machine: At some point, if a seemingly solid bet requires constructing elaborate gnostic ontologies that are otherwise entirely unsupported by our actual experience of the world, shouldn't that trigger a sort of meta-reflective reappraisal of our original conclusion? I think there's a real danger in giving ourselves such broad theoretical license otherwise.
Yeah, like every theodicy, extremely unconvincing at best, totally nut at worst. Anyone with a little glimpse of common sense can see that the far better explanation of the data is : There is no perfect being looking over this whole mess.
No big deal, you just need to understand that thinking that a perfect being supervises predation and doesn't intervene is totally nut. I'm just trying to help you.
>Yeah, like every theodicy, extremely unconvincing at best, totally nut at worst.
A theodicy is not meant to convince anyone of theism. It's meant to weaken the problem of evil for those who, for other reasons, believe theism is likely. A Lewis put it:
"Certainly at all periods the pain and waste of human life was equally obvious. Our own religion begins among the Jews, a people squeezed between great warlike empires, continually defeated and led captive, familiar as Poland or Armenia with the tragic story of the conquered. It is mere nonsense to put pain among the discoveries of science. Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practised, in a world without chloroform.
"At all times, then, an inference from the course of events in this world to the goodness and wisdom of the Creator would have been equally preposterous; and it was never made. Religion has a different origin."
In other words, if you don't already believe theism is plausible for other reasons then of course a theodicy is not going to convince you it is plausible. For someone like BB who believe theism is plausible for other reasons (his anthropic argument and the rest) then finding out whether there are plausible theodicies starts to matter.
Isn't this reasoning disharmonious with your anthropic argument for god? If the Archons usually succeed, shouldn't we expect to find ourselves in one of those worlds?
>Suppose that you rescue someone from a burning building. You do it at great personal difficulty and risk to yourself. You seriously might have failed. Ultimately, this heroic act will forge a kind of connection between you and the person that you saved. They’ll see you as a hero, and your relationship with them will be stronger than it ever could have been otherwise.
I think this depends on the person saving you not having set the building on fire in the first place. If the guy saving you is the arsonist, you probably won’t love him forever for almost burning you alive.
It seems like god could much more easily forge a connection identical to the strongest one humanity currently knows: the connection between a mother and a child. This only depends on a creator’s unconditional love and presence. Incidentally, making soup for your child when they’re sick is a common expression of it.
Similarly, couldn't god make it so building these rewarding connections doesn't require harrowing risks, or couldn't god make it so that the beings forging such connections merely surmise that they're difference makers even if there's secretly a safety net?
But the archons aren't the one who set up the scheme: God is. So we won't resent the archons if they succeed. We might resent God, but we won't in the afterlife if we see that the scheme was infinitely good.
Bob is married to Cindy. The marriage is average. Walter, an old neighbor down the street has a grown daughter, Wendy, whom he’s certain would make Bob happier than Cindy.
So Walter secretly burns down Bob’s house setting fire to the upstairs where Cindy’s sleeping (Bob’s sleeping downstairs). After the arson, Walter runs home and yells to Wendy, “dear god, Bob’s house is on fire! Do something!” Wendy runs over and saves Bob who’s burnt but lives. Cindy burns to death upstairs. Wendy and Bob develop an incredible bond due to Wendy’s heroics, Bob marries her and Bob is far happier married to Wendy. After many years, Bob finds out it was Walter who burned down his house and killed his family. How do you suppose Bob feels about Walter, Wendy and his life?
I think Walter sucks and victimized Bob, Wendy and Cindy. I think Bob hates Walter for it, and certainly looks at Wendy differently. Regardless, if this is how divine love works, it’s dysfunctional.
I guess in your scenario, Walter technically has Wendy “accidentally” burn down Bob’s house herself by making her do some electrical work at Bob’s even though she’s a dropout who cuts hair, but this just seemed to bizarre for me to posit.
Yeah, I mean, I find it very difficult to believe that the Jews who had themselves and their families be gassed to death in ovens during the Holocaust will simply forgive God for this in the afterlife, since they could have had the benefits of the afterlife without them and their families being gassed to death in this life. This, of course, also assumes that an afterlife actually exists, and that's very far from actually guaranteed *even if, for the sake of argument, one actually accepts the existence of God*.
If you yourself were a Jew that got gassed to death--along with most or all of your family--in an oven during the Holocaust, would you be willing to forgive God for this even if you got an infinitely good afterlife? Or would you have argued that God should be condemned for allowing this to happen, since you could have gotten the benefits of the afterlife without you and your family being gassed to death in this life?
I'm not sure if a relationship based on one party undergoing great personal cost to save the other from a horrendous evil is the most valuable type of relationship. For me it would be enough to know that someone cares about me enough that they would be willing to do so, but I would still hope that such a situation never arose.
Also I dont see why God couldnt just make the archons care enough about sentient beings to rid the world of evil in every universe. Sure it's ultimately God that would cause people to be saved, but I dont think that would make me any less grateful to the archons. By analogy, it may very well be that your parents were determined to care about you and raise you by factors outside of their control (biology, culture etc.) but that shouldnt make you any less grateful to them if they still care(d) about you and benefit(ted) you all the same.
>Suppose that you rescue someone from a burning building. You do it at great personal difficulty and risk to yourself. You seriously might have failed. Ultimately, this heroic act will forge a kind of connection between you and the person that you saved. They’ll see you as a hero, and your relationship with them will be stronger than it ever could have been otherwise.
Well, let's take this analogy more seriously. Suppose I'm a parent, and I need to go out of town for a while and hire a somewhat long-term nanny to take care of my child. Right before I depart, I layer my house with highly flammable materials that drastically increase the probability of my house catching fire, because this will increase the probability that the nanny heroically saves my kid from a deadly fire and they form a lifelong, or maybe even eternal, bond. This doesn't seem like the action of either a perfectly loving or a perfectly moral parent! And it seems most of your defenses of this theology are going to apply to this case. (I can think of a few disanalogies, but they can be fixed by minor modifications to the example which I omitted for simplicity.)
I'm not sure if this is really an improvement on the other connection-based theodicies, like the preexistence theodicy. I think it still has the same problems and might even make some of them worse. The main problems I have are:
1. It doesn't take God's omnipotence seriously enough. If God is truly omnipotent, he should be able to forge the valuable connections between us and the archons, or between us and other people, without needing to resort to a method that involves allowing for a massive amount of evil to exist.
