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The Problem of Evil (2015)

plato.stanford.edu

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Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#41

Post by pmoriarty »

liberalbias998 wrote: post #36
pmoriarty wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

The Problem of Evil concerns this universe.

Why is there suffering in this universe? Why is this universe imperfect?

The possibility that another universe could be better actually argues against god being omnipotent, perfectly benevolent, or omniscient.

The standard answer from theists is that this is "the best of all possible worlds" -- a position that Voltaire satirized in Candide.

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#42

Post by liberalbias998 »

tablespoon wrote: post #39
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…

> 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 opt…

I agree; what I am trying to say; is there is no excuse for God. People have spent centuries making excuses most of them much smarter people than me. In a 21st century context it seems apparent that Gods possible excuses for creating a universe that mandates suffering are running out.

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#43

Post by andrei_says_ »

alex_young wrote: post #3

If you can get to the understanding that all of the outcomes in human thought and behavior are based on inputs of some level, be they genetic, or nurture, or through interaction with others or impacts from the natural environment, then it seem truly odd to believe in a concept like evil.

This is a beautiful way to put it. Contemporary Advaita provides many pointers, one of which is to observe your choices and try to find a force independent of observable causality chains.

Unpacking what we call “free will” in this way is a really sobering experience, leading to automatic compassion for everyone.

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#44

Post by smeej »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #37
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 omnipote…

It is omnipotent turtles all the way down, though. "Matter and the laws of physics" is "turtles" just as much as "God" is "turtles."

Choosing to believe the turtles are impersonal doesn't alleviate the problem of the turtles.

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#45

Post by deertick1 »

Just wanted to chime in here with a book suggestion : "The Problem if Pain" by C.S. Lewis.

Tackles this problem from a christian apologista perspective. Its about as intellectual an analysis as you are going to get on this subject matter. I personally don't agree with 100% of it, but Lewis always presents arguments I never would have considered otherwise. Worth a read.

Also, listening to scientists and engineers discuss issues of morality (e.g. this comments section) is always a painful experience. The analytical mind is not often applied appropriately to matters of philosophy. At least thats my impression.

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#46

Post by pmoriarty »

smeej wrote: post #40
pmoriarty wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Claiming that a question is nonsensical doesn't make it so.

Such questions are meaningful to the people that ask them. Someone who asks "can God make a square circle?" is unlikely to consider it to be equivalent to asking "gjqrio jtioajfs dklfjl?" (ie. a sentence made of words which really are meaningless)

You can claim that these questions are meaningless, but then you have to prove why.. and there's been no such proof, just an assertion.

Maybe you intended a proof by definition? That is to say that you want to maintain that any question that involves a contradiction is meaningless by definition? Well, that's an assumption, and the person you're speaking with doesn't have to grant that assumption or agree to that definition.

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#47

Post by exo-pla-net »

breuleux wrote: post #31
exo-pla-net wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 underst…

You'd have to impose a lot of conditions on such a god to make it not nightmarish.

Without a god, we control our own destiny. A lot of things are currently awful, but with enough human ingenuity, we can overcome them.

On the other hand, if our fate is determined by a god driven by its own motives, we have lost control of our destinies to something that evidently doesn't care about us.

We would be ants on the back of a whale that might decide to dive at any moment, doomed perhaps to see our loved ones swirl away screaming into the watery void, on whale's whim, pointless.

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#48

Post by pmoriarty »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #43
alex_young wrote: post #3

If you can get to the understanding that all of the outcomes in human thought and behavior are based on inputs of some level, be they genetic, or nurture, or through interaction with others or impacts from the natural environment, then it seem truly odd to believe in a concept like evil.

This is a beautiful way to put it. Contemporary Advaita provides many pointers, one of which is to observe your choices and try to find a force independent of observable causality chains. Unpacking what we call “free will” in this way is a really sobering experience, leading to automatic compassion for everyone.

"Contemporary Advaita provides many pointers, one of which is to observe your choices and try to find a force independent of observable causality chains."

How can we observe causality?

We can observe a sequence of events, but that one event causes another is not something we can observe.

See Hume's critique of causality for more on this.

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#49

Post by ikrenji »

nine_k wrote: post #11
alex_young wrote: post #3

If you can get to the understanding that all of the outcomes in human thought and behavior are based on inputs of some level, be they genetic, or nurture, or through interaction with others or impacts from the natural environment, then it seem truly odd to believe in a concept like evil.

This sort of removes any agency from humans. It's then easier to believe in a clockwork world where everything is predefined.

how do we know its not? if not a super deterministic clockwork, at least a probalistic one

Re: The Problem of Evil (2015)

#50

Post by breuleux »

pmoriarty wrote: post #29
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…

"It seems kind of presumptuous to think that God's conception of morality would bear any similarity with ours." If God's conception of morality is not equivalent to the human conception of morality, then what does it mean to claim that God is good? The fact is that a lot of people worship God in great part because they do think that God is good in the ordinary human sense: that he loves humanity, cares for them, want…

> If God's conception of morality is not equivalent to the human conception of morality, then what does it mean to claim that God is good?

Nothing I would describe as meaningful, but from what I recall of what (admittedly little) I've read of it, theological philosophy that's concerned about proving that God must be good comes disturbingly close to unironically destroying the concept of goodness. Because when you try to derive it from first principles like "something is good if it fills its intended purpose" or "something is good if it brings something closer to its ideal essence" you end up making it vague enough that the black plague might actually be good, you know.

> Saying that God is good in some unknowable and incomprehensible way that would allow for human suffering to exist just isn't a very satisfactory answer for a lot of believers, who continue to believe in a benevolent God who's good in a very human way.

You're absolutely right, this is a non-starter for believers, because their faith is marred with self-interest.

On the other hand, from a purely intellectual standpoint, it has to be a consideration. If the only options are atheism or belief in a conventionally moral supreme deity, that sort of suggests that the only reason to believe that God exists is if God rewards us, which is suspect, because reality doesn't care about our self-interest. This kind of blind spot can corrupt our reasoning.

For instance, a lot of theistic arguments, like fine tuning, the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, regardless of their intrinsic merits, basically say nothing about God's character. They couldn't. They don't operate at that level. But if you work under the assumption that a morally indifferent God is not an option, these arguments appear to imply far more than they actually do.

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