The Problem of Evil

[Veritas Aequitas]

Can you show that allowing people to have free will is worse than making them robots? That's what you would need to show.

Note my point,

• 1. IF the supposed-God exists,
  
  2. God is by nature is intrinsically omni-wise, omni-compassionate, omni-GOOD & omni-whatever as such it would not be the nature of your supposed-God to allow terrible evil [e.g. babies tortured by humans for pleasure, etc.] to happen via humans which is created by God.
  
  3. It is evident humans had committed terrible EVIL acts throughout since they were created.
  
  4. Therefore the supposed-omni-GOOD GOD does not exist.

I saw your argument. It has the same basic flaw as the las time you said it.

Be precise.
Which of the above premise is false?

You are trying to be deceptive in bringing in 'BEST'.

Not at all, if you think about it. But you need to think.

If it's wrong for God to allow something less than the good, why would it be right for Him to allow anything other than the best? Are you supposing that a truly righteous, good, God could (say) prevent abortions, but then turn around and wink at lying? Could He righteously come down hard against theft, but allow gossip and backbiting still to go on? It's got to be pretty apparent to you that those are still evils, and a good God could not be firm on the former and ignore the latter.

But why would we think a good God could, say, allow a range of less-than-completely-good options, or even a set of second-rate options, if He already knew the perfect option existed and He could have made that happen instead? So if God is truly righteous AND is obligated to make the good always happen instead of the evil, then He is also obligated to make the best always happen, not other things. And you're back to determinism, then.

I believe in determinism but not absolutely-absolute determinism.
You need to think more carefully, the term 'BEST' is very relative, e.g. Hitler has done his best.
Good can also be relative, but we are arguing that GOD is omni-GOOD, i.e. absolutely-absolute Good.

The critical point is God is omni-wise, omni-compassionate and more importantly in this case, omnipotent.

Because your supposed God is omnipotent to the extent he is capable of creating the fine-tuning of the universe to perfect precision,
then GOD should be able to enable fine-tuning to the humans he created
such that there is no possibility of abortion, murder, torturing babies for pleasure or other evil acts.

IC: Can you show that allowing people to have free will is worse than making them robots?
I argued IF the supposed God exists,
then by its intrinsic nature of omni-GOOD, GOD must logically give free-will to humans to do Good but the free-will is limited in not committing EVIL.

Well, if an omni-good God, as you put it, must give free will to humans, then He must give them the choice of obeying His will, His choice, which always has to be the best, since He is who He is, OR the choice of doing the not-the-best, the not-HIs-will, the not-His-preference-but-theirs, which is exactly what it means to say an entity has "free will." Free will means the person can do according to his/her choices, not according to somebody else's. And in reference to God, who is the Source of all good, it necessarily means the option to choose evil instead.

Like I said from the start, 'free will" to humans is not absolutely-absolute free, but freewill to human are always limited. As such an omni-compassionate and omni-potent will logically give humans limited freewill with the limitation they will not commit evil and violent acts.

Point is, if your supposed God is omni-Good, logically whatever he created, he will naturally be driven to be omni-Good, and his creations that follow will be imbued with qualities of God being omni-Good.
As such, God being omnipotent will have to fine tune the freewill to be given to humans in his blue print and plan.
Thus it is impossible for an omni-Good god to create humans with potential for evil consequences.

Yes, God can give humans the freewill to have the choice of obeying his will, but at the same time God being [omni-Good and omni-compassionate] will ensure in a fool proof manner, the freewill given to man do not extent to acts that are evil.

Get it?
Point is you are not thinking hard enough due to the threat of the cognitive dissonance.

For example, if I created a million robots and programmed them with free will and autonomous learning, i.e. with the ability to do good and do evil. Then, after say 5 years, half the robots killed millions of humans based on their free will and autonomous learning.
It is obvious in this case, I am responsible for the humans killed. If I am morally good, I will ensure the robots are programmed with fool proof measures to ensure the robot only good and never evil.

It's not by accident that your example refers to robots. If you did what you say, then you would have created Determinism. But it is quite plausible that to create free beings is more moral than to create robots.

Moreover, there's a much better analogy. Let's say you have a child. The child is a freewill-having being. And plausibly, your child might turn out to be a drug addict, a rapist or a thief, if things go badly in some way; every parent knows that. So would it be more moral for parents not to procreate, but instead to buy robots? What would be lost? What would be different? Would the parent who refused to create a child and instead buys a robot be a more moral parent than the one who has a child, learns how to raise and relate to that child, and gives that child freedom -- even though it remains quite possible that the child, having free will, will abuse his/her freedom?

I don't get the determinism point re my analogy with robots.

Nah, your analogy is not analogous because I don't have the power like your supposed GOD which is omnipotent to create within his qualities of omni-compassionate.
Why should I buy a robot, IF I am omnipotent and has qualities of omni-compassionate and omni-whatever, instead I will plan and procreate a child [..I prefer bones and flesh] with freewill but with no tendency at all to commit evil and violence.

What you need to prove is that THERE CAN BE NO SUFFICIENT REASON for God to allow such creatures as we, free-will-having beings, to exist.
Can you do that?
Take your best shot.