2. If the archons fail, then we don't forge valuable connections with them, and we would in fact come to resent them for failing us and causing us immense suffering. So the failure of the archons has just as big a negative effect on our infinite future in heaven as the success of the archons would have a positive effect. If there's some way for God to prevent this negative effect, then that just makes point 1 even stronger - God has some way of strengthening our relationships with the archons that doesn't require the possibility of suffering. And evidently, the archons are pretty likely to fail given that the theodicy argues that God made it very difficult and costly for them to succeed, and we know that they failed in the only instance we've observed.
3. The same connections could have been forged by giving the archons a chance to give us an immense good in a world that was devoid of extreme suffering but just not as good as it could be by default (e.g., it's also devoid of extreme, heavenly pleasure). The archons' success would still give us just as much reason to connect with them in heaven due to our gratitude for the immense good they gave us in our earthly lives, but it wouldn't require the possibility of extreme suffering. This would probably also make the heavenly consequences of the archons' failure much less severe - even if they failed to bring us an extreme good, that would weaken our connection much less than if they had allowed extreme suffering.
4. The theodicy requires libertarian free will, which, as a compatibilist, I don't think is metaphysically possible. God could have just made the archons perfect so that they were guaranteed not to fail. It would still be their agency that creates the good world for us and saves us from suffering, so all the connection-building benefits would still be there. And he could still precommit to not intervening in this situation so that the archons would be genuine difference-makers - it's just that he would never need to follow through on that precommitment because the archons would never fail. In addition to still obtaining all the same goods that we would get from from archons that might fail, this one would also strengthen our connection with God, since we would be grateful to him for creating the archons in such a perfect manner that they could never fail us.
5. The failure of the archons not only weakens our connection with them, but with God for creating the conditions that allowed them to fail and resulted in extreme suffering if they failed. Arguably, it would damage our connection with God even if they had succeeded - as another commenter noted, your connection with someone isn't strengthened if they save you from a fire that they started in the first place solely to be able to save you. But even if this is not the case, our connection with God would surely weaken in the case that they fail, because then we had to go through horrible suffering, all on God's watch, because of conditions he created, and it's not compensated by anything, since we don't get to form the relationships with the archons that people in worlds where they succeeded would. For people with deontological sympathies, it might even be immoral for God to create these conditions, since they caused some people great, uncompensated suffering, only to be made up for by other people's greater ability to connect with their archons. I'm a consequentialist, so that doesn't exactly matter to me, but it still seems the connection-forming consequences now weigh even more heavily against what God did: The archons succeeding would help us foster a greater connection with them, but their failure hurts our connection with them and with God.
6. Clearly, Matt Dillahunty's reaction to you coming on his show was of such great disvalue that it outweighs even the infinite value of forming connections with the archons.
1) Each kind of connection is a unique kind of good. Thus, only this world can give us the unique kind of connection of making a difference to whether another undergoes a horrendous fate.
2) But that opens up new avenues for connection through repentance and forgiveness. And while the value of success is infinite, the disvalue of failure isn't.
3) That would make them smaller difference makers. Then they're relevantly like people who offer you a great gift--paying for college--rather than save you from a burning building and then pay for college. If the alternative is worse, the connection is better.
4) I don't know that it requires that. It might be able to work with deterministic agents tempted. You might think there's something screwed up about God directly determining that people are always motivated to act rightly--there must be genuine risk of failure. I also think that conditional on theism you probably have to be a libertarian. Fortunately, libertarianism is true and the only way to account for moral knowledge (if determinism is true the moral facts play no explanatory role in our moral beliefs).
5) I don't think it weakens our connection to God because we recognize that he did it for our sakes and it was good off in expectation. If God set a fire because he knew your life would be saved in a scheme that infinitely would benefit you, then upon having complete wisdom in the afterlife, your relationship wouldn't be damaged.
1) I don't really think there's a distinct kind of connection aside from what God could give you. Maybe there could be on an objective list theory of well-being, but definitely not on a hedonic theory. On a preference theory, I suppose it depends on your individual preferences, but I feel like most people would be fine not having to go through horrendous suffering and just having God do whatever is necessary to forge a psychologically equivalent connection.
2) If the value of success is infinite, I think the disvalue of failure would also have to be infinite. If helping someone forges some sort of positive connection with them for all time, then hurting someone should forge a negative connection for all time. Maybe it can be lessened by factors like forgiveness, but by the same token, we could forge a connection without others helping us through an abundance of love.
3) They would be creating a good much greater than paying for college though. They could make the world so unimaginably good that the difference between that life and a good but not overwhelmingly good life is comparable to the difference between a good life and a life of horrendous suffering.
4) God could have just created all the archons to be resistant to temptation. I don't think there's anything screwed up about it unless you already accept incompatibilism. The archons are still freely choosing to do good.
I don't know what the inference from theism to libertarianism would be - it seems to me like theism actually gels much better with compatibilism since it's predetermined that God will always make the morally best choice. But even if theism implies libertarianism, that just makes the problem even worse, since now it's a problem for any version of theism and not just a specific theodicy. I also don't think libertarianism is required for moral knowledge. I think moral facts can play an explanatory role in our moral knowledge in a similar way that mathematical facts do in our mathematical knowledge, even if it's not a causal role. But even if that doesn't work, something like, "God knows all the moral facts do to his omniscience and then put that knowledge in our heads," would imply an explanatory role for moral facts in our moral knowledge without saying anything about whether free will is compatible with determinism.
5) In the case where it actually does benefit you, it may not weaken your connection to God, but what about the case where the archons fail? In that case, it genuinely didn't benefit you. Even if the you forgave the archons and your connection with them was not infinitely harmed, as you suggested, your connection still hasn't been strengthened, so you were harmed with ultimately no benefit to yourself. And God, being omniscient, knew this would happen.
1) Yeah I'm assuming OLT. I think theodicy is only plausible given OLT, but OLT is the best view.
2) I don't think that follows. Especially because failure enables new kinds of connections like repentance and forgiveness. Worst case scenario, if our relationship with the archons is bad, we just like don't have to interact much with them.
