"Just as naturalism predicts evil by the hypothesis of indifference, by saying the universe doesn’t care about us, theism says God would put us (for some time) in a universe that doesn’t care about us."
But... theism doesn't say that, right? There's absolutely nothing intrinsic to theism that suggests God would put us into a world where it seems like he doesn't exist. That's something you would only ever accept because you have to make sense of the actual data in front of you; do you really think someone who had never seen this universe before would, upon learning only that a perfect God created it, predict that things would appear as though he hadn't? Or, alternatively, do you think in some alternate universe where everything was perfect and God's existence appeared obvious, atheists in that world would use that fact to argue God didn't exist? Of course not.
In general, I don't think it's ever legitimate to say two theories are equivalently likely just because one can be made to appear like the other through the addition of an ad hoc hypothesis. I mean, think about someone who looks like they've died of a heart attack - it would be silly to say the theory that they were murdered by a sadistic trickster who likes to fake heart attacks was equally likely just because that hypothesis does predict their death would look like a heart attack, right?
Also, you have to immediately ask why God allowed you to figure this out, if apparently it's an overwhelming moral good that you experience life as though it were godless. Now that the "game is up," in some sense, what justifies God continuing the charade?
Sorry, typo, should have said "this theodicy says." The good doesn't come from having the belief that the world is godless but from the world being designed in an indifferent way, except those ways required for knowing the broad contours of the world and existing in the first place.
But this seems like a tough pill to swallow too. Our lives would be dramatically better if God made himself known immediately and directly, right? So if the goodness of the indifferent universe doesn't depend on God being hidden, he shouldn't hide. And if his hiding does play an important role, then God has really screwed up by letting you peak behind the curtain!
Also, how do non-human animals play a role here? It's very implausible that an indifferent world helps a salmon develop any positive relationships, even if the salmon is essentially an immortal soul like us. So why should salmon suffer?
>There's absolutely nothing intrinsic to theism that suggests God would put us into a world where it seems like he doesn't exist.
I don't think the article adopts the premise that God puts us in a world where it seems like he doesn't exist. He puts us in a world where, on one hand, there is robust evidence that he does exist (fine-tuning blah blah), while on the other hand, there is indifference and suffering. Whether it seems like He seems not to exist in light of these two clumps of data is what's under dispute right?
So I think a better analogy would be corpse lying on the ground with signs of cardiac failure, but also stab wounds, or something like that, and we have to piece together which came first, which caused what, etc.
>Also, you have to immediately ask why God allowed you to figure this out, if apparently it's an overwhelming moral good that you experience life as though it were godless.
Seems like most of the goods of an indifferent universe that this article describes don't require us to be in a state of ignorance - I guess I'm not sure why God would want to erase those goods just because we're aware of them?
This is an amazing theodicy. Definitely the most promising I’ve ever seen and it’s seriously making me reconsider my views.
One problem I can think of though:
Suppose moral knowledge cannot develop through unguided evolution. There are two horns we can take:
1. God intervened in evolution to give us moral knowledge. This means that it was good for God to intervene in evolution if it led to great goods later on. However, if it is true that it is good to intervene in evolution if it leads to great goods later on, God would plausibly have intervened to destroy certain evolved organisms that cause tremendous suffering or to give us better moral knowledge or to make humans less flawed in their psychology.
2. God did not intervene in evolution. Therefore, we do not have moral knowledge, therefore the case for theism is undercut.
Can you elaborate on how psychophysical laws can explain moral knowledge? Do you mean there’s a law that’s something like “x physical cause causes moral knowledge”?
Also, what reason may there be for God not to make perfect psychophysical laws? I understand that understated evidence is dealt with by your theodicy, but I don’t see why there should be understated evidence in the psychophysical laws when this is like one of the few things you think God actually created about the natural world.
There are various laws that govern the emergent psychophysical laws so that we can understand things. The reason is that God only deviates from an indifferent world to enable us to exist or figure out the broad contours of the world.
My strongest argument against this is just Occam's Razor. Which is more likely: God created an indifferent world to teach us things for the afterlife, or we just live in an indifferent world?
Frankly, it sounds to me like you have a predetermined conclusion (God is real), and you're brainstorming any possible reason why that might be true.
I think God is very simple and naturally explains many features of the world so it's worth believing in, even if you have to posit one extra implausible thing.
A lot of theodicies don't seem to take omnipotence seriously. Any form of "God needs to allow X as a means to Y" (e.g. soul-building) doesn't seem to appreciate that an omnipotent God could skip straight to Y (e.g. create a soul that starts off in the "built" state). Something like relationship-building, where the connection is logical rather than causal, seems more promising. But it's hard to believe that being in an apparently-indifferent world is strictly logically necessary for anything valuable.
On a different note: seems like you don't need to worry so much about factory farming or x-risk now? re: x-risk: If the world got too bad (or ended prematurely), God could just re-set it.
re: factory-farming: the suffering of farmed animals can't possibly be necessary for any larger good. God would obviously just zombify them without telling us, so the world *seemed* indifferent but was *actually* much less bad than it seems.
//But it's hard to believe that being in an apparently-indifferent world is strictly logically necessary for anything valuable.//
Well, I tried to motivate the idea that it would be. First of all, there's always the possibility of unknown afterlife goods that justify this. Second of all, there might be a necessary connection between it and certain kinds of relationship building--it might be that spending time apart from people, where they are not actively involved in your life and then choosing to enter a relationship is of intrinsic value.
Re ex risks, well, if the valuable thing is an indifferent universe, but that requires a bunch of people to suffer a bunch to bring it about, then it would cause tons of extra suffering. I also think this is sort of naive utilitarian logic a bit--if your religious convictions lead you to consider destroying the world, you should assume you've miscalculated.
Re x-risks, perhaps there's something valuable about God making factory farmed animals conscious so that those who help stop factory farming can have relationships in the afterlife with them. But the main idea of the theodicy is to motivate why God can't just make little tweaks to the world to improve things--even if those things, like zombifying animals, would improve things a lot. Finally, I think a similar thing to what I do about x-risks, if you see an animal being tortured and your conclusion is "that probably isn't bad," you've probably miscalculated.
A big flaw in all of this to me is part of what I said in response to your fine-tuning article: it doesn't make sense for humans to exist in the first place. If God is perfect, and he wanted to create life, he would create beings that are the ontological equivalent of God. It seems rather hard to argue that it is better for billions of humans to exist rather than billions of perfect beings. Is the value of the relationships between primates really better than the relationships between perfect beings? If they are, then it doesn't seem like those beings are 'perfect' anymore. And is there a benefit to "soul building" if you're created with a perfect soul? Even just considering life on earth - suffering is just as bad regardless of species, but I don't think it's implausible to think a human relationship has more value than a pig relationship. Whatever value there is to those 6 benefits, it seems like the value would tend to go up the more cognitively advanced the species. At some point of diminishing cognition, there wouldn't be much value at all, which creates an issue with the idea of God randomly selecting a universe.
I don't understand your response to this objection: "Fifth, you might worry that God could create a better indifferent universe."
As far as I can tell, all 6 of the possible benefits you mentioned could be achievable in a large range of universes. So, let's say that range of universes is U1, U2, U3, U4... and W is the set of all of those benefits you listed. If each U has a different level of suffering/well-being but still is compatible with W, then it seems like he should choose the Un that maximizes well-being. If U1 is full of suffering but still compatible with W, and U2 has a bit less suffering but is still compatible with W, then the latter is preferable.
