The Problem of Evil: Gratuity Included
March 30, 2007 § 67 Comments
Alexander Pruss at Right Reason adds an important point to discussion of the Problem of Evil.
Someone who asserts the problem of evil is asserting that God definitely must not exist, because God (if He did exist) would not allow certain things (call them E) to occur, and yet E actually does occur. Professor Pruss’ insight is that equating E to “evil” doesn’t do the necessary work in the inference. Rather, in order for the inference to work E has to represent gratuitous evil: evil from which no good comes at all, eternally. At least intuitively a perfectly good and omnipotent God would not permit things to occur when no good whatsoever comes from them and only evil comes from them: a perfectly good God would not (at least intuitively) permit gratuitous evil.
In an unrelated note on the same subject, a commenter is debating my position that the POE is self-negating. In my previous post on the subject a different commenter here took a similar position and I don’t think I addressed it as rigorously as it could be addressed. At issue is that both commenters seem to think that I am making a more general argument than I am in fact making. My contention is that any statement of the Problem of Evil is self-negating. My interlocutors have responded by claiming that the nonexistence of God is logically compatible with the existence of evil. That may even be true**, but “the noneexistence of God is logically compatible with the existence of evil” isn’t a statement of the POE. The POE is a claim that God definitely does not exist, inferred from the fact that evil things occur. It is not merely a claim that the existence of evil and the nonexistence of God are logically compatible.
** My inclination is to think that it isn’t so much true as incoherent, because it rests on the simultaneous premeses of existence and not-God; but it is either true or incoherent, it seems to me. In either case it isn’t a statment of the Problem of Evil.
Zippy Catholic 
Y’know, I’m not sure that I agree with the person who says that God’s existence is incompatible with even gratuitous evil, where “gratuitous” is related to consequences that follow after the evil–what “comes from” it. I still believe that the free will defense is the best response to the POE and must always be retained and not replaced with the claim (even when true) that God brings good _out of_ evil. God may have decided that it was most important to make free beings with causal efficacy in the world. If they then do evil, it’s not clear to me that God must always, to act in accordance with his character, “bring good out of” each evil act as a consequence. One could simply say that the evil was not “gratuitous” simply because God considered it better to have the free beings than not, regardless of what consequences came of it.And it does seem, aside from evil done to innocents, that there must be many millions of sins out of which God brings no good, because the person does not repent, damns himself, and so forth, and where “forgiveness” is not a relevant category.
<>I still believe that the free will defense is the best response to the POE and must always be retained and not replaced with the claim (even when true) that God brings good _out of_ evil.<>I guess I see free will as one of many goods. So it isn’t that I deny that argument so much as I think it may represent a supervenience of a more general condition. So this:<>One could simply say that the evil was not “gratuitous” simply because God considered it better to have the free beings than not, regardless of what consequences came of it.<>… perhaps really does cover all cases of <>moral<> evil. But even if it does, that still leaves open the question of tsunamis and diseases and such. Plus free will is a squirrely enough concept that if the argument against the POE doesn’t need to rest on it so much the better: it applies even to (either univocal or equivocal) determinists.<>…that there must be many millions of sins out of which God brings no good…<>That is a lot less clear to me. I suppose it depends on how interconnected and contingent the world actually is, and how much positive feedback (in the sense of the butterfly effect) there is in any given act. If some nameless peasant had sat on a different pile of straw in 1335 we probably wouldn’t be here at all (someone else would). And it isn’t just the big things that radiate out into history changing everything: even the smallest of things changes everything, from a far enough distance in time away.I’m still trying to process whether forgiveness is enough of a good in itself to justify allowing the evils that need to be forgiven. Like you I’m reluctant to adopt that premise uncritically without a lot more thought on it.
I’m willing to stand on the existence of free will. The heck with the determinists; they’re messed up theologically anyway. 🙂What bothers me about Alex’s approach is…well…several things. First of all, there seems to be the idea that _if_ we could really be sure that God brought no good consequence out of some evil, then the evil would be gratuitous and we’d have a major theodicy problem. I’m just not willing to grant that. It certainly seems to me prima facie clear that there are a lot of specific sins God probably isn’t bringing any consequential good out of. (For that matter, in the rape example, maybe _no_ child results.) Do I _have_ to believe that He must be doing so somewhere, somehow, maybe in some highly circuitous way, to defend Him? That just isn’t clear to me.Then, there is the idea that, as you bring up, the possibility of forgiveness and the attendant greatness of the soul achieved by the one forgiving is sufficient to justify allowing evil. As I said in the comments thread on RR, this would seem to have as a consequence that God could legitimately have allowed death and disease, and murder (perhaps by fallen angels or something) on *unfallen* man, because even unfallen Adam would become so much greater as a result. That in turn seems to downplay the biblical teaching of the centrality of the Fall in bringing evils upon mankind. So it seems like something more than just the possibility that the person would forgive is needed to justify God’s allowing evil to befall.Finally, I’ve always been wary of the idea that the world is better for evil-doing than without it because of some “teaching” thing that happens. That seems to me to downplay the notion that sin is contrary to God’s will, period. I mean, it’s not like God is sitting around secretly hoping for sin, saying, “That’s right, hit the guy! I know it’s bad, but then I’ll be able to bring so much _good_ out of it.”
Excellent post (as always), Zippy. I would only add, as a hack screenwriter and would-be dramatist, where in the world would Shakespeare, or Jerry Bruckheimer for that matter, have been without gratuitous evil?
Not that I’m suggesting that’s why God allows it or anything.🙂
<>…where in the world would Shakespeare, or Jerry Bruckheimer for that matter, have been without gratuitous evil?<>Yeah, and would we have ever had the < HREF="http://www.alabev.com/history.htm" REL="nofollow">Hymn to Ninkasi<>?Part of the point is that evil is (like existence itself) a <>mystery<>. The POE attempts to banish that mystery by negating God; but it fails to do so without also negating actual existence, including the actual existence of the person asserting it. I’m not claiming to have explained evil or justified its presence in our world; I’m just claiming to have refuted a particular argument against the existence of God (or really just to have pointed out that that argument is self-refuting).Lydia: I agree that “Adam would learn something” doesn’t (intuitively, for me) do the work required to justify God’s tolerance of evil: His standing back and allowing evil to unfold, despite the inherent blasphemy in any occurrence of evil in His created world. But my daughter’s sparkly little eyes do.
I don’t see how the conception and birth of the particular set of people we have can answer the POE, because there’s every reason to think that if God had prevented this or that evil, some different children would have been born instead. So, if a pregnant woman is murdered and God doesn’t prevent it, that child is _not_ born, though that may mean by some indirect route that a different child is born (say, if her husband remarries), who would not have been if the evil had not occurred. If my birth mother had not had the pre-marital affair that produced me, we wouldn’t have me and my beautiful daughters. But perhaps (while we’re conjecturing indirect consequences) she would have married sooner and had other children (who would have had children) all of whom don’t now exist. So the whole existence-of-people thing just seems to me like a wash. It comes out even, as far as we can tell. It’s not as though we can say things are better for the non-existence of child A and the existence of child B instead. We have one beautiful child and not a different one who would have existed had He prevented the evil. So if the _consequences_ of evil are what has to justify God, it seems to me like He’s still not off the hook. But I question whether God has to be justified in terms of the later consequences of allowing evil.