3) But the good would be even better if they also are preventing an evil and it establishes a new kind of connection building.
4) Yeah maybe this works. I think that it's basically impossible to solve the problem of evil without being a libertarian.
5) If someone sets up a scheme that's expectedly good for you even if it doesn't pay out it's not rational to resent them.
1) I thought you were a hedonic utilitarian. I feel like the only benefit of OLT is that it allows you to say that any intuitively good thing is in fact good, but preference utilitarianism also allows you to say that but in a much simpler, non-arbitrary package. I guess you could try to make the theodicy work with preference utilitarianism, too, but then you have the issue that God could have just made people's preferences work in such a way that they prefer a deeper connection regardless of how that connection was forged.
2) Do you think repentance and forgiveness would make your relationship with the archons even stronger than it would be if they had just never been in a position to fail you in the first place? It seems like a very weird asymmetry to say that your relationship with them will be strengthened either by them helping your or by them failing you, and that it's metaphysically necessary that this is the only way.
3) Should the default be that the world is full of the most unimaginable suffering possible unless the archons can fix it, then? After all, saving you from that would be the greatest thing they could do for you. It just seems really implausible to me that the best possible world would be like that.
4) Well, fair enough, I guess you can say, "Here's a theodicy that might work if libertarianism is true." I think it's a big problem, though, because I think libertarianism is the least plausible theory of free will.
5) I don't disagree with this, but I also think it's not rational to like someone more just because they saved you from some evil situation, when the only reason you were put in that situation was to be saved by them. So it seems like the theodicy requires some irrationality on humanity's part. Also, it arguably wasn't expectedly good for you from God's perspective, since God knows everything and therefore knew how everything would turn out.
You said that you consider this the most plausible account for why evil exists. What's your rough estimate for the probability that this explanation is true?
You said that this theory could explain things "as well as atheism", but that cuts both ways - it makes it harder to explain religious revelation, miracles, and the incarnation of Christ! You could take this a couple of ways:
1. You could loop all the way back to deism and say that all prophets were frauds, all miracles were fakes, and Christ was just a wise teacher, since (given that the archons have abandoned us) we shouldn't expect any genuine divine intervention. Monotheism is true, but all real-world monotheists have been Gettier-cased. This is definitely the funniest option. But it seems like maybe we should give it a penalty, since it implies that the reason we originally believed religion is false, yet by an amazing coincidence our belief turned out to be true anyway.
2. Maybe the archons have good days and bad days, they gave us religion on a good day, but their performance has trailed off since then and now they just show up once a century or so to levitate a random nun. This adds an extra epicycle and should get a penalty.
3. Maybe, although God thinks it would defeat the purpose of archons for Him to intervene drastically in an individual universe, He wants there to be a floor effect limiting how bad things can get in case of archon abandonment, and giving people religion was part of His floor. He limits Himself to a very strict intervention budget, and after spending most of it on Sinai and Christ, the remainder is only enough to levitate a nun once per century or so. This also seems unpredicted by the theory and should get a penalty, though maybe smaller than the others since it might be the sort of thing we would do if we were God. Still, this definitely doesn't predict the exact level of non-divinity in the universe very well.
4. It sounds like whoever proposed the term "archon" was already familiar with Gnosticism, which is kind of a combination of 2 and 3. Maybe the archons went evil (or got confused) and gave us failed or corrupted revelations (this explains everything bad in the Bible). God felt like His intervention budget was enough to give a small number of people a countervailing true revelation, but not enough to fully kick out the archons and retake control. We should be uncertain which revelations are true or false, and generally treat theology as an adversarial environment where powerful and potentially-superintelligent entities are trying to confuse us. This would have some big implications for your philosophy of religion project!
I think 1 and 3 are the most plausible. Now, it's important to say God doesn't leave everything up to the archons--otherwise it makes the same predictions as atheism--but that instead God guarantees that there are some creatures of some sort of another who are capable of intervening but mostly leaves stuff up to the archons (basically, he makes sure that if the archons fail we serve as backup archons, tasked with bringing about the transhumanist utopia). Now, if he wants to make humans as backup archons, and one of the great goods is bringing a person out of the state of ignorance of God, then it's not improbable that he'd set up a way of doing that. Thus, I don't find 3 that implausible--not much less than using God to explain fine-tuning. And if you're a Christian, then you'll think that God becoming incarnate was needed for the very best event in human history that relates to our salvation, so it's worth it.
Regarding 4, I do think there's a puzzle about how the archons work. It doesn't seem like they can regularly intervene, otherwise we'd expect frequent small interventions, and perhaps dramatic public displays on occasion, which we don't see. I don't really know what to make of miracles--they are puzzling on any theology--but the evidence is good enough that I chalk them up to "there are more things in heaven and earth than in my ontology." And if there aren't miracles--if I have to trade the argument from miracles for defeating the problem of evil--that is a deal I'd take in a heartbeat, as I'm not at all sure about miracles and very confident that evil is a big problem for theism.
Regarding the term archons, I was the one who gave the theodicy that name, but that had more to do with the fact that archons and abandonment both began with the letter A than anything about gnosticism :).
>Regarding 4, I do think there's a puzzle about how the archons work. It doesn't seem like they can regularly intervene, otherwise we'd expect frequent small interventions, and perhaps dramatic public displays on occasion, which we don't see.
I'm not big on this archon theodicy, but is it really the case that what you describe isn't what we see? Miracle claims are as common as dirt, and every once and a while you get a big public one. I'd recommend checking out Dr. Keener's book "Miracles": it's a two book volume that goes into detail on whether miracle claims are rare or common, and comes down on the side of "common" with a lot of receipts. (https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Credibility-New-Testament-Accounts/dp/0801039525)
Why should we expect that the archons failed, or as you even say, "didn't even try"? Shouldn't beings created and tasked by God possess superhuman benevolence and ability? Basically, why would God create such shitty archons?
Well, he had to make it difficult and psychologicall taxing to bring about the best kind of connection building. The best kind comes when you do good even despite temptation. But temptation means risk of failure.
Should we use anthropic reasoning to assume that our observation of failed archons implies that most archons failed? Because observing ourselves to be in a universe where the archons failed to save us would be more likely if the archons failed in more universes.
