Omniscience and omnibenevolence

[Age]

WHY do 'you', human beings, in the days when this is being written, 'fight', 'argue', or 'squabble' over IF some 'thing' exists or not but NEVER thought about just DEFINING this 'thing', which is purported to EXIST, or maybe NOT?

Also, have ANY of 'you' NOTICED that NONE of 'your' so-called 'arguments' are sound AND valid, and therefore are NOT even worthy of repeating ONCE, let alone OVER and OVER, AGAIN and AGAIN?

But some words and ideas are such common currency that they need no defining before they may be used. Omniscience , omnipotence, and omnibenevolence are words that are common currency for everybody who has been educated to a certain level.

WHY are you ASSUMING, and THINKING ABOUT, THOSE WORDS here?

[Belinda]

WHY do 'you', human beings, in the days when this is being written, 'fight', 'argue', or 'squabble' over IF some 'thing' exists or not but NEVER thought about just DEFINING this 'thing', which is purported to EXIST, or maybe NOT?

Also, have ANY of 'you' NOTICED that NONE of 'your' so-called 'arguments' are sound AND valid, and therefore are NOT even worthy of repeating ONCE, let alone OVER and OVER, AGAIN and AGAIN?

But some words and ideas are such common currency that they need no defining before they may be used. Omniscience , omnipotence, and omnibenevolence are words that are common currency for everybody who has been educated to a certain level.

WHY are you ASSUMING, and THINKING ABOUT, THOSE WORDS here?

Because the words make up the title of this thread, and I am interested in the ideas.

[Immanuel Can]

Do you think it's logically possible...

Okay. One thing before I try to fashion some sort of reply to what are clearly a worthy set of questions. We're getting reeeeally long. That's at least as much my fault as yours, but maybe I'll try to blame you for having such substantial responses.

However, it seems to me there are some ways of clustering the concerns that keep reappearing, in somewhat different forms, throughout our increasingly lengthy repartee. With your permission, I'm going to try to consolidate some of these, with the proviso that if I miss something you deem significant, we should go back and pick it up again. My goal is not to cut anything important off.

Fair enough?

Ok, so it's possible to do, but the question remains of whether it would be desirable, good, or other such descriptors. We'll get into that.

Right. I'll hold that thought.

Wait...

This is our first key issue, I think. And I think we need to camp on it, and think it through carefully.

In order to allege that God is responsible for actions we assess as "non-benevolent," to use the current term in favour, or "evil" or "bad" or "malicious," or whatever) we would need a standard. That standard of "benevolence" would have to be big enough to judge not human beings but God Himself. In other words, we'd need to be able to say, "This action doesn't just seem to some local human beings to be unwanted, but is actually, objectively, universally "non-benevolent."

However we can't meet this requirement with reference to God, as a Christian does, since God is the One we're aiming to assess: so it has to transcend Him, if you're going to be able to say, "God is non-benevolent," and that statement is going to imply an indictment that can stick. (However, if we say God defines benevolence, and benevolence is what God also has, then we aren't in that pickle: but I think you don't want that, do you? I think you want to say, "God is non-benevolent, and should not be that way." I think that's the fair understanding of your intention. So the "should not" is the source of the problem.)

But here's the real sticking point: you're a non-cognitivist, you say. And by definition, you do not believe that moral values can be objective. So there is no moral evalution that transcends the merely personal, local or cultural. Thus, in your view, there is no moral standpoint big or universal enough for us to make the evaluation that "God is non-benevolent."

That's not merely a serious problem: if we cling to non-cognitivism, it's terminal. It means that the statement "God is non-benevolent" reduces to nothing but "God does some things AC doesn't like." And that's obviously nowhere near strong enough an indictment to warrant what seems to be wanted here, when we want to convince other people that "God is non-benevolent."

That problem can't be overlooked. It's a show-stopper, in itself.

When I first mentioned this, your reply was:

When speaking for myself, I haven't said "physical suffering is evil." I've said that it isn't congruent with benevolence,

But that won't help.

If you're only "speaking for yourself," then by a non-cognitivist account, nobody has a duty or reasons to agree with you. And if you invoke "benevolence" again, then it can only be by way of a universal, objective standard capable of being a basis for judging God. But again, you've said you're a non-cognitivist, so that, you cannot possibly have...without transcending the limits of certainty insisted upon by non-cognitivism itself.

Now, how to deal with that problem? It's clearly decisive to the whole allegation. And I don't see how a non-cognitivist account can do anything with it.

Now, a second problem also needs mention right at the start. The allegation that God is "non-benevolent" would require something I think you'll be reluctant to concede: namely, that God is the only ultimately effective moral agent in existence. If there's another (say, if humans, or aliens, or demons, or anything else) that is capable of creating evil in a way independent of God, then, to whatever extent you assign parts of the "non-benevolence" to these other possible agencies, God is off the hook. And the "non-benevolence" you believe you observe may well be partially or totally assignable to them.