<>…some different children would have been born instead.<>But those are hypothetical ones. None of them are my daughter. And God loves my daughter even more than I do.<>It comes out even, as far as we can tell.<>Only if we can’t tell the difference between hypothetical people and actual ones. (Those other worlds may exist, for all I know; but <>this<> one exists because God loves <>these actual people<>.)Also, I’m not sure <>consequences<> are the best descriptor for Being: at the very least it can be a bit deceiving. Being-as-it-is is in some sense a consequence of God’s humility and therefore tolerance of evil, but Being-as-it-is isn’t an ordinary consequence.The notion that God loves any old abstractly possible group of people, as opposed to loving <>you<>, is I think an error. <>You<> are not interchangeable as a commodity (a wash) for any other abstract female human in God’s eyes. It isn’t that He loves communion with some abstract humans, and any humans will do. He loves <>us<>.I might have had another daughter in some abstractly possible world, but “some daughter in any abstractly possible world” isn’t a commodity that can be exchanged for my actual daughter.<>So if the _consequences_ of evil are what has to justify God, it seems to me like He’s still not off the hook.<>Only if “consequences” are viewed in some abstract terms that treat you and I as fungible with any other hypothetical beings. But that wouldn’t be love, would it?
Well, what about all the real children that have been murdered in evil acts? For example, God loves all the children who have been aborted _and_ their younger siblings who now exist but wouldn’t have been conceived in the first place if Mom hadn’t killed the older child. I don’t think we can say that the world is a better place having the younger siblings than having the older ones who were killed. So it still seems to me we have lots of evil acts that have resulted in the loss of real, concrete human beings and the conception of other real ones, and I wouldn’t want to be bound to defend God’s justice on the grounds of the good consequences overall of the situation.Another point: At the time a hundred years ago when Sam was thinking about whether to sin or not, we could say that both you (and your descendants) who resulted indirectly from Sam’s sin and the other descendants who would result if Sam didn’t sin in whatever way were equally “hypothetical.” Do we want to say that the world is the better for Sam’s sin because one set resulted rather than another?
<>Well, what about all the real children that have been murdered in evil acts?<>Is it better to die in a dumpster and enjoy the Beatific Vision than to never have existed at all? I think that may be one of those questions that isn’t as well-formed as it seems to be: an artifact of our ability to abstract away reality when we model it in our noggins.<>Do we want to say that the world is the better for Sam’s sin because one set resulted rather than another?<>I can’t say that it is better for “the world”, when the world is understood as some abstraction. But it is better for you and I, to be sure.
The child who died in a dumpster might have enjoyed the beatific vision anyway after living a full life and given and received joy and love with other humans in this world first. (And I thought Catholics believed unbaptized infants go to Limbo? Myself, I don’t know but hope they go to heaven.) It seems to me not better _for him_ to have died in this way than not to have been murdered, even though that meant that a younger sibling existed. God could have prevented the evil of that child’s murder and loved him during his life here on earth, as would other people. And besides, by _count_, I think it probable that sin has probably resulted in _fewer_ people’s being born and living out their lives, growing up and having children of their own. Think of all the aborted children who never have younger siblings, either.So I still just don’t see that we can justify God’s ways on the grounds of there being people who have existed as a result of sin and would not have otherwise. And why should that sort of consequence be the standard of God’s goodness, anyway?
<>And I thought Catholics believed unbaptized infants go to Limbo?<>Some do, some don’t. It isn’t a required doctrine.<>God could have prevented the evil of that child’s murder and loved him during his life here on earth, as would other people.<>The question though is whether that child, viewing eternity from the Beatific Vision, would or would not object to God’s choices of where not to intervene as something other than maximally loving.<>So I still just don’t see that we can justify God’s ways on the grounds …<>Well, again, I am not so ambitious as to attempt to justify God’s ways. My point is the much narrower one that the POE as an argument against God’s existence is self-refuting.
I _think_ your position is that a person who puts forward the POE has to be saying that he himself would have been better off not existing. Now, I agree that it makes no sense to say, “I would be better off not existing.” But I have a similar problem with saying, “I’m better off existing than never having existed.” The whole question as to whether I would or wouldn’t be better off not existing than existing makes no sense to me.But I don’t see that a person who says that God’s existence is incompatible with the evil that happens in our world is necessarily saying that he, personally, would be better off not existing. Couldn’t he just be looking at the thing as an abstract question: Is God’s existence or isn’t it incompatible with the evil found in our world?
<>[…]this would seem to have as a consequence that God could legitimately have allowed death and disease, and murder (perhaps by fallen angels or something) on *unfallen* man, because even unfallen Adam would become so much greater as a result.<>In my 18 years as a Catholic, I was taught that Catholics do not believe literally that Adam existed, and that the Genesis story was more of a metaphor (or poem, as one priest explained it.) Can someone more familiar with the Catechism explain this to me?
<>And God loves my daughter even more than I do.<>It could be that the POE establishes more about the nature of God than the existence of God. For example, based on our understanding of human nature and of history, we could assert that, despite God’s love for your daughter, the two of you would behave very differently if some terrible thing were about to befall her (I don’t think we need specifics.) You would probably do everything in your power to stop it, while God, based on existing evidence, would do nothing, despite his presumed omnipotence.Thus, perhaps the POE does not disprove God’s existence, but it does disprove the simplistic notion that God interferes in human affairs on a regular basis. Of course, if God does not reach his hand down to stop trains and murderers and painful deaths, then thousands of treacly inspirational email forwards would be bad theology. Is that possible?
Frankly, I think Phil brings up something very important:Christians may not believe that God stops tragedies on a regular basis, but they are committed to believing that he does so *sometimes*. The Psalms are full of pleas that God would “save me from the wicked man.” Scripture teaches that Jesus healed the sick and raised the dead. And Catholics (I’m Protestant) are committed as well to the miracles of those canonized as saints.So to me the greatest question of theodicy is this: Given that it isn’t contrary to God’s nature to prevent or reverse some tragedies, why doesn’t He prevent or reverse them all? And if we say (which I think is true) that He is committed to leaving a background of “business as usual” without miraculous interventions so that humans can use their free will with an expectation of causal efficacy in the world, then how the dickens does He decide when to intervene and when not to? Doesn’t it seem arbitrary to say, “I’ll heal these sick people but not ‘too many'”? How many is too many? The notion of God’s intervention at a “rate” that undermines the expectation of natural consequences of one’s actions is _intrinsically_ fuzzy, and I think this does create a theodicical problem.But I think it would be theologically *completely wrong* for either Catholics or Protestants to hold that God is Spinozistic and has bound himself never to help or deliver. That just isn’t what God has revealed himself to be.
Lydia,If we’re using revealed scripture as our evidence, it would seem that the nature of Divine interventions changed significantly over the course of history.At one point, God was speaking directly to people, intervening in visible, measurable ways, and evening sending his physical incarnation to interact with a handful of Middle Easterners. (Consider: the Apostles weren’t expected to muster the same kind of faith that we are; they had <>proof.<>)Today, to paraphrase a parody web site, many people pray for deliverance from cancer and believe that their prayers are answered, while anyone who prays to God to heal their amputated limb gets a “no.” A few things we might infer: that the modern God chooses never to do anything that would unequivocally, unambiguously prove his existence and his nature, and that some of the people who believe that God has caused their remission or somehow alleviated their suffering are wrong, and that he didn’t actually intervene.…or is that incorrect? Must we attribute all good to God’s direct intervention? As I see it, the POE doesn’t disprove God’s existence because nothing can do that. Either by supernatural design or by the evolution of the God-meme, God’s nature no longer has any quality that can be “disproven.” But the POE does point out the inconsistency in thanking God for the good actions that befall one in life and not blaming him for the bad.Might it be sacrilege to thank God for the good in your life, because it implies that he is responsible for the bad, too?
“Can someone more familiar with the Catechism explain this to me?”I am not as familiar with my Catechism as I should be, but I have investigated this subject – er, sort of. So I am neither being rigorous here, nor claiming a high level of certainty.That being said, I have – for a long time – understood that the creation story(s) of Genesis is of the *type* of literature we call myth. Myth, however, does not imply that it is not true. It is, in fact, true in deeply and profound ways. It simply uses a certain kind of language and symbolism to convey that intended Truth.That is from the Biblical side. It is my understanding that the true and literal existence of two human beings (referred to in Genesis as “Adam” and “Eve”) that committed original sin is firmly embedded in traditional knowledge. I believe it is even Tradition with a capital “T.”So I would not teach that Adam and Eve did not “literally” exist – even if the literature that tells there story is not of a “literal” type. But even more importantly than that, I would *never* relegate the story of the Creation and the Fall to being *merely* a metaphor or poem. (At least not with some major magisterial muscle flexing behind me.)Priests are here to feed the sheep. They are teachers of doctrine, but they are not authorities on doctrine. Unfortunately, there is a lot of egregious theology coming from priests these days. (Not to be interpreted as saying all priests or even a majority. Nor to imply anything about the individual status of their faith.)
