"Probably a rich and diverse array of experiences is maximally conducive to soul building. One’s character is more enriched by tons of different experiences than just one kind—and probably some of those would involve lots of suffering."
But why would god create souls that require suffering in order to undergo soul-building? In many real-world cases, suffering causes a degradation of character, not an improvement of it.
No offense, BB, but I find your theism-related posts to be baroque, hard to follow, and unpersuasive. But I don't have much background in philosophy, so maybe the fault lies with my ignorance.
It seems like a necessary fact that certain kinds of character development require undergoing hardship for certain valuable souls. Spending eternity tranquil and untroubled wouldn't access all the same goods.
The traditional solutions to the problem of evil can't explain features of the world about evil that are strongly predicted on naturalism--e.g. the biological pairing of pleasure and pain. We'd actively expect that on naturalism--conditional on the background evidence--but it's surprising on theism. This theodicy explains that by saying that we'd be placed into a bunch of worlds, including worlds that look broadly naturalist, and as a result ends up being plausible.
B. Well if you're placed in a huge and diverse array of worlds many of which don't seem to be optimal--as the theodicy supports--probably some would be like this one.
A. If I don’t remember, what’s the point? Also, erasing memories like that is evil.
B. Ok, but you appear to concede that every individual world must itself be net good to be placed in. So this just collapses into the same old arguments.
A. Why? And you'll remember in some of the worlds that you're in, not all of them.
B. They need to be good as a whole in combination with the other ones. But it's much more plausible that this world would be included in an infinitely large set of optimal worlds--if such a set is very diverse--than that it's the best single world.
on B (and I'll warn, I'm unfortunately very uninformed on anthropics, despite reading you semi-regularly):
Moving the goalposts back seems not to help much? Vikram's point, as I understand it, is that each world has to be good, and evil in this world makes that doubtful. Then you're saying that even if that's doubtful, all of the infinite worlds will combine and be good together. But we won't necessarily have memory of the different worlds (indeed, in this world, we don't have memory of any others), so we won't even be able to say "hm, seems like this infinite set is bad cause of all the evil."
Doesn't that just reduce to Vikram's original problem though? (Which would reduce to the generic explanations...) In all the worlds I can remember (this one), there's a lot of evil. If that's all I know of the infinite set, why should I default to disregarding that evil and assuming that the rest of the worlds are good? I would only do that if I already believed in a good god, no?.. Feels question-beggy.
I think this is right, most of the defenses for premise 1 (including the “very good” ones!) are just fancy rephrasing of “evil exists to make life interesting/make the good meaningful/etc.” The burden of proof is on Bentham, and isn’t met—hand-waving maybes about god’s-optimal-strategy-in-a-very-complex-game don’t sway me any more than the classic hand-waving maybes about “god’s plan.”
See my respsonse to Vikram. Also, the burden of proof--if there is such a thing--isn't on the theist here, because the atheist is the one raising the problem. They're saying the theist has reason to reject their views, which requires a reason.
What does the atheist need to prove to satisfy you? It seems you've pretty much set the conditions so that no empirical evil could be evidence against God. Consider your analogy about watching someone play a big complicated strategy board game we don't know the all the rules to.
You: "I have prior reasoning that leads me to conclude that it's extremely likely that this guy is a truly God-Tier Magnus Stockfish player"
Me: "I mean, maybe, but it looks like this dude just hung a few pretty important pieces. This seems to call your theory into question"
You: "Not at all, we don't really know all the rules, and for all we know these supposed 'mistakes' could be brilliantly planned sacrifices"
Me: "It's true that we can't be certain one way or the other, but doesn't it seem a bit un-Stock-fishy that this guy is playing more or less exactly like we'd expect if he were just blindly and randomly moving pieces?"
You: "Not at all. In fact, in general, sacrifices in strategic games tend to lead to more beautiful play in the end, just like Paul Morphy games. Moreover, based on some mysterious heads/tails reasoning, if this guy is indeed a Perfect player, we should even expect to find ourselves in situations where we have this kind of dubious impression of his level of play."
As far as I could tell, your God's goodness is utterly immune to any observable evil
"Imagine you’re in some competition you don’t know much about, and your partner is a supposedly high-powered AI. Unfortunately, the AI might be malfunctioning in a way that makes it behave completely randomly. Near the end of the match, you start to think about what moves the AI has made. Some have been great - it made all the obvious moves that even you would have made, and a bunch of clever ones you would have missed. But quite a few of the AI’s moves didn’t get you any points at all, and they sometimes set your opponent up to take points for themselves. What would you think about all this?
Here, I can understand saying something like, “Well, the AI seemed to know what was going on with some of these moves, so maybe I just don’t get the rest of them.” Whether that sort of reasoning is actually justified is up for debate, but at least it makes sense; your knowledge of the game might just be too shaky for you to grasp the optimum strategy every single time. Personally, I’d still be inclined to think all the productive moves were just good luck - it seems much more likely that malfunctioning AI would occasionally do well than that a perfect one would occasionally do poorly - but as long as the AI sometimes shows a real aptitude for the game, it might be reasonable to throw up your hands and trust it.
Now imagine instead that, near the end of the match, you realize the AI hasn’t made a single move you can confidently say was anything more than random. Every decision it makes seems completely pointless or even intentionally destructive. How would that change your evaluation? Of course, no matter how many moves appear to go wrong, it’s still conceivable that the AI is working perfectly. Maybe your knowledge of the game is so deficient that you’ve failed to appreciate the strategy behind every move. Or maybe, by losing, the AI can get an advantage in a second round you don’t even know is coming. Who knows? All of those are metaphysically live options, but it’s hard to see how it could plausibly play a role in your actual evaluation of the AI’s status.
