Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Problem of Evil (2015)

plato.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 84 posts

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#31

Post by breuleux »

exo-pla-net wrote: post #18
breuleux wrote: post #5

It seems kind of presumptuous to think that God's conception of morality would bear any similarity with ours. Presumably God created what It considers to be the perfect world and therefore everything that happens in it is good according to God's own definition of goodness, including torturing babies (if and when it happens -- and when it doesn't happen, then it is good that it doesn't). Perhaps God never had any inte…

Sure, a deity could believe that children dying from painful diseases is righteous and good: perhaps it finds it entertaining, and it believes the greatest good is its own amusement. That's a good argument for atheism. Because if such a god is real, we're in a waking nightmare we'd best bury our collective heads about, for our psychological wellbeing.

I don't think it's necessarily as sinister as that. Perhaps God is simply an engineer who loves designing systems that straddle the line between order and chaos and believes that the laws of physics are supremely perfect and anything that proceeds from these laws is good. Perhaps they find the process of evolution breathtaking beautiful, and the cruelty of natural selection is lost on them. Perhaps they can't understand or relate to our experience any better than we can understand the experience of an ant.

It is entirely pointless to worship such a God, but I wouldn't say it's a nightmare that it exists.

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#32

Post by liberalbias998 »

throw0101a wrote: post #21
liberalbias998 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of discussion usually gets trapped in discussions about God allowing Evil in order to allow free will; but that is an evasion; especially since the universe is probably deterministic; and consciousness is probably an illusion. The problem of evil; is logically caused by the existence of life that strives and competes within an environment of finite resources. Give us a universe where all the beings are powe…

> This sort of discussion usually gets trapped in discussions about God allowing Evil in order to allow free will; but that is an evasion; especially since the universe is probably deterministic; and consciousness is probably an illusion. If you actually think the universe is deterministic, then cross the street without looking both ways. If you were "meant" to get hit by a car, looking won't matter anyway; if you ar…

Because the universe is deterministic; I was taught the highway code by my mother as a child.

I agree that in a less competitive universe a being could still behave in a way that others find impolite; however you are just describing competition for non physical things; it is still competition; it could still be eliminated by God.

In this universe our daily existence depends on the physical suffering of other beings.

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#33

Post by enugu »

david422 wrote: post #13
tovej wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Following this argument, nobody is culpable for any crime they may commit, because their behavior is fully determined by their biology and environment. Try that in a court. Evil is a perfectly straightforward concept. It may have many definitions but it's easy to conceive of one, e.g.: willingly making others suffer unjustly. The concept of evil is quite different from what is being argued in the source material. The…

> Following this argument, nobody is culpable for any crime they may commit, because their behavior is fully determined by their biology and environment. Try that in a court. It's pretty simple. If you have no choice but to commit murder because your fate is predetermined, the court is also predestined to put you in jail.

This is indeed a standard response. But one issue is that courts do make exceptions for provably insane persons from being convicted of crimes. Nor do they punish accidental deaths as severely as intentional crimes.

When all actions are an outcome of environment(inherited or cultural), the non-trivial issue is to make a clear demarcation in different kinds of influence on a person who commits a crime.

A natural process which flows through conscious reasoning and motivation is different from a uncontrollable malfunction in the mind.

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#34

Post by foobiekr »

exo-pla-net wrote: post #18
breuleux wrote: post #5

It seems kind of presumptuous to think that God's conception of morality would bear any similarity with ours. Presumably God created what It considers to be the perfect world and therefore everything that happens in it is good according to God's own definition of goodness, including torturing babies (if and when it happens -- and when it doesn't happen, then it is good that it doesn't). Perhaps God never had any inte…

Sure, a deity could believe that children dying from painful diseases is righteous and good: perhaps it finds it entertaining, and it believes the greatest good is its own amusement. That's a good argument for atheism. Because if such a god is real, we're in a waking nightmare we'd best bury our collective heads about, for our psychological wellbeing.

Funny. Wathammer 40000 actually sort of follows this logic in the atheist 30k era. The problem is the evil gods find a way to make themselves evident.

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#35

Post by pmoriarty »

danuker wrote: post #28

> How would one go about establishing via a purely deductive argument that a deer’s suffering a slow and painful death because of a forest fire, or a child’s undergo lingering suffering and eventual death due to cancer, is not logically necessary either to achieve a greater good or to avoid a greater evil? Gods can't make a square circle, even if they're omnipotent? They could rewrite our brains to just make the word…

"Gods can't make a square circle, even if they're omnipotent?"

I'm not really seeing what this has to do with what you quoted about the existence of suffering.

Still, to go on that tangent about God being unable to make a square circle...

God's omnipotence (ie. being all-powerful) means they can do anything... even things that might appear contradictory to the puny human intellect.