Phil, sure, some people are doubtless wrong that God intervened in their cancer. Are all of them? I just don’t know. Yep, God seems to intervene a heck of a lot less now than he did during Jesus’ lifetime. But how much less? I don’t know. I’m not prepared to say that there’s some sort of rule that says, “After about 100 A.D., God promised himself and us never to do any more miracles.” And in fact, a lot of my prayers presuppose that at least he _might_ do one now. He’s a person, and we can only ask.But my belief in God depends chiefly upon the truth of various historical claims about his revelation of himself in Jesus Christ, and while these could certainly be shown to be probably false–so my belief is not a matter of blind faith–it isn’t the case that if God doesn’t do a miracle _now_, this is going to give me strong reason to think he doesn’t exist. So on my view, God’s existence is neither closed to evidential considerations nor based on the claim that he presently does miracles. But what I know about him doesn’t rule out his doing them now, either. I haven’t looked Adam and Eve up in the Catechism, and I’m not Catholic, but I certainly hope it isn’t taught de fide that Adam and Eve were definitely not real human beings. My guess is that maybe it’s taught by the Catholic Church that it would be “theologically okay” if they weren’t, and that some priests therefore teach that they definitely weren’t, but that no Catholic is required by the magisterium to believe that they weren’t. ‘Zat right, Zippy?
Lots of interesting stuff to comment on here when I get the chance. But on the factual point of Catholic doctrine w.r.t. a literal Adam I give you < HREF="http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius12/P12HUMAN.HTM" REL="nofollow">Humani Generis<>:<>When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which through generation is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.<>
<>Given that it isn’t contrary to God’s nature to prevent or reverse some tragedies, why doesn’t He prevent or reverse them all?…How many is too many? The notion of God’s intervention at a “rate” that undermines the expectation of natural consequences of one’s actions is _intrinsically_ fuzzy, and I think this does create a theodicical problem.<>Only on the assumption that we <>deserve<> any intervention at all. What are you trying to do, Lydia, let Heather MacDonald into the conversation?The same goes for Phil’s observation, that <>the POE does point out the inconsistency in thanking God for the good actions that befall one in life and not blaming him for the bad.<>It is possible to thank God for the great gift of life and love without seeking to blame him for the evil that comes our way, as though true gratitude could not exist but in the absence of a need to blame, or unless that evil were known for a certainty to be undeserved. There are even some (better men than I) who thank him for the evil as well.I’m with Zippy on the self-negation thing. “The POE is a claim that God <>definitely does not exist<>, inferred from the fact that evil things occur.” I guess it’s saying that, <>if<> there is a God, there can be no evil. Since there is evil, there is no God. What I find interesting about it is what it admits without saying: that if there is a God, he must be good. The POE apologists don’t want God and they don’t want evil, but if they would rid us of the former, they must be thankful for the latter.
I do think the probabilistic POE I raised is not logically impossible to overcome. For one thing, there’s so much _other_ evidence for God’s existence. And the thing about a probabilistic POE is that it is so much weaker than a logical one–that is, it makes no attempt to say that evil is strictly inconsistent w/ God’s existence, only that we would “expect less evil overall” or something like that if God exists, so that the quantity of allowed evil is taken to be _some_ evidence against God’s existence. At the risk of being branded a heretic, I think there is some evidence there against God’s existence but that it is overwhelmed by evidence for. And the logical POE, I think, doesn’t work because of the free will defense.I’m not at all sure we have to “deserve” to be helped in some special way. We don’t think that ourselves when a child is about to be attacked: “Well, I’m not sure that little girl deserves to have me stop the guy who is about to shoot her.” Here I do think that it’s theologically correct that the evil done there is in a strong sense against God’s will and that he, in a sense, restrains himself from intervening in every case to stop it for reasons that don’t apply to us, but not because the little girl “doesn’t deserve” to be rescued.
<>only that we would “expect less evil overall” or something like that if God exists, so that the quantity of allowed evil is taken to be _some_ evidence against God’s existence<>I don’t see how we can concede this ‘matter of degrees’ argument without losing it. From the POE point of view, If God can allow “less evil”, then he should allow none at all. If the presence of evil is <>any<> evidence against God’s existence, they only need one instance of it to make their case.<>I’m not at all sure we have to “deserve” to be helped in some special way.<>Neither am I, because that’s not quite what I said. I said that the only reason we’d have to blame God for our evil circumstances is that we knew <>for a certainty<> that they were undeserved. Neither of us believes that the aborted child deserved it. And the girl in your example we are morally obligated to help, to do good for her. But the Fall of Man does not tell us that this person deserves x amount of evil. It tells us only that the whole race is under a curse, the consequences of which (in this life) are unjustly doled out. If your little girl indeed got shot, it might appear to us as an instance of entirely gratuitous, irredeemable evil. The question is not whether I should have tried to save her, but whether God should have miraculously intervened. The answer can be yes only if we admit the POE’s premise that such evil is incompatible with God’s existence, and I don’t think we should ever admit even a hint of it. It’s not evil that is gratuitous, but grace.Btw, I’m not clear how your ‘free will defense’ answers Zippy’s tsunami problem.
Well, obviously, God _can_ allow “less evil.” That is, in any given case every Christian should believe that it’s His “option” as it were to intervene, that He _might_ choose to do it. It’s not like He’s bound never to do so.But I think you may be aiming at a response that is frequently made by us Christians to what’s called the “evidential problem of evil” (as distinct from the logical POE). That response is that the person making the argument can’t in any principled way point to some amount of evil and say, “God shouldn’t allow more than _that_ much.” The idea is that once the logical POE is abandoned, there is no way to get any purchase on any version of the POE at all.My own theory here is that one could put together an “expected amount of evil allowed by God” by using Biblical accounts overall. In the Bible, God allows some evil–quite a lot, in fact–but intervenes to prevent it not only some of the time but, it looks like, with a greater frequency than He prevents it in the centuries since about, oh, say 100 A.D. So I suppose one could take that frequency and say something like this: “That frequency is the expected frequency of divine intervention to prevent evil for the Judeo-Christian God revealed in the Bible. Since we seem to have a lower frequency of intervention in the world as we observe it outside of the pages of Scripture, this is some evidence that the Bible is untrue and that the God revealed therein doesn’t exist.”That would at least give some principled way to say “how much evil we could expect God to prevent” instead of just vague hand-waving.The Christian has a response, of course, in terms of the purposes of God being more urgent and so forth for many of the miracles in the Bible. I have to admit that this doesn’t seem to apply to _all_ of them, and that this causes me to have some doubt about some of the more “weird” miracles reported, e.g., for the prophet Elisha. The ax-head floating is a favorite whipping boy of mine. It just seems too much like God’s speaking to me to tell me how to fix my car or something silly like that. But _for the most part_ miracles in the Bible are fitted into a “big story” context. This is certainly true of the crossing of the Red Sea, Christ’s miracles of healing, and those of the Apostles. So we respond that God had a particular reason there, but that in the main it’s “better” that there be (as you put it to me once) a background of regularity. Then we give various reasons why this is better, and so forth.So it’s not as though there is no answer to the probabilistic POE. And of course one of the best answers is just _other_ evidence _for_ God’s existence.My only point is that the evidential POE seems a lot more reasonable to me than the logical one.For tsunamis (and cancer, and birth defects, and…), I think you have to go with the curse, which comes back to free will–Adam and Eve’s. Dang ’em. Not that I have (because we aren’t given) a detailed metaphysical explanation for why their sin brought natural evil upon man, but God says it did, so that at least has to be taken seriously as an answer.