To this, you might reply that, "Well, God is ominipotent, so either by commission or omission, He has to be responsible." But this would only be another way of saying that the wills of humans, aliens, demons, etc. are not the effective moral wills...they don't actually have any ultimate responsibility for what happens. And you need that, so that the responsibility for the "non-benevolence" can fall unequivocally on God. But can you have it, without banishing from serious consideration all other moral wills, human, alien, demon, and so on? Can you make God the unequivocally clear and exclusive Agency behind the " non-benevolence" you believe you observe?

I don't see how you can do this, either.

This brings us to a third problem: how do we know, when we see what we construe to be "non-benevolence," that it is "gratuitious"?

We need to know, and know for certain. Why? Because if "non-benevolence of a gratuitious kind" is only a seeming-to-you or a seeming-to-us, then it is only a seeming. We don't know if what seems is what is true. In human experience, it's often not what seems that is what is ultimately true...that is, in fact, why we call things "seemings." And based on a mere seeming, we don't even have probabilistic grounds to conclude that a particlar situation is non-benevolent. We just don't know.

You write:

If benevolence means not to inflict gratuitous suffering (for instance),and some example of physical suffering is gratuitous, then the one that inflicted it is not benevolent by definition: this works even without moral realism because it's simply a definitional contradiction.

To define "benevolence" and "gratutious" is fine. But the problem is that we don't know if we are looking at a case of "non-benevolence" or "gratutiousness" in a given situation. Having a definition isn't the same as proving that the defined term is rightly applicable in an actual situation. So are there real-world cases of "non-benevolent" and "gratuitious" suffering? How do we know that there are? We surely are not going to lapse back into something like, "Well, it seems to me there are, are we?" We're going to need to show that there actually are such cases, and that we have sound evidence that should convince any skeptic that there really are.

You said:

In the quote above, I even said, "whatever any of that means," making it clear that I was just putting on a moral realist hat to talk like one for a moment to present the same problem in moral realist terms. I don't have to be one or accept that the terms are ultimately meaningful to know how they interact and how moral realists interpret them.

No, you don't have to be a moral realist to talk like one, assuming you know how they think. I grant you that. But if you go back to non-cognitivism, and say that the moral realists are simply deluded, then you've undermined your own argument immediately. There is no objective status to "non-benevolence" as an assessment. And you're still faced with that problem of showing the moral realists that genuine cases of totally "gratuitous" suffering actually take place.

The PoE can be given without moral realism by simply noting suffering appears incongruent with benevolence.

Yes, but this will go right back to the "seeming" problem. "Appears" and "seems" are synonyms. And "seeming" will not get us the objective indictment we need...we would also have to know that the "appearance" corresponded to an objective truth, or that the "seeming" was justified by the case in hand.

In short, the reason "definitions" do not fix the problem is simple: to "define" something, and even to agree on the meaning of the definition," does not take us one step in the direction of actually making the case. It's just preliminary stuff, stuff that has to be done before the first premise can even be launched, but which contributes absolutely no evidence to the case.

For example, you can I can agree completely on the definition of "phlogiston," or "alchemy," or "unicorn." But if our discussion is going to impinge on anything in the real world, we're going to have to agree that the definitions define something real. And that's the task that has not been tackled yet. That can't be bracketed-off indefinitely, even if, for a time, we strictly argue definitions. Sooner or later, that definition has to be integrated into an actualy real-world premise, such as "Gratuitious suffering and non-benevolence really happen."

We're nowhere near having that, yet. We have only "seemings," so far.

Later, you continue,

We may not have a way to definitely know if suffering is gratuitous, but we have thresholds of when it's more reasonable/rational to accept a possibility is more likely than another.

That's also to say it "seems" so. And given that you and I are limited, embodied beings, who never see much, very far, or very long, that's not a terribly strong "seeming." The best we could take from that, maybe, is that given how the world goes (babies dying, terminal illnesses, earthquakes in Turkey) you and I don't know the reasons some things happen. But as to the actual agency in each case, and as to whether or not it's "gratuitious," and as to whether or not we have the standard to judge it the "non-benevolent" responsibility of God, we're realy far behind the 8-ball. We have work to do.

Now, let's get a secondary thing out of the way, if we can.

Now, you ask (I snipped it for now) where a standard comes from that we should consider all peoples' suffering equally, I snipped this interesting question (don't want you to think it's not) because it's pretty far outside the scope of the current argument and I think is really parallel to the moral realism vs. noncognitivism argument because it's a value question. I'll honor the question briefly by saying I simply hold such a value (that all things considered peoples' suffering matters equally), but I think we should discuss where values come from and stuff like that under another topic than this one because that will just muddy the waters with a topic I think deserves its own topic. It's sufficient for now to just assume that someone isn't a racist for instance (and doesn't think "my 'race' deserves more consideration when it comes to suffering" or "some other race doesn't deserve the same consideration when it comes to suffering") and so on. That will get us really far off track. Make the other topic if you want.