And what seems contradictory to the puny human intellect and the entire universe being such that squares aren't circles are themselves supposedly due to God's will.. which could be otherwise.

So we could very well live in a world of square circles if God wished it so.

It might not make sense to us, but God is not limited to only doing what makes sense to us.

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#36

Post by liberalbias998 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #17
liberalbias998 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of discussion usually gets trapped in discussions about God allowing Evil in order to allow free will; but that is an evasion; especially since the universe is probably deterministic; and consciousness is probably an illusion. The problem of evil; is logically caused by the existence of life that strives and competes within an environment of finite resources. Give us a universe where all the beings are powe…

"especially since the universe is probably deterministic" Not at the subatomic level.. and the subatomic level may well have some significant impact on (or even be responsible for) consciousness. "consciousness is probably an illusion" This is an extremely controversial claim which is far from settled. We can't even settle on a definition of consciousness. "The problem of evil; is logically caused by the existence of…

The hurricane events described are only natural in this Universe; there is no reason that another Universe would have harmful natural events; assuming it is created to be perfect by God.

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#37

Post by paulryanrogers »

heythereguy wrote: post #27

This is how I see it. I’m actually open to a creator of our simulation or our reality simply because it’s the best explanation we have right now. Existence coming out of nothing is ridiculous. We really have no clue how we even got here. Maybe our existence could be proven scientifically down the line, but right now creation is actually the most feasible to my mind, strange enough. So with that the problem of evil co…

> I’m actually open to a creator of our simulation or our reality simply because it’s the best explanation we have right now.

This was my position as I was leaving Christianity. Now though I think it's more likely that matter and the laws of physics have just always existed, possibly an infinite amount or to an infinitely small scale. While that may seem difficult to comprehend I think it's much simpler than omnipotent turtles all the way down.

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#38

Post by pmoriarty »

heythereguy wrote: post #27

This is how I see it. I’m actually open to a creator of our simulation or our reality simply because it’s the best explanation we have right now. Existence coming out of nothing is ridiculous. We really have no clue how we even got here. Maybe our existence could be proven scientifically down the line, but right now creation is actually the most feasible to my mind, strange enough. So with that the problem of evil co…

"Existence coming out of nothing is ridiculous. We really have no clue how we even got here. Maybe our existence could be proven scientifically down the line, but right now creation is actually the most feasible to my mind, strange enough."

But if God created the world then what created God? If you're ok with the answer that God always existed, why wouldn't you be ok with the universe always existing (thereby having no need for a creator God)?

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#39

Post by tablespoon »

liberalbias998 wrote: post #9
pmoriarty wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Problem of Evil is not really about "evil" people doing "evil" things... or at least only tangentially so. It's about why there is suffering (or imperfection even) in a world created by an ostensibly omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent god. Terrorism would qualify as being one of the causes of suffering, as would completely impersonal forces such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and diseases. If god exists and real…

This sort of discussion usually gets trapped in discussions about God allowing Evil in order to allow free will; but that is an evasion; especially since the universe is probably deterministic; and consciousness is probably an illusion. The problem of evil; is logically caused by the existence of life that strives and competes within an environment of finite resources. Give us a universe where all the beings are powe…

> Give us a universe where all the beings are powered by an infinite source of energy so they don't need to chase, catch, kill and eat each other.

> Problem solved; would have expected God could figure this out.

Why not go further? A universe that's entirely static populated by entities frozen in some joyous state has no evil. Hell, a universe that doesn't exist doesn't have evil either.

It's often pretty easy to optimize for one quality.

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#40

Post by smeej »

pmoriarty wrote: post #35
danuker wrote: post #28

> How would one go about establishing via a purely deductive argument that a deer’s suffering a slow and painful death because of a forest fire, or a child’s undergo lingering suffering and eventual death due to cancer, is not logically necessary either to achieve a greater good or to avoid a greater evil? Gods can't make a square circle, even if they're omnipotent? They could rewrite our brains to just make the word…

"Gods can't make a square circle, even if they're omnipotent?" I'm not really seeing what this has to do with what you quoted about the existence of suffering. Still, to go on that tangent about God being unable to make a square circle... God's omnipotence (ie. being all-powerful) means they can do anything... even things that might appear contradictory to the puny human intellect. And what seems contradictory to the…

The flaw here isn't in God's omnipotence. It's in the nonsensical question formulation.

I can make up whatever words I want and put them in a syntactically correct structure, but that doesn't mean the sentence means anything.

"Can God tell a true lie?"

No, of course not, not because God isn't omnipotent, but because it's a nonsense question. There can no more be true lies than four-sided triangles or objects that are immovable in the face of an irresistible force.

The flaw is in the question.

Post reply on HN