The deltas between these could be massive. I don't see what benefit God choosing a universe "randomly" gives us, but even if it gives us some, it's hard to believe there isn't some delta that would outweigh that. Just imagine a universe where we spend every moment of life in pure agony. God also has to "meddle" in some sense - he's creating the universe, after all. You also believe he is fine-tuning the universe, so no choice can be completely random, he's selecting a range of possible 'tunings.' I don't think these tunings could be very loose either - he couldn't just tune it to create any form of life. What if the universe he created had nothing but bacteria? Or the highest cognitive level was that of an ant? Does this universe selection process require him to create a universe with sufficiently advanced life to get the benefits you listed? And, if he does need to meddle in a sense much more than random selection, then the original objection stands: why didn't he tune the universe to be better? He could've just made this universe + humans with higher capacity of empathy. Or this universe + no cancer. Or, my preference, other gods.
And since I mentioned that ant universe, another large objection to all of this: How does any of this justify animal suffering? Most of those benefits you listed simply wouldn't apply to most species. So why do they suffer? The idea that stronger bonds or soul-building with humans, a small fraction of all life, can justify trillions upon trillions of animals experiencing nothing but suffering and death is radically implausible to me. If one of those deltas I mentioned could outweigh whatever benefit a random universe selection gives, a universe without animal suffering seems like an obvious candidate.
Anyway, sorry for the long comment. Interesting article, I haven't thought much about theism for a long time, until I started reading your posts.
"I don’t know if this theodicy is exactly right. But I think it’s at least in the vicinity of the correct theodicy."
I agree!
Your theodicy is a specific type of "greater good theodicy." The Apostle Paul had his own version of this:
CSB 2 Corinthians 4:17 For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. 18 So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
AND
CSB Romans 8:18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is going to be revealed to us.
When you're thinking is close to that of one of the authors of what is, by a very wide margin, the most influential book in human history, it could be an indication that you're on the right track!
Keep thinking. Keep seeking. Keep writing. You're gifted at these things.
In addition to all the other issues I wrote about, I don't find any of those 6 potential benefits to be very convincing.
1. Of course there could be some reason, I don't think many people think the problem of evil makes the existence of God impossible. It's just extremely unlikely. As for your specific example - if we had perfect minds to begin with, we wouldn't need this experience in an indifferent universe to make the right decision.
2. It's rather bizarre to me to suggest causing us incredible suffering will strengthen our relationship with him. Normally, if someone is responsible for torturing you or your loved ones, your relationship with that person, to put it mildly, would be weakened not strengthened. Also, if this relationship is of infinite value, then increasing its strength won't increase its value. Unless you're suggesting we're increasing the cardinality of this relationship, whatever that would mean.
3. Idk what souls are or what soul-building is, but he could've just given us perfect souls to begin with.
4. A) If we form maximally valuable relationships, then there isn't a way to increase the value. B) We could still go through hardships in a universe with much less suffering. God choosing the universe at random doesn't justify how much suffering there is if this benefit would've existed with many orders of magnitude less suffering. C) If our relationship with god is infinitely intense and valuable, what benefit is there to having other relationships? As soon as we DO have a relationship w/ god, all those other relationships would be infinitely negligible in comparison, so what was the point of strengthening them?
5. In what way are we working with God to make it better? God doesn't seem to be doing anything. He's also responsible for how bad it is in the first place. It's weird to think it's good to create a problem, like mass suffering, so that you can work on fixing it with a friend. And if he was working with us, he could solve any problem with a thought. Is it really valuable for A and B to work on problem C if B could instantly solve the issue and instead makes A do all the work?
6. I don't understand the requirement you're putting on the level of God's meddling. Why can he not go further than making us exist and making us understand him? He could've made a much better universe with much less suffering, and us still being able to choose him.
Some of these fail on their own, but the rest fail because I don't think your response to the fifth objection is successful. For your proposal to work, you have to think it's a logical impossibility to maximize well-being or value without the amount of suffering in our universe. If God could create a universe with less suffering, with a bit more meddling, and the same amount of value, it would've been wrong to do otherwise. The 6 get instrumental value in being in a non-perfect universe, not value in being in a randomly chosen universe. As an example, if he just made this universe minus wildlife suffering, not sure why that is 'objectional meddling' or how that lowers the value in people choosing him - one doesn't seem to have anything to do with the other. Nor do I see how the value in a negligible percentage of life choosing him outweighs the negative value of all that suffering.
Wouldn’t this be susceptible to an anthropic defeater? If we are going to spend infinite time in heaven, then it would seem that there is basically no chance that we would exist now in the finite time-span which is our mortal life. Assuming we sample from every possible observer-moment, there would have to be ludicrously bad luck on our part to suppose that we just happen to be an observer which exists in the present moment that is our suffering-prone setting. I suppose you could refute this by denying that we should take into consideration observer moments (as opposed to just observers). But it’s not clear to me why that should be the case.
P.S. I promise I haven’t forgotten about our earlier conversation! Will message you soon.
>Fourth, even if a theodicy can explain various evils, it poorly predicts them. ... My theodicy again solves this problem by incorporating the hypothesis of indifference!
I don't think this is true. It may be the case that your theodicy predicts various qualitative categories of evils (though I'm not really sure of even that), but it doesn't predict anything about the precise degree to which we'll observe them. It seems intuitively like the universe could definitely be a little better while still appearing similarly indifferent overall, so why doesn't God improve it to that extent? Of course, this is an old kind of objection - "if evils are caused by God wanting X, why doesn't God improve the evils a little bit while keeping X the same" - and there are classical responses to it, like, most notably, Van Inwagen's IIRC. But my point is that I'm not sure this theodicy is doing a lot of work that others aren't, if it's facing the same kind of issues.
I apologize, I swear that I did see it when I read your post in my inbox this morning, but forgot about it when I responded just now!
The random selection defense is pretty tricky. Call a world Pareto-optimal if it's impossible to improve it in any way without losing something important that God wants, at least to some degree. Even if God is randomly choosing worlds with different combinations of good and evil, he has reason to only randomly select between Pareto-optimal worlds. If this is the case, you need to argue that the current world is Pareto-optimal, or at least that it's rationally permissible to believe it is. But I don't see how that'd work. It seems obvious that (say) sparing the pain of a single animal dying in the forest in 1,000,000 BC would make the world better without losing out on whatever virtues you think are to be gained by an indifferent-seeming universe.
Well, "intervention" is a bit of an ambiguous word. If you're choosing now between two later outcomes and then commit to inaction once the outcome has begun to come to pass, have you intervened?
If the answer is "yes," then it seems like God is intervening no matter what in this sense. If the answer is "no," why didn't God set it up initially so the world - however it ended up, in terms of overall level of goods vs. evils - would be Pareto-optimal (and then he'd refuse to act within it any further after that)? I guess you can say that God temporarily removed his own omnipotence and omniscience or something so he had no control over the Pareto-optimality of his creation, but why would doing such thing be preferable to not doing that?
Sure, so when he's in the setting-up stage, why not ensure it will be Pareto-optimal, or at least is so with respect to the things he can control? And then you have the other problem, which is that it's not clear why remaining apart from the world (after setting it up) is a morally acceptable thing for him to do to begin with.
I think the main point of contention will be simplicity and epistemological frameworks. The appeal to perfection as simple and commitment to naive “seems plausibilism” is what I see as the more problematic aspects of your case. All nonmentalist goods are specially vulnerable to evolutionary debunking and I don’t think invoking theism to solve the moral knowledge problem will do much for those who don’t take it to be simple. If by theism getting us scientific knowledge you are referring to induction being justified via a sensus divinitatis that gets us to know the correct bayesian prior, I think you’re mistaken, the appeal to meta-inductive optimality is a cogent alternative way for the atheist to justify induction
Meta-inductive methods are demonstrated to be optimal (by Schurz, Bianchi and Lugosi) by utilizing all available object methods and their performance history. They aim to create an optimal meta-method from this information, which is never inferior and potentially superior to all accessible alternative methods (once the optimality of MI is established, we can have a non-circular justification of induction in our world). Nonmentalist goods are basically all non-hedonist goods except I think that pleasure may not be the only mental good, some experiences may not be reducible to an underlying single unit of value, though they may still be comparable. Mill's qualitative hedonism is a version of a non-hedonist mentalist theory of well being. I think some people also use the term "experientialism".