I'm happy to bracket this question for now. I think we agree that people have, at the very least, significant value. It's much stickier to show that they have equal value, it's true; but we don't need to try to get that much, since I think we both have a general sense of the value of human beings.

I'm tempted to point out that there's no warrant for seeing human beings that way apart from God, but I'll refrain for the moment. We can do that sort of stuff later, if we wish.

...even if the programmer isn't the one that "pulls the trigger" when someone uses this ability, they still share culpability in the act for having deliberately made it possible. Would you agree?

This goes back to the "ultimate responsibility" problem I mentioned at the start of course. Unless one is willing to concede that God is the only effective will in the universe, then one is not going to get God to be allegedly responsible for all that goes on. But one is going to get that only by way of denying the possibility of alternate agency, including human agency.

The Matrix is an interesting movie. I've seen it many times. (Just the first one: the second is barely endurable and the third is a train-wreck.) However, it won't really help us illuminate this question, since it depends on reference to a "real" world outside of the "matrix" one. Ironically, The Matrix is a realist film, in the sense that it affirms the primacy and even supremacy of a "real" world over that of the "matrix" one. That's why Neo can fly in the matrix, but not in the real world.

But we digress...let us get back to listing the current problems we face.

Here's a significant one: "significance."

Its people have free will, and they even have significant freedom because they can make morally significant choices such as whether to keep or break a promise (an example Plantinga himself used for significant freedom). However, even if they pick up a gun and shoot someone else, the other person isn't harmed. They can use a knife to cut a tomato to make a salad, but as soon as they turn it on someone else, the inertia leaves the knife and that person is unharmed.

The question arises: "can significant freedom be had by allowing mental malevolence, but not physical malevolence or violence?"

I want to adjust the terms somewhat, because at the moment they're not quite reflecting the key issue. I want to ask, "Can significant freedom be had by the allowing of cognitive evils without the allowing of actual evils?"

Why "actual"? Because, as I see it, what we're really asking is about free thoughts versus free acts: can we act on the thoughts we have, or not? And if we cannot, can we still justifiably say we have freedom? Can freedom be in-thought, or does it have to be actualized in order to be real freedom?

In other words, what makes freedom "significant"? Is it just thoughts? Or is it necessary that one also have the ability to act on those thoughts?

You seem to be saying that you believe that there could be a world in which people had freedom to think evil but knew that they could not do it. I don't think that's a coherent postulate. If one knows that one cannot act on something, does one have that option? I would say that one knows one does not.

Even in the Matrix, the belief in freedom that the inhabitants have utterly depends on their belief that they are acting in the real world. Once Neo has been red pilled, he no longer has that belief, and collapses into an existential funk for a time. He knows that up to then, as Morpheus says, he has been a "slave" and not free...and nothing he did really "counted" for anything. It has only been when he has broken out into the real world, the objective world, that that situation changed.

But in the world you suggest, people could not avoid knowing that their freedom was illusory. They would discover it every single time they had a thought-impulse on which they found they were incapable of acting. They would know that they were "slaves," and tortured, miserable ones at that. They would find their thoughts aggitating them, but would be continually reminded of their own sterility and impotence.

Could a "significant freedom" be created under those conditions? I say it could not. Could one grow, learn and choose under those conditions? I think decidedly not. The belief in one's freedom implies, at the very least, that your thoughts can "signify" potentials you can enact in the real world. You have to believe that your choices "count." Otherwise, they're not choices at all. And if you are going to have the option to choose the good (both in thought and action), you're also going to have to choose the not-good, with all that that may entail. Thought and action are indispensibly linked in the having of moral choices and freedom. Anything less is simply "insignificant."

Somewhere below, you praise "...the blessings of volition, identity, creativity, autonomy, ability to love, the option to act charitably and with mercy, individuality, moral awareness, and all those other things." Isn't it the case that the people in my Matrix, including you if you visit it, have "volition, identity, creativity, autonomy, ability to love, the option to act charitably and with mercy, individuality, moral awareness, and all those other things?" Seems like my Matrix-people can check every single one of those boxes.

Only so long as they are governed by the illusion that they are not enslaved. The minute they know it, the game would be over. But in your proposed real-world counterpart, human beings couldn't possibly not know their choices were constrained to only the good; the non-benevolent would never work for them, so they would know it was no authentic option.

Interestingly, this concession of yours brings us rather close together:

2) Preventing mental suffering while retaining free will may entail contradictions. For instance, if God has to rearrange the universe so that no promises are ever broken, it might be the case that mutually exclusive promises exist; and that would be impossible to maintain even for an omnipotent being.

The case of "promising" brings us to a key point, here.

What is a "promise"? Is it a commitment to feel or think things? Sometimes, as in wedding vows. But more often, it's a commitment to do things.