I have already shown you the reason

Actually, you have not. You have stated only that evil is bad, and good is good. You have not done anything to show that there are not goods that make it reasonable to permit the possibility of some evils in order for the good to come about.

A woman who has a baby (the good) will have to go through labour (the evil). An athlete who has a goal of winning a race (the good) will have to go through tremendous strain and muscular pain in order to do it (the evil). A person who wished to obtain a PhD (the good) will have to go through a series of test and defences, and spend long hours studying difficult subjects and writing long explanations (the evil) in order to achieve the goal.

The idea of their being some suffering, some bad things, some pains and afflictions that are worthwhile in view of the goal is a routine feature of our experience. It's obvious to us all.

So what is your certainty that there can be no good sufficient to offset the bad that you perceive in the world? You have not answered that question. Instead, you've recycled the same flawed argument -- namely, that you think there can be no reason why a good God could allow evil, even though ordinary human experience strongly suggests the contrary is at least plausible.

So you need to fix that feature of your argument.

What?? again the deception and hasty generalization?

Note not all pains, sufferings are evil.
Some pains has survival values, e.g. it is painful to touch a kettle that is boiling, if such pains are not activated, a person could pour boiling water over himself which can be fatal. There are many such examples.
Are you sure you are not joking with your point that the 'sufferings' on go through to get a PhD is evil.

First you need to define what is evil, rate them in terms of evilness [1low-100high] and prepare a taxonomy of evil. I have done that.
Note those acts with the highest rating or evilness are for example, genocides, torturing babies for pleasure, mass rapes, mass murder, mass torture, and the likes.

• IC: even though ordinary human experience strongly suggests the contrary is at least plausible.

The above cannot be your supporting point.
The above is evidence to point out they are contradictions to your supposed God which is omni-GOOD, omni-compassionate with omnipotence to prevent the evident evil acts by humans.

-some theists will even kill non-theists if their theistic beliefs are threatened.

A silly argument. Theists are manifestly not all alike. How many Mennonites, or Quakers or Unitarians have ever done this?

So your argument is on the level of, "Some women butcher their babies in abortion clinics, therefore all women are murderers." Does that make any sense, even on the surface?

Where did I generalize to ALL theists?
I specifically mentioned "some" to highlight the extreme cases of theists.

The point is ALL theists cling an idea of God that emerged as a consonance to soothe the terrible angsts of existential dissonance.

[Skepdick]

It changes the problem.

It's not that we don't have enough food; it's that the distribution and allocation of it is unequal.

Does it?

The problem is still exactly the same: there is not enough food at B.

By the principle of equifinality there's many ways to address that.

Whether the demand for B is manufactured at B; or delivered from A - it's still an economic problem. The exact same economic problem: who will cover the cost on executing whichever plan is chosen?

But there are actually few nations today that, if they had peace and good government, would even need food aid. Sudan might; but a lot of others would never need it. In fact, a good many disrupted nations have vast agricultural lands and natural resources that could be parlayed into everything they need. Look at central and southern Africa, for example.

So does it make any difference whether the aid comes in the form of actual food, or in the form of subsidies to keep the Sudanese or African food manufacturing industry afloat?

One could even make the argument that empowering local manufacturing is a better long-term strategy. Teach a man to fish and all that...

The problem is really bad government. People still starve in rich nations when civil war, despotism, certain particular religions, or Communism are in charge.

The only way you get to blame government here is if government is actively preventing food manufacturers from distributing the excess food (you claim exists) to the people who need it. But that's a but of a caricature... all those altruists ready and waiting to feed the world, but the government got in their way.

But it's pretty ironic you should fixate on sub-optimal distribution/allocation and bad governance. It's almost as if you are implying a need for centralized planning. You closet communist, you!

[Belinda]

We do not have enough natural resources unless, right now, coronavirus kills most humans.

Totally untrue, B. Factually untrue, as a matter of fact: verifiably untrue. You've fallen for propaganda there.

We've long had enough food that nobody in the world should be starving. And we have vast new reserves of things like oil, that have been discovered in the last few years. For example, the US has recently gone from being a dependent importer of oil to having an excess supply. There's a lot more than we used to know, or to be able to access.

You seem be unaware of the apocalypse now happening.

Point it out to me.

Ruination of Amazon rain forest

That's a product of politics, not of overpopulation.

Women who are educated can and sometimes do a lot more than control their own conceptions!

Of course. Nobody said otherwise. But the environmentalist loonies often try to suggest that population cannot be naturally controlled by positive means. Like you, they think people may even need to die in order for the world to survive. They are factually quite wrong; population would come under control naturally, without any deaths, if we only took the very positive step of educating young women...and I don't mean "educating only in keeping their reproduction in check." What happens is that educated young women voluntarily make choices to prioritize their freedoms and financial advantages, including having fewer than two children each. Uneducated women are forced to be reproducers, because they have neither knowledge nor means to resist those who drive them into that role. They become victims.

So by helping young women become educated and free, we can control world population voluntarily, painlessly, without killing anyone. Why wouldn't you want that?