In real life, you would obviously decide the thing was malfunctioning, and you would be absolutely justified in doing so. Could you be wrong? Sure, it’s possible. But at the end of the day, you still need to work with the evidence you have, and none of that evidence even gets you started down the path of confidence. And it wouldn’t help for the designers to simply point out that the AI’s skill is so much greater than your own. After all, it’s not that you’re failing to trust the skill of the AI, once you’ve accepted it exists. It’s that you’re failing to trust any such skill exists in the first place!"
Yes, the pattern I've noticed with God arguments is, all of God's "perfections" are unfalsifiable. And it probably has to be that way, because commonsense observations of the universe have pretty much falsified all falsifiable perfections. So, we're basically left with wishful thinking ("Some day it will all make sense, and I'll see that this AI is truly a supergenius"). The question is whether it's an adaptive thing to engineer unfalsifiable wishes with unfalsifiable abstractions of common and relevant words like "goodness". It seems like "perfect goodness" risks warping our understanding of "real goodness", just like holding out for "perfect AI play" could blind us to mistakes in the game
>It seems you've pretty much set the conditions so that no empirical evil could be evidence against God.
It could just be that's how things are. To assume that evil *ought* to disprove God, and then say "how much evil does it take?" is indeed where your disagreement with him seems to be. But reality has no obligation to you to be falsifiable in the way that you desire.
I agree, but what do we do with an unfalsifiable God? A: Anything we want, because it doesn't matter. Like, if BB's gonna occupy his mind with unfashionable metaphysical baggage, he should at least experiment around with experiential Gods, like those of religion. Otherwise he should free up some head space with the Delete function
Today is October 1st, 2024. What are the chances that in a timeline extending infinitely forward and backward that today would be that specific date? Infinitesimal. Instead imagine that we’re all stuck in a Groundhog Day loop but have our memories wiped every morning. In that scenario it is always October 1st 2024, which as a theory has infinitely better explanatory power for why that is today’s date. Therefore statistically it is infinitely more likely to be true.
That feels like the crux of a lot of these arguments. Something something infinite probabilities, therefore God.
Hmm, maybe the difference between a Groundhog Day loop and an ordinary reincarnation hypothesis is that the Groundhog Day loop has a lower prior? By virtue of being ad hoc, arbitrary, etc
But what that theory explains in predictive power it loses in prior because it's so unlikely it would always loop October 1. This is a general feature of more specific hypotheses--they explain the data but have a lower prior.
It’s not really fair if you wait until October 2nd to say it isn’t always October 1st (joking).
How is your theory of God not a specific hypothesis? You make a lot of specific claims about His nature in order to be able to explain the data. You don’t claim that there is just A god, but one with very particular goals and desires.
Anyone who wants to use the "what if suffering is metapysically necessary for goodness" argument needs to at the least engage with the fact that apparently even our world allows the existence of perfectly normal humans who simply do not suffer.
> For centuries, philosophers have praised suffering as a necessary part of the human condition. Without suffering, we couldn’t learn, couldn’t empathize, couldn’t be fully human. Jo Cameron forces us to ask: is that just cope?
Jo will have to be sent to hell for her corrupt soul, and God will also have to send himself there apparently for not sufferring in a diverse enough array of worlds.
While you are strawmanning our host who notably doesn't believe in Hell, the point about God is a fair one.
If one assumes the idea that suffering is necessary for some level of goodness how comes God himself is infinitely good without going through suffering? I suppose one can retort that subjecting us to suffer is also suffering for God and therefor this circularly makes all of us, including God good, but I am yet to see anyone claim it wit ha straight face.
Your argument for theism in "The Best Argument for God" is equally valid if God is evil-maxxing (i.e., "God in his perfection would create all possible people who he could give a bad life to").
Yes, but an evil God is improbable https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-evil-god-challenge?utm_source=publication-search. In particular, it's monstrously complicated, having to posit that God wants to maximize bad stuff. Perfect being theism posits God has just a single fundamental property--being an unlimited mind or agent--and his perfection comes along for free, because one who knows everything and has no conflicting desires would want to pursue the good if they have no rational limits. So an evil God is no more likely than, say, a paper-clip maximizing god.
Do you see how untethered you've become? You've introduced an unfalsifiable notion of "perfect goodness", functionally indistinguishable from "perfect evil" given our limited perspective, and now you're making comparative "likelihood" claims (which by their nature require empirical data to confirm). You mentioned that before you became philosophically advanced you would have considered a yellow-sky painting giant to be soundly refuted by a blue sky and lack of confirning evidence. But apparently,
Blue sky + Lack of evidence + Advanced philosophy = Yellow-sky-painting Giant exists.
How confident are you that this philosophical advancement is in your best interests??
Like, I'd even grant you perfect being theism, Anselmian variety or whatever, along with your three point theodicy (even though I don't get your SIA green/red room argument & think there may be some typos, but whatever, doesn't matter, the premises of the theodicy seem fair enough, anyway). But, as I see things, here's how we stand:
1. Our limited understanding make things such that, empirically/experientially speaking, there is currently no difference to us between a reality governed by A. a perfectly good God, B. a perfectly evil God, C. a paper-clip maximizing God, or D. bare Nature
2. Given any finite T, there's no guarantee that T will be sufficient time to come to an empirical sense of what is governing our reality. If there's no afterlife, after all, we just rot in the ground and remain none the wiser. If we do end up in an apparent afterlife, it could be a naturalistic quantum immortality deal. And if the afterlife seems experientially good, there's no guarantees things can't change for the worse, and if it's experientially bad, we could always hope "eventually this will get good". So in no case is there any way to come to a definitive empirical judgement for A, B, C, or D. Finite beings like us can simply never experience "infinite goodness" in any meaningful/definitive sense in any finite time T
3. There will never come a day when we can say "I have experienced infinite time"
4. So what you call a "perfectly good God" I may just as well call "bare Nature"
You first justification for 1 just brings up more assumptions. But really what is more plausible? [A] God acts in a way that is good from the perspective of a creature that doesn't show up until more than 13 billion years into Creation or {B} God acts in a way that is good from the perspective of God, who has been present from the beginning.