I don't think you should be that confident in the success of any such evolutionary debunking argument.
But surely whether to trust induction will depend on your priors! If your prior in a world like ours until one second from now which spontaneously self-desctructs is 90%, then you should expect induction to self-destruct.
I thought you shared my confidence on their success given that you think moral knowledge is such a big win for theism! And sure, your trust on induction will depend on your prior in the trivial sense you describe, what I mean is that you don't get the justification for the use of some particular prior via a sixth sense of sorts (that god gave us), you get it via generalizing insights from meta-optimality in conjunction with observations from our world into a broadly bayesian framework
I meant meta-inductive optimality, sorry for the typo. Meta-induction justifies induction in our world till now, you might claim it also justifies "induction+radical shift starting now", let's say that it does: you'll see that when we start applying such prediction methods to the future and our world continues to exhibit regularities, it'll lose out to induction, cause it'll be less favored by meta-induction. You might claim that this is still problematic because one could endorse a prediction strat like "induction+radical shift starting in some unspecified time" but in practice, that'll be equivalent induction, so no problem.
This is a pretty bad theodicy. It requires positing as brute fact he idea that we can gain infinite future value from suffering through a process that no one can explain, and that there is no way to better achieve that value elsewhere.
The “explanatory power” section of the argument is also laughable. Of course you’ll be able to come up with a theory that “explains” anything if you allow for God and also say that we can posit incomprehensible reasons for his actions.
Let me go through each point specifically!
> This theodicy also avoids the problems with skeptical theism, because it only requires positing an unknown reason for one thing—making an indifferent universe.
No! You’re gerrymandering “one thing” and then saying that it increases the likelihood of your hypothesis when the “one thing” is arbitrary. I can say that anything is “one thing”, including the broad category of evil and the very specific category of why I have to make breakfast this morning.
We are still vulnerable to skeptical theism, because if in fact there is “one thing” which is unknowable to us but which justifies all the evil in the world (which, according to you, has been net negative for the overwhelming majority of its relevant existence due to animal suffering), then we have no epistemic reason for believing that anything we do is valuable. Perhaps there is some hidden unknown reason which justifies it all.
You also have to consider that there are *other* hidden unknown reasons. After all, if there is an incomprehensible unknown reason for “indifference” that we position as brute fact, then you should be open to there being hidden unknown reasons for basically anything, since you accept there are some hidden unknown reasons and also that they are so unknown that no earthly evidence could contradict them.
> Perhaps being in an indifferent world, one whose features resemble the typical godless world that contains us and where we can know about the broad features of the world, strengthens our relationship with God.
This would be exceptionally curious, because it seems like as people know more about the world, atheism rates dramatically rise. This also posits a mechanism for infinite goodness by brute fact.
It’s also grossly incompatible with your claims to be a utilitarian. If you believe that God is omnipotent and that all mental states are indistinguishable, then you should have zero objection to God simply creating versions of ourselves with the memories of suffering but who didn’t actually experience it. There is no way you can explain why the actual experience is better than that without a knowing something special about successions of mental states.
> Just going through a narrowly tailored set of challenges doesn’t give one the knowledge that they can overcome hardships in the same way that overcoming a random suite of challenges does.
This is obviously false. Imagine that you were given two options to learn swordfighting.
1. Random swordfights where you could die.
2. An omnipotent omniscient being designs swordfight challenges with the goal of making you the best swordfighter.
Clearly under #2 you would emerge the better sword fighter. Under #1 you would be dead.
You have to posit something unique about “soul building”.you have yet to define soul building in a sphere way, so please do that.
Also, what “soul-building” happens to conscious animals that are tortured in conditions outside of their control or comprehension then promptly thrown in a blender and eaten?
> Perhaps being in an indifferent world builds our connections with others.
I’ll answer each point, but it seems like a huge problem with this is that an indifferent God would inspire indifference in man. If indifferent plausibly leads to infinite value, perhaps I shouldn’t care at all. Intervening could actually be infinitely bad because it could reduce soul building through suffering!
With this theodicy you DON’t get to say “god build the world perfectly so any deviation will take you further away from perfection”. Instead you claim that the world is random, and is this very far from perfect. One could reasonably be indifferent and say that they’re increasing “soul-building” or whatever, since lots of indifferent is good, and we don’t know that we are at the right level of indifference.
> First, the fact that our lives have some element of randomness, where everything isn’t set by God makes it so that our relationships may be more valuable. God designing the world specifically to be such that specific people form maximally valuable relationships might rob the relationships of some of their value, in a way akin to arranged marriage.
1. This requires denying your version of utilitarianism.
2. This is faux randomness. Imagine if your parents arranged a marriage with someone, but decided you would consummate it in three years. In the meantime they let you do whatever you want, except they intervene whenever *they* want in order to make sure that you’re interested in their choice. This is like your theodicy. The choice to make things “random” was God’s, the choice to make things “Intelligible” was God’s, as was the determination of what’s sufficient for humanity to understand God. The world was made in a way that we wouldn’t clearly reject God (atheism isn’t as obvious as induction). This is not “randomness”! It robs value in the same way you posit.
3. Do you believe some people cannot form a relationship with God? If the answer is no, then everything seens preordained, clearly triggering this. If the answer is no, you have to justify evil for those people.
> Finally, were we to be in a relationship with God, it might be infinitely more intense and thus crowd out our other relationships.
This is a really pathetic “omnipotent” God if he can’t annihilate a debatable constraint of human psychology when infinite value is on the line. Your contention has to be that limited friend-making is beyond GOD’s power to change. That is farcical.
> There might be something valuable about us working to better the world alongside God or, more broadly, working with God to achieve things.
Working “alongside” someone who could remove all your problems and finish the work single-handedly, but who chooses not to for reasons you will never be given? Sounds terrible.
> it’s valuable for us to freely choose God. But that requires that we be apart from God in some broad sense
1. Would you say that you “freely choose” to believe in evolution? I would say so, yet we are probably not fundamentally separate from evolution!
2. God is preordaining things! You say that in your very next sentence when you admit God would have to specifically tailor a world to make things comprehensible and his existence conceivable!
3. If we don’t freely choose God, what happens to us? Does he kill us? Are we forced to? Either answer undermines this argument.
> predicting indifference, excepting that we would exist and have scientific and moral knowledge.
In conclusion, you have come up with an arbitrary hypothesis purely in order to fit the data. According to you, arbitrariness is very big bad. You should reject this!
I think this theodicy is substantially weaker than your arguments for things like non-infinite SIA.
Last point: doesn’t this contradict your declaration that God creates an unboundedly infinite number of people?!?!?
Leave shorter comments if you want me to respond to them! Let me just address some of it.
//Last point: doesn’t this contradict your declaration that God creates an unboundedly infinite number of people?!?!?//
No, the theodicy says God creates people!
//The “explanatory power” section of the argument is also laughable. Of course you’ll be able to come up with a theory that “explains” anything if you allow for God and also say that we can posit incomprehensible reasons for his actions.//
Well, if you have a nice simple theory that explains everything with just a few posits, that's a virtue of a theory.
//No! You’re gerrymandering “one thing” and then saying that it increases the likelihood of your hypothesis when the “one thing” is arbitrary. I can say that anything is “one thing”, including the broad category of evil and the very specific category of why I have to make breakfast this morning.//
But in that case, you're positing, for each of a large category of things, that they have some greater purpose. This doesn't do that! It posits just one fundamental kind of reason for one fundamental feature of the world.
//We are still vulnerable to skeptical theism, because if in fact there is “one thing” which is unknowable to us but which justifies all the evil in the world (which, according to you, has been net negative for the overwhelming majority of its relevant existence due to animal suffering), then we have no epistemic reason for believing that anything we do is valuable. Perhaps there is some hidden unknown reason which justifies it all.//
Possibility is not probability. If the theodicy is right then the value comes from the broadly indifferent universe, rather than any particular evil. Now we're positing just a moral reason for one kind of action--putting us in an indifferent universe.