I agree that empowering women so they are economically equal to men would allow a significant number of women to use contraception.At this time it is mainly poorer less educated women who struggle to live without some man's money to support them and their children.

The politics of people like Jair Bolsonaro the President of Brazil and a main acolyte of Trump are destroying Amazon rain forests.

Reserves of oil adequate or not are useless because we must must (ecological imperative) stop global warming through climate change. All fossil fuels are now defunct for that reason. Was Trump going to rejoin the international Paris agreement to limit fossil fuels?

[attofishpi]

We do not have enough natural resources unless, right now, coronavirus kills most humans.

Totally untrue, B. Factually untrue, as a matter of fact: verifiably untrue. You've fallen for propaganda there.

We've long had enough food that nobody in the world should be starving. And we have vast new reserves of things like oil, that have been discovered in the last few years. For example, the US has recently gone from being a dependent importer of oil to having an excess supply. There's a lot more than we used to know, or to be able to access.

You seem be unaware of the apocalypse now happening.

Point it out to me.

Ruination of Amazon rain forest

That's a product of politics, not of overpopulation.

Women who are educated can and sometimes do a lot more than control their own conceptions!

Of course. Nobody said otherwise. But the environmentalist loonies often try to suggest that population cannot be naturally controlled by positive means. Like you, they think people may even need to die in order for the world to survive. They are factually quite wrong; population would come under control naturally, without any deaths, if we only took the very positive step of educating young women...and I don't mean "educating only in keeping their reproduction in check." What happens is that educated young women voluntarily make choices to prioritize their freedoms and financial advantages, including having fewer than two children each. Uneducated women are forced to be reproducers, because they have neither knowledge nor means to resist those who drive them into that role. They become victims.

So by helping young women become educated and free, we can control world population voluntarily, painlessly, without killing anyone. Why wouldn't you want that?

I agree that empowering women so they are economically equal to men would allow a significant number of women to use contraception.At this time it is mainly poorer less educated women who struggle to live without some man's money to support them and their children.

The politics of people like Jair Bolsonaro the President of Brazil and a main acolyte of Trump are destroying Amazon rain forests.

Reserves of oil adequate or not are useless because we must must (ecological imperative) stop global warming through climate change. All fossil fuels are now defunct for that reason. Was Trump going to rejoin the international Paris agreement to limit fossil fuels?

Of course not, because he and his ilk spoon fed from the silver spoon of mans labour in the pits have no comprehension that indeed they will inherit what they sowed. (Reincarnation is a bit of a ****)

The likes of him and his ilk are here for the moment - their obvious existence and all the sp_oils that can be garnered from it...thus their private jets can be lavishly furnished with all the fineries that matter has on offer.

When he reincarnates in a drought stricken part of Africa barely able to get some milk - well - karma is a BIT of a problem.

[Immanuel Can]

Which of the above premise is false?

I've said it four times now.

It's the supposition that a good God can have no sufficient reason for the allowing of some evil to exist.

I believe in determinism but not absolutely-absolute determinism.

Not possible. You've misunderstood what Determinism means. The whole implication of Determinism is that nothing can exist outside of its control. Otherwise, it's not Determinism: it's only the very routine position that some things are in our control and some are not...which nobody but Determinists would deny.

...the term 'BEST' is very relative, e.g. Hitler has done his best.

You've mistaken an idiom. To "do one's best" does not imply to do something morally good; it means "to do all that one is able to do."

Because your supposed God is omnipotent to the extent he is capable of creating the fine-tuning of the universe to perfect precision,
then GOD should be able to enable fine-tuning to the humans he created
such that there is no possibility of abortion, murder, torturing babies for pleasure or other evil acts.

All this is true, but begs the question completely. "The question is not COULD God do these things," but rather "What are the logical consequences if He were to do so?" In the same way, we could ask "Could God have not created any humans in the first place, and the answer is obviously, "Yes." But that's a totally uninteresting question here: the important one, is "Since human beings exist as free will beings, what are the implications of that?"

IC: Can you show that allowing people to have free will is worse than making them robots?
I argued IF the supposed God exists,
then by its intrinsic nature of omni-GOOD, GOD must logically give free-will to humans to do Good but the free-will is limited in not committing EVIL.

Of course a "free will" is not "limited," either to only good or to only evil. So that question doesn't even make sense. Free wills are NEVER limited to "just good" or "just evil" -- if they were, then by definition, they wouldn't be free wills at all. That's the point.

Well, if an omni-good God, as you put it, must give free will to humans, then He must give them the choice of obeying His will, His choice, which always has to be the best, since He is who He is, OR the choice of doing the not-the-best, the not-HIs-will, the not-His-preference-but-theirs, which is exactly what it means to say an entity has "free will." Free will means the person can do according to his/her choices, not according to somebody else's. And in reference to God, who is the Source of all good, it necessarily means the option to choose evil instead.

Like I said from the start, 'free will" to humans is not absolutely-absolute free, but freewill to human are always limited.

Of course there are limitations of circumstance, embodiment, locality, physical potentials and so on. That's an entirely useless caveat. The question is about the potential for good or evil choices.

Seriously, are you having trouble understanding this? It's so simple.