So our situation would be akin to someone putting a bunch of people in burning buildings, knowing that the vast majority of people sent in to save them will fail. I know you appeal to an infinite afterlife making even extreme sacrifices for slight relationship-building worth it, but you have to admit that on the face of it it doesn't make God look very good. Surely there could have been a better way to build relationships than to put people in universes full of suffering that most of the time they won't be saved from.
No, what? I didn't say most archons fail. I say there's an update in favor of most archons failing. But that doesn't mean likely most archons will fail! I think probably most succeed!
Absent risking serious harm, one can't get access to the kind of connection building where you make a difference to whether one undergoes great harm.
Because there were a series of pre-conditions which God wants to fulfill in and of themselves. One way of looking at this is a stereotypically Panglossian way, but another is that even to the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, structure matters. The Trinity is that all three are God but none are each other, and this is the key insight. Could an omnipotent God make all three each other at the same time? Only through God.
Forgive me if I’m being dense or anti-intellectual… but theodicies just seem like philosophically wrapped coping mechanisms.
“Why does evil exist if a perfectly good and all powerful god exists?”
“Well if you assume that a bunch of severely undersupported facts (that amount to a nice, cozy, and warm story) are true, then that’s why!”
… this kind of argument seems primarily designed to assuage tension in the minds of believers, not to convince proponents of the problem of evil of anything.
Well, ideally a theodicy won't be severely unsupported, but will instead be plausible given theism. If you can come up with a plausible explanation of why a world with God would have lots of evil then that should undercut the force of the problem of evil,.
Plausible (?) given theism but necessary to maintain theism.
Seems a wee bit circular at some level. Maybe that of persuasion.
If you have good reason to believe theism is true, but the problem of evil makes theism less likely to be true, then whether there are plausible solutions to the problem of evil are relevant. Nobody becomes a theist because of theodicy, they do so for other reasons.
As a simple example, lets say I read in a book that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and I am inclined to believe the book because I trust it as an authority. Yet I have a problem: my direct observation of the Sun shows it traveling through the sky, appearing to go around the Earth. Yet there is a plausible explanation for this: if the Earth is rotating then the sun would appear to travel around the Earth, even if it wasn't. This "theodicy" for heliocentrism is plausible, so I continue to believe the book.
You can argue that I can prove heliocentrism for myself through experiment, but this isn't the case: I do not have the equipment or knowledge necessary to prove such a thing. Yet I feel confident in taking it on authority because there is a plausible solution to the problem of the sun appearing to travel around the earth.
That's not how it works.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QAK43nNCTQQycAcYe/conjunction-fallacy
P(Evil)&P(God) > P(Evil)&P(God)&P(AnyParticularTheodicy)
And every extra level of bells and whistles you add on top of it, like any specific details about angels, decrease the overall probability mass even further.
It does not, in fact, violate the conjunction fallacy to say that your difficulty solving some puzzle conditional on a view goes down if you find some plausibly hypothesis conditional on the view that solves the problem.
Of course it doesn't - it's a prime example of conjunction fallacy.
The fact that things that appear more plausible to our intuitions are not actually less improbable is the whole point:
"Adding more detail or extra assumptions can make an event *seem more plausible*, even though the event necessarily becomes less probable"
When your intuitions are miscalibrated like that, you may feel as if adding archons to your theodicy somehow improves it, makes the problem less difficult, while, in fact, the overall improbability only increases. You may feel that you've mostly solved the problem of Evil, but in probability theoretic terms your theory is worse than just saying "God has His reasons".
And when you unlearn this fallacy, the former does not appear more plausible than the latter.
To clarify: You're suggesting that the more variables (archons, an afterlife, et cetera) are added for a particular hypothesis, especially when these variables are speculative as opposed to conclusively proven, the more likely it is that this hypothesis will violate Occam's razor?
Basically yes. The more specific details - the more complex the hypothesis is. The more complex the hypothesis - the more improbable it is. This is just a consequence of the fact that value of probability function can't exceed 1.
P(A)P(B) ≤ P(A)
And unless B is a subset of A, therefore isn't an extra detail to begin with, the only way for P(A)P(B) = P(B) is when (B) =1. Meaning that it's conclusively proven.
So adding new speculative details always makes the overal theory less probable. The only way to increase probability of a theory is to find some evidence in favor of it, which isn't done through speculation but through experiment.
I love engaging with philosophy of religion because I do think its a valuable domain (and, above all, it offers an exercise for the mind). There are also many philosophically questionable aspects of the atheist worldview (I say this as an theist).
However, some of these theodicies just seem like the product of creative fiction competitions... I mean, come on, I'm expected to casually endorse the existence of "archons"? Seriously? Such things are *exceedingly* difficult to believe. The bigger your claims, the greater your assumptions; the greater your assumptions, the more burdensome it is to substantiate them and make them compelling. As you said, these theodicies just come off as elaborate coping mechanisms peppered with appeals to "plausibilities".
Don't get me wrong, I'm not wholly opposed to abductive argumentation, and Bentham, if you're reading this, I should assure you that I love your work. I just find it fantastical that the existence of "archons", their failure to execute their divinely assigned role, and "connection-building" with a God who puts his heart and soul into hiding himself from us humans, are the reasons why evil and suffering exist.
In this comment section, a user named "nelson" commented on the circularity of these theodicies being plausible given theism but necessary to *maintain* theism. I find that to be a decisive putting down of such theodicies.
Yeah, I'm still confused as to why exactly God would design flawed archons, or at least archons that are flawed to such an extraordinarily massive extent, as evidenced by our real world. God can see the past, present, and future, after all, so why not design (much) better archons?
And there would also be other ways for archons to achieve connection-building with humans, such as by bringing their dead friends and family members/relatives back to life, but somehow we don't see archons ever do this, at least not in our real world. What's the point of depriving people of such a valuable connecting-building opportunity by refusing to do this?
And all of this assumes that archons and the afterlife both exist. What if they don't? Even if one believes in God (a subject which I am agnostic about), this does not necessitate any obligation to believe in either archons or an afterlife. Personally, I'm extremely skeptical in beliving that human minds can ever be separated from human brains.
CS Lewis propounds a theodicy very similar to this one in his science fiction trilogy. There, be suggests that there are many angels (eldila), but each world has a governing archangel (Oyarsa). Most of the Oyarsa are very good, but ours is Satan, and he corrupted earth pretty badly. Eventually, God will redeem earth (through Christ), but in the meantime a lot of suffering and evil happens because our angels are evil.