If you want shorter comments, write articles with fewer mistakes!
But if you respond to anything, respond to this:
How is the world indifferent in a way that accesses your purported benefits, if God actively chose two things
1. The meta-choice of whether to make the world random
2. All the necessary physical conditions to make the world comprehensible, understandable, and open to God. See arranged marriage example from my initial comment.
> No, the theodicy says God creates people!
No shit. But you need an unboundedly infinite number of people. This theodicy cannot predict that, because such infinite creation would create at least as many people as there are truths, so only universes that fit your idea of indifference cannot get you there.
According to your interaction of SIA, then, the probability of you specifically existing is zero, so there is infinite evidence against this theodicy, unless you reject SIA, in which case you also lose your best argument for God.
> Well, if you have a nice simple theory that explains everything with just a few posits, that's a virtue of a theory.
A. No. See your continued refusal to even engage with my solipsistic comments. You are justified in that because the simplest theory that explains everything has no power if it’s arbitrary.
B. You admit your theory is arbitrary. See the first comment on this post by Both Sides Brigade.
> But in that case, you're positing, for each of a large category of things, that they have some greater purpose. This doesn't do that! It posits just one fundamental kind of reason for one fundamental feature of the world.
Please describe what makes something “fundamental”. For example, why isn’t a “reason for evil” “one thing” when “indifference to evil” is.
Large category of things makes no sense. Indifference can be framed as a “large category of things”. I can list out every animal being pointlessly tortured.
> If the theodicy is right then the value comes from the broadly indifferent universe
Bulldog. Indifference isn’t intrinsically valuable. It’s valuable instrumentally. The valuable thing is our relationship with God. One could rationally conclude that, if God being indifferent is best for our relationship with god for each of the 6 reasons you suggest, being indifferent to other humans might also improve those Humam’s relationship with God for much the same reasons
Matthew is dramatically better than me at debating philosophy. If he spent just two hours with me, I would be metaphorically crucified for my atheism. Engaging with him in an overly smug manner is fun for precisely that reason!
All of these supposed reasons why evil exists in a theistic reality imply that God has limitations of some sort. For example, with soul-building or building relationships, couldn't God just wirehead us to already have these things if he's truly omnipotent? If God were entirely omnipotent and omnibenevolent with no limitations at all, and if Benthamite utilitarianism is the objectively correct morality, paradise would already exist and everything would be hedonium. If he can't do these things, then he isn't omnipotent, and therefore isn't the ultimate source of reality.
Meh. It would be better to question whether evil is actually evil. Set aside that evil that people cause now, and focus on natural evil. Maybe illness, natural disasters, predators etc. are not a bad thing, rather your utilitarianism is overly suffering-focused. Would a world without predators not just be boring? Maybe the programmer of this simulation wants an exciting show.
A very thoughtful and intelligent take on a topic that I, as a Christian, give much thought to. And I'd agree on much of what you bring up.
I think that it's not puzzling God permits some evil (natural and human caused). Obviously if there's free will you are going to have the choice of evil or free will would mean nothing, and in addition, good, and love , would not be real either. And yes this world in part must be a soul-shaping experience.
And agree, the adversity of the world creates relational strength. Shared adversity creates deep bonds.
I don't think it's possible to gauge the extent to which the universe is indifferent versus God intervening. I think He intervenes pretty often, not just in the obvious miracle accounts (and there are fair numbers of credible ones on YouTube alone even allowing room for phony ones). For all we know God tweaks our experiences pretty often to meet his agenda for our development or whatever.
But I do understand the atheist position here. If there were not other factors I regard as proofs I'd join them.
>By predicting God wants to equip us with the faculties to discover the broad contours of our world, it predicts the world’s finely-tuned discoverability, the widespread sense of God, moral+modal+mathematical knowledge, psychophysical harmony, fine-tuning, and so on.
God could bypass setting up a world and just alter our epistemic attitudes. Whether or not we believe we discovered something, the benefits we reap from that are not dependent on the things we discovered, but on our other attitudes and judgments. For example, imagine two people, one of which reaches the city of El Dorado before the other, but both of which believe that they are the first to discover it. They never conduct any empirical tests to see whether they "really" discovered it, but both enjoy the cognitive benefits of thinking they are the first to "discover" it, even though one of them was "really" second to discover it. It's not clear to me what difference the city of El Dorado having the intrinsic property "not discovered" when the first person laid eyes on it but "already discovered" when the second person laid eyes on it could make, even in principle, without it impinging on the two persons' epistemic states. And the world we find ourselves in is the El Dorado world, because we can always construct alternate theories and rerender something previously known as a new discovery in a new framework.
I am stalking a woman. She lives in constant paranoia, is in danger from my violent actions, has to take precautions to avoid me that drastically lower her quality of life, and she has decided to to get a restraining order from the court filed against me. While I am stalking her, I do so out of an obsessive compulsion, so I also face many of the negatives that come with carrying out this crime - I am frequently pepper sprayed, assaulted by her protectors (police officers, ex-boyfriends), and have a criminal suit filed against me.
During the trial, the judge is commenting on the nature of mine and the woman's relationship by going over the evidence - it is dysfunctional, abusive, dangerous, neither the woman nor I (due to the stalking being my obsessive compulsion) want the relationship to continue or evaluate it positively. Just before the judge is going to approve the restraining order, my beautiful lawyer Bentham's Bulldog luckily interjects, "Ah, but you haven't considered whether their relationship has any ~objective~ value. ~Objective~ value doesn't depend on the subjects' preferences about relationships, their perception of how their current relationship is going, or even on anything that causally interacts with them. Their relationship is merely superficially negative, but it could still be the case, unbeknownst to them and completely outside of their ability to judge based on the quality of the interactions between them, that their relationship is objectively valuable." Stunned by the last minute defense, the judge dismisses the trial due to insufficient evidence that my stalking the woman is destructive to our relationship, and the whole world stands up and claps.
>Perhaps being in an indifferent world, one whose features resemble the typical godless world that contains us and where we can know about the broad features of the world, strengthens our relationship with God. To consider an analogy: your relationship with your eventual spouse might be strengthened by the fact that you spent time without them. Having time without someone might strengthen your relationship with them. Similarly, time spent in a world apart from God might strengthen one’s eventual relationship with God, a relationship that is of infinite value.
This is effectively just global skepticism. I can't be sure of the quality of my relationships with others, I can't trust whether pain is actually bad for me, I can't trust ANY of my evaluations, because God might actually be deceiving me and actually it's all good from God's perspective. I propose this alternative schema for making sense of relationships: My relationships are good or bad based on mine and the other persons' perceptions of the relationship - if we both think it's fine, it's fine - no further fact can discount this one unless it alters our perception of the relationship. (Relationships are based on beliefs.) If I perceive that I lack a relationship with God - by considering the various ways I've interacted with others in my relationships and how I haven't interacted with God at all - I simply lack the relationship with God, just the same as I lack the relationship with Santa Claus or Plato or other people I don't know and have never met and thus can't be in a relationship with. This account has the benefit that rather than a relationship being something inscrutable and completely outside of the participants' control and seemingly unrelated to the interactions between the participants (and thus subject to unlimited metaphysical speculation), it is embedded in their very form of life.
"Just as naturalism predicts evil by the hypothesis of indifference, by saying the universe doesn’t care about us, theism says God would put us (for some time) in a universe that doesn’t care about us."
But... theism doesn't say that, right? There's absolutely nothing intrinsic to theism that suggests God would put us into a world where it seems like he doesn't exist. That's something you would only ever accept because you have to make sense of the actual data in front of you; do you really think someone who had never seen this universe before would, upon learning only that a perfect God created it, predict that things would appear as though he hadn't? Or, alternatively, do you think in some alternate universe where everything was perfect and God's existence appeared obvious, atheists in that world would use that fact to argue God didn't exist? Of course not.