It seems like the POE doesn’t work as a “proof” because the nature of what is being disproven is so amorphous. The POE can be applied to any God who is posited to be omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent, not just to the God of Jewish and Christian understanding. We can say that “If God exists, he is not a being who stops earthquakes from killing babies,” but the response to this statement is, inevitably, “God does not need to stop earthquakes from killing babies because of X.” X can be any one of a number of theories based on personal conjecture or interpretation of the Scriptures.Perhaps, rather than treating POE as a proof, it could be viewed as an evidential statement in a larger argument, such as “During my lifetime, the behavior of God has been consistent with that of a being who is imaginary.” This does not prove God’s nonexistence, but for some agnostics may be enough to decide that the data is inconclusive.
<>The POE can be applied to any God who is posited to be omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent, not just to the God of Jewish and Christian understanding.<>I agree with that: that is to say, I don’t think the POE is intended to be an argument against Yawheh specifically, but against any pan-omni creator of the universe.<>Perhaps, rather than treating POE as a proof, it could be viewed as an evidential statement in a larger argument…<>I suppose the evidentiary value depends on how much one consideres onesself to know specifically about the nuts and bolts of creating universes in general and the specific universe which gives rise to Phil Thibedeaux in particular. As a matter of theodicy this is the best of all possible worlds for Phil Thibedeaux, at least up to the moment of his conception, because it is the one in which he comes into existence. Whether that constitutes evidence of God’s belevolence, malevolence, existence, or nonexistence probably depends a great deal on what one thinks of Phil Thibedeaux.
<>Well, obviously, God _can_ allow “less evil.”<>Yes, He can. But to the POE apologist, that won’t be permissible. It’s either all (there is no God) or nothing (there <>might<> be a God and, if so, he is good).<>But I think you may be aiming at a response that is frequently made by us Christians to what’s called the “evidential problem of evil” (as distinct from the logical POE).<>I think you’re probably right.
Hello Mr Zippy,I don’t get this POE stuff, I mean it’s all a bit adolescent to me. It’s a bit like a teenager daughter saying to her father: “you must hate me becuase your not going to let me go out tonight”. Really the whole argument boils down to following: God doesn’t exist because the world isn’t the way I expect it to be. Talk about the hubris!For what it’s worth, I’m with Lydia on the matter of free will as an important component of the POE. There is however another aspect of God’s existance which needs to be taken into account, and that is the FOM otherwise known as the Fact of Mercy.All of us want evil men to be punished with the exception of ourselves; we want a second chance. A completely just and mercilless God would wipe us out the moment we practiced evil, no chance for redemption. Evil exists because we have a capacity to choose it, in an enviroment which is overseen by a God who wants to spare the rod as much as possible. It is strange, but I think it’s Gods Mercy which, in a perverse way allows evil to exist.I think it is in the book of Revleation, where it is written that men would be amazed at Gods mercy towards sinners. This line gives me the heebie jeebies, for it implies that there there is going to be amazing amount of sin that God did not act on immeadiately. This means that there is going to be a hell of a lot of gratutitous evil as I’m not a man who is amazed easily.As I see it, Pruss’s line of reasoning is that evil is permitted because ulimtely there are good consequences. To put it politelty: that is crap. For it would imply that God willed evil in an indirect way. Thats new to my catechism.
<>God doesn’t exist because the world isn’t the way I expect it to be.<>Or because it isn’t the way it would be if I were God.<>Talk about the hubris!<>Yep. We do this all the time in the lower levels of existence too. Everyone knows how much better things would be if “I” were running them. (The only antidote to this hubris seems to be the sort that I’ve been fortunate – I suppose – enough to receive myself: the experience of screwing up running a small enterprise to enough of an extent to instill terror at the thought of me running anything important. And even that antidote doesn’t always seem to work).<>As I see it, Pruss’s line of reasoning is that evil is permitted because ulimtely there are good consequences.<>Well, sort of — but only if we are willing to call love and loved persons “consequences”. <>For it would imply that God willed evil in an indirect way.<>I don’t think so. I think it implies that God tolerates evil out of love. (I’m not sure there is any other sensible reason why God would tolerate evil; but then I am not God).
<>Really the whole argument boils down to following: God doesn’t exist because the world isn’t the way I expect it to be. Talk about the hubris!<>If our goal in a moral/philosophical debate is to avoid hubris, then the only stance to take is agnosticism, because any other position asserts that we as an individual know something that the other does not.You can’t rely on divine authority to get you off the hook if you believe in free will, because it’s still your choice to believe that your opinion about which of thousands of religious texts is true is not just the best opinion, but is the Truth. This might present a moral problem for some Christian sects, which are required to profess their beliefs as belief, not as possibilities.
To be honest, I just cannot agree with the claim that even the logical POE is self-contradictory. I think it doesn’t work and is answerable, but that’s a different thing. I mean, you don’t have to say that God could have created you without creating you. There’s nothing self-contradictory about saying, “It would have been a better world if so-and-so had not sinned and I had never been conceived.” It may be false or true as a statement, but it isn’t incoherent. Heck, maybe I’m a jerk, and the world really would be better off without me. Or maybe the goodness of my existence is outweighed by the evil of this or that sin (or some group of sins) that were causally necessary for me to exist. This seems especially plausible to me if it were to turn out (which as far as I know isn’t true) that someone was murdered and that I was conceived as a “replacement” for that person. It seems intuitively correct to say that that person’s being murdered can’t be outweighed by the wonderfulness of having me around instead.But whether such statements are true or false, they just don’t seem to me incoherent. Suppose one pushes it by saying that in that case the asserter of the POE is saying that the world would have been a better place if he’d never existed to assert it. Well, so? There’s no principle that says that statements are _false_ if the world would be a better place for their not being uttered. I can think of lots of true things I’ve said (grin) that would have been better left unsaid.
<>There’s nothing self-contradictory about saying, “It would have been a better world if so-and-so had not sinned and I had never been conceived.”<>Fair enough. “God was wicked to have allowed me or anyone else who exists now to exist” may not be logically self-contradictory, but it is certainly nihilistic.
<>If our goal in a moral/philosophical debate is to avoid hubris, then the only stance to take is agnosticism, because any other position asserts that we as an individual know something that the other does not.<>That would only be true if every claim were hubris, or if every claim were equally hubristic. It seems to me though that an aggressive agnosticism which claims that we can’t know anything is just as hubristic as the sort which claims to know what a perfectly good all-powerful God would definitely do or not do. Postmodernism and positivism are just two sides of the same “I’m not God so there is no God” coin.
I suppose one could say, “If there was a creator who caused people to exist, then He was wicked not to stop all of the ones who were going to do evil from harming innocent others right from the beginning with Cain and Abel. If that had happened, every person who exists as a direct or indirect result of deliberate harm to some innocent person would not exist. And one of those people may be I. But the world would be a better place.”I think that statement is wrong, and I _suppose_ one could call it “nihilistic,” though I’m not sure. But not quite as bad as saying that God should never have created human beings at all.
<>But not quite as bad as saying that God should never have created human beings at all.<>Well, again, only if “human beings” doesn’t include any of the seven billion or so actual ones alive now, including ourselves and everyone we love, all of whom without exception are relegated to nonexistence under this “less evil” plan. If that – the insistence on Nothing if I can’t have things my way, even if my way is incoherent – isn’t nihilism then I don’t know what is.