If I promise you to visit on Tuesday, it means I am going to follow through physically on my words. But if I know that I cannot follow through with actions to my words, then I am not merely performing a benevolent thing by "promising," but rather a (malevolent, even?) act of misleading you to think I can do what I cannot, or will do what I will not. Moreover, if you and I know that I cannot do what I "promise," then what significance has the "promise" to each of us? I know I can't do it, and you know I won't. That quite changes the whole nature of "promising," I think you'll agree.

But the problem, in the "promising" case is exactly the one I'm pointing to: that thoughts, when totally divorced from actions, are not what they are at all. They are not "choices" anymore. One does not have "freedom" in a significant and stable way. How can such a transformation fail to warp and even destroy the basic conditions upon which human life is lived, and upon which human freedom is actualized?

Good points, but I was also considering that most actions thought to be morally bad seem to cause suffering elsewhere, too (e.g. you punch someone, they feel pain; you steal from someone, they have lost something they value, and so on).

Yes. And this account for the "victim" problem, as well. Evil is not the kind of thing that confines its activities and consequences to the individual. It refuses to grant privacy, exclusiveness, or immunity. It is a contagion, not merely a congenital disease. It involve actions that can hurt others, destroy relationships, defile the innocent, and destroy the good.

But we didn't expect evil to be good, did we?

Intentions seem to play a role as well (a desperately starving person living in abject privation that steals a loaf of bread to stay alive is frowned on less than an affluent person stealing candy from a baby even if both are stealing).

Absolutely. Intentions are an important part of the moral equation. And the same is even true in cases where the proposed action is thwarted by circumstance, as when you try to hit me with a baseball bat and happen to miss. Your intention was evil, even if the consequence was not. But then, if you had succeeded, there are two conjoined evils in play: your desire to kill me, and your effectively having done it, too. Both, according to Jesus Christ, are evil.

However, it was only because you genuinely believed that you could hit me that you swung the bat. So again, intention and action were fused.

...saying "significant freedom is good to have" is literally the same thing as saying "being able to take both sides of a moral action is good," and if a moral action is a moral action because someone suffers (whereas no one suffers when you choose Cheerios instead of Wheaties so it isn't considered a moral action), then it's the same thing as saying "being able to cause suffering is good." Note that's not the same thing as saying "causing suffering is good," it's that "being able to cause suffering is good."

No, that's a non sequitur, made by what's called a "fallacy of composition."

It is good, we are saying, for people to have significant freedom.

Significant freedom requires that they have had, at least at one time, one choice they could make contrary to the good.

But it does not create the entailment that the choice they actually make is therefore good. The goodness only comes from the significant freedom, not from the choice. The choice can be either of what is good, or of what is bad. But to choose the good means to decide to reject the real ability to do the bad. And to do the bad means to reject the good.

Consider I present you a box with a big red button on it. If you press that big red button, then all the kittens and puppies on Earth explode in front of children that have to watch.

Well, you're now able to press the big red button, but it would be bad if you did.

Like Adam and Eve, you mean? (Let's save the poor kittens; I like cats.)

Is the world where this exists better than the world you're in right now, where you don't have this big red button? If having the choice is so good (even if using it is bad), do you feel like you're really missing out on not having this big red button? Has God done you a disfavor by not presenting you with the big red button?

What I "feel" isn't, of course, the point. What is the point is this: that the giving of "significant freedom" is a surpassingly good thing. And if the giving of "significant freedom" entails that I have an option that is morally reprehensible, at least one time in my life, then there is countervailing goodness in God allowing the possibility that I will make a reprehensible choice. The goodness will never inhere in the reprehensible choice itself, but in the "signficant freedom" that I could equally have by refusing to press the red button at all...though that was available only since, at one time at least, I genuinely could have pressed it.

I don't think it seems that way at all, so we might have to hammer this out more.

For instance, God ostensibly has maturity and spiritual development without ever having had to "learn" it. We might excuse this by saying "well, God is perfect." But what does that even mean, and why couldn't God make a human perfect in similar ways?

There's no question that God could make a being "perfect." The question is how He could make her "significantly free."

Could He zoop and have it done, or is the term "forced freedom" a contradiction in terms, like "manipulated individuality"? And what does it require for two entities to enter into a genuine "love" relationship? Can it be done by zoop?

(That word is not going away, by the way. We're going to keep using it until we get a call from Oxford or Cambridge, informing us that it's been integrated formally into the language. That's just how it goes.)

This was one of the main notions of my OP: it's a logical impossibility for God to make another being omnipotent, but I see no reason why God couldn't make another being omniscient.

Well, he'd be a god, then. And then God wouldn't be God. So analytically, that doesn't work.

But I don't think the creating of omnipotent beings was ever God's purpose. I think it was the chance to create free, volitional, loving creatures. None of that requires ominpotence in them. In fact, it may well work better without.

I haven't said that God would zoop them into prefering friendship with God, just zooped them with knowledge so they can make an informed choice about that.