In general, I don't think it's ever legitimate to say two theories are equivalently likely just because one can be made to appear like the other through the addition of an ad hoc hypothesis. I mean, think about someone who looks like they've died of a heart attack - it would be silly to say the theory that they were murdered by a sadistic trickster who likes to fake heart attacks was equally likely just because that hypothesis does predict their death would look like a heart attack, right?
Also, you have to immediately ask why God allowed you to figure this out, if apparently it's an overwhelming moral good that you experience life as though it were godless. Now that the "game is up," in some sense, what justifies God continuing the charade?
Sorry, typo, should have said "this theodicy says." The good doesn't come from having the belief that the world is godless but from the world being designed in an indifferent way, except those ways required for knowing the broad contours of the world and existing in the first place.
But this seems like a tough pill to swallow too. Our lives would be dramatically better if God made himself known immediately and directly, right? So if the goodness of the indifferent universe doesn't depend on God being hidden, he shouldn't hide. And if his hiding does play an important role, then God has really screwed up by letting you peak behind the curtain!
Also, how do non-human animals play a role here? It's very implausible that an indifferent world helps a salmon develop any positive relationships, even if the salmon is essentially an immortal soul like us. So why should salmon suffer?
>There's absolutely nothing intrinsic to theism that suggests God would put us into a world where it seems like he doesn't exist.
I don't think the article adopts the premise that God puts us in a world where it seems like he doesn't exist. He puts us in a world where, on one hand, there is robust evidence that he does exist (fine-tuning blah blah), while on the other hand, there is indifference and suffering. Whether it seems like He seems not to exist in light of these two clumps of data is what's under dispute right?
So I think a better analogy would be corpse lying on the ground with signs of cardiac failure, but also stab wounds, or something like that, and we have to piece together which came first, which caused what, etc.
>Also, you have to immediately ask why God allowed you to figure this out, if apparently it's an overwhelming moral good that you experience life as though it were godless.
Seems like most of the goods of an indifferent universe that this article describes don't require us to be in a state of ignorance - I guess I'm not sure why God would want to erase those goods just because we're aware of them?
This is an amazing theodicy. Definitely the most promising I’ve ever seen and it’s seriously making me reconsider my views.
One problem I can think of though:
Suppose moral knowledge cannot develop through unguided evolution. There are two horns we can take:
1. God intervened in evolution to give us moral knowledge. This means that it was good for God to intervene in evolution if it led to great goods later on. However, if it is true that it is good to intervene in evolution if it leads to great goods later on, God would plausibly have intervened to destroy certain evolved organisms that cause tremendous suffering or to give us better moral knowledge or to make humans less flawed in their psychology.
2. God did not intervene in evolution. Therefore, we do not have moral knowledge, therefore the case for theism is undercut.
What are your thoughts on this?
I don't think God intervened but instead set up the psychophysical laws so that they'd have us evolve to be able to have moral knowledge.
And thanks!
Can you elaborate on how psychophysical laws can explain moral knowledge? Do you mean there’s a law that’s something like “x physical cause causes moral knowledge”?
Also, what reason may there be for God not to make perfect psychophysical laws? I understand that understated evidence is dealt with by your theodicy, but I don’t see why there should be understated evidence in the psychophysical laws when this is like one of the few things you think God actually created about the natural world.
There are various laws that govern the emergent psychophysical laws so that we can understand things. The reason is that God only deviates from an indifferent world to enable us to exist or figure out the broad contours of the world.
My strongest argument against this is just Occam's Razor. Which is more likely: God created an indifferent world to teach us things for the afterlife, or we just live in an indifferent world?
Frankly, it sounds to me like you have a predetermined conclusion (God is real), and you're brainstorming any possible reason why that might be true.
I think God is very simple and naturally explains many features of the world so it's worth believing in, even if you have to posit one extra implausible thing.
Very interesting!
A lot of theodicies don't seem to take omnipotence seriously. Any form of "God needs to allow X as a means to Y" (e.g. soul-building) doesn't seem to appreciate that an omnipotent God could skip straight to Y (e.g. create a soul that starts off in the "built" state). Something like relationship-building, where the connection is logical rather than causal, seems more promising. But it's hard to believe that being in an apparently-indifferent world is strictly logically necessary for anything valuable.
On a different note: seems like you don't need to worry so much about factory farming or x-risk now? re: x-risk: If the world got too bad (or ended prematurely), God could just re-set it.
re: factory-farming: the suffering of farmed animals can't possibly be necessary for any larger good. God would obviously just zombify them without telling us, so the world *seemed* indifferent but was *actually* much less bad than it seems.
//But it's hard to believe that being in an apparently-indifferent world is strictly logically necessary for anything valuable.//
Well, I tried to motivate the idea that it would be. First of all, there's always the possibility of unknown afterlife goods that justify this. Second of all, there might be a necessary connection between it and certain kinds of relationship building--it might be that spending time apart from people, where they are not actively involved in your life and then choosing to enter a relationship is of intrinsic value.
Re ex risks, well, if the valuable thing is an indifferent universe, but that requires a bunch of people to suffer a bunch to bring it about, then it would cause tons of extra suffering. I also think this is sort of naive utilitarian logic a bit--if your religious convictions lead you to consider destroying the world, you should assume you've miscalculated.
Re x-risks, perhaps there's something valuable about God making factory farmed animals conscious so that those who help stop factory farming can have relationships in the afterlife with them. But the main idea of the theodicy is to motivate why God can't just make little tweaks to the world to improve things--even if those things, like zombifying animals, would improve things a lot. Finally, I think a similar thing to what I do about x-risks, if you see an animal being tortured and your conclusion is "that probably isn't bad," you've probably miscalculated.
A big flaw in all of this to me is part of what I said in response to your fine-tuning article: it doesn't make sense for humans to exist in the first place. If God is perfect, and he wanted to create life, he would create beings that are the ontological equivalent of God. It seems rather hard to argue that it is better for billions of humans to exist rather than billions of perfect beings. Is the value of the relationships between primates really better than the relationships between perfect beings? If they are, then it doesn't seem like those beings are 'perfect' anymore. And is there a benefit to "soul building" if you're created with a perfect soul? Even just considering life on earth - suffering is just as bad regardless of species, but I don't think it's implausible to think a human relationship has more value than a pig relationship. Whatever value there is to those 6 benefits, it seems like the value would tend to go up the more cognitively advanced the species. At some point of diminishing cognition, there wouldn't be much value at all, which creates an issue with the idea of God randomly selecting a universe.
I don't understand your response to this objection: "Fifth, you might worry that God could create a better indifferent universe."
As far as I can tell, all 6 of the possible benefits you mentioned could be achievable in a large range of universes. So, let's say that range of universes is U1, U2, U3, U4... and W is the set of all of those benefits you listed. If each U has a different level of suffering/well-being but still is compatible with W, then it seems like he should choose the Un that maximizes well-being. If U1 is full of suffering but still compatible with W, and U2 has a bit less suffering but is still compatible with W, then the latter is preferable.
The deltas between these could be massive. I don't see what benefit God choosing a universe "randomly" gives us, but even if it gives us some, it's hard to believe there isn't some delta that would outweigh that. Just imagine a universe where we spend every moment of life in pure agony. God also has to "meddle" in some sense - he's creating the universe, after all. You also believe he is fine-tuning the universe, so no choice can be completely random, he's selecting a range of possible 'tunings.' I don't think these tunings could be very loose either - he couldn't just tune it to create any form of life. What if the universe he created had nothing but bacteria? Or the highest cognitive level was that of an ant? Does this universe selection process require him to create a universe with sufficiently advanced life to get the benefits you listed? And, if he does need to meddle in a sense much more than random selection, then the original objection stands: why didn't he tune the universe to be better? He could've just made this universe + humans with higher capacity of empathy. Or this universe + no cancer. Or, my preference, other gods.