Point is, if your supposed God is omni-Good, logically whatever he created, he will naturally be driven to be omni-Good,

This is incorrect, and takes us once again back to the fundamental question: "Can God have sufficient reasons for creating beings that are not, to use your phrase, 'omni-good.'" The answer, I propose, is "Yes."

Thus it is impossible for an omni-Good god to create humans with potential for evil consequences.

This is obviously untrue.

Yes, God can give humans the freewill to have the choice of obeying his will, but at the same time God being [omni-Good and omni-compassionate] will ensure in a fool proof manner, the freewill given to man do not extent to acts that are evil.

The logical consequence would be the banishing of free will. For free will entails that one is able to do either good or evil.

It's not "cognitive dissonance" we're having trouble with: it's that you don't understand the problem in your claim. You're supposing that one can have "free will," and at the same time be able to choose "only the good." That's false, because free will implies you have ALTERNATIVES.

Get it yet?

It's not by accident that your example refers to robots. If you did what you say, then you would have created Determinism. But it is quite plausible that to create free beings is more moral than to create robots.

Moreover, there's a much better analogy. Let's say you have a child. The child is a freewill-having being. And plausibly, your child might turn out to be a drug addict, a rapist or a thief, if things go badly in some way; every parent knows that. So would it be more moral for parents not to procreate, but instead to buy robots? What would be lost? What would be different? Would the parent who refused to create a child and instead buys a robot be a more moral parent than the one who has a child, learns how to raise and relate to that child, and gives that child freedom -- even though it remains quite possible that the child, having free will, will abuse his/her freedom?

I don't get the determinism point re my analogy with robots.

Oh, man...it's SO dead easy.

A "robot" is only capable of doing what its programmers make it, or program it to do. It's a predetermined machine. It has no free will.

I don't have the power like your supposed GOD which is omnipotent to create within his qualities of omni-compassionate.

Of course you don't. But you've begged the central question again: "Is it logically coherent to speak of a free will being that has no choice but to be maximally compassionate?

The answer is obviously, "No, it's not even a coherent idea." It's like a wet dryness or a square circle: it can't even potentially exist. It's a logical contradiction.

I asked:

What you need to prove is that THERE CAN BE NO SUFFICIENT REASON for God to allow such creatures as we, free-will-having beings, to exist.
Can you do that?
Take your best shot.

But you didn't answer the question at all.

Get it? There are sufficient reasons for God to allow pains to exist. Some of them issue in goods that are more than sufficient to offset the pain involved.

So just stop skating, and answer the one question you need to: Can God have sufficient reasons for allowing some pain and suffering in the world? You have just implied your own answer: "Yes." In the case of kettles and "many such examples," you say, it's certain He can.

So your argument fails, by your own testimony. Thus, it will need to be improved if it is even possibly to be believable.

[Immanuel Can]

I agree that empowering women so they are economically equal to men

They already are, and have gone beyond the average man in the Western world.

...would allow a significant number of women to use contraception.

It's not just about reproduction. Education does women universal good, and alerts them to the choices and options they have in life. It frees them up to make their own lives what they choose them to be. The fact that one choice they tend to make is contraception is, frankly, up to them. But it does have the salutary side-effect of controlling population growth.

Reserves of oil adequate or not are useless because we must must (ecological imperative) stop global warming through climate change.

This is a myth. The so-called "ecological movement" is actually driven by financial interests, not interest of global good. And you can tell, because they advocate a bunch of measures that actually harm the environment, but allow them to make billions on so-called "green" money.

I'll give you just a couple of examples. They send around diesel trucks to pick up balloons of air (i.e. plastic bottles and packages) of various types. But only clear, hard plastic, like water bottles, can be recycled at a profit. So they throw the rest into the landfill. But that requires two sorting processes instead of one, and two trucks for every one truck that had to be sent before. So they're net-harming the environment by running city recycling programs.

Here's another. Windmills have long been proved too expensive and inefficient to generate electricity in many places. Wind is not consistent, and the huge windmills also murder millions of birds. They're hard to construct, expensive to produce, and hard to recycle (because of batteries, etc.) when they are defunct. They're terribly messy and inefficient; but we continue to produce them on the delusion that "wind is free."

One more: electric cars. To produce them takes far more energy than to produce a regular car. To dismantle them is hugely more expensive, and involves highly polluting heavy metals from the battery. They wear tires much faster than regular cars, too. And the electricity they need still needs to be produced by conventional means, which are often things like coal-fired plants. So they electric car is actually an overwhelming negative for the environment, but people imagine they're "clean" because of the tailpipe. They're actually immeasurably worse for the environment overall than fossil-fuel cars...and much more difficult and expensive to produce, as well. But people are drawn to them because of ignorance and good intentions. The environment will not thank us for ignorance and good intentions, however. It will only thank us for actually-effective measures.

Until the alleged "green" movement only advocates things that are actually "green," you should stay off that bandwagon.

[bahman]

So you believe in a bunch of minds? But then you have to also be believing in some substantial difference between them that gives them their distinct identities, and makes them a bunch, not a singular mind. So now you're positing some kind of reality, and "all is mind" is false...

Yes. I have arguments for why what I said is true.