But it cannot be TOO informed. That's a problem for "significant freedom." If they are so "informed" that they regard no other possibility as even an option, but to love God, then they have no power of free choice anymore.

This, as an aside, also speaks to the question so many naive skeptics pose, "If God is real, why doesn't he just come down and show Himself to me?" Well, if we believe the Biblical account, any genuine encounter with God is utterly devastating to evil...and what's to happen to the skeptic if God comes down to meet her? But even if that were not a problem, if God had done that, then she would not ever have even been able to entertain the possibility of disbelief or rejection. The experience would be so utterly overwhelming as to obliterate that entirely.

Of course, there's one way it would work: and that's if God, say, reduced Himself to human form, and so suppressed both the evidence of his righteousness and the undeniable evidence of his glory, and encountered us as a Person, not as an overwhelming experience. But the skeptic thinks that has never happened, so that's why she chides God for having failed to show Himself sufficiently to warrant her belief.

But what if He had?

If you still insist that's not logically possible, then what about this. I could zoop you into a dimension where you live out each possibility, each iteration of deciding to be my friend or not (but in this pocket dimension, the other people are philosophical zombies and not actual sapient beings, unknown to you -- so nobody else actually suffers no matter what you do in them). Then when you're finished collating all the data (maybe you don't even realize that's what's happening at the time), I zoop you back to the real world and combine all that experience in your mind so now you can make a truly informed choice in a way that no one ever had to suffer in order to gather the information to make the choice. How about that? I feel like the "zooping" option is fine and not logically contradictory, but I wanted to provide an alternative just in case.

What convinces you that that is not exactly what is going on?

I'm not saying it is. But if it were, how would you be able to detect the difference between that scenario and the one we now have?

Free will is just to have a choice between at least two options. That doesn't necessitate one of those options causing suffering or gratuitous suffering.

It depends on what they are options of.

If the option is to love God, then the opposite is to hate and reject Him. If the option is to voluntarily do good, then the option is to voluntarily refuse to do the good (negligence) or to do harm (malevolence). If the option is eternal life, then the option is...

What is the threshold for how long a reward from doing evil needs to last? Doesn't the Christian think that all evil is ultimately not rewarded, and unfailingly punished -- exactly the scenario you describe here?

You're asking how long God must countenance evil. And my answer is, that I do not know. What I do know is that His forebearance is not due to slackness with regard to His righteousness, but due to His generosity in not precluding our chances. That much we can get from places like 2 Peter 3:8-10.

"But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not willing for any to perish, but for all to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be discovered."

I understand that a person has to die and enter the afterlife before they're punished according to most Christians, but why is it good that they get a little brief window (e.g. the rest of their mortal life) where they thought evil rewarded them? Why is that good?

Because it's the only way they would ever consider it a serious option. And unless it was, for them, a serious option, they could never freely choose the good.

They [Adam and Eve] should have known better: why didn't they?

Because in their understanding, the alternatives were approximately equipoised, apparently.

You and I might find that hard to grasp, given how the world has gone; but we have to remember that they had no conception of how bad the consequences of the wrong choice would really be, other than that it would violate their relationship with God and produce a thing called "death." They could believe God, or they could doubt Him and disobey. They had the choice.

Why they made the one they did, you'd have to ask them.

If the tree would give them knowledge that they did not have, then they weren't making an informed choice.

They had the information they needed in order to make the right choice, but not all the information they would have needed to reject the bad one. Thus, they had a real choice. This is why Milton said they were "sufficient to have stood" -- they could have refused, and chosen God. But he also added, "but free to fall" -- given that they didn't have so many disincentives that it was not a live option for them.

Parents teach young children not to talk to strangers, but most of them I know also tell their children not to listen to strangers because strangers can lie. If I tell a child, "don't open the front door for a stranger," but then I'm sleeping or something and a stranger knocks and tells the child, "actually you can open the front door, your mom said it was OK," and I haven't prepared my child for what deception is, what do you think is going to happen? Isn't it kind of on me to prepare my child for that?

You prepare children. But you also let them go.

That's the hardest paradox for mothers, I think. They begin by doing absolutely everything for the child, and have difficulty relinquishing their role. But the truth is, as one of my female friends so astutely told me, that the whole process of raising a child is a process of letting-go. Sooner or later, you have to start shifting the responsibility for making decisions to them, or they will not grow up and become agents in their own right, and properly developed human beings.

Smother-mothers ultimately destroy their children. They don't realize it, because they "do it with love." But a child only grows into adulthood by taking on his or her own volition, resposibilities, choices, freedoms, agency...and consequences. All of those are necessary, as hard as it is for mothers to watch. If you love your kids, you let them gradually make their own choices...and yes, even when those choices sometimes turn out to be wretched and painful.

Do you think anyone would make a bad choice if they truly knew the repurcussions of making that choice, both for themselves and others?

Yes. I've seen it. Often, the proximal gains seem to outweigh the long-term detriments, especially if the perpetrator can cast those detriments as illusory or at least uncertain to follow. That's why criminals do what they do. They don't like jail; they just think they'll never end up there.