And since I mentioned that ant universe, another large objection to all of this: How does any of this justify animal suffering? Most of those benefits you listed simply wouldn't apply to most species. So why do they suffer? The idea that stronger bonds or soul-building with humans, a small fraction of all life, can justify trillions upon trillions of animals experiencing nothing but suffering and death is radically implausible to me. If one of those deltas I mentioned could outweigh whatever benefit a random universe selection gives, a universe without animal suffering seems like an obvious candidate.
Anyway, sorry for the long comment. Interesting article, I haven't thought much about theism for a long time, until I started reading your posts.
"I don’t know if this theodicy is exactly right. But I think it’s at least in the vicinity of the correct theodicy."
I agree!
Your theodicy is a specific type of "greater good theodicy." The Apostle Paul had his own version of this:
CSB 2 Corinthians 4:17 For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. 18 So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
AND
CSB Romans 8:18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is going to be revealed to us.
When you're thinking is close to that of one of the authors of what is, by a very wide margin, the most influential book in human history, it could be an indication that you're on the right track!
Keep thinking. Keep seeking. Keep writing. You're gifted at these things.
In addition to all the other issues I wrote about, I don't find any of those 6 potential benefits to be very convincing.
1. Of course there could be some reason, I don't think many people think the problem of evil makes the existence of God impossible. It's just extremely unlikely. As for your specific example - if we had perfect minds to begin with, we wouldn't need this experience in an indifferent universe to make the right decision.
2. It's rather bizarre to me to suggest causing us incredible suffering will strengthen our relationship with him. Normally, if someone is responsible for torturing you or your loved ones, your relationship with that person, to put it mildly, would be weakened not strengthened. Also, if this relationship is of infinite value, then increasing its strength won't increase its value. Unless you're suggesting we're increasing the cardinality of this relationship, whatever that would mean.
3. Idk what souls are or what soul-building is, but he could've just given us perfect souls to begin with.
4. A) If we form maximally valuable relationships, then there isn't a way to increase the value. B) We could still go through hardships in a universe with much less suffering. God choosing the universe at random doesn't justify how much suffering there is if this benefit would've existed with many orders of magnitude less suffering. C) If our relationship with god is infinitely intense and valuable, what benefit is there to having other relationships? As soon as we DO have a relationship w/ god, all those other relationships would be infinitely negligible in comparison, so what was the point of strengthening them?
5. In what way are we working with God to make it better? God doesn't seem to be doing anything. He's also responsible for how bad it is in the first place. It's weird to think it's good to create a problem, like mass suffering, so that you can work on fixing it with a friend. And if he was working with us, he could solve any problem with a thought. Is it really valuable for A and B to work on problem C if B could instantly solve the issue and instead makes A do all the work?
6. I don't understand the requirement you're putting on the level of God's meddling. Why can he not go further than making us exist and making us understand him? He could've made a much better universe with much less suffering, and us still being able to choose him.
Some of these fail on their own, but the rest fail because I don't think your response to the fifth objection is successful. For your proposal to work, you have to think it's a logical impossibility to maximize well-being or value without the amount of suffering in our universe. If God could create a universe with less suffering, with a bit more meddling, and the same amount of value, it would've been wrong to do otherwise. The 6 get instrumental value in being in a non-perfect universe, not value in being in a randomly chosen universe. As an example, if he just made this universe minus wildlife suffering, not sure why that is 'objectional meddling' or how that lowers the value in people choosing him - one doesn't seem to have anything to do with the other. Nor do I see how the value in a negligible percentage of life choosing him outweighs the negative value of all that suffering.
Wouldn’t this be susceptible to an anthropic defeater? If we are going to spend infinite time in heaven, then it would seem that there is basically no chance that we would exist now in the finite time-span which is our mortal life. Assuming we sample from every possible observer-moment, there would have to be ludicrously bad luck on our part to suppose that we just happen to be an observer which exists in the present moment that is our suffering-prone setting. I suppose you could refute this by denying that we should take into consideration observer moments (as opposed to just observers). But it’s not clear to me why that should be the case.
P.S. I promise I haven’t forgotten about our earlier conversation! Will message you soon.
https://benthams.substack.com/p/three-niche-philosophical-objections?utm_source=publication-search
>Fourth, even if a theodicy can explain various evils, it poorly predicts them. ... My theodicy again solves this problem by incorporating the hypothesis of indifference!
I don't think this is true. It may be the case that your theodicy predicts various qualitative categories of evils (though I'm not really sure of even that), but it doesn't predict anything about the precise degree to which we'll observe them. It seems intuitively like the universe could definitely be a little better while still appearing similarly indifferent overall, so why doesn't God improve it to that extent? Of course, this is an old kind of objection - "if evils are caused by God wanting X, why doesn't God improve the evils a little bit while keeping X the same" - and there are classical responses to it, like, most notably, Van Inwagen's IIRC. But my point is that I'm not sure this theodicy is doing a lot of work that others aren't, if it's facing the same kind of issues.
See the section where I address that objection!
I apologize, I swear that I did see it when I read your post in my inbox this morning, but forgot about it when I responded just now!
The random selection defense is pretty tricky. Call a world Pareto-optimal if it's impossible to improve it in any way without losing something important that God wants, at least to some degree. Even if God is randomly choosing worlds with different combinations of good and evil, he has reason to only randomly select between Pareto-optimal worlds. If this is the case, you need to argue that the current world is Pareto-optimal, or at least that it's rationally permissible to believe it is. But I don't see how that'd work. It seems obvious that (say) sparing the pain of a single animal dying in the forest in 1,000,000 BC would make the world better without losing out on whatever virtues you think are to be gained by an indifferent-seeming universe.
No worries.
The idea is that part of the optimality comes from the fact that God really is, in some deep sense, apart from the world and does not intervene.
Well, "intervention" is a bit of an ambiguous word. If you're choosing now between two later outcomes and then commit to inaction once the outcome has begun to come to pass, have you intervened?
If the answer is "yes," then it seems like God is intervening no matter what in this sense. If the answer is "no," why didn't God set it up initially so the world - however it ended up, in terms of overall level of goods vs. evils - would be Pareto-optimal (and then he'd refuse to act within it any further after that)? I guess you can say that God temporarily removed his own omnipotence and omniscience or something so he had no control over the Pareto-optimality of his creation, but why would doing such thing be preferable to not doing that?
Well he did some intervention to set up the world, but once the world happens, he's apart from the workings of the world.
Sure, so when he's in the setting-up stage, why not ensure it will be Pareto-optimal, or at least is so with respect to the things he can control? And then you have the other problem, which is that it's not clear why remaining apart from the world (after setting it up) is a morally acceptable thing for him to do to begin with.
I think the main point of contention will be simplicity and epistemological frameworks. The appeal to perfection as simple and commitment to naive “seems plausibilism” is what I see as the more problematic aspects of your case. All nonmentalist goods are specially vulnerable to evolutionary debunking and I don’t think invoking theism to solve the moral knowledge problem will do much for those who don’t take it to be simple. If by theism getting us scientific knowledge you are referring to induction being justified via a sensus divinitatis that gets us to know the correct bayesian prior, I think you’re mistaken, the appeal to meta-inductive optimality is a cogent alternative way for the atheist to justify induction
Explain the appeal to meta-inductive optimality?
What do you mean by nonmentalist goods?
Meta-inductive methods are demonstrated to be optimal (by Schurz, Bianchi and Lugosi) by utilizing all available object methods and their performance history. They aim to create an optimal meta-method from this information, which is never inferior and potentially superior to all accessible alternative methods (once the optimality of MI is established, we can have a non-circular justification of induction in our world). Nonmentalist goods are basically all non-hedonist goods except I think that pleasure may not be the only mental good, some experiences may not be reducible to an underlying single unit of value, though they may still be comparable. Mill's qualitative hedonism is a version of a non-hedonist mentalist theory of well being. I think some people also use the term "experientialism".