Can you help me out here? What arguments do you have?

I have an argument for the mind. I have an argument that there are at least two minds.

I am questioning your worldview when I talk about harming animals.

Well, fair enough...but it can't be a sincere worry to you, since you don't believe animals actually exist, right?

Animals are similar to us in the sense that they have a mind and body. They experience suffering. Their brain doesn't allow them to understand and be rational.

They exist. They are mind like me and you. Their bodies however are different. That is all.

Oh? So "all is NOT mind"? Now I'm really confused.

You say "all is mind," but that "animals exist." Do they "exist" as mere delusions, as mere figments of a mind? Or do they exist as real, distinct, physical beings? You say they have "bodies": where do these "bodies" exist, if "all is mind"?

Animals have minds. Similar to us.

[Belinda]

I agree that empowering women so they are economically equal to men

They already are, and have gone beyond the average man in the Western world.

...would allow a significant number of women to use contraception.

It's not just about reproduction. Education does women universal good, and alerts them to the choices and options they have in life. It frees them up to make their own lives what they choose them to be. The fact that one choice they tend to make is contraception is, frankly, up to them. But it does have the salutary side-effect of controlling population growth.

Reserves of oil adequate or not are useless because we must must (ecological imperative) stop global warming through climate change.

This is a myth. The so-called "ecological movement" is actually driven by financial interests, not interest of global good. And you can tell, because they advocate a bunch of measures that actually harm the environment, but allow them to make billions on so-called "green" money.

I'll give you just a couple of examples. They send around diesel trucks to pick up balloons of air (i.e. plastic bottles and packages) of various types. But only clear, hard plastic, like water bottles, can be recycled at a profit. So they throw the rest into the landfill. But that requires two sorting processes instead of one, and two trucks for every one truck that had to be sent before. So they're net-harming the environment by running city recycling programs.

Here's another. Windmills have long been proved too expensive and inefficient to generate electricity in many places. Wind is not consistent, and the huge windmills also murder millions of birds. They're hard to construct, expensive to produce, and hard to recycle (because of batteries, etc.) when they are defunct. They're terribly messy and inefficient; but we continue to produce them on the delusion that "wind is free."

One more: electric cars. To produce them takes far more energy than to produce a regular car. To dismantle them is hugely more expensive, and involves highly polluting heavy metals from the battery. They wear tires much faster than regular cars, too. And the electricity they need still needs to be produced by conventional means, which are often things like coal-fired plants. So they electric car is actually an overwhelming negative for the environment, but people imagine they're "clean" because of the tailpipe. They're actually immeasurably worse for the environment overall than fossil-fuel cars...and much more difficult and expensive to produce, as well. But people are drawn to them because of ignorance and good intentions. The environment will not thank us for ignorance and good intentions, however. It will only thank us for actually-effective measures.

Until the alleged "green" movement only advocates things that are actually "green," you should stay off that bandwagon.

Women all over the world need to be economically stronger. Do not imagine the world is not a global thing and national borders are only historical not natural.

Fossil fuels must be left underground. The industrial/military complex must be controlled by people who look to the future not to immediate profits.

The soils that grow crops must be protected.

The seas and oceans must be protected against plastic pollution and over fishing.

The atmosphere must be cleaned so that people especially children who live in cities do not die from asthma and other COPDs.

National unrest must be curbed by fairer treatment of minorities in such a way that all can see it is fair. In the USA this applies particularly to black Americans.

[Immanuel Can]

I have an argument for the mind. I have an argument that there are at least two minds.

That's interesting. Can you share those?

Animals are similar to us in the sense that they have a mind and body.

If that's so, there are is not one mind, nor two, but many...since every animal has one, no? And if they "experience suffering," they must also have a real body and exist on a physical plane, because otherwise suffering is NOT happening. And as for this plane, it must be one which we also share, since you indict human beings for causing animal suffering...a thing not possible to believe, if physical existence is unreal.

So now you have many minds, plus a common plane called "reality," which all share. And this does not seem to differ in any important way from the way everybody instinctively thinks things are. But one thing for sure: it cannot then be even possibly true that "all is mind." Rather "mind" must be "one mind among many," and "all" is flatly untrue, since the physical plane also has real existence.

So if we're still saying "all is mind," you're going to have to explain to me how that works.

They exist. They are mind like me and you. Their bodies however are different. That is all.

Oh? So "all is NOT mind"? Now I'm really confused.

You say "all is mind," but that "animals exist." Do they "exist" as mere delusions, as mere figments of a mind? Or do they exist as real, distinct, physical beings? You say they have "bodies": where do these "bodies" exist, if "all is mind"?

Animals have minds. Similar to us.

Yeah, but is the "suffering" you indict merely "in the mind"? If it is, it's imaginary, not real. It can be cured only by that "mind" itself, and only by it "changing its own disposition of mind." Nobody outside of that "mind" -- no human, no other animal, and no God -- can any longer be responsible for it.

So you can no longer say there's a "problem of evil" except the imaginary problem inside the "mind." And that, only the "mind" itself can cure.

[Immanuel Can]

Women all over the world need to be economically stronger.