...it's still a very good question why God doesn't give them the knowledge to make informed choices. Why doesn't He?

A choice that has no advantages and only detriments isn't a choice at all. And it's the "significant freedom" occasioned by the power to have a choice that is the precious commodity.

So a true "choice" has to be "informed" enough to make the good chooseable, but not so "informed" as to make the alternative unthinkable. That's about where good and evil are, in this world.

Whew! Made it to the bottom. I think once we confirm all of those terms we defined are sensible to both of us, I can launch into a couple of actual arguments.

I see I have failed miserably in my mission to render our conversation more parsimonious. Shame on me.

Oh well...I tried.

Thanks for the responses. Again, if I've missed something important, please bring it back into play. I've tried only to eliminate those passages where a single question recurred in a new form. That tends to happen, because the same sets of issues are basic here. Let's see if I can abbreviate:

1. The issue of the need for an objective moral standard to judge "benevolence."
2. Whether or not we can make God out to be the only effective moral will in the universe.
3. How do we know that "non-benevolence" and "gratuitious" are warranted assessments?
4. The problem of what is required for "significant freedom": just thoughts, or actions too, how much knowlege, victims/no victims, etc.?

That's my best attempt to clarify and shorten. Let's see if that helps us out.

[Age]

But some words and ideas are such common currency that they need no defining before they may be used. Omniscience , omnipotence, and omnibenevolence are words that are common currency for everybody who has been educated to a certain level.

WHY are you ASSUMING, and THINKING ABOUT, THOSE WORDS here?

Because the words make up the title of this thread, and I am interested in the ideas.

And what were those words, in the title of this thread, in relation to, EXACTLY?

[Astro Cat]

(Post)

In the interest of trimming, I haven't quoted everything but assure you I have read everything -- and where things are snipped, they are usually snipped in such a way that it's just clarifying statements that are being snipped (and the snipped parts are still considered in my responses).

This is the itemized list from the bottom of your post:
1. The issue of the need for an objective moral standard to judge "benevolence."
2. Whether or not we can make God out to be the only effective moral will in the universe.
3. How do we know that "non-benevolence" and "gratuitious" are warranted assessments?
4. The problem of what is required for "significant freedom": just thoughts, or actions too, how much knowlege, victims/no victims, etc.?

(Note: I propose further down that we break 4 up into three different points, with 4 being about significant freedom, 5 being about making informed choices, and 6 being about innocent victimhood)


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1. The issue of the need for an objective moral standard to judge "benevolence."
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Regarding (1), a standout quote is:

In order to allege that God is responsible for actions we assess as "non-benevolent," to use the current term in favour, or "evil" or "bad" or "malicious," or whatever) we would need a standard. That standard of "benevolence" would have to be big enough to judge not human beings but God Himself. In other words, we'd need to be able to say, "This action doesn't just seem to some local human beings to be unwanted, but is actually, objectively, universally "non-benevolent."

However we can't meet this requirement with reference to God, as a Christian does, since God is the One we're aiming to assess: so it has to transcend Him, if you're going to be able to say, "God is non-benevolent," and that statement is going to imply an indictment that can stick. (However, if we say God defines benevolence, and benevolence is what God also has, then we aren't in that pickle: but I think you don't want that, do you? I think you want to say, "God is non-benevolent, and should not be that way." I think that's the fair understanding of your intention. So the "should not" is the source of the problem.)

You also point out that I'm a moral noncognitivist and don't think moral values can be objective, and that "'God is non-benevolent' reduces to nothing but 'God does some things AC doesn't like.'"

The answer to all of this is that suffering doesn't have to be objectively wrong to be incongruous with benevolence (which doesn't have to be objectively right to be incongruous with causing suffering). We fix wrinkles such as suffering caused for a greater purpose by specifying a hypothetical type of suffering (gratuitous suffering). We build our PoE by saying something like:

"If God is omnipotent and omniscient, then God has the power to actualize any logically possible state of affairs and the knowledge to know what possible states of affairs there are and furthermore their consequences. If God is benevolent, then God will seek to prevent or minimize gratuitous suffering. If there is gratuitous suffering observed in the world, then there is reason to doubt that God is omnipotent, that God is omniscient, that God is benevolent, some combination thereof, or that God even exists."

You say that we need a "standard" of benevolence as if it's a moral judgment: but it's not, at least not in the context of the PoE. "Suffering" isn't a moral judgment either: S can note that P is suffering without making any kind of comment about whether or not P suffering is "good" or "evil." Consider for instance that if we think of a brutal parent that literally whips a child for some minor offense until the child's skin breaks: we might form a moral opinion, "this is excessive and bad." Consider an alternative timeline where someone stops Hitler with a bullet through the heart before he can do too much worse: we might form a moral opinion, "this is good that he was stopped." Yet in both cases a dispassionate, fact-based statement could also be simply made: "this is suffering." In both cases there is suffering (the child being whipped and Hitler being shot), and that there is suffering is a separate fact from whether or not we form a moral opinion over whether the suffering is good or bad, or deserved or not, etc.