I think that because the evils look like the byproduct of indifference, abandonment is a better bet than deliberate malice or corruption.
Lewis also theorized that the indifference of the natural world is a direct result of the Fall of Man: that we were made to rule over the natural world, and having rebelled against God the natural world has rebelled against us as well. In other words, before the Fall of Man nature was subservient rather than indifferent. In "The Problem of Pain" he writes
"The modern Yogi claims — whether falsely or truly — to have under control those functions which to us are almost part of the external world, such as digestion and circulation. This power the first man had in eminence. His organic processes obeyed the law of his own will, not the law of nature. His organs sent up appetites to the judgement seat of will not because they had to, but because he chose. Sleep meant to him not the stupor which we undergo, but willed and conscious repose — he remained awake to enjoy the pleasure and duty of sleep. Since the processes of decay and repair in his tissues were similarly conscious and obedient, it may not be fanciful to suppose that the length of his life was largely at his own discretion. Wholly commanding himself, he commanded all lower lives with which he came into contact. Even now we meet rare individuals who have a mysterious power of taming beasts. This power the Paradisal man enjoyed in eminence....
"...Up to that moment (the Fall) the human spirit had been in full control of the human organism. It doubtless expected that it would retain this control when it had ceased to obey God. But its authority over the organism was a delegated authority which it lost when it ceased to be God’s delegate. Having cut itself off, as far as it could, from the source of its being, it had cut itself off from the source of power. For when we say of created things that rules this must mean that God rules through. I doubt whether it would have been intrinsically possible for God to continue to rule the organism through the human spirit when the human spirit was in revolt against Him. At any rate He did not. He began to rule the organism in a more external way, not by the laws of spirit, but by those of nature. Thus the organs, no longer governed by man’s will, fell under the control of ordinary biochemical laws and suffered whatever the inter-workings of those laws might bring about in the way of pain, senility and death. And desires began to come up into the mind of man, not as his reason chose, but just as the biochemical and environmental facts happened to cause them. And the mind itself fell under the psychological laws of association and the like which God had made to rule the psychology of the higher anthropoids. And the will, caught in the tidal wave of mere nature, had no resource but to force back some of the new thoughts and desires by main strength, and these uneasy rebels became the subconscious as we now know it. The process was not, I conceive, comparable to mere deterioration as it may now occur in a human individual; it was a loss of status as a species. What man lost by the Fall was his original specific nature."
I think you are right. The evil of earth, taken by itself, looks more like neglect than malice.
Theologian Greg Boyd does a great job expanding on a theodicy similar to this in his book “Satan and the Problem of Evil” (as well as the previous title “God at War”). Some of the philosophical verbiage he uses goes over my head but I think you’d enjoy it.
I second this recommendation!
While I did laugh reading the blow-by against bounded aggregation, it actually seems to me that bounded aggregation could help this theodicy! Not only because, as you suggest with reply 1, the goods in heaven are plausibly good enough to not be the kinds with low bounds (like eating a chocolate bar), but actually because it seems plausible that goods in heaven might even be *lexically superior* to a whole lot of earthly goods and bads. Bounded aggregation is a friend :)
Also — potential worry: do you think the good of connections are dependent on the *actual* amount of good someone does for me? Or just my *belief* in the amount of good someone does for me? Like, if I believe you save my life, and so do you, but it turns out in fact all along someone else would’ve intervened if you failed, or if all along I actually wasn’t at danger because the laws of nature were about to change, or we’re in some skeptical scenario, etc., does this make my connection to you any less great? I mean, suppose I never find out you didn’t *actually* save my life. Seems I’d be equally grateful to you and our connection would be equally strong.
Probably some combination of how much good they actually do and how much they believed they'd do.
Hmm…then if God can keep us sufficiently fooled, and thus prevent a whole lot of evil, at the cost of only “half” the goods of connections, seems maybe He should? Maybe the infinity stuff saves here
Deceiving us for all eternity is bad. And the actual good matters too.
On certain theories of well-being, sure. But even so — if we grant we can still have (somewhat) valuable connections to archons even if God would’ve intervened, not so clear God shouldn’t have that as a policy.
I can see someone who is absolutely convinced of theism otherwise deciding this is the least bad way to explain the problem of evil, or at least that it's one way out of the bind. But when held against a naturalistic explanation of evil, you'd have to acknowledge it's radically less plausible in terms of simplicity, elegance, prior probability and so on, right? I guess this is my issue with throwing everything into the Big Bayes Machine: At some point, if a seemingly solid bet requires constructing elaborate gnostic ontologies that are otherwise entirely unsupported by our actual experience of the world, shouldn't that trigger a sort of meta-reflective reappraisal of our original conclusion? I think there's a real danger in giving ourselves such broad theoretical license otherwise.
Yeah, like every theodicy, extremely unconvincing at best, totally nut at worst. Anyone with a little glimpse of common sense can see that the far better explanation of the data is : There is no perfect being looking over this whole mess.
I don't know how to refute an incredulous stare.
No big deal, you just need to understand that thinking that a perfect being supervises predation and doesn't intervene is totally nut. I'm just trying to help you.
>Yeah, like every theodicy, extremely unconvincing at best, totally nut at worst.
A theodicy is not meant to convince anyone of theism. It's meant to weaken the problem of evil for those who, for other reasons, believe theism is likely. A Lewis put it:
"Certainly at all periods the pain and waste of human life was equally obvious. Our own religion begins among the Jews, a people squeezed between great warlike empires, continually defeated and led captive, familiar as Poland or Armenia with the tragic story of the conquered. It is mere nonsense to put pain among the discoveries of science. Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practised, in a world without chloroform.
"At all times, then, an inference from the course of events in this world to the goodness and wisdom of the Creator would have been equally preposterous; and it was never made. Religion has a different origin."
In other words, if you don't already believe theism is plausible for other reasons then of course a theodicy is not going to convince you it is plausible. For someone like BB who believe theism is plausible for other reasons (his anthropic argument and the rest) then finding out whether there are plausible theodicies starts to matter.
Isn't this reasoning disharmonious with your anthropic argument for god? If the Archons usually succeed, shouldn't we expect to find ourselves in one of those worlds?