Not in the developed West. They're doing just fine there. Boys are now generally recognized as more severely disadvantaged in elementary and high school education, being in programs more adaptable to girl's skills, and now 60% of students in higher education are women, and young, single women are far more employable than young, single men. Men remain behind in things like divorce arrangements, too, and the male work fatality and suicide rate far exceed the female rates. By almost every metric, men are now behind women.

Do not imagine the world is not a global thing

Eh? Of course it's a globe. What else would it be: a pancake?

Fossil fuels must be left underground.

Why, if they are more abundant and more environmentally positive than the present alternatives?

National unrest must be curbed

Heh. Do you think "defund the police" and riotous "peaceful protests" are conducive to any of that? But we can thank the Dems for both....and also for the insane environmental "policy" that at present only enriches the makers of allegedly "green" products, and hastens the poisoning of the environment.

[bahman]

I have an argument for the mind. I have an argument that there are at least two minds.

That's interesting. Can you share those?

You can find the argument for the mind in here. Once, it is shown that a conscious mind is needed for any change then it follows that there are at least two minds, one is obviously you who causes different changes and another mind causes other changes that your mind are not in charge of them.

Animals are similar to us in the sense that they have a mind and body.

If that's so, there are is not one mind, nor two, but many...since every animal has one, no? And if they "experience suffering," they must also have a real body and exist on a physical plane, because otherwise suffering is NOT happening. And as for this plane, it must be one which we also share, since you indict human beings for causing animal suffering...a thing not possible to believe, if physical existence is unreal.

So now you have many minds, plus a common plane called "reality," which all share. And this does not seem to differ in any important way from the way everybody instinctively thinks things are. But one thing for sure: it cannot then be even possibly true that "all is mind." Rather "mind" must be "one mind among many," and "all" is flatly untrue, since the physical plane also has real existence.

So if we're still saying "all is mind," you're going to have to explain to me how that works.

No, I am saying that there are at least two minds.

Oh? So "all is NOT mind"? Now I'm really confused.

You say "all is mind," but that "animals exist." Do they "exist" as mere delusions, as mere figments of a mind? Or do they exist as real, distinct, physical beings? You say they have "bodies": where do these "bodies" exist, if "all is mind"?

Animals have minds. Similar to us.

Yeah, but is the "suffering" you indict merely "in the mind"? If it is, it's imaginary, not real. It can be cured only by that "mind" itself, and only by it "changing its own disposition of mind." Nobody outside of that "mind" -- no human, no other animal, and no God -- can any longer be responsible for it.

So you can no longer say there's a "problem of evil" except the imaginary problem inside the "mind." And that, only the "mind" itself can cure.

There is no evil problem in my worldview. There is one in yours.

[Immanuel Can]

You can find the argument for the mind in here.

Well, there are huge problems with that. Firstly, unless there is an independent reality, then you can't be sure there IS change. Maybe there's actually none.

I think you can get "Consciousness exists" from Descartes. But you've got no evidence beyond the existence of a consciousness.

...it follows that there are at least two minds, one is obviously you who causes different changes and another mind causes other changes that your mind are not in charge of them.

That doesn't follow, of course. It could be the case that there is only one "mind," and it is dreaming. But if there are two minds, then there has to be some reality that makes the second mind to be not-the-first-mind. So now you'd have three things: at least two minds, if not more, plus a mediating reality.

And you're back to the conventional view of mind and body.

Animals are similar to us in the sense that they have a mind and body.

If that's so, there are is not one mind, nor two, but many...since every animal has one, no? And if they "experience suffering," they must also have a real body and exist on a physical plane, because otherwise suffering is NOT happening. And as for this plane, it must be one which we also share, since you indict human beings for causing animal suffering...a thing not possible to believe, if physical existence is unreal.

So now you have many minds, plus a common plane called "reality," which all share. And this does not seem to differ in any important way from the way everybody instinctively thinks things are. But one thing for sure: it cannot then be even possibly true that "all is mind." Rather "mind" must be "one mind among many," and "all" is flatly untrue, since the physical plane also has real existence.

So if we're still saying "all is mind," you're going to have to explain to me how that works.

No, I am saying that there are at least two minds.

You must be saying more, now. Now there are a bunch of minds: the mind that changes, the mind that produces the changes in the first mind, and now a bunch of animal minds.

Animals have minds. Similar to us.

Yeah, but is the "suffering" you indict merely "in the mind"? If it is, it's imaginary, not real. It can be cured only by that "mind" itself, and only by it "changing its own disposition of mind." Nobody outside of that "mind" -- no human, no other animal, and no God -- can any longer be responsible for it.

So you can no longer say there's a "problem of evil" except the imaginary problem inside the "mind." And that, only the "mind" itself can cure.

There is no evil problem in my worldview. There is one in yours.

Well, there might be, if you believed what I believe. But you don't. So that gives you no grounds for saying, "God allows evil." Apparently, according to you, He doesn't. What's happening instead is that one mind...or two minds...or many minds (I can't figure out which you believe in) are having delusions. and delusions are neither evil nor good...they're just delusions anyway.