It seems to me that B is far more likely, and in this case the problem of evil goes away, it's simply a matter of perspective. God IS good, from ITS perspective.
Indeed, f the Holocaust doesn't get you to reject a perfectly good God, then you're pretty much a de facto skeptic. I'm trying to give BB's theism as fair a shake as possible, but it's almost as if he's treating the pen/paper existence of abstract non-contradictory moral principles that would excuse apparent evil as if they were tangible bits of concrete empirical evidence
I don't think, say, being a factory farmed chicken is a particularly valuable experience on net. However, you can rectify this by saying although such experiences don't actually happen, valuable experiences may include experiences of worlds where it appears as if they happened. That is, if you see someone experiencing something very bad, they aren't actually experiencing it and it only just looks that way. However, this proposition is not exactly super attractive.
The arguments that I give provide a reason to doubt our ability to ascertain whether they're good in the long term, or more specifically, whether a world with them is good to be in.
Interesting piece as always! I agree with metachirality that something rubs me the wrong way about this argument when one considers the horrors of factory farming. The suffering is just so gratuitous. It could all be for a greater good but man...it sucks.
The Pruss piece you linked to contains an interesting back and forth in the comments section after someone raises this point. Pruss gives the below defense. TL;DR he says the animals either undergo a 'transformation' in the afterlife (no idea what this means) or they can't actually feel pain on earth. I don't find his arguments very comforting or convincing.
"It's a very good point about (nonhuman) animal suffering not being handled by standard afterlife considerations. One might be able to handle it by the kinds of afterlife considerations in my colleague Dougherty's book, which involve a transformation of these animals.
I also don't know how closely analogous in disvalue animal pain is to human pain--it may be that what would make pain into horrendous suffering would require very high cognitive function.
And as a last resort I am attracted to thinking that those (if there are any such) apparent instances of animal pain that cannot be justified theodically are *merely* apparent. This sounds crazy, I know. But I like the idea that God with good moral reason follows a defeasible principle of minimal intervention. In the case of nonhuman animals, it seems not unlikely that something like epiphenomenalism is true. The minimal divine intervention would then be to remove the qualia of pain without changing any of the physical states. And removing the qualia of pain will not change the overt behavior of the animal given epiphenomenalism. And so we would observe exactly what we do observe, namely pain behaviors."
>And so we would observe exactly what we do observe, namely pain behaviors.
Yeah, pain behavior is what makes pain bad. There isn't a special quale that gets instantiated in your mind and causes no further reactions and does nothing and that's what we call "bad." Pain is bad because you want it to stop, it overwhelms your cognition, is accompanied with bodily harm that you don't want, etc. Dualism is such an awful theory, and dualists never engage with empirical results like change blindness that encroach on the putative distinction between qualia and behavioral reactions.
But don't you think most people would be justified in rejecting any philosophical position that requires the premise "We don't know whether or not it's good overall to be tortured for your entire life and then die with nothing to show for it" to function?
But I don't claim that it's good to be factory farmed, just that being placed in a world like that for 0% of your life--a smaller share than a millisecond is of your earthly life--might be conducive to longrun flourishing.
But what is the substantive distinction between "It is good to be tortured for your whole life and then killed" and "It is good to be in a world where you are tortured your whole life and then killed?" Your presence in the world is nothing more than just the sum of what you experience in that world, so I don't get the distinction being made.
The point is that the great goods come from, say, being in a world with laws of nature that are universally adhered to where agents have morally significant free will that God doesn't interfere with. A world like that is valuable, but it produces lots of evil as a tragic side effect.
But we're just circling the same basic problem: It definitely doesn't *seem* like being in a world like that is valuable for the chicken who is tortured for its whole life and then killed, right? "It is not valuable to be born into a world with laws of nature that are universally adhered to where agents have morally significant free will that God doesn't interfere with if it means you just get tortured for your entire life and then killed" is one of the most obvious premises I could possibly imagine - the amount of skepticism towards your own evaluative mechanisms required to reject it is just as extreme as it is in the case of traditional skeptical theism.
If the Hindus are right, maybe in your last life you did something to deserve being tortured your whole life and then killed. Maybe you tortured people in your last life, so now you need to experience what it was like so that you can grow as a soul.
I'm a Christian so I don't believe reincarnation is very likely, but its certainly a possibility that could be happening.
If you exist for all eternity in the afterlife, then you aren't tortured for your whole life and then killed. You're tortured for what is effectively 0% of your life.
Then what's the point of trying to get rid of factory farming, or doing any other altruistic thing for that matter?
You might be able to make an argument for doing altruism based on functional decision theory, or at least a weird updateless version of evidential decision theory, but you don't subscribe to functional decision theory.
The idea is that factory farming and stuff are bad! But a world that produces them--e.g. through having us evolve and have morally significant free will--is good. So bad things are bad and you should still try to get rid of them.
But if you can act in ways that prevent something like factory farming without somehow abrogating those morally valuable goods, then why can't God? Just picture the most effective possible strategy you could dream up for ending factory farming in a way that's great for everyone and does no violence whatsoever to the goods you're talking about. What is stopping God from doing that exact thing himself? This is the ultimate contradiction at the heart of so many theodicies - if you really need the bad stuff to *actually happen* in order for the goods to obtain, then you shouldn't try to stop that bad stuff, but if you're capable of preventing the bad stuff and still getting all the benefits, then what excuse does God have?