<>“God was wicked to have allowed me or anyone else who exists now to exist” may not be logically self-contradictory, but it is certainly nihilistic.<>If the person making the statement is asserting that the POE suggests that there is no God, how can they also be saying that He is wicked?I’ve got to agree with Lydia, although perhaps for different reasons. The POE can’t be used as proof of nonexistence because the assertion is unprovable (akin to saying “George Washington didn’t really love Martha.” No amount of historical, contemporary, or logical evidence can “prove” such a statement.) But it’s not self-contradictory to say that “the POE implies that there is no God.” And it’s not self-contradictory to say “the POE proves that there is no God;” it’s just not necessarily correct.It seems that your arguments about self-contradiction (or in this case, nihilism) keep bringing in God-dependent variables. If there’s no God, then God cannot be wicked. If there’s no Hell, I cannot consign myself to Hell.If the nature of the universe is unpleasant, and I am describing it as accurately as I can, that might suck, but you can’t fault me for attempting to describe it accurately.
<>It seems that your arguments about self-contradiction (or in this case, nihilism) keep bringing in God-dependent variables.<>The POE is an assertion about God. Discussion of bicycles necessarily entails “wheel dependent variables”.<>If there’s no God, then God cannot be wicked.<>But the person asserting the POE is necessarily asserting the wickedness of <>his own<> existence: because if there were a good God, that good God would not tolerate it.
<>The POE is an assertion about God. Discussion of bicycles necessarily entails “wheel dependent variables”.<>It’s not quite the same thing. If I asserted that Santa Claus did not exist, you couldn’t logically refute that by saying, “He must exist, because who else would take care of the elves?” The POE may be a “godless” statement, but that’s not the same as saying it’s an assertion of one’s own wickedness. You seem to be conflating “a world in which evil occurs” with “an evil world.” I could assert that random evil occurs in the world, and no higher power has any influence over it, but that’s not the same as saying I approve of this evil. (It’s also not a proof, because the potential nonexistence of God is an unprovable assertion.)It seems like you’re presenting a false dichotomy, as though disbelief in God is automatically wicked, and so asserting that disbelief is a wicked statement. You’re focusing on the “attack on God’s benevolence,” but the POE can be taken as evidence to disprove one aspect of a God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent. A person could assert that God may be benevolent but not omnipotent; what’s self-negating about that?
<>You’re focusing on the “attack on God’s benevolence,” …<>No, you have completely misunderstood me (which makes the length of our disputation more understandable). Someone who disbelieves in God and simultaneously asserts the incompatibility of this actual world with an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God is still asserting that his own – the person-who-asserts (PWA) – existence is evil (because he is asserting that an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God, if one existed, wouldn’t have tolerated the evil in this world necessarily prerequisite to the creation of the PWA). The POE is a conditional: actual belief or disbelief in God is independent of the assertion that <>if<> there was such a being as an omnipotent and omnibenevolent creator God He would never have created <>this<> world (and therefore the PWA).
Zippy,I thought I would just come over here to work this argument out. Wow! Lots of comments already.A version of your argument could read as follows:1. The person asserting the PoE expects that they would still exist in a world without evil.2. Since they are actualized in this world, and not some other one, that expectation is false.Heaven is by definition a perfectly good world that God created. Presumably, persons or their essences exist in that world.
Hi Step2,<>I thought I would just come over here to work this argument out.<>Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the “wait until your comment appears tomorrow” school of thread moderation.Your paraphrase is <>almost<> accurate; but it should be a reference to <>origins<> in order to capture my argument. Obviously I could (at least non-contradictorily) leave this world for another one any time, presuming the other one is actual.Pay careful attention to what happens to the term “I” in the following:(A) I could leave this world and enter another one.(B) I could have come into existence in a world without evil.In (A), the term “I” refers to the actual me, as an actual particular incarnate being typing here at my computer. In (B) the term “I” acts like it is referring to me, but it doesn’t really refer to me: it refers to some hypothetical being which does not exist (or if that being does exist he still isn’t <>me<>).As a matter of origins, <>I<> cannot be someone other than who I actually am. Remake my history and the <>I<> we are discussing isn’t really me, it is someone else. As a matter of ultimate (or intermediate future) destination though (the actual) <>I<> may well correspond to one of the hypotheticals we discuss: that is, I may end up in Heaven, Hell, Limbo, or even Toledo (though I’m not sure the last one really exists).
Hi Zippy,The part I have trouble with is that either your challenge is too broad and all counterfactual worlds are self-negating or it is too thin and has no bearing upon the outcome. If I say that I could not have come into existence in a world without quality Y, that would almost certainly be true, but it does not rule out that intelligent entities could exist in such a world. The actual me could leave this world and enter that other one (say Toledo), where I would almost certainly be changed by the new context of my environment. Transformations of that type are a rebuttal of the proposition that world -Y could not exist or is self-negating.If I accept your assertion (B), that implies that coming into existence for any individual depends upon the evil in the world, does it not? It may be that in order to recognize good and evil we have to have experience of both to compare them, in a sort of yin/yang dichotomy. That by itself says something about the nature of the universe and the Creator of that universe, or at least about the limits of the act of creation.
Step2: I agree with your entire first paragraph except for the first sentence. And to clarify a bit, I don’t think other worlds are self-negating; I think me-originating-in-another-world is nonsense, that is, equivocates on the term “me”. The self-negation doesn’t come in until the person asserts that a good God would not tolerate this world, because it also entails that a good God would not tolerate me.<>That by itself says something about the nature of the universe and the Creator of that universe, or at least about the limits of the act of creation.<>I think the latter, and would say that this by itself says something about the limits of the act of creating <>me<> (as well as limits on the active participation of contingent beings such as ourselves in creation, though pretty clearly we do participate). And it is a logical limit: even God can’t create <>me<> without creating <>me<>, any more than God can pfloof the snargles on the franfruppet: that is, because the concept “create me without creating me” is just nonsense masquerading as a well-defined concept. (Some may notice that although positivism is itself a bunch of nonsense, nevertheless there are things that I’ve learned from the positivist historical incident, if you will).
I’m willing to bite the bullet on this one and say that it seems at least _possible_, at least not _stupid_, to think that the world would be a better place if Adam and Eve hadn’t sinned and had had a bunch of beautiful, sinless descendants, even if those millions of beautiful, sinless descendants had included none of us having this discussion. I mean, why not? I’m not saying it is true, I’m just saying I don’t see that it’s a dumb thing to think.I think we have to be willing in theory to “give somebody up” in the sense of saying that it would be better if someone–even someone greatly loved–hadn’t existed, when the condition of that person’s existence is some sin. This may even be necessary as part of repenting of our own sins. Example: Suppose Alan and Ginny have an abortion. They repent within the time that Ginny wd. have been pregnant with the aborted child. They get pregnant again immediately. Jennifer is born and greatly loved. Alan and Ginny, as part of recognizing the gravity of their own sin, say, “It would have been better if we hadn’t aborted that first baby.” Now I guess you could say that’s being “willing to give up Jennifer,” because very plausibly–given the physiological facts– Jennifer would never have been conceived if her elder sibling hadn’t been murdered. But it’s no _insult_ to Jennifer, no case of “consigning” her to non-existence in some horrible, nihilistic sense. It’s just saying that her conception doesn’t “outweigh” the evil of their own sin in aborting her elder sibling, doesn’t make everything “better in the end after all.” That makes sense to me.
<>I’m not saying it is true, I’m just saying I don’t see that it’s a dumb thing to think.<>And I am not so much saying that it is a <>dumb<> thing to think as that thinking it is the same as thinking that it is better for onesself to never have existed.I’d be the last person to claim that actually choosing to do evil is excusable. I’m not explaining everything there is to know about evil, nor am I excusing people who engage in it even when God makes a great good, even another life, come forth from it. That isn’t really what is at issue, specifically, with the POE. What is at issue is whether God – being omnipotent and therefore capable of doing anything coherently conceivable – is Himself doing evil by standing back and allowing evil to occur. According to the POE we are faced with two options: either (1) there is no God or (2) there is one and He is doing evil by inaction, so He can’t be the God conceived by most religions and certainly Christianity.Again I am not claiming some comprehensive theodicy which banishes all questions about evil. And I am most certainly <>not<> saying “a human being is justified in committing fornication because another human being may result”. My claim is much more narrow: it is that one who asserts the POE is asserting the evil of his own existence. That doesn’t explain why God wants <>me<> (independent of whether these other worlds we are discussing are actual or merely hypothetical).Also, the possibility of other worlds really makes no difference at all. <>This<> world is what is held up as evidence against the existence of a good and omnipotent God. The existence or nonexistence of other more perfect or less perfect worlds is really irrelevant. They may be real for all I know. It doesn’t matter to the specific question of whether the POE (probabilistic or categorical) asserted by a human product of <>this<> world does or does not involve an assertion that ones own self ought not – in a moral sense ought not – exist.