I don't think you should be that confident in the success of any such evolutionary debunking argument.
But surely whether to trust induction will depend on your priors! If your prior in a world like ours until one second from now which spontaneously self-desctructs is 90%, then you should expect induction to self-destruct.
I thought you shared my confidence on their success given that you think moral knowledge is such a big win for theism! And sure, your trust on induction will depend on your prior in the trivial sense you describe, what I mean is that you don't get the justification for the use of some particular prior via a sixth sense of sorts (that god gave us), you get it via generalizing insights from meta-optimality in conjunction with observations from our world into a broadly bayesian framework
I was saying I don't think you should be confident that in the actual world certain beliefs are debunked.
What do you mean by broad meta-optimality? Both theories of uniformity and rapid jumps predict the laws have been uniform till now!
I meant meta-inductive optimality, sorry for the typo. Meta-induction justifies induction in our world till now, you might claim it also justifies "induction+radical shift starting now", let's say that it does: you'll see that when we start applying such prediction methods to the future and our world continues to exhibit regularities, it'll lose out to induction, cause it'll be less favored by meta-induction. You might claim that this is still problematic because one could endorse a prediction strat like "induction+radical shift starting in some unspecified time" but in practice, that'll be equivalent induction, so no problem.
This is a pretty bad theodicy. It requires positing as brute fact he idea that we can gain infinite future value from suffering through a process that no one can explain, and that there is no way to better achieve that value elsewhere.
The “explanatory power” section of the argument is also laughable. Of course you’ll be able to come up with a theory that “explains” anything if you allow for God and also say that we can posit incomprehensible reasons for his actions.
Let me go through each point specifically!
> This theodicy also avoids the problems with skeptical theism, because it only requires positing an unknown reason for one thing—making an indifferent universe.
No! You’re gerrymandering “one thing” and then saying that it increases the likelihood of your hypothesis when the “one thing” is arbitrary. I can say that anything is “one thing”, including the broad category of evil and the very specific category of why I have to make breakfast this morning.
We are still vulnerable to skeptical theism, because if in fact there is “one thing” which is unknowable to us but which justifies all the evil in the world (which, according to you, has been net negative for the overwhelming majority of its relevant existence due to animal suffering), then we have no epistemic reason for believing that anything we do is valuable. Perhaps there is some hidden unknown reason which justifies it all.
You also have to consider that there are *other* hidden unknown reasons. After all, if there is an incomprehensible unknown reason for “indifference” that we position as brute fact, then you should be open to there being hidden unknown reasons for basically anything, since you accept there are some hidden unknown reasons and also that they are so unknown that no earthly evidence could contradict them.
> Perhaps being in an indifferent world, one whose features resemble the typical godless world that contains us and where we can know about the broad features of the world, strengthens our relationship with God.
This would be exceptionally curious, because it seems like as people know more about the world, atheism rates dramatically rise. This also posits a mechanism for infinite goodness by brute fact.
It’s also grossly incompatible with your claims to be a utilitarian. If you believe that God is omnipotent and that all mental states are indistinguishable, then you should have zero objection to God simply creating versions of ourselves with the memories of suffering but who didn’t actually experience it. There is no way you can explain why the actual experience is better than that without a knowing something special about successions of mental states.
> Just going through a narrowly tailored set of challenges doesn’t give one the knowledge that they can overcome hardships in the same way that overcoming a random suite of challenges does.
This is obviously false. Imagine that you were given two options to learn swordfighting.
1. Random swordfights where you could die.
2. An omnipotent omniscient being designs swordfight challenges with the goal of making you the best swordfighter.
Clearly under #2 you would emerge the better sword fighter. Under #1 you would be dead.
You have to posit something unique about “soul building”.you have yet to define soul building in a sphere way, so please do that.
Also, what “soul-building” happens to conscious animals that are tortured in conditions outside of their control or comprehension then promptly thrown in a blender and eaten?
> Perhaps being in an indifferent world builds our connections with others.
I’ll answer each point, but it seems like a huge problem with this is that an indifferent God would inspire indifference in man. If indifferent plausibly leads to infinite value, perhaps I shouldn’t care at all. Intervening could actually be infinitely bad because it could reduce soul building through suffering!
With this theodicy you DON’t get to say “god build the world perfectly so any deviation will take you further away from perfection”. Instead you claim that the world is random, and is this very far from perfect. One could reasonably be indifferent and say that they’re increasing “soul-building” or whatever, since lots of indifferent is good, and we don’t know that we are at the right level of indifference.
> First, the fact that our lives have some element of randomness, where everything isn’t set by God makes it so that our relationships may be more valuable. God designing the world specifically to be such that specific people form maximally valuable relationships might rob the relationships of some of their value, in a way akin to arranged marriage.
1. This requires denying your version of utilitarianism.
2. This is faux randomness. Imagine if your parents arranged a marriage with someone, but decided you would consummate it in three years. In the meantime they let you do whatever you want, except they intervene whenever *they* want in order to make sure that you’re interested in their choice. This is like your theodicy. The choice to make things “random” was God’s, the choice to make things “Intelligible” was God’s, as was the determination of what’s sufficient for humanity to understand God. The world was made in a way that we wouldn’t clearly reject God (atheism isn’t as obvious as induction). This is not “randomness”! It robs value in the same way you posit.
3. Do you believe some people cannot form a relationship with God? If the answer is no, then everything seens preordained, clearly triggering this. If the answer is no, you have to justify evil for those people.
> Finally, were we to be in a relationship with God, it might be infinitely more intense and thus crowd out our other relationships.
This is a really pathetic “omnipotent” God if he can’t annihilate a debatable constraint of human psychology when infinite value is on the line. Your contention has to be that limited friend-making is beyond GOD’s power to change. That is farcical.
> There might be something valuable about us working to better the world alongside God or, more broadly, working with God to achieve things.
Working “alongside” someone who could remove all your problems and finish the work single-handedly, but who chooses not to for reasons you will never be given? Sounds terrible.
> it’s valuable for us to freely choose God. But that requires that we be apart from God in some broad sense
1. Would you say that you “freely choose” to believe in evolution? I would say so, yet we are probably not fundamentally separate from evolution!
2. God is preordaining things! You say that in your very next sentence when you admit God would have to specifically tailor a world to make things comprehensible and his existence conceivable!
3. If we don’t freely choose God, what happens to us? Does he kill us? Are we forced to? Either answer undermines this argument.
> predicting indifference, excepting that we would exist and have scientific and moral knowledge.
In conclusion, you have come up with an arbitrary hypothesis purely in order to fit the data. According to you, arbitrariness is very big bad. You should reject this!
I think this theodicy is substantially weaker than your arguments for things like non-infinite SIA.
Last point: doesn’t this contradict your declaration that God creates an unboundedly infinite number of people?!?!?
Leave shorter comments if you want me to respond to them! Let me just address some of it.
//Last point: doesn’t this contradict your declaration that God creates an unboundedly infinite number of people?!?!?//
No, the theodicy says God creates people!
//The “explanatory power” section of the argument is also laughable. Of course you’ll be able to come up with a theory that “explains” anything if you allow for God and also say that we can posit incomprehensible reasons for his actions.//
Well, if you have a nice simple theory that explains everything with just a few posits, that's a virtue of a theory.
//No! You’re gerrymandering “one thing” and then saying that it increases the likelihood of your hypothesis when the “one thing” is arbitrary. I can say that anything is “one thing”, including the broad category of evil and the very specific category of why I have to make breakfast this morning.//
But in that case, you're positing, for each of a large category of things, that they have some greater purpose. This doesn't do that! It posits just one fundamental kind of reason for one fundamental feature of the world.
