> Many people find the notion of a good God plausible, yet virtually no one finds the evil god that way.
This could well be answered by humans being optimistic on average or just the people who believe in god are all copying each other, back to the first people to invent the idea 1000's of years ago. Large fractions of god believers all use the same few names, so it's clear that A LOT of copying is going on. No one takes the idea of an evil god seriously because no one was indoctrinated into the idea as a child. (And such an idea is less prone to spread than the idea of a god that rewards you for spreading the idea)
"The problem of good is harder because more evil aims could be accomplished through deception. A good God is limited to achieving their aims without too much deception or wrongdoing."
And enough people are atheists or violently disagree about which god exists.
" In contrast, an evil god has more options to bring about evils, for they’re unbound by moral constraints."
Wouldn't an evil god be bound by a constraint to always lie? Or if evil is allowed to be unconstrained, why shouldn't good be? Moral constraints are a way to protect humans from our stupidity. Many acts of evil committed in the name of a greater good never actually lead to the greater good that was imagined. An omniscient god would not have this problem.
"I think we have basic justification for trusting that we’re not super confused, on both abductive grounds and from first principles."
It is pretty clear from the wildly differing ideas and the total nonsense people spout that we are rather confused about the existence of god.
"An evil god is intrinsically weirder. If, like me, you doubt that bad people deserve to suffer, then you’d have to think that the evil god wants itself to suffer, to an infinite degree. But that’s clearly crazy. "
I mean some existing people want themselves to suffer. Or maybe the evil god just wants everyone else to suffer.
"An evil god would almost definitely just make a torture world. Surely this world would be worse if we were just being tortured all the time, to an unlimited degree. "
A good god would just make a utopia world. Surely the world would be better if diseases just didn't exist or whatever.
There is an extent to which it is somewhat harder to think of ways to improve the world than ways to make it worse. That's because a lot of humans have tried their best to improve the world (and only a few people want to make it worse for humans). It's still not hard for a good god to improve on the status quo.
Human morality is complex and determined by all sorts of evolutionary and cultural factors. There is no "perfect good" that aliens would agree was perfectly good. When you try to get into specific details, humans, especially those from different cultures, will disagree a lot as well.
Human morality has stuff like incest taboos because the people who didn't have those instincts ended up producing inbred and genetically diseased babies.
My preferences are determined by genetics and culture. They are, in a cosmic sense, pretty arbitrary. They bear the footprint of evolution. And they are my preferences and I will chase them anyway.
I think the article goes a bit astray in mostly discussing a “maximally” evil god.
Why should God be maximally evil? I think He or She or It is as evil as the creation would warrant us to believe: pretty evil but perhaps not maximally so.
> Therefore, the problem of evil is a knockdown objection to a maximally evil deity.
Don't you mean a maximally good deity?
Fixed.
> Many people find the notion of a good God plausible, yet virtually no one finds the evil god that way.
This could well be answered by humans being optimistic on average or just the people who believe in god are all copying each other, back to the first people to invent the idea 1000's of years ago. Large fractions of god believers all use the same few names, so it's clear that A LOT of copying is going on. No one takes the idea of an evil god seriously because no one was indoctrinated into the idea as a child. (And such an idea is less prone to spread than the idea of a god that rewards you for spreading the idea)
"The problem of good is harder because more evil aims could be accomplished through deception. A good God is limited to achieving their aims without too much deception or wrongdoing."
And enough people are atheists or violently disagree about which god exists.
" In contrast, an evil god has more options to bring about evils, for they’re unbound by moral constraints."
Wouldn't an evil god be bound by a constraint to always lie? Or if evil is allowed to be unconstrained, why shouldn't good be? Moral constraints are a way to protect humans from our stupidity. Many acts of evil committed in the name of a greater good never actually lead to the greater good that was imagined. An omniscient god would not have this problem.
"I think we have basic justification for trusting that we’re not super confused, on both abductive grounds and from first principles."
It is pretty clear from the wildly differing ideas and the total nonsense people spout that we are rather confused about the existence of god.
"An evil god is intrinsically weirder. If, like me, you doubt that bad people deserve to suffer, then you’d have to think that the evil god wants itself to suffer, to an infinite degree. But that’s clearly crazy. "
I mean some existing people want themselves to suffer. Or maybe the evil god just wants everyone else to suffer.
"An evil god would almost definitely just make a torture world. Surely this world would be worse if we were just being tortured all the time, to an unlimited degree. "
A good god would just make a utopia world. Surely the world would be better if diseases just didn't exist or whatever.
There is an extent to which it is somewhat harder to think of ways to improve the world than ways to make it worse. That's because a lot of humans have tried their best to improve the world (and only a few people want to make it worse for humans). It's still not hard for a good god to improve on the status quo.
Human morality is complex and determined by all sorts of evolutionary and cultural factors. There is no "perfect good" that aliens would agree was perfectly good. When you try to get into specific details, humans, especially those from different cultures, will disagree a lot as well.
Human morality has stuff like incest taboos because the people who didn't have those instincts ended up producing inbred and genetically diseased babies.
My preferences are determined by genetics and culture. They are, in a cosmic sense, pretty arbitrary. They bear the footprint of evolution. And they are my preferences and I will chase them anyway.
I think the article goes a bit astray in mostly discussing a “maximally” evil god.
Why should God be maximally evil? I think He or She or It is as evil as the creation would warrant us to believe: pretty evil but perhaps not maximally so.
I don’t
That’s because this was an article about whether a good god is likelier than an evil one.
An evil god is ridiculously improbable. The claim is that it’s similarly plausible to a good god.