I think a person who asserts the probabilistic POE is saying that God should have stepped in and prevented the evil regardless of consequences, because the evil was so bad. Just as one of us would be obligated to do so regardless of indirect consequences. Suppose an aggressor is about to shoot an innocent person, and you’re about to jump on him and knock him over. If somebody could stop-motion the film and try to dissuade you by telling you that by doing this you would indirectly preventing some other person from being conceived later on, you’d rightly say, “So what?” and go ahead and knock down the aggressor.I take it that the probabilistic POE asserter holds that a good God would have the same type of obligation and that the highly indirect consequences of the non-conception of various people should be irrelevant. God knocks the club out of Cain’s hand and a bunch of people don’t get conceived later by a variety of indirect consequences. Well, but wasn’t it still “the right thing to do” to save Abel’s life?Again, that aspect of the argument makes sense to me. I just think we have to judge God’s “police actions” or failures thereof differently from our own, _not_ because He knows all about the various people who in a consequentialist fashion will not be conceived if He knocks the club out of Cain’s hand, but for an entirely different set of reasons. So, for example, if God sets himself up to prevent all murders and aggressions, people are going to stop thinking of themselves as free agents, they’re going to expect God always to take care of the bad consequences of their actions, freedom is going to become much less relevant as are choices of right and wrong (because you’re not allowed to carry out your wrong actions but are always stopped by force majeur), and so forth. But it can’t be because of conception prevention. I just don’t see that that’s the relevant point. Suppose Jennifer grows up and says, “If there was a God, He should have stopped my mom from aborting my older sibling by striking the abortion clinic with lightning or making the roads impassable by a miraculous flood. There must not be a good God.” The problem with this lies _not_ in the fact that, if God had done this, Jennifer herself would not have existed. Because after all, it would make perfect sense and be quite reasonable for Jennifer to say instead, “My mom should have repented sooner and not aborted my older sibling.” No one would (I hope) be inclined in that case to say that there was this huge problem in that Jennifer was asserting that her own existence was morally evil, etc. But she wouldn’t exist either way–whether her mother repented before getting the abortion or whether God made the roads impassable by floods. The problem instead lies in the insistence that God ought always to come in and stop all harms by miraculous force.
<>I take it that the probabilistic POE asserter holds that a good God would have the same type of obligation…God knocks the club out of Cain’s hand, etc… Again, that aspect of the argument makes sense to me.<>I don’t understand why. I mean I understand your “free agent” argument, but this habit of the POE’ers of putting human moral constraints on the Source of those constraints is annoying and childish. There’s something Catch-22ish about it. To have God, they insist on a world without evil. But since there is evil, there is no God, which, in turn, means there is no evil, really, just things that happen to us that we don’t like. Evil owes its reality to a comparison with the Good. But since there is no Good…and round we go.I don’t think the POE is a serious argument. Its advocates not only negate their own existence, they render impossible any comprehensible understanding of perfection . I don’t think they’re interested in finding the Love which passeth all understanding. They just like flinging it in our faces because they think it’s hard to answer. <>The problem instead lies in the insistence that God ought always to come in and stop all harms by miraculous force.<>That’s only a problem for people who are more impressed by < HREF="http://wluse.blogspot.com/2006/08/atheism-and-evil.html" REL="nofollow">suffering than by existence<>.
I’m not sure that Lydia and I are disagreeing so much as talking about different things. I <>think<> Lydia agrees with me that to assert the POE is to assert that I shouldn’t exist if there is a good God (whether probabilistically or categorically, depending on the form of POE being asserted). It is just that she is making arguments for why that is a not-crazy thing to assert. I’m not sure what sort of argument it would take to convince me that retroactive ontological suicide isn’t crazy (supposing God would take the POE-asserter up on his argument). But I haven’t seen one.Of course I may be wrong that Lydia agrees with me on the basic point.
Whether a distinction between good and evil is possible if God does not exist is definitely a separate issue. It’s one response you can make to the POE, but it isn’t the one Zippy’s been working with here. I’m just making the more narrow point that “Preventing evil would have indirectly prevented you or this other person from being conceived” does not seem to me a very good response. It’s an indirect consequence, and to say that evil should be prevented regardless of such an indirect consequence is not to say anything specifically _bad_ about the existence of the person who would have thus been conceived. Frankly, it just seems to me morally irrelevant. It would seem to me morally irrelevant for any agent, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be similarly irrelevant for God. Look, suppose you were a policeman with just ordinary human powers of stopping and preventing evil but with superhuman powers of knowing counterfactual facts about the consequences of your actions. So you know all kinds of things about how catching or stopping an evil-doer is causally indirectly going to bring about or prevent the conception of various human beings. Sometimes one thing is the case, sometimes the other. I would hope you would stop bad guys _without reference to_ such facts. I would hope you wouldn’t say, “Oh, I’ll let that evil guy capture and torture that little girl to death instead of arresting him, because if I arrest him, there will be a convoluted chain of causal circumstances that will mean that several other beautiful little girls will never be conceived.” I mean, it just shouldn’t matter. It’s not like you’re desiring the non-conception of the other children or saying that their existence would per se be a bad thing by stopping the murder of this one. I have difficulty understanding why God’s evaluation should be different. And in any event an answer to the POE that falls back on saying, “Yeah, that makes no sense, but God’s ways are not ours” is possible but really ends up being the same no matter how you started out. Why bother with all the stuff about how the asserter would never have been conceived if you’re just going to fall back in the end on saying that God’s ways are not ours? You might as well say that at the beginning and be done with it. My point is just that telling him he–or his children, or others he loves–wouldn’t have been conceived doesn’t make him nihilistic or nuts or bad if he says, “Well, but I still think, despite that, that God should have prevented these evils.”
<>Look, suppose you were a policeman with just ordinary human powers of stopping and preventing evil but with superhuman powers of knowing counterfactual facts about the consequences of your actions.<>That is shifting the goalposts though. The POE asserts that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator God would have been a good policeman and never allowed me to come into existence in the first place. I think we agree that this is what it asserts; it is just that I think the assertion is manifestly crazy, and you don’t.
Zippy,“According to the POE we are faced with two options: either (1) there is no God or (2) there is one and He is doing evil by inaction, so He can’t be the God conceived by most religions and certainly Christianity.”You have already allowed for a limit on the act of creation, though. So there ought to be a third option, (3) For God to directly interfere with the world is incoherent. If you think of creation like a gyroscope that has been set in motion, there are indirect ways to influence it once it is spinning, but a direct intervention would bring it crashing to a stop.
<>You have already allowed for a limit on the act of creation, though.<>That depends on what you mean by a limit on the act of creation. It is possible for human beings to construct strings of words that don’t represent something God can do, because they don’t represent anything coherent at all. That isn’t a limit on God as much as it is a limit on human beings. And just because I reject the statement “God could have created ‘me’ without creating <>me<>” as an incoherent statement that doesn’t mean that I subscribe to some sort of Deism or whatever.