BB thinks that 1. the chickens get really nice after-lives/other-lives, to make up for the terrible earth-life, and 2. that the point of the suffering chickens is to give humans an opportunity to become better people by helping the chickens. At least, that's a basic summary of what he told me when I went on his pod. I don't find that at all probable, but it's a nice thought and would certainly make me happier than just that earth is a slaughter-house for no reason, or a slaughter-house because there's a god who's a sadist.
Couldn't God give us the afterlife goods of having gone through suffering without us actually having to have gone through that suffering? For example, you give the example of us telling stories in the afterlife based on past life experiences. Couldn't God give us false memories of our lifetimes of suffering so that we'd be able to tell our stories without having to have actually experienced it? I know you could say this would be God misleading or deceiving us, but I'd rather be deceived about having gone through suffering rather than having to really suffer. Maybe that preference isn't universal, but I'd still prefer to be deceived than to suffer, and it's worth noting that that preference at least exists and is something God would have to contend with if he was really trying to give us maximally valuable lives.
I address that in the linked article. But in short, some of the goods are more valuable if the things actually happened to us and we're not deceived. Being eternally deceived would be very bad because it lasts forever, while earthly suffering is temporary.
I suppose as a pure hedonic utilitarian I still don't find that convincing, because I don't see anything having inherent value or disvalue except for emotional valence. So deception, even infinite deception, is only bad if it causes us to suffer. I suppose this is an issue of different terminal values that would be difficult to bridge, I know you've said in the past you believe in goods other than positive emotion, so what's a convincing argument for theism for you might not be for me given that insurmountable difference in what we think ultimately matters.
Yes, if you're a hedonic utilitarian you won't find theism probable most likely. It's still not obvious that the PoE works because there might be some necessary connections between pleasures and some experiences and you might appeal to unknown goods, but it certainly makes theism less plausible. But I think that you shouldn't be extremely confident in a doctrine as controversial as hedonic utilitarianism, and so an argument that rests on it won't be convincing (even if you're 90% confident, I think the arguments for theism should convince you).
What about hedonic utilitarianism do you find "controversial"? To me it seems like the most immediately obvious system of morality. We can directly feel positive emotions as simply feeling "good," and negative emotions as simply feeling "bad," with no intermediary. It seems like this is a unique property that nothing else shares. For all other values, I posit that we either value them because experiencing them brings about a positive emotion, or contemplating them brings about a positive emotion. Even the ascetic had a certain self-satisfied pleasure they experience in contemplation of their state of asceticism. Taking this into consideration, it makes emotional valence be the only terminal value to which all other values are contingent. I would be interested in hearing why you think otherwise, to see how someone's fundamental moral intuitions can differ from mine, which I have always felt to be self-obvious.
Well, a potential concern: Imagine AGI controlling our world and hooking everyone to heroin/MDMA all while creating new human beings and doing the same to them forever. A lot of people would view that as repugnant, evil or maybe even pointless yet it would qualify as the ultimate good for hedonic utilitarianism. Intuitively, some people also simply don’t view all negative emotions as bad in and of themselves. If you ask: « would you rather never have felt any pain or discomfort ever in your life ? » I think a lot of people would say no. Not saying it’s justified or not but just trying to give you an intuitive gut feeling of how others might think.
Reading the comment section looks like you've largely addressed the immediate skepticism I had (regardless of whether I found it convincing), so rather than rehash that I'll say that I find the idea of infinite good/evil/whatever pretty pointless to discuss, because it seems like that means everything will go according to plan, regardless of what I decide. On the other hand, contingent good/evil/etc. is a lot more interesting to me.
How is this not just the traditional skeptical theist approach? I get that you're suggesting a specific positive good here - an experience of diverse worlds - and that skeptical theists generally don't, but you still need the exact same skeptical approach to accept that it *is* a positive good in the first place. So I don't see how that helps you. All this really does is move you from "There is some positive good, but we just shouldn't expect to know what it is" to "There is this particular positive good, but we just shouldn't expect to know why it's positive." Isn't that in some ways worse? It would be like going from "I don't know who the killer is, but I wouldn't expect to know their identity anyway" to "I think the killer is Frank, but I wouldn't expect to know how Frank could have possibly done it."
First of all, I deny we're totally in the dark about the goods that justify great evils. Second, I give lots of non skeptical justifications for a diverse array of worlds.
But the problem is that those non-skeptical justifications only work when you understate the evidence in terms of the particular features of those diverse worlds. "A diverse world is good because it generates stories that are beneficial to tell" is a non-skeptical justification in general, but "A story about dying in the Holocaust as an infant is one of those beneficial stories" only makes sense if you adopt a radically skeptical position on our ability to evaluate what constitutes a beneficial story. It sure doesn't seem like one to me and you, right?
Indeed, f the Holocaust doesn't get you to reject a perfectly good God, then you're pretty much a de facto skeptic. I'm trying to give BB's theism as fair a shake as possible, but it's almost as if he's treating the pen/paper existence of abstract non-contradictory moral principles that would excuse apparent evil as if they were tangible bits of concrete empirical evidence
"Probably a rich and diverse array of experiences is maximally conducive to soul building. One’s character is more enriched by tons of different experiences than just one kind—and probably some of those would involve lots of suffering."
But why would god create souls that require suffering in order to undergo soul-building? In many real-world cases, suffering causes a degradation of character, not an improvement of it.
No offense, BB, but I find your theism-related posts to be baroque, hard to follow, and unpersuasive. But I don't have much background in philosophy, so maybe the fault lies with my ignorance.
It seems like a necessary fact that certain kinds of character development require undergoing hardship for certain valuable souls. Spending eternity tranquil and untroubled wouldn't access all the same goods.
Sorry to hear that!
This is a repackaged version of generic explanations for evil. It shouldn’t convince anyone who wasn't already convinced.