And your allegation of animal suffering...since there's no reality, there is no suffering there either. So you can't charge God with a problem you personally don't believe even exists. And it isn't "wrong" of me to believe anything I might happen to, because according to you, that's just "all in mind" anyway.

So...where's your allegation now?

[Belinda]

Women all over the world need to be economically stronger.

Not in the developed West. They're doing just fine there. Boys are now generally recognized as more severely disadvantaged in elementary and high school education, being in programs more adaptable to girl's skills, and now 60% of students in higher education are women, and young, single women are far more employable than young, single men. Men remain behind in things like divorce arrangements, too, and the male work fatality and suicide rate far exceed the female rates. By almost every metric, men are now behind women.

Do not imagine the world is not a global thing

Eh? Of course it's a globe. What else would it be: a pancake?

Fossil fuels must be left underground.

Why, if they are more abundant and more environmentally positive than the present alternatives?

National unrest must be curbed

Heh. Do you think "defund the police" and riotous "peaceful protests" are conducive to any of that? But we can thank the Dems for both....and also for the insane environmental "policy" that at present only enriches the makers of allegedly "green" products, and hastens the poisoning of the environment.

Yes, poverty strikes down men too. However when we are talking about women having the power to not conceive we are talking about economic empowerment flor which education is one stepladder. Fair employement initiatives for women is another way to empower women.

National unrest can be curbed by getting rid of the differential in income between the poorest and the richest. By dismantling the prison system that uses prisoners as cheap slave labour. By national insurance to pay for health care. By enrichment of schools that serve the poorest especially racial minorities.

Unless all this and more is done the USA will turn fascist.

The whole catastrophe that is America could not have happened at a worse time : covid and climate change.

[Immanuel Can]

Fair employement initiatives for women is another way to empower women.

They already have that. In Western democracies, it's actually illegal to discriminate against employees on the basis of sex. And young women are much more employable than young men. Only when they reach the childbearing years, and stop being productive for employers, do women fall behind men. Otherwise, they have the pole position in any race to the top. And any woman, of any age, who behaves (relative to the employer) exactly the same as a man -- putting in the same hours, doing the same job, not taking time off for family issues -- is far ahead of her male competition.

[Veritas Aequitas]

Which of the above premise is false?

I've said it four times now.

It's the supposition that a good God can have no sufficient reason for the allowing of some evil to exist.

But I have supported my premise that it is a contradiction that a supposed omni-benevolent with omnipotence would allow evil to exist.
Your use of 'some evil' do not help your argument at all when millions or billion of innocent humans [babies kids and adults] has been killed and made to suffer.

I believe in determinism but not absolutely-absolute determinism.

Not possible. You've misunderstood what Determinism means. The whole implication of Determinism is that nothing can exist outside of its control. Otherwise, it's not Determinism: it's only the very routine position that some things are in our control and some are not...which nobody but Determinists would deny.

Note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

...the term 'BEST' is very relative, e.g. Hitler has done his best.

You've mistaken an idiom. To "do one's best" does not imply to do something morally good; it means "to do all that one is able to do."

Idiom? What??
Note the dictionary meaning of 'best'

• Best:
  of the highest quality, excellence, or standing:
  -the best work; the best students.
  most advantageous, suitable, or desirable:
  -the best way.

You did not qualify your 'best' with morally good.

If you refer to morally good then God is omni-Good [moral wise] which I was referring to before you deflect to 'best'.
So forget with using 'best'.

Because your supposed God is omnipotent to the extent he is capable of creating the fine-tuning of the universe to perfect precision,
then GOD should be able to enable fine-tuning to the humans he created
such that there is no possibility of abortion, murder, torturing babies for pleasure or other evil acts.

All this is true, but begs the question completely.
"The question is not COULD God do these things," but rather
"What are the logical consequences if He were to do so?"
In the same way, we could ask "Could God have not created any humans in the first place, and the answer is obviously, "Yes."
But that's a totally uninteresting question here: the important one, is
"Since human beings exist as free will beings, what are the implications of that?"

What is more critical question is this;

• 1. Humans exists [empirical fact].
  2. Humans are endowed with an existential crisis, a cognitive dissonance [psychological fact]
  3. Humans [theists] conjured [ASSUME] an all-powerful GOD [illusory] as a consonance to resolve the dissonance. [speculation]
  4. To maintain the consonance, theists speculate humans are given absolute free will. [speculation]
  5. Thus there is no problem of evil, i.e. God exists as real.

As such your conclusion beg the question, i.e. you merely assume [3] God exists in giving absolute freewill to humans [4].

If we resolve the fact of the existential crisis and cognitive dissonance [2] like Buddhism and other non-theistic spirituality and philosophies, there would be no need for a belief in a God [an illusion] and wrestling with the Problem of Evil.

IC: Can you show that allowing people to have free will is worse than making them robots?
I argued IF the supposed God exists,
then by its intrinsic nature of omni-GOOD, GOD must logically give free-will to humans to do Good but the free-will is limited in not committing EVIL.

Of course a "free will" is not "limited," either to only good or to only evil. So that question doesn't even make sense. Free wills are NEVER limited to "just good" or "just evil" -- if they were, then by definition, they wouldn't be free wills at all. That's the point.