1) If half the archons fail, then there are still way more instances of us finding ourselves in worlds that look indifferent given theism than atheism--see also here https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-most-plausible-explanation-of
2) Probably there's no precise percent of time the archons fail as it's infinite in both cases.
3) Even if we take a small hit in probability from most worlds having the archons succeed, it's just so paltry compared to the anthropic update.
>Suppose that you rescue someone from a burning building. You do it at great personal difficulty and risk to yourself. You seriously might have failed. Ultimately, this heroic act will forge a kind of connection between you and the person that you saved. They’ll see you as a hero, and your relationship with them will be stronger than it ever could have been otherwise.
I think this depends on the person saving you not having set the building on fire in the first place. If the guy saving you is the arsonist, you probably won’t love him forever for almost burning you alive.
It seems like god could much more easily forge a connection identical to the strongest one humanity currently knows: the connection between a mother and a child. This only depends on a creator’s unconditional love and presence. Incidentally, making soup for your child when they’re sick is a common expression of it.
Similarly, couldn't god make it so building these rewarding connections doesn't require harrowing risks, or couldn't god make it so that the beings forging such connections merely surmise that they're difference makers even if there's secretly a safety net?
But the archons aren't the one who set up the scheme: God is. So we won't resent the archons if they succeed. We might resent God, but we won't in the afterlife if we see that the scheme was infinitely good.
Bob is married to Cindy. The marriage is average. Walter, an old neighbor down the street has a grown daughter, Wendy, whom he’s certain would make Bob happier than Cindy.
So Walter secretly burns down Bob’s house setting fire to the upstairs where Cindy’s sleeping (Bob’s sleeping downstairs). After the arson, Walter runs home and yells to Wendy, “dear god, Bob’s house is on fire! Do something!” Wendy runs over and saves Bob who’s burnt but lives. Cindy burns to death upstairs. Wendy and Bob develop an incredible bond due to Wendy’s heroics, Bob marries her and Bob is far happier married to Wendy. After many years, Bob finds out it was Walter who burned down his house and killed his family. How do you suppose Bob feels about Walter, Wendy and his life?
I think Walter sucks and victimized Bob, Wendy and Cindy. I think Bob hates Walter for it, and certainly looks at Wendy differently. Regardless, if this is how divine love works, it’s dysfunctional.
I guess in your scenario, Walter technically has Wendy “accidentally” burn down Bob’s house herself by making her do some electrical work at Bob’s even though she’s a dropout who cuts hair, but this just seemed to bizarre for me to posit.
Yeah, I mean, I find it very difficult to believe that the Jews who had themselves and their families be gassed to death in ovens during the Holocaust will simply forgive God for this in the afterlife, since they could have had the benefits of the afterlife without them and their families being gassed to death in this life. This, of course, also assumes that an afterlife actually exists, and that's very far from actually guaranteed *even if, for the sake of argument, one actually accepts the existence of God*.
If you yourself were a Jew that got gassed to death--along with most or all of your family--in an oven during the Holocaust, would you be willing to forgive God for this even if you got an infinitely good afterlife? Or would you have argued that God should be condemned for allowing this to happen, since you could have gotten the benefits of the afterlife without you and your family being gassed to death in this life?
A distant, hands-off God who leaves the world in the hands of a bunch of lazy, incompetent deputies... Did you guys just reinvent gnosticism? 😂😂
I'm not sure if a relationship based on one party undergoing great personal cost to save the other from a horrendous evil is the most valuable type of relationship. For me it would be enough to know that someone cares about me enough that they would be willing to do so, but I would still hope that such a situation never arose.
Also I dont see why God couldnt just make the archons care enough about sentient beings to rid the world of evil in every universe. Sure it's ultimately God that would cause people to be saved, but I dont think that would make me any less grateful to the archons. By analogy, it may very well be that your parents were determined to care about you and raise you by factors outside of their control (biology, culture etc.) but that shouldnt make you any less grateful to them if they still care(d) about you and benefit(ted) you all the same.
>Suppose that you rescue someone from a burning building. You do it at great personal difficulty and risk to yourself. You seriously might have failed. Ultimately, this heroic act will forge a kind of connection between you and the person that you saved. They’ll see you as a hero, and your relationship with them will be stronger than it ever could have been otherwise.
Well, let's take this analogy more seriously. Suppose I'm a parent, and I need to go out of town for a while and hire a somewhat long-term nanny to take care of my child. Right before I depart, I layer my house with highly flammable materials that drastically increase the probability of my house catching fire, because this will increase the probability that the nanny heroically saves my kid from a deadly fire and they form a lifelong, or maybe even eternal, bond. This doesn't seem like the action of either a perfectly loving or a perfectly moral parent! And it seems most of your defenses of this theology are going to apply to this case. (I can think of a few disanalogies, but they can be fixed by minor modifications to the example which I omitted for simplicity.)
I'm not sure if this is really an improvement on the other connection-based theodicies, like the preexistence theodicy. I think it still has the same problems and might even make some of them worse. The main problems I have are:
1. It doesn't take God's omnipotence seriously enough. If God is truly omnipotent, he should be able to forge the valuable connections between us and the archons, or between us and other people, without needing to resort to a method that involves allowing for a massive amount of evil to exist.
2. If the archons fail, then we don't forge valuable connections with them, and we would in fact come to resent them for failing us and causing us immense suffering. So the failure of the archons has just as big a negative effect on our infinite future in heaven as the success of the archons would have a positive effect. If there's some way for God to prevent this negative effect, then that just makes point 1 even stronger - God has some way of strengthening our relationships with the archons that doesn't require the possibility of suffering. And evidently, the archons are pretty likely to fail given that the theodicy argues that God made it very difficult and costly for them to succeed, and we know that they failed in the only instance we've observed.
3. The same connections could have been forged by giving the archons a chance to give us an immense good in a world that was devoid of extreme suffering but just not as good as it could be by default (e.g., it's also devoid of extreme, heavenly pleasure). The archons' success would still give us just as much reason to connect with them in heaven due to our gratitude for the immense good they gave us in our earthly lives, but it wouldn't require the possibility of extreme suffering. This would probably also make the heavenly consequences of the archons' failure much less severe - even if they failed to bring us an extreme good, that would weaken our connection much less than if they had allowed extreme suffering.