The traditional solutions to the problem of evil can't explain features of the world about evil that are strongly predicted on naturalism--e.g. the biological pairing of pleasure and pain. We'd actively expect that on naturalism--conditional on the background evidence--but it's surprising on theism. This theodicy explains that by saying that we'd be placed into a bunch of worlds, including worlds that look broadly naturalist, and as a result ends up being plausible.
A. I don’t recall being placed into an infinite number of worlds. You’re positing blatant falsehoods here.
B. Saying you’d be placed into many worlds adds nothing because you still have to prove that this individual world is good to be placed in.
A. But you wouldn't remember the previous worlds.
B. Well if you're placed in a huge and diverse array of worlds many of which don't seem to be optimal--as the theodicy supports--probably some would be like this one.
A. If I don’t remember, what’s the point? Also, erasing memories like that is evil.
B. Ok, but you appear to concede that every individual world must itself be net good to be placed in. So this just collapses into the same old arguments.
A. Why? And you'll remember in some of the worlds that you're in, not all of them.
B. They need to be good as a whole in combination with the other ones. But it's much more plausible that this world would be included in an infinitely large set of optimal worlds--if such a set is very diverse--than that it's the best single world.
> A. Why?
lol.
on B (and I'll warn, I'm unfortunately very uninformed on anthropics, despite reading you semi-regularly):
Moving the goalposts back seems not to help much? Vikram's point, as I understand it, is that each world has to be good, and evil in this world makes that doubtful. Then you're saying that even if that's doubtful, all of the infinite worlds will combine and be good together. But we won't necessarily have memory of the different worlds (indeed, in this world, we don't have memory of any others), so we won't even be able to say "hm, seems like this infinite set is bad cause of all the evil."
Doesn't that just reduce to Vikram's original problem though? (Which would reduce to the generic explanations...) In all the worlds I can remember (this one), there's a lot of evil. If that's all I know of the infinite set, why should I default to disregarding that evil and assuming that the rest of the worlds are good? I would only do that if I already believed in a good god, no?.. Feels question-beggy.
I think this is right, most of the defenses for premise 1 (including the “very good” ones!) are just fancy rephrasing of “evil exists to make life interesting/make the good meaningful/etc.” The burden of proof is on Bentham, and isn’t met—hand-waving maybes about god’s-optimal-strategy-in-a-very-complex-game don’t sway me any more than the classic hand-waving maybes about “god’s plan.”
See my respsonse to Vikram. Also, the burden of proof--if there is such a thing--isn't on the theist here, because the atheist is the one raising the problem. They're saying the theist has reason to reject their views, which requires a reason.
What does the atheist need to prove to satisfy you? It seems you've pretty much set the conditions so that no empirical evil could be evidence against God. Consider your analogy about watching someone play a big complicated strategy board game we don't know the all the rules to.
You: "I have prior reasoning that leads me to conclude that it's extremely likely that this guy is a truly God-Tier Magnus Stockfish player"
Me: "I mean, maybe, but it looks like this dude just hung a few pretty important pieces. This seems to call your theory into question"
You: "Not at all, we don't really know all the rules, and for all we know these supposed 'mistakes' could be brilliantly planned sacrifices"
Me: "It's true that we can't be certain one way or the other, but doesn't it seem a bit un-Stock-fishy that this guy is playing more or less exactly like we'd expect if he were just blindly and randomly moving pieces?"
You: "Not at all. In fact, in general, sacrifices in strategic games tend to lead to more beautiful play in the end, just like Paul Morphy games. Moreover, based on some mysterious heads/tails reasoning, if this guy is indeed a Perfect player, we should even expect to find ourselves in situations where we have this kind of dubious impression of his level of play."
As far as I could tell, your God's goodness is utterly immune to any observable evil
I 100% agree - I wrote a piece about this a while ago that uses exactly this metaphor: https://bothsidesbrigade.substack.com/p/the-other-half-of-the-problem-of
"Imagine you’re in some competition you don’t know much about, and your partner is a supposedly high-powered AI. Unfortunately, the AI might be malfunctioning in a way that makes it behave completely randomly. Near the end of the match, you start to think about what moves the AI has made. Some have been great - it made all the obvious moves that even you would have made, and a bunch of clever ones you would have missed. But quite a few of the AI’s moves didn’t get you any points at all, and they sometimes set your opponent up to take points for themselves. What would you think about all this?
Here, I can understand saying something like, “Well, the AI seemed to know what was going on with some of these moves, so maybe I just don’t get the rest of them.” Whether that sort of reasoning is actually justified is up for debate, but at least it makes sense; your knowledge of the game might just be too shaky for you to grasp the optimum strategy every single time. Personally, I’d still be inclined to think all the productive moves were just good luck - it seems much more likely that malfunctioning AI would occasionally do well than that a perfect one would occasionally do poorly - but as long as the AI sometimes shows a real aptitude for the game, it might be reasonable to throw up your hands and trust it.
Now imagine instead that, near the end of the match, you realize the AI hasn’t made a single move you can confidently say was anything more than random. Every decision it makes seems completely pointless or even intentionally destructive. How would that change your evaluation? Of course, no matter how many moves appear to go wrong, it’s still conceivable that the AI is working perfectly. Maybe your knowledge of the game is so deficient that you’ve failed to appreciate the strategy behind every move. Or maybe, by losing, the AI can get an advantage in a second round you don’t even know is coming. Who knows? All of those are metaphysically live options, but it’s hard to see how it could plausibly play a role in your actual evaluation of the AI’s status.
In real life, you would obviously decide the thing was malfunctioning, and you would be absolutely justified in doing so. Could you be wrong? Sure, it’s possible. But at the end of the day, you still need to work with the evidence you have, and none of that evidence even gets you started down the path of confidence. And it wouldn’t help for the designers to simply point out that the AI’s skill is so much greater than your own. After all, it’s not that you’re failing to trust the skill of the AI, once you’ve accepted it exists. It’s that you’re failing to trust any such skill exists in the first place!"