Yeah, I don’t think it’s crazy, and for that reason I think describing it as “retroactive suicide” is confusingly pejorative. And the reason I don’t think it’s crazy is because it’s so obviously _not_ crazy if we assert it about human action. I don’t see how asserting it about Divine action makes the difference here. Suppose I say, “My parents committed fornication for me to come into existence. It would have been better if they had been converted and refrained from such an act.” That’s not “retroactive suicide,” even though as a matter of fact, it would have resulted in my not existing. It’s just saying that it would have been better if they hadn’t done evil, even though some good outcome came about as an indirect consequence of the evil. Similarly, if some person was murdered in the causal chain of my coming into existence, it doesn’t seem crazy to say, “It would have been good if someone had come along and knocked the murderer to the ground and prevented the murder,” even if you show me this whole trail of circumstances whereby that means I wouldn’t have existed. Would that be “retroactive suicide”? That just seems a misguided way of putting it. It’s just saying that it’s good to prevent evil, even if preventing it also prevents some indirect consequential good, and even if you _know_ that preventing it will indirectly prevent some consequential good. That doesn’t make the consequential good an evil in itself.Since it’s not crazy or suicide or nihilistic to say these things about human action that would indirectly have prevented my existence, why should it be so to say it about divine action? The difference lies not in whether I exist or not, but in the degree and type of power used, and so forth. So it seems to me the solution must lie somewhere quite different from the *consequences* of God’s having prevented evil.
“Look, suppose you were a policeman with just ordinary human powers of stopping and preventing evil but with superhuman powers of knowing counterfactual facts about the consequences of your actions.”One of the problems with hypotheticals like that one is that they are (respectfully) actually nonsense. When does a “policeman” cease being a policeman? Does a “policeman” with omniscience (part of which would be eternal Love) operate in any way similar to a policeman without it? I would sincerely doubt that. But what I do not doubt is that a “policeman” with omniscience is not a policeman at all. He is an entirely different kind of being.Turning this around, if it is proper to expect that a “policeman with omniscience” would act just like a normal policeman, then it would seem proper to expect that the subset of abilities that God has that are equivalent to those abilities of a policeman should be utilized as we expect a policeman to perform.So, as far as I can tell, your statement says one of two things:1) A policeman that is not a policeman should act like a policeman. (Which is obvious nonsense.) OR2) God with His power of a policeman should act the way *you* expect him to. Which pretends to know the eternal Plan and the eternal Love.It reminds me of the old problem “If God is all powerful, he should be able to make a rock that is too heavy for him to pick up.” We know instinctually that it is a nonsensical statement – but why is it? My take on it is that a supposed “rock” would have to reach eternal proportions to fit the order – and a rock is a discrete form which would cease to be a rock when it reaches any kind of eternal form. A policeman, too, would cease being a policeman when he reached the eternal form of omniscience you are using.
I, too, think that the analogy between God and a human policeman is flawed. I just don’t think it’s flawed because God knows more about what humans will be conceived. I think it’s chiefly flawed because God has more worries than we ever have to have about shutting down human freedom by the exercise of overwhelming power. My use of the policeman analogy is directed pretty narrowly at the idea that knowledge of what humans will be conceived if we allow evil is in itself a good reason to allow evil, and that we shouldn’t ask or expect someone to stop evil if his doing so will as a totally indirect consequence prevent some person from being conceived.
I’m with Silly in thinking that since the whole point to the POE is to start from the premise of a pan-omni God (and putatively infer a contradiction from pan-omni AND the fact that evil is permitted to occur), analogizing to policemen (or perhaps Superman) doesn’t really do it for me. An analogy only works to the extent that attributes essential to the argument are present, and the difference between Superman and God isn’t just a matter of scaling. The whole point to the discussion is the putative mutual exclusivity of evil and all of the omni’s.I do think that someone who buys into the POE would, if faced with sudden omnipotence (and lets say lacking the other omni’s), be morally compelled to retroactively destroy all of reality including himself: to make them all never-have-been. (A probabilistic POE-er would have to at least agonize over the decision). That seems to me to be a -reductio- of the whole God-as-superpoliceman analogy.
Why does omniscience imply love, much less love that humans would recognize? Serious question.All thoughtful theists acknowledge there is an unfathomable mystery to the ways of God. Which creates a difficulty for the theist who claims that God, while being unknowable, is also the source of all morality. If God permits evil so that good can come from it through some chain of consequences, that makes any particular judgement we finite humans have about good and evil trivial at best and completely wrong at worst. Not exactly a great situation to be in.
When it comes to “retroactively destroying reality,” that’s where _I_ start saying an omnipotent being cannot do an absurdity. Retroactively destroying reality doesn’t compute to me as a meaningful possibility. But such a critter (a POE advocate suddenly endowed with omnipotence) might stop all sorts of evil from then on out and, indirectly, the existence of various other, later people who otherwise would have existed. He’d probably also bring about indirectly the existence of various people who otherwise wouldn’t have existed–e.g. the descendants of people he saved from death who were conceived after the ancestor was rescued. I just don’t see that that should be morally relevant to the decision to prevent an evil one way or another.
<>Why does omniscience imply love, much less love that humans would recognize? Serious question.<>I don’t think it does (at least not in the definition of terms), which is why I think omnibenevolence is a different attribute (or at least a different modality) from omniscience. <>All thoughtful theists acknowledge there is an unfathomable mystery to the ways of God.<>Amen to that. I’m not trying to explain the ways of God here; just showing that (as far as I can tell) a human assertion of the POE doesn’t make any sense.<>Which creates a difficulty for the theist who claims that God, while being unknowable, is also the source of all morality.<>I am not sure “mystery” means what this apparently assumes it to mean. That is to say, I don’t think knowledge and mystery form the kind of dichotomy that they would have to form in order for knowledge of morality to be peculiarly difficult to come by as contrasted to knowledge of other things.(Maybe one of the reasons Lydia the analytic philosopher and I see things so differently despite an obviously close correspondence in world views is that, when push comes to shove, I’m a bit of a mystic when it comes to epistemology. That may well be a product of ignorance on my part, but it’s where I’m at: I don’t think the mystery can be <>completely<> banished from <>anything<>).
<>When it comes to “retroactively destroying reality,” that’s where _I_ start saying an omnipotent being cannot do an absurdity.<>Maybe; but less so. To make something never-have-been isn’t <>logically<> contradictory. Presumably an omnipotent being could without logical contradiction travel through time, or access reality from outside of time, and make things be or not be. That is, what I just said seems to be meaningful, whereas “an omnipotent God could make ‘me’ without making <>me<>” is not a meaningful statement when ‘me’ and <>me<> are understood to be the same being, that is, me.<>But such a critter (a POE advocate suddenly endowed with omnipotence) might stop all sorts of evil from then on out and, indirectly, the existence of various other, later people who otherwise would have existed.<>The POE though is fundamentally a problem of <>historical<> evil and <>actual<> people, not hypothetical future evil and hypothetical future people. I don’t think the POE-asserter would let God off the hook if He put an end to all evil right now. If the POE asserter was willing to concede that then he has no reason to privilege right now over the Parousia.
Actually, I think it is logically contradictory to make something “never have been.” Because I think the proposition, “X exists” is a-temporally either true or false. It can’t be both true and false. So that assumes only one real time-line, not a bunch. But it’s even _worse_ if we start with a being who himself came into existence at some point in time and then start trying to give him power to prevent his own coming-into-being. Can’t happen, because if he prevents himself from coming into existence well…then…he doesn’t exist. That’s the problem with time-travel scenarios. God gets out of the problem because he’s not in time to begin with. Boethius and all that. But that still doesn’t mean God can make things not-exist that _already_ did exist. Because either they do or don’t.Yeah, you’re right that the POE person isn’t going to let God off the hook if he stops all evil now. But that’s because God _was there_ back at the beginning, so there was no problem with His having prevented the evil then. It’s like knowing a story about a person who sat by and watched some horrific evil happen 100 years ago when he could easily have stopped. Even though _I_ can’t go back and rip up time and make it not-have-happened, _he_ could have stopped it at the time. So I can blame him for that. And it seems to me that I can blame him for that negligence even if indirectly that negligence was causally required for my own existence. It’s not like I’m saying I’m a blot on the landscape to say that the other guy’s negligence was wrong. He shouldn’t have sat around and watched the evil without lifting his finger to stop it, and that would be true even if someone whispered in his ear, “Lydia will never exist if you stop this terrible thing happening.”My whole problem with this is just the “conception of humans” thing. If you want to give me the Job routine and tell me that God’s ways aren’t mine, I’ll actually receive that fairly humbly. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. But _that_ isn’t an _answer_ to the POE, and it has nothing to do with arguing that God allowed the evil actions of men so that some particular other men would be conceived. Instead, it’s telling the person that he has to be willing to accept that there may not be an entirely satisfactory answer to be given right now. I think, too, that’s where the difference between a logical and a probabilistic POE comes into play, because if you just assert a probabilistic one and are given an only-partly-satisfactory answer, then your worries can be overcome by other evidence for God’s existence, of which there’s lots.