4. The theodicy requires libertarian free will, which, as a compatibilist, I don't think is metaphysically possible. God could have just made the archons perfect so that they were guaranteed not to fail. It would still be their agency that creates the good world for us and saves us from suffering, so all the connection-building benefits would still be there. And he could still precommit to not intervening in this situation so that the archons would be genuine difference-makers - it's just that he would never need to follow through on that precommitment because the archons would never fail. In addition to still obtaining all the same goods that we would get from from archons that might fail, this one would also strengthen our connection with God, since we would be grateful to him for creating the archons in such a perfect manner that they could never fail us.
5. The failure of the archons not only weakens our connection with them, but with God for creating the conditions that allowed them to fail and resulted in extreme suffering if they failed. Arguably, it would damage our connection with God even if they had succeeded - as another commenter noted, your connection with someone isn't strengthened if they save you from a fire that they started in the first place solely to be able to save you. But even if this is not the case, our connection with God would surely weaken in the case that they fail, because then we had to go through horrible suffering, all on God's watch, because of conditions he created, and it's not compensated by anything, since we don't get to form the relationships with the archons that people in worlds where they succeeded would. For people with deontological sympathies, it might even be immoral for God to create these conditions, since they caused some people great, uncompensated suffering, only to be made up for by other people's greater ability to connect with their archons. I'm a consequentialist, so that doesn't exactly matter to me, but it still seems the connection-forming consequences now weigh even more heavily against what God did: The archons succeeding would help us foster a greater connection with them, but their failure hurts our connection with them and with God.
6. Clearly, Matt Dillahunty's reaction to you coming on his show was of such great disvalue that it outweighs even the infinite value of forming connections with the archons.
1) Each kind of connection is a unique kind of good. Thus, only this world can give us the unique kind of connection of making a difference to whether another undergoes a horrendous fate.
2) But that opens up new avenues for connection through repentance and forgiveness. And while the value of success is infinite, the disvalue of failure isn't.
3) That would make them smaller difference makers. Then they're relevantly like people who offer you a great gift--paying for college--rather than save you from a burning building and then pay for college. If the alternative is worse, the connection is better.
4) I don't know that it requires that. It might be able to work with deterministic agents tempted. You might think there's something screwed up about God directly determining that people are always motivated to act rightly--there must be genuine risk of failure. I also think that conditional on theism you probably have to be a libertarian. Fortunately, libertarianism is true and the only way to account for moral knowledge (if determinism is true the moral facts play no explanatory role in our moral beliefs).
5) I don't think it weakens our connection to God because we recognize that he did it for our sakes and it was good off in expectation. If God set a fire because he knew your life would be saved in a scheme that infinitely would benefit you, then upon having complete wisdom in the afterlife, your relationship wouldn't be damaged.
6) LOL!
1) I don't really think there's a distinct kind of connection aside from what God could give you. Maybe there could be on an objective list theory of well-being, but definitely not on a hedonic theory. On a preference theory, I suppose it depends on your individual preferences, but I feel like most people would be fine not having to go through horrendous suffering and just having God do whatever is necessary to forge a psychologically equivalent connection.
2) If the value of success is infinite, I think the disvalue of failure would also have to be infinite. If helping someone forges some sort of positive connection with them for all time, then hurting someone should forge a negative connection for all time. Maybe it can be lessened by factors like forgiveness, but by the same token, we could forge a connection without others helping us through an abundance of love.
3) They would be creating a good much greater than paying for college though. They could make the world so unimaginably good that the difference between that life and a good but not overwhelmingly good life is comparable to the difference between a good life and a life of horrendous suffering.
4) God could have just created all the archons to be resistant to temptation. I don't think there's anything screwed up about it unless you already accept incompatibilism. The archons are still freely choosing to do good.
I don't know what the inference from theism to libertarianism would be - it seems to me like theism actually gels much better with compatibilism since it's predetermined that God will always make the morally best choice. But even if theism implies libertarianism, that just makes the problem even worse, since now it's a problem for any version of theism and not just a specific theodicy. I also don't think libertarianism is required for moral knowledge. I think moral facts can play an explanatory role in our moral knowledge in a similar way that mathematical facts do in our mathematical knowledge, even if it's not a causal role. But even if that doesn't work, something like, "God knows all the moral facts do to his omniscience and then put that knowledge in our heads," would imply an explanatory role for moral facts in our moral knowledge without saying anything about whether free will is compatible with determinism.
5) In the case where it actually does benefit you, it may not weaken your connection to God, but what about the case where the archons fail? In that case, it genuinely didn't benefit you. Even if the you forgave the archons and your connection with them was not infinitely harmed, as you suggested, your connection still hasn't been strengthened, so you were harmed with ultimately no benefit to yourself. And God, being omniscient, knew this would happen.
1) Yeah I'm assuming OLT. I think theodicy is only plausible given OLT, but OLT is the best view.
2) I don't think that follows. Especially because failure enables new kinds of connections like repentance and forgiveness. Worst case scenario, if our relationship with the archons is bad, we just like don't have to interact much with them.
3) But the good would be even better if they also are preventing an evil and it establishes a new kind of connection building.
4) Yeah maybe this works. I think that it's basically impossible to solve the problem of evil without being a libertarian.
5) If someone sets up a scheme that's expectedly good for you even if it doesn't pay out it's not rational to resent them.
1) I thought you were a hedonic utilitarian. I feel like the only benefit of OLT is that it allows you to say that any intuitively good thing is in fact good, but preference utilitarianism also allows you to say that but in a much simpler, non-arbitrary package. I guess you could try to make the theodicy work with preference utilitarianism, too, but then you have the issue that God could have just made people's preferences work in such a way that they prefer a deeper connection regardless of how that connection was forged.
2) Do you think repentance and forgiveness would make your relationship with the archons even stronger than it would be if they had just never been in a position to fail you in the first place? It seems like a very weird asymmetry to say that your relationship with them will be strengthened either by them helping your or by them failing you, and that it's metaphysically necessary that this is the only way.
3) Should the default be that the world is full of the most unimaginable suffering possible unless the archons can fix it, then? After all, saving you from that would be the greatest thing they could do for you. It just seems really implausible to me that the best possible world would be like that.