//We are still vulnerable to skeptical theism, because if in fact there is “one thing” which is unknowable to us but which justifies all the evil in the world (which, according to you, has been net negative for the overwhelming majority of its relevant existence due to animal suffering), then we have no epistemic reason for believing that anything we do is valuable. Perhaps there is some hidden unknown reason which justifies it all.//
Possibility is not probability. If the theodicy is right then the value comes from the broadly indifferent universe, rather than any particular evil. Now we're positing just a moral reason for one kind of action--putting us in an indifferent universe.
If you want shorter comments, write articles with fewer mistakes!
But if you respond to anything, respond to this:
How is the world indifferent in a way that accesses your purported benefits, if God actively chose two things
1. The meta-choice of whether to make the world random
2. All the necessary physical conditions to make the world comprehensible, understandable, and open to God. See arranged marriage example from my initial comment.
> No, the theodicy says God creates people!
No shit. But you need an unboundedly infinite number of people. This theodicy cannot predict that, because such infinite creation would create at least as many people as there are truths, so only universes that fit your idea of indifference cannot get you there.
According to your interaction of SIA, then, the probability of you specifically existing is zero, so there is infinite evidence against this theodicy, unless you reject SIA, in which case you also lose your best argument for God.
> Well, if you have a nice simple theory that explains everything with just a few posits, that's a virtue of a theory.
A. No. See your continued refusal to even engage with my solipsistic comments. You are justified in that because the simplest theory that explains everything has no power if it’s arbitrary.
B. You admit your theory is arbitrary. See the first comment on this post by Both Sides Brigade.
> But in that case, you're positing, for each of a large category of things, that they have some greater purpose. This doesn't do that! It posits just one fundamental kind of reason for one fundamental feature of the world.
Please describe what makes something “fundamental”. For example, why isn’t a “reason for evil” “one thing” when “indifference to evil” is.
Large category of things makes no sense. Indifference can be framed as a “large category of things”. I can list out every animal being pointlessly tortured.
> If the theodicy is right then the value comes from the broadly indifferent universe
Bulldog. Indifference isn’t intrinsically valuable. It’s valuable instrumentally. The valuable thing is our relationship with God. One could rationally conclude that, if God being indifferent is best for our relationship with god for each of the 6 reasons you suggest, being indifferent to other humans might also improve those Humam’s relationship with God for much the same reasons
You're nowhere near good enough at this to be as smug as you are.
Brutal but accurate.
Sorry, you get that I was talking to you, right?
I think it was a mea culpa
Matthew is dramatically better than me at debating philosophy. If he spent just two hours with me, I would be metaphorically crucified for my atheism. Engaging with him in an overly smug manner is fun for precisely that reason!
All of these supposed reasons why evil exists in a theistic reality imply that God has limitations of some sort. For example, with soul-building or building relationships, couldn't God just wirehead us to already have these things if he's truly omnipotent? If God were entirely omnipotent and omnibenevolent with no limitations at all, and if Benthamite utilitarianism is the objectively correct morality, paradise would already exist and everything would be hedonium. If he can't do these things, then he isn't omnipotent, and therefore isn't the ultimate source of reality.
Meh. It would be better to question whether evil is actually evil. Set aside that evil that people cause now, and focus on natural evil. Maybe illness, natural disasters, predators etc. are not a bad thing, rather your utilitarianism is overly suffering-focused. Would a world without predators not just be boring? Maybe the programmer of this simulation wants an exciting show.
A very thoughtful and intelligent take on a topic that I, as a Christian, give much thought to. And I'd agree on much of what you bring up.
I think that it's not puzzling God permits some evil (natural and human caused). Obviously if there's free will you are going to have the choice of evil or free will would mean nothing, and in addition, good, and love , would not be real either. And yes this world in part must be a soul-shaping experience.
And agree, the adversity of the world creates relational strength. Shared adversity creates deep bonds.
I don't think it's possible to gauge the extent to which the universe is indifferent versus God intervening. I think He intervenes pretty often, not just in the obvious miracle accounts (and there are fair numbers of credible ones on YouTube alone even allowing room for phony ones). For all we know God tweaks our experiences pretty often to meet his agenda for our development or whatever.
But I do understand the atheist position here. If there were not other factors I regard as proofs I'd join them.
I'll just make one more quick point
>By predicting God wants to equip us with the faculties to discover the broad contours of our world, it predicts the world’s finely-tuned discoverability, the widespread sense of God, moral+modal+mathematical knowledge, psychophysical harmony, fine-tuning, and so on.
God could bypass setting up a world and just alter our epistemic attitudes. Whether or not we believe we discovered something, the benefits we reap from that are not dependent on the things we discovered, but on our other attitudes and judgments. For example, imagine two people, one of which reaches the city of El Dorado before the other, but both of which believe that they are the first to discover it. They never conduct any empirical tests to see whether they "really" discovered it, but both enjoy the cognitive benefits of thinking they are the first to "discover" it, even though one of them was "really" second to discover it. It's not clear to me what difference the city of El Dorado having the intrinsic property "not discovered" when the first person laid eyes on it but "already discovered" when the second person laid eyes on it could make, even in principle, without it impinging on the two persons' epistemic states. And the world we find ourselves in is the El Dorado world, because we can always construct alternate theories and rerender something previously known as a new discovery in a new framework.
The Objectively Beneficial Stalker Argument
I am stalking a woman. She lives in constant paranoia, is in danger from my violent actions, has to take precautions to avoid me that drastically lower her quality of life, and she has decided to to get a restraining order from the court filed against me. While I am stalking her, I do so out of an obsessive compulsion, so I also face many of the negatives that come with carrying out this crime - I am frequently pepper sprayed, assaulted by her protectors (police officers, ex-boyfriends), and have a criminal suit filed against me.
During the trial, the judge is commenting on the nature of mine and the woman's relationship by going over the evidence - it is dysfunctional, abusive, dangerous, neither the woman nor I (due to the stalking being my obsessive compulsion) want the relationship to continue or evaluate it positively. Just before the judge is going to approve the restraining order, my beautiful lawyer Bentham's Bulldog luckily interjects, "Ah, but you haven't considered whether their relationship has any ~objective~ value. ~Objective~ value doesn't depend on the subjects' preferences about relationships, their perception of how their current relationship is going, or even on anything that causally interacts with them. Their relationship is merely superficially negative, but it could still be the case, unbeknownst to them and completely outside of their ability to judge based on the quality of the interactions between them, that their relationship is objectively valuable." Stunned by the last minute defense, the judge dismisses the trial due to insufficient evidence that my stalking the woman is destructive to our relationship, and the whole world stands up and claps.
>Perhaps being in an indifferent world, one whose features resemble the typical godless world that contains us and where we can know about the broad features of the world, strengthens our relationship with God. To consider an analogy: your relationship with your eventual spouse might be strengthened by the fact that you spent time without them. Having time without someone might strengthen your relationship with them. Similarly, time spent in a world apart from God might strengthen one’s eventual relationship with God, a relationship that is of infinite value.
This is effectively just global skepticism. I can't be sure of the quality of my relationships with others, I can't trust whether pain is actually bad for me, I can't trust ANY of my evaluations, because God might actually be deceiving me and actually it's all good from God's perspective. I propose this alternative schema for making sense of relationships: My relationships are good or bad based on mine and the other persons' perceptions of the relationship - if we both think it's fine, it's fine - no further fact can discount this one unless it alters our perception of the relationship. (Relationships are based on beliefs.) If I perceive that I lack a relationship with God - by considering the various ways I've interacted with others in my relationships and how I haven't interacted with God at all - I simply lack the relationship with God, just the same as I lack the relationship with Santa Claus or Plato or other people I don't know and have never met and thus can't be in a relationship with. This account has the benefit that rather than a relationship being something inscrutable and completely outside of the participants' control and seemingly unrelated to the interactions between the participants (and thus subject to unlimited metaphysical speculation), it is embedded in their very form of life.