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Faith and Belief: Richard Dawkins evolves his arguments

latimes.com

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Re: Faith and Belief: Richard Dawkins evolves his arguments

#61

Post by jamesbritt »

foldr wrote: post #60
jamesbritt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't quite see what you're getting at here." Without first establishing the number of gods and their qualities, questions about how they deal with evil seems pointless.

Well now you're saying something quite different. Before, you said it was "necessary" to find out which (if any) gods exist before asking whether or not the existence of various kinds of god is compatible with the existence of evil. Now you're just saying that this particular sort of hypothetical question seems pointless to you. I can't argue with your lack of interest, but there is no reason to think that hypothetic…

"The question of whether or not evil is possible in a world created by a good and omnipotent God is basically equivalent to the question of whether or not it is logically possible for good to exist without evil."

No, not really. Apples and oranges.

"The problem doesn't really arise in any interesting way for the Gods of non-Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions."

Lack of imagination here. You really can't imagine various gods for whom the question of evil arises in any interesting way?

Re: Faith and Belief: Richard Dawkins evolves his arguments

#62

Post by foldr »

jamesbritt wrote: post #61
foldr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well now you're saying something quite different. Before, you said it was "necessary" to find out which (if any) gods exist before asking whether or not the existence of various kinds of god is compatible with the existence of evil. Now you're just saying that this particular sort of hypothetical question seems pointless to you. I can't argue with your lack of interest, but there is no reason to think that hypothetic…

"The question of whether or not evil is possible in a world created by a good and omnipotent God is basically equivalent to the question of whether or not it is logically possible for good to exist without evil." No, not really. Apples and oranges. "The problem doesn't really arise in any interesting way for the Gods of non-Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions." Lack of imagination here. You really can't imagine various…

>No, not really. Apples and oranges.

No, they come down to almost the same thing. If God is both good and omnipotent, it's obvious that evil should only exist if it is logically necessary for some amount of evil to exist in order for the maximum amount of good to exist. (God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to do things which are _logically_ impossible, such as creating a square circles, so if some degree of evil is a logically necessary corollary of maximal good, it follows that the best world that God can possibly make must still contain some evil.)

> You really can't imagine various gods for whom the question of evil arises in any interesting way?

It only arises in an interesting way for the kind of God I mentioned, so far as I can see. Can you suggest another kind of God for whom it arises? If God is not 100% omnipotent, we can put down the existence of evil to his inability to fix it. If he's not 100% good, we don't expect the world to be 100% good in the first place. I suppose you could argue that the world is in some sense "too evil" to have been created by a God who is (say) only 99% good, and pose the problem of evil in that way for a non-maximally-good God (and similarly for a non-maximally-potent God); but that seems like a pretty uninteresting variant. I think it is a fairly accurate historical statement that the problem of evil is really one that only came to be posed with the advent of monotheistic religions, which all have a broadly similar conception of god.

In any case, what would it matter if the problem of evil arose for other kinds of god? It would not make the hypothetical questions any less interesting. At the very least, it's a cute way of framing questions about good, evil and various kinds of necessity.

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