Yes, the pattern I've noticed with God arguments is, all of God's "perfections" are unfalsifiable. And it probably has to be that way, because commonsense observations of the universe have pretty much falsified all falsifiable perfections. So, we're basically left with wishful thinking ("Some day it will all make sense, and I'll see that this AI is truly a supergenius"). The question is whether it's an adaptive thing to engineer unfalsifiable wishes with unfalsifiable abstractions of common and relevant words like "goodness". It seems like "perfect goodness" risks warping our understanding of "real goodness", just like holding out for "perfect AI play" could blind us to mistakes in the game
>It seems you've pretty much set the conditions so that no empirical evil could be evidence against God.
It could just be that's how things are. To assume that evil *ought* to disprove God, and then say "how much evil does it take?" is indeed where your disagreement with him seems to be. But reality has no obligation to you to be falsifiable in the way that you desire.
I agree, but what do we do with an unfalsifiable God? A: Anything we want, because it doesn't matter. Like, if BB's gonna occupy his mind with unfashionable metaphysical baggage, he should at least experiment around with experiential Gods, like those of religion. Otherwise he should free up some head space with the Delete function
I love it when the clever counterarguement I come up with while reading the first half of an article getz properly adressed in the second half
Today is October 1st, 2024. What are the chances that in a timeline extending infinitely forward and backward that today would be that specific date? Infinitesimal. Instead imagine that we’re all stuck in a Groundhog Day loop but have our memories wiped every morning. In that scenario it is always October 1st 2024, which as a theory has infinitely better explanatory power for why that is today’s date. Therefore statistically it is infinitely more likely to be true.
That feels like the crux of a lot of these arguments. Something something infinite probabilities, therefore God.
Hmm, maybe the difference between a Groundhog Day loop and an ordinary reincarnation hypothesis is that the Groundhog Day loop has a lower prior? By virtue of being ad hoc, arbitrary, etc
But what that theory explains in predictive power it loses in prior because it's so unlikely it would always loop October 1. This is a general feature of more specific hypotheses--they explain the data but have a lower prior.
It’s not really fair if you wait until October 2nd to say it isn’t always October 1st (joking).
How is your theory of God not a specific hypothesis? You make a lot of specific claims about His nature in order to be able to explain the data. You don’t claim that there is just A god, but one with very particular goals and desires.
Anyone who wants to use the "what if suffering is metapysically necessary for goodness" argument needs to at the least engage with the fact that apparently even our world allows the existence of perfectly normal humans who simply do not suffer.
Citation from https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative:
> For centuries, philosophers have praised suffering as a necessary part of the human condition. Without suffering, we couldn’t learn, couldn’t empathize, couldn’t be fully human. Jo Cameron forces us to ask: is that just cope?
Jo will have to be sent to hell for her corrupt soul, and God will also have to send himself there apparently for not sufferring in a diverse enough array of worlds.
While you are strawmanning our host who notably doesn't believe in Hell, the point about God is a fair one.
If one assumes the idea that suffering is necessary for some level of goodness how comes God himself is infinitely good without going through suffering? I suppose one can retort that subjecting us to suffer is also suffering for God and therefor this circularly makes all of us, including God good, but I am yet to see anyone claim it wit ha straight face.
Your argument for theism in "The Best Argument for God" is equally valid if God is evil-maxxing (i.e., "God in his perfection would create all possible people who he could give a bad life to").
Yes, but an evil God is improbable https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-evil-god-challenge?utm_source=publication-search. In particular, it's monstrously complicated, having to posit that God wants to maximize bad stuff. Perfect being theism posits God has just a single fundamental property--being an unlimited mind or agent--and his perfection comes along for free, because one who knows everything and has no conflicting desires would want to pursue the good if they have no rational limits. So an evil God is no more likely than, say, a paper-clip maximizing god.
Do you see how untethered you've become? You've introduced an unfalsifiable notion of "perfect goodness", functionally indistinguishable from "perfect evil" given our limited perspective, and now you're making comparative "likelihood" claims (which by their nature require empirical data to confirm). You mentioned that before you became philosophically advanced you would have considered a yellow-sky painting giant to be soundly refuted by a blue sky and lack of confirning evidence. But apparently,
Blue sky + Lack of evidence + Advanced philosophy = Yellow-sky-painting Giant exists.
How confident are you that this philosophical advancement is in your best interests??
Like, I'd even grant you perfect being theism, Anselmian variety or whatever, along with your three point theodicy (even though I don't get your SIA green/red room argument & think there may be some typos, but whatever, doesn't matter, the premises of the theodicy seem fair enough, anyway). But, as I see things, here's how we stand:
1. Our limited understanding make things such that, empirically/experientially speaking, there is currently no difference to us between a reality governed by A. a perfectly good God, B. a perfectly evil God, C. a paper-clip maximizing God, or D. bare Nature
2. Given any finite T, there's no guarantee that T will be sufficient time to come to an empirical sense of what is governing our reality. If there's no afterlife, after all, we just rot in the ground and remain none the wiser. If we do end up in an apparent afterlife, it could be a naturalistic quantum immortality deal. And if the afterlife seems experientially good, there's no guarantees things can't change for the worse, and if it's experientially bad, we could always hope "eventually this will get good". So in no case is there any way to come to a definitive empirical judgement for A, B, C, or D. Finite beings like us can simply never experience "infinite goodness" in any meaningful/definitive sense in any finite time T
3. There will never come a day when we can say "I have experienced infinite time"
4. So what you call a "perfectly good God" I may just as well call "bare Nature"
The whole problem with evil is based on an assumption that god is good. 1 is perfectly plausible if God is NOT good, but not if God is good.