Since whether there is suffering or not is a dispassionate amoral fact, we don't need a "standard." It's just a question: is there suffering or not? Benevolence, as used by the PoE, is the same: it is simply to ask, "does God cause or enable gratuitous suffering or not?" It is not a judgment as to whether gratuitous suffering is good or bad, it's just asking whether it exists or not.

If we get too caught up on the term "benevolence" (which is only ever being used for brevity anyway), we can instead replace the premise "God is omnibenevolent" with something like "God seeks to prevent or minimize gratuitous suffering." The PoE would then have these amended premises:
a) God is omnipotent
b) God is omniscient
c) God seeks to prevent or minimize gratuitous suffering (this is what is meant by the premise, "God is omnibenevolent", which is said for brevity)

Then the observation would be made that there is suffering in the world, so we must ask "is any of this suffering gratuitous?" Without answering that question yet, as you can see, we can know dispassionately (without involving moral judgments) that if there is gratuitous suffering, then one or more of the premises must be wrong. That's it. We don't need any kind of moral standard for the argument to work because it's an amoral argument about premises being incongruent with observations about the world, a reductio ad absurdum. It would be as if a premise were, "God seeks never to create anything circular," but then we observe circular objects in the actual world (and so we have reason to think one of the premises is false). And I think this wholly answers your objection from point (1).

The theist is of course free to say, "Oh. Well, I don't think God seeks to prevent or minimize gratuitous suffering. God is wrathful, for instance, and sometimes if He has to murder everyone's firstborn just to show how powerful He is, then so be it." (I have seen this before). And that is fine, that simply defeats the PoE, or more aptly, just renders it moot: the PoE doesn't apply to a person that doesn't believe all of its requisite premises. The problem for many classical theists, though, is that usually rejecting any of the premises is unpalatable. But some people like Calvinists reject at least one of them all the time, so the PoE just doesn't phase them. And that's OK, it's not meant to: it's only aimed at the conception of God laid out in its premises.

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2. Whether or not we can make God out to be the only effective moral will in the universe.
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Regarding (2), you say:

Now, a second problem also needs mention right at the start. The allegation that God is "non-benevolent" would require something I think you'll be reluctant to concede: namely, that God is the only ultimately effective moral agent in existence. If there's another (say, if humans, or aliens, or demons, or anything else) that is capable of creating evil in a way independent of God, then, to whatever extent you assign parts of the "non-benevolence" to these other possible agencies, God is off the hook. And the "non-benevolence" you believe you observe may well be partially or totally assignable to them.

To this, you might reply that, "Well, God is ominipotent, so either by commission or omission, He has to be responsible." But this would only be another way of saying that the wills of humans, aliens, demons, etc. are not the effective moral wills...they don't actually have any ultimate responsibility for what happens. And you need that, so that the responsibility for the "non-benevolence" can fall unequivocally on God. But can you have it, without banishing from serious consideration all other moral wills, human, alien, demon, and so on? Can you make God the unequivocally clear and exclusive Agency behind the " non-benevolence" you believe you observe?

I'm not saying that God is the only culpable person for an act of gratuitous physical suffering (let's say stabbing as an example). The stabber is still fully culpable for their act. God has special culpability for the simple reason that He is responsible for the very environment and rules that make the stabbing possible. The ingredients for this culpability involve some of God's properties (I am trying to use different letters for itemized lists throughout the discussion so it's clear which one we're talking about at a particular time, here I will use lowercase Roman numerals):
i) God is omnipotent, and so can actualize any logically possible state of affairs
ii) God is omniscient, and so knows what states of affairs are possible and what each ones' consequences are
iii) It's possible for God to make a universe where S is free yet S can't stab P
iv) God instead created a universe where S is able to stab P

It follows that S being able to stab P is a deliberate choice. If S stabbing P is gratuitous, then God is culpable. The argument of course is whether or not S stabbing P is gratuitous (such as with an argument about S being able to stab P being such an overriding good that it's worth it to have it even if sometimes S does stab P). But that argument is for later. Right now we're just establishing why God is culpable if S stabbing P is gratuitous. It doesn't mean that S isn't also culpable, S is still fully culpable if S stabs P. But God is culpable as well, and it's uniquely because God could have made the universe otherwise but chose not to (as soon as that happened, it made stabbing's very possibility something that God deliberately chose).

An analogy could be this. Let's say that I'm on the USS Enterprise and I'm in charge of day care. For whatever reason let's say that the holodeck is the best place for me to watch over everybody's kids. Now, normally the holodeck has safety protocols in place where, say, a summoned weapon isn't actually able to hurt anybody because the computer detects it and prevents it from causing harm. I know this, but I think today's lesson would be best if I just turned the safety protocols off (it's important that I know there is an alternative where the safety is on, it's important that I deliberately decide to turn the safety off). If little Timmy summons a tommy gun, Picard style (as in First Contact), and uses it on another one of the kids, who's culpable?