<>My whole problem with this is just the “conception of humans” thing.<>It isn’t a “conception of humans” thing. It is a conception of <>this<> human, the one actually asserting the POE, thing: asserting the POE is to complain to God about one’s own existence, to say that God ought not have allowed me (the asserter) to exist.
I don’t see it as “complaining about” the speaker’s existence per se. In other words, it’s not that he’s saying there’s something _intrinsically_ bad about his own existence. Rather, he’s saying that there’s something intrinsically bad about various events that, as a matter of contingent fact, got causally tangled up in bringing about his own existence. He’s saying that God should have stopped those events even though that would have meant causally as an indirect consequence that he wouldn’t exist. This seems to me a fairly understandable and non-crazy thing to say, just as it seems to me that it would be non-crazy to say it about some human being who negligently permitted some horrific evil. That I wouldn’t have existed if said human agent had not been shockingly negligent just doesn’t seem to me to let him off the hook.What would _you_ say about such a human? Suppose that some human sat by and didn’t lift a finger to help a screaming woman or a tortured child 100 years ago, but that if he _had_ done so, you wouldn’t be here. Would you say he was blameworthy? Then you’re willing to blame somebody for failing to do something even though by an indirect route that failure resulted in your own existence. Would it be crazy to blame him?And if you say, “God’s different,” I agree. But not because of _anything_ to do with the specificity of your not existing, because that’s the same in the two cases.
<>And if you say, “God’s different,” I agree.<>Right, the whole discussion is predicated on the pan-omnis and on God being the formal cause of all of creation. No human analogy makes any sense at all. Human analogies that purport to place themselves in the perspective of God are simply non-starters, and my argument doesn’t address them. I’m addressing forms of the POE that are more sensible than an anthromorphism: the POE I am addressing is a putative argument against the existence of <>God<>, not “the big human in the sky”.<>But not because of _anything_ to do with the specificity of your not existing, because that’s the same in the two cases.<>The difference between a pan-omni creator God and a human being has everything to do with the specificity of my existence, and the two cases are not even remotely analogous. The policeman 100 years ago isn’t my (putative at least – that is, stipulated in the argument by the atheist who is looking for a contradiction) creator. He doesn’t have omniscience or omnipotence or omnibenevolence, and it isn’t his particular act as a contingent being that is under the microscope here. It is the act of formally causing (breathing the fire of reality into) this world (including me) at all by God that is under the microscope. There is no analogy.I think part of the problem is definitely in attempting to shift morally to God’s perspective, which anthropomorphises an act of formal causation and makes the POE seem like a reasonable complaint, as though making a world exist were an act like or analogizable to “preventing a rape”. But that anthropomorphised analogy has nothing to do with my specific criticism of the POE. I don’t pretend to be able to adopt God’s perspective; I simply assume the perspective of the human being making asserting the POE. God’s perspective remains a mystery.The POE is necessarily an assertion that God would not formally cause this world; that He would only breathe the fire of existence into perfect evil-free worlds that don’t give rise to me, not original-sin-laden worlds like this one where evil is inextricably – as a logical matter – entangled with Creation, including me.My criticism of the POE is that it is irrational – crazy even – from the perspective of the asserting contingent human person in addressing the existence of a pan-omni creator God. The attempt to analogize to human acts is simply a non-starter. Human beings are incapable of formally causing actual worlds to exist, and there is no analogy in human acts to formally causing actual worlds to exist.
I don’t myself believe that God causes a whole universe with its history. That’s often an error made by advocates of the POE. I call it the “fallacy of the clickable universe.” The idea is that God creates the whole world-with-history ensemble. Some POE advocates will then complain that he didn’t “choose to create a world in which Adam did not sin.” Now, to them, I would give the answer that God doesn’t create a “world-in-which-Adam-sins” but rather creates _Adam_, a free human being whose choices then have a causal part in the subsequent history of the world thus created.Now the POE advocate for whom I’ve been playing devil’s advocate doesn’t, or doesn’t necessarily, make that mistake. Rather, he just says God should have prevented various evil actions *on the part of* created agents. Those preventions needn’t be part of some huge single universe-clicking act. They could be case-by-case interventions.I think Christians should also avoid the fallacy of the clickable universe. We shouldn’t say that God created the whole universe-cum-history, including ourselves, as a single act. Rather, because God gives humans free will and causal efficacy, if we believe in a creationist (rather than a traducian) view of the origin of individual souls, we will say that God creates some human souls as a result of his knowledge of the physical acts of other humans (e.g., sexual intercourse) that bring into existence physical human beings–embryos.What all this means is that I reject the view that sin and pain are inextricably, much less logically, linked with creation. After all, the first humans had a choice, even after they were created. If their sinning was logically linked with their creation, that would seem to mean that they had no choice but to sin. Of course God _knew_ what they would do and _knew_ all of the people who would actually exist as a result of their good and evil acts. But this still leaves open the question of why he sometimes chooses to intervene to help and deliver (as he does) and sometimes doesn’t so choose. I, frankly, don’t know why for sure, though I have an inkling. But one thing I’m pretty sure of: His reason for not intervening isn’t that he’d really rather have person A (say, me) exist than have person B (who would have existed instead if he’d intervened) exist.Finally, I do think that if we are going to say that no analogy between God’s actions and human moral actions is legitimate, this should probably be the _first-line_ response to the POE. I don’t think I agree with the statement (there are too many Scriptural injunctions for us to be like God in his mercy and so forth to make him this unknowable and this disanalogous to ourselves), but if it’s really true that God’s actions are strictly speaking morally incommensurable to any human actions, then that cashiers the POE by itself and right away. And it requires no reference to nihilism, self-negation, or retroactive suicide, none of which really make sense to me as criticisms of the POE.
<>I think Christians should also avoid the fallacy of the clickable universe. We shouldn’t say that God created the whole universe-cum-history, including ourselves, as a single act.<>I don’t think I said that He did though. Creation ex nihilo doesn’t need to be viewed as a single act nor as a cancellation of free will; but this universe would not exist at all from one moment to the next unless God willed its actual existence. In fact when someone argues against the existence of God, it is the personhood of this formal cause that he is arguing against.<>What all this means is that I reject the view that sin and pain are inextricably, much less logically, linked with creation.<>I completely disagree. Sin and pain are most definitely inextricably linked to <>my<> existence. Christians call this link “original sin”.<>After all, the first humans had a choice, even after they were created.<><>They<> might have had a choice, but <>I<> didn’t. I was never in a position to will whether or not I was affected by original sin. Any semi-Pelagian who thinks I had such a choice is welcome to point out precisely when I made it.<>I do think that if we are going to say that no analogy between God’s actions and human moral actions is legitimate, this should probably be the _first-line_ response to the POE.<>Certainly if somoene asserts a POE against the Big Policeman in the Sky, that is different from asserting the POE against God. My whole approach has been to address the latter though, not the former. Someone asserting the former needs to do more work on understanding the concept of God before he can get about the business of trying to undermine it.
Can’t the Problem of Evil also be turned around to the Problem of Good? Isn’t the existence of Good incompatible with the nonexistence of God?