Well I gave several arguments for 1) if God is good.
You first justification for 1 just brings up more assumptions. But really what is more plausible? [A] God acts in a way that is good from the perspective of a creature that doesn't show up until more than 13 billion years into Creation or {B} God acts in a way that is good from the perspective of God, who has been present from the beginning.
It seems to me that B is far more likely, and in this case the problem of evil goes away, it's simply a matter of perspective. God IS good, from ITS perspective.
Indeed, f the Holocaust doesn't get you to reject a perfectly good God, then you're pretty much a de facto skeptic. I'm trying to give BB's theism as fair a shake as possible, but it's almost as if he's treating the pen/paper existence of abstract non-contradictory moral principles that would excuse apparent evil as if they were tangible bits of concrete empirical evidence
I don't think, say, being a factory farmed chicken is a particularly valuable experience on net. However, you can rectify this by saying although such experiences don't actually happen, valuable experiences may include experiences of worlds where it appears as if they happened. That is, if you see someone experiencing something very bad, they aren't actually experiencing it and it only just looks that way. However, this proposition is not exactly super attractive.
The arguments that I give provide a reason to doubt our ability to ascertain whether they're good in the long term, or more specifically, whether a world with them is good to be in.
Interesting piece as always! I agree with metachirality that something rubs me the wrong way about this argument when one considers the horrors of factory farming. The suffering is just so gratuitous. It could all be for a greater good but man...it sucks.
The Pruss piece you linked to contains an interesting back and forth in the comments section after someone raises this point. Pruss gives the below defense. TL;DR he says the animals either undergo a 'transformation' in the afterlife (no idea what this means) or they can't actually feel pain on earth. I don't find his arguments very comforting or convincing.
"It's a very good point about (nonhuman) animal suffering not being handled by standard afterlife considerations. One might be able to handle it by the kinds of afterlife considerations in my colleague Dougherty's book, which involve a transformation of these animals.
I also don't know how closely analogous in disvalue animal pain is to human pain--it may be that what would make pain into horrendous suffering would require very high cognitive function.
And as a last resort I am attracted to thinking that those (if there are any such) apparent instances of animal pain that cannot be justified theodically are *merely* apparent. This sounds crazy, I know. But I like the idea that God with good moral reason follows a defeasible principle of minimal intervention. In the case of nonhuman animals, it seems not unlikely that something like epiphenomenalism is true. The minimal divine intervention would then be to remove the qualia of pain without changing any of the physical states. And removing the qualia of pain will not change the overt behavior of the animal given epiphenomenalism. And so we would observe exactly what we do observe, namely pain behaviors."
"[Pruss] says the animals either undergo a 'transformation' in the afterlife (no idea what this means) or they can't actually feel pain on earth."
Yikes. Wasn't Pruss recently presented to us as being one of the thinkers who gives intelligent, thoughtful arguments in favor of theism?
>And so we would observe exactly what we do observe, namely pain behaviors.
Yeah, pain behavior is what makes pain bad. There isn't a special quale that gets instantiated in your mind and causes no further reactions and does nothing and that's what we call "bad." Pain is bad because you want it to stop, it overwhelms your cognition, is accompanied with bodily harm that you don't want, etc. Dualism is such an awful theory, and dualists never engage with empirical results like change blindness that encroach on the putative distinction between qualia and behavioral reactions.
But don't you think most people would be justified in rejecting any philosophical position that requires the premise "We don't know whether or not it's good overall to be tortured for your entire life and then die with nothing to show for it" to function?
But I don't claim that it's good to be factory farmed, just that being placed in a world like that for 0% of your life--a smaller share than a millisecond is of your earthly life--might be conducive to longrun flourishing.
But what is the substantive distinction between "It is good to be tortured for your whole life and then killed" and "It is good to be in a world where you are tortured your whole life and then killed?" Your presence in the world is nothing more than just the sum of what you experience in that world, so I don't get the distinction being made.
The point is that the great goods come from, say, being in a world with laws of nature that are universally adhered to where agents have morally significant free will that God doesn't interfere with. A world like that is valuable, but it produces lots of evil as a tragic side effect.
But we're just circling the same basic problem: It definitely doesn't *seem* like being in a world like that is valuable for the chicken who is tortured for its whole life and then killed, right? "It is not valuable to be born into a world with laws of nature that are universally adhered to where agents have morally significant free will that God doesn't interfere with if it means you just get tortured for your entire life and then killed" is one of the most obvious premises I could possibly imagine - the amount of skepticism towards your own evaluative mechanisms required to reject it is just as extreme as it is in the case of traditional skeptical theism.
If the Hindus are right, maybe in your last life you did something to deserve being tortured your whole life and then killed. Maybe you tortured people in your last life, so now you need to experience what it was like so that you can grow as a soul.
I'm a Christian so I don't believe reincarnation is very likely, but its certainly a possibility that could be happening.
If you exist for all eternity in the afterlife, then you aren't tortured for your whole life and then killed. You're tortured for what is effectively 0% of your life.
But you're still tortured for the entirety of one particular "life placement," and that's supposed to be the valuable thing here.
Then what's the point of trying to get rid of factory farming, or doing any other altruistic thing for that matter?
You might be able to make an argument for doing altruism based on functional decision theory, or at least a weird updateless version of evidential decision theory, but you don't subscribe to functional decision theory.
The idea is that factory farming and stuff are bad! But a world that produces them--e.g. through having us evolve and have morally significant free will--is good. So bad things are bad and you should still try to get rid of them.