I define 'free will' as the ability for any person to WILL an act in the future as determined by what is in the past.
Naturally, what is inherited of the past by a person provide the basis for infinite options he can take in the future.

BUT IF there is a supposed God which is omni-GOOD with omnipotence, logically that GOD should have created humans who are inhabited from committing EVIL.
Since it is evident there are terrible evils by humans, that supposed-God above does not exist.
Therefore humans emerged as they are and are not created by a supposed God.

Point is, if your supposed God is omni-Good, logically whatever he created, he will naturally be driven to be omni-Good,

This is incorrect, and takes us once again back to the fundamental question: "Can God have sufficient reasons for creating beings that are not, to use your phrase, 'omni-good.'" The answer, I propose, is "Yes."

I have argued, No!.
It is a contradiction of a supposed omni-GOOD God to enable EVIL consequence from humans created by an omni-GOOD God.

Thus it is impossible for an omni-Good god to create humans with potential for evil consequences.

This is obviously untrue.

As I had stated, it is impossible, else it is a contradiction in the first place.

Yes, God can give humans the freewill to have the choice of obeying his will, but at the same time God being [omni-Good and omni-compassionate] will ensure in a fool proof manner, the freewill given to man do not extent to acts that are evil.

The logical consequence would be the banishing of free will. For free will entails that one is able to do either good or evil.

It's not "cognitive dissonance" we're having trouble with: it's that you don't understand the problem in your claim. You're supposing that one can have "free will," and at the same time be able to choose "only the good." That's false, because free will implies you have ALTERNATIVES.

Get it yet?

Note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism
Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent.

I did not state, choose only the good from what is evil.
An omni-GOOD God with omnipotence will created humans who will spontaneously do good and never evil. There is no choice here.

Humans are given limited free will to make choices but whatever the choice it will always end up Good, albeit variation in degrees of goodness.

It's not by accident that your example refers to robots. If you did what you say, then you would have created Determinism. But it is quite plausible that to create free beings is more moral than to create robots.

Moreover, there's a much better analogy. Let's say you have a child. The child is a freewill-having being. And plausibly, your child might turn out to be a drug addict, a rapist or a thief, if things go badly in some way; every parent knows that. So would it be more moral for parents not to procreate, but instead to buy robots? What would be lost? What would be different? Would the parent who refused to create a child and instead buys a robot be a more moral parent than the one who has a child, learns how to raise and relate to that child, and gives that child freedom -- even though it remains quite possible that the child, having free will, will abuse his/her freedom?

I don't get the determinism point re my analogy with robots.

Oh, man...it's SO dead easy.

A "robot" is only capable of doing what its programmers make it, or program it to do. It's a predetermined machine. It has no free will.

Do you understand what are autonomous self-learning robots?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_robot
Your knowledge base is too archaic.

These autonomous self-learning robots can be programmed with limited free will with restraint from doing damage or a threat to humans.

I don't have the power like your supposed GOD which is omnipotent to create within his qualities of omni-compassionate.

Of course you don't. But you've begged the central question again: "Is it logically coherent to speak of a free will being that has no choice but to be maximally compassionate?

The answer is obviously, "No, it's not even a coherent idea." It's like a wet dryness or a square circle: it can't even potentially exist. It's a logical contradiction.

Yours is a straw-man.
I did not state 'maximally'.

As explained there is Compatibilism with free will for humans.

My point is an omni-GOOD God with omnipotence [capable of anything] will created humans with limited free will which will spontaneously do good only and never evil at all.

I asked:

What you need to prove is that THERE CAN BE NO SUFFICIENT REASON for God to allow such creatures as we, free-will-having beings, to exist.
Can you do that?
Take your best shot.

But you didn't answer the question at all.

Get it? There are sufficient reasons for God to allow pains to exist. Some of them issue in goods that are more than sufficient to offset the pain involved.

So just stop skating, and answer the one question you need to: Can God have sufficient reasons for allowing some pain and suffering in the world? You have just implied your own answer: "Yes." In the case of kettles and "many such examples," you say, it's certain He can.

So your argument fails, by your own testimony. Thus, it will need to be improved if it is even possibly to be believable.

I believe I have already answered your question, i.e.
There is no sufficient reason because it is a contradiction that a supposedly omni-benevolent with omnipotence would create humans with the potential to commit evil acts.
Surely you understand the criticalness a contradiction as illogical and untenable.
If that is not to your expectation, it is because I do not understand your question, you have make it more simple.

I had stated earlier you cannot conflate pain and sufferings with evil.
I have defined evil as,
any human act that is net-negative to the well being of the individual and therefrom to humanity.

What is Well-Being?
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30983

As I had stated above, you are deflecting to ambiguous pains [e.g. muscle pains from an exercise, and the likes] that are temporary and ultimately leads to good.
Why don't you get to the point re evil as I have thumping all the while, e.g. genocides, torturing babies for pleasure, mass rapes, mass kidnapping, and the likes plus natural evils, i.e. catastrophe.

Note,
the manner you wrestle and eel your way with twists and turns to defend 'God exists' is because of a defense mechanism to maintain the consonance that inhibit the cognitive dissonance arising from an existential crisis.