4) Well, fair enough, I guess you can say, "Here's a theodicy that might work if libertarianism is true." I think it's a big problem, though, because I think libertarianism is the least plausible theory of free will.
5) I don't disagree with this, but I also think it's not rational to like someone more just because they saved you from some evil situation, when the only reason you were put in that situation was to be saved by them. So it seems like the theodicy requires some irrationality on humanity's part. Also, it arguably wasn't expectedly good for you from God's perspective, since God knows everything and therefore knew how everything would turn out.
You said that you consider this the most plausible account for why evil exists. What's your rough estimate for the probability that this explanation is true?
Idk
You said that this theory could explain things "as well as atheism", but that cuts both ways - it makes it harder to explain religious revelation, miracles, and the incarnation of Christ! You could take this a couple of ways:
1. You could loop all the way back to deism and say that all prophets were frauds, all miracles were fakes, and Christ was just a wise teacher, since (given that the archons have abandoned us) we shouldn't expect any genuine divine intervention. Monotheism is true, but all real-world monotheists have been Gettier-cased. This is definitely the funniest option. But it seems like maybe we should give it a penalty, since it implies that the reason we originally believed religion is false, yet by an amazing coincidence our belief turned out to be true anyway.
2. Maybe the archons have good days and bad days, they gave us religion on a good day, but their performance has trailed off since then and now they just show up once a century or so to levitate a random nun. This adds an extra epicycle and should get a penalty.
3. Maybe, although God thinks it would defeat the purpose of archons for Him to intervene drastically in an individual universe, He wants there to be a floor effect limiting how bad things can get in case of archon abandonment, and giving people religion was part of His floor. He limits Himself to a very strict intervention budget, and after spending most of it on Sinai and Christ, the remainder is only enough to levitate a nun once per century or so. This also seems unpredicted by the theory and should get a penalty, though maybe smaller than the others since it might be the sort of thing we would do if we were God. Still, this definitely doesn't predict the exact level of non-divinity in the universe very well.
4. It sounds like whoever proposed the term "archon" was already familiar with Gnosticism, which is kind of a combination of 2 and 3. Maybe the archons went evil (or got confused) and gave us failed or corrupted revelations (this explains everything bad in the Bible). God felt like His intervention budget was enough to give a small number of people a countervailing true revelation, but not enough to fully kick out the archons and retake control. We should be uncertain which revelations are true or false, and generally treat theology as an adversarial environment where powerful and potentially-superintelligent entities are trying to confuse us. This would have some big implications for your philosophy of religion project!
I think 1 and 3 are the most plausible. Now, it's important to say God doesn't leave everything up to the archons--otherwise it makes the same predictions as atheism--but that instead God guarantees that there are some creatures of some sort of another who are capable of intervening but mostly leaves stuff up to the archons (basically, he makes sure that if the archons fail we serve as backup archons, tasked with bringing about the transhumanist utopia). Now, if he wants to make humans as backup archons, and one of the great goods is bringing a person out of the state of ignorance of God, then it's not improbable that he'd set up a way of doing that. Thus, I don't find 3 that implausible--not much less than using God to explain fine-tuning. And if you're a Christian, then you'll think that God becoming incarnate was needed for the very best event in human history that relates to our salvation, so it's worth it.
Regarding 4, I do think there's a puzzle about how the archons work. It doesn't seem like they can regularly intervene, otherwise we'd expect frequent small interventions, and perhaps dramatic public displays on occasion, which we don't see. I don't really know what to make of miracles--they are puzzling on any theology--but the evidence is good enough that I chalk them up to "there are more things in heaven and earth than in my ontology." And if there aren't miracles--if I have to trade the argument from miracles for defeating the problem of evil--that is a deal I'd take in a heartbeat, as I'm not at all sure about miracles and very confident that evil is a big problem for theism.
Regarding the term archons, I was the one who gave the theodicy that name, but that had more to do with the fact that archons and abandonment both began with the letter A than anything about gnosticism :).
>Regarding 4, I do think there's a puzzle about how the archons work. It doesn't seem like they can regularly intervene, otherwise we'd expect frequent small interventions, and perhaps dramatic public displays on occasion, which we don't see.
I'm not big on this archon theodicy, but is it really the case that what you describe isn't what we see? Miracle claims are as common as dirt, and every once and a while you get a big public one. I'd recommend checking out Dr. Keener's book "Miracles": it's a two book volume that goes into detail on whether miracle claims are rare or common, and comes down on the side of "common" with a lot of receipts. (https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Credibility-New-Testament-Accounts/dp/0801039525)
Why should we expect that the archons failed, or as you even say, "didn't even try"? Shouldn't beings created and tasked by God possess superhuman benevolence and ability? Basically, why would God create such shitty archons?
Well, he had to make it difficult and psychologicall taxing to bring about the best kind of connection building. The best kind comes when you do good even despite temptation. But temptation means risk of failure.
Should we use anthropic reasoning to assume that our observation of failed archons implies that most archons failed? Because observing ourselves to be in a universe where the archons failed to save us would be more likely if the archons failed in more universes.
It will update us in favour of most archons failing but not definitively.
So our situation would be akin to someone putting a bunch of people in burning buildings, knowing that the vast majority of people sent in to save them will fail. I know you appeal to an infinite afterlife making even extreme sacrifices for slight relationship-building worth it, but you have to admit that on the face of it it doesn't make God look very good. Surely there could have been a better way to build relationships than to put people in universes full of suffering that most of the time they won't be saved from.
No, what? I didn't say most archons fail. I say there's an update in favor of most archons failing. But that doesn't mean likely most archons will fail! I think probably most succeed!
Absent risking serious harm, one can't get access to the kind of connection building where you make a difference to whether one undergoes great harm.
My mistake, you're right that updating towards x isn't equivalent to saying x is overall the most likely.
Because there were a series of pre-conditions which God wants to fulfill in and of themselves. One way of looking at this is a stereotypically Panglossian way, but another is that even to the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, structure matters. The Trinity is that all three are God but none are each other, and this is the key insight. Could an omnipotent God make all three each other at the same time? Only through God.
I fail to see what this has to do with my question about incompetent archons.
I would have been interested to hear Matt D's response if asked to demonstrate that atheism is a possible hypothesis for such and such.