But if you can act in ways that prevent something like factory farming without somehow abrogating those morally valuable goods, then why can't God? Just picture the most effective possible strategy you could dream up for ending factory farming in a way that's great for everyone and does no violence whatsoever to the goods you're talking about. What is stopping God from doing that exact thing himself? This is the ultimate contradiction at the heart of so many theodicies - if you really need the bad stuff to *actually happen* in order for the goods to obtain, then you shouldn't try to stop that bad stuff, but if you're capable of preventing the bad stuff and still getting all the benefits, then what excuse does God have?
Have you read Unsong by Scott Alexander?
I think Occam's razor favors p-zombie chickens.
BB thinks that 1. the chickens get really nice after-lives/other-lives, to make up for the terrible earth-life, and 2. that the point of the suffering chickens is to give humans an opportunity to become better people by helping the chickens. At least, that's a basic summary of what he told me when I went on his pod. I don't find that at all probable, but it's a nice thought and would certainly make me happier than just that earth is a slaughter-house for no reason, or a slaughter-house because there's a god who's a sadist.
Couldn't God give us the afterlife goods of having gone through suffering without us actually having to have gone through that suffering? For example, you give the example of us telling stories in the afterlife based on past life experiences. Couldn't God give us false memories of our lifetimes of suffering so that we'd be able to tell our stories without having to have actually experienced it? I know you could say this would be God misleading or deceiving us, but I'd rather be deceived about having gone through suffering rather than having to really suffer. Maybe that preference isn't universal, but I'd still prefer to be deceived than to suffer, and it's worth noting that that preference at least exists and is something God would have to contend with if he was really trying to give us maximally valuable lives.
I address that in the linked article. But in short, some of the goods are more valuable if the things actually happened to us and we're not deceived. Being eternally deceived would be very bad because it lasts forever, while earthly suffering is temporary.
I suppose as a pure hedonic utilitarian I still don't find that convincing, because I don't see anything having inherent value or disvalue except for emotional valence. So deception, even infinite deception, is only bad if it causes us to suffer. I suppose this is an issue of different terminal values that would be difficult to bridge, I know you've said in the past you believe in goods other than positive emotion, so what's a convincing argument for theism for you might not be for me given that insurmountable difference in what we think ultimately matters.
Yes, if you're a hedonic utilitarian you won't find theism probable most likely. It's still not obvious that the PoE works because there might be some necessary connections between pleasures and some experiences and you might appeal to unknown goods, but it certainly makes theism less plausible. But I think that you shouldn't be extremely confident in a doctrine as controversial as hedonic utilitarianism, and so an argument that rests on it won't be convincing (even if you're 90% confident, I think the arguments for theism should convince you).
What about hedonic utilitarianism do you find "controversial"? To me it seems like the most immediately obvious system of morality. We can directly feel positive emotions as simply feeling "good," and negative emotions as simply feeling "bad," with no intermediary. It seems like this is a unique property that nothing else shares. For all other values, I posit that we either value them because experiencing them brings about a positive emotion, or contemplating them brings about a positive emotion. Even the ascetic had a certain self-satisfied pleasure they experience in contemplation of their state of asceticism. Taking this into consideration, it makes emotional valence be the only terminal value to which all other values are contingent. I would be interested in hearing why you think otherwise, to see how someone's fundamental moral intuitions can differ from mine, which I have always felt to be self-obvious.
Well, a potential concern: Imagine AGI controlling our world and hooking everyone to heroin/MDMA all while creating new human beings and doing the same to them forever. A lot of people would view that as repugnant, evil or maybe even pointless yet it would qualify as the ultimate good for hedonic utilitarianism. Intuitively, some people also simply don’t view all negative emotions as bad in and of themselves. If you ask: « would you rather never have felt any pain or discomfort ever in your life ? » I think a lot of people would say no. Not saying it’s justified or not but just trying to give you an intuitive gut feeling of how others might think.
Reading the comment section looks like you've largely addressed the immediate skepticism I had (regardless of whether I found it convincing), so rather than rehash that I'll say that I find the idea of infinite good/evil/whatever pretty pointless to discuss, because it seems like that means everything will go according to plan, regardless of what I decide. On the other hand, contingent good/evil/etc. is a lot more interesting to me.
What are you basing Premise 1 off of just out of curiosity?
How is this not just the traditional skeptical theist approach? I get that you're suggesting a specific positive good here - an experience of diverse worlds - and that skeptical theists generally don't, but you still need the exact same skeptical approach to accept that it *is* a positive good in the first place. So I don't see how that helps you. All this really does is move you from "There is some positive good, but we just shouldn't expect to know what it is" to "There is this particular positive good, but we just shouldn't expect to know why it's positive." Isn't that in some ways worse? It would be like going from "I don't know who the killer is, but I wouldn't expect to know their identity anyway" to "I think the killer is Frank, but I wouldn't expect to know how Frank could have possibly done it."
First of all, I deny we're totally in the dark about the goods that justify great evils. Second, I give lots of non skeptical justifications for a diverse array of worlds.
But the problem is that those non-skeptical justifications only work when you understate the evidence in terms of the particular features of those diverse worlds. "A diverse world is good because it generates stories that are beneficial to tell" is a non-skeptical justification in general, but "A story about dying in the Holocaust as an infant is one of those beneficial stories" only makes sense if you adopt a radically skeptical position on our ability to evaluate what constitutes a beneficial story. It sure doesn't seem like one to me and you, right?
Indeed, f the Holocaust doesn't get you to reject a perfectly good God, then you're pretty much a de facto skeptic. I'm trying to give BB's theism as fair a shake as possible, but it's almost as if he's treating the pen/paper existence of abstract non-contradictory moral principles that would excuse apparent evil as if they were tangible bits of concrete empirical evidence
It seems some of the paragraphs for the red/green room experiments may have been scrambled
Plausible, probably, God would......
Imagine a finite being even deigning to comment on the existence of God one way or the other. Hubris and blasphemy.
Let alone God's nature or what God would do.