Obviously little Timmy is culpable for conjuring the weapon and using it. But I'm also culpable because of the unique circumstances where I'm in charge of the very rules and environment the kids are locked into (beyond their own choice, I might add). The first question everyone is going to ask me when I'm court martialed by Starfleet is, "why did you turn off the safety protocols?" They're not going to say, "oh, well, this is entirely little Timmy's fault; you are blameless." Do you agree? The unique ingredients of making a deliberate choice about what kind of environment and rules exist for other beings is the burden of any kind of creator or powerful being, and it confers to them a special type of culpability -- even if they aren't the one that pulls the trigger.

So, I think the response to (2) is that God isn't the "only" moral agent in existence. Little Timmy is after all still culpable for what he did. It's just that God is culpable in some way as the one that makes any gratuitous suffering possible when a world could have been made where it's not possible (we are not deigning to compare culpabilities here, whether one is "more" or "less," just noting that there is culpability).

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3. How do we know that "non-benevolence" and "gratuitious" are warranted assessments?
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You write,

We need to know, and know for certain. Why? Because if "non-benevolence of a gratuitious kind" is only a seeming-to-you or a seeming-to-us, then it is only a seeming. We don't know if what seems is what is true. In human experience, it's often not what seems that is what is ultimately true...that is, in fact, why we call things "seemings." And based on a mere seeming, we don't even have probabilistic grounds to conclude that a particlar situation is non-benevolent. We just don't know.

The response to (3) may become the largest argument here. How do we know gratuitousness when we see it? Well, the answer is that we aren't omniscient, so there's no way to absolutely know suffering is gratuitous. However, like anything else we don't absolutely know, we are still within reasonable and rational bounds to make observations and assign epistemic probabilities based on what we do observe and cognize.

For instance, consider Hume and the problem of induction. Bertrand Russell said,

Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

I can rationally believe that the sun will appear to rise tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, and so on: but I don't absolutely know that, there's just a threshold where it becomes more rational for me to regard this as so probably true that I can reasonably treat it as if it simply is true. It would be less reasonable for me to treat it as totally unknown and especially less reasonable for me to treat it as false; particularly given my uncommon position of understanding the physics beyond merely inducing from prior sunrises.

I know you're probably tired of this example by now, but I think it makes a valid point. If Martians arrive to Earth and begin blowing up cities and running through the streets with ray guns blasting people, suppose that they play over an intercom, "do not run, we are your friends." Now, of course, it's possible they are our friends. It's possible they have some inscrutable but benevolent reason for this wanton violence: we mere humans may just not be able to understand. But wouldn't you say -- asking you personally, IC -- that there is a threshold where it's more reasonable, more rational to believe they are not your friends no matter what they're saying over the intercom?

There is a threshold where we can reasonably argue, think, and believe things that we don't know absolutely: it is a fact of human existence, a consequence (ironically) of being epistemically limited. And this is how we respond to point (3): whether or not we can absolutely know there is gratuitous suffering, we can still do at least two things. One, we can still form valid and sound arguments that if gratuitous suffering exists, then one or more of the premises as posed by the PoE must be wrong. We basically punt the problem of deciding whether there actually is gratuitous suffering for later. Then, two, we can examine the existence of suffering in the observed world and reason through possible reasons for it that are cognizable to us to see if the suffering seems gratuitous: enough so that it may potentially be more rational to suppose that it might be than not. If we're being reasonable when we think the ray gun happy Martian isn't actually our friend, then there is a threshold where we're also being reasonable when we think that God might not actually be benevolent. The question is whether we can find and cross that threshold. (It is also the case that different people likely have different thresholds for when they're willing to call this reasonable, but that can't be helped).

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4. The problem of what is required for "significant freedom": just thoughts, or actions too
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(Note: The rest of 4 included "how much knowlege, victims/no victims, etc.?" but I feel like those topics are so rich that they deserve their own spot on some sort of itemized list of topics: as 5 and 6, respectively, basically)
You say,

The question arises: "can significant freedom be had by allowing mental malevolence, but not physical malevolence or violence?"

I want to adjust the terms somewhat, because at the moment they're not quite reflecting the key issue. I want to ask, "Can significant freedom be had by the allowing of cognitive evils without the allowing of actual evils?"

Why "actual"? Because, as I see it, what we're really asking is about free thoughts versus free acts: can we act on the thoughts we have, or not? And if we cannot, can we still justifiably say we have freedom? Can freedom be in-thought, or does it have to be actualized in order to be real freedom?

In other words, what makes freedom "significant"? Is it just thoughts? Or is it necessary that one also have the ability to act on those thoughts?

You seem to be saying that you believe that there could be a world in which people had freedom to think evil but knew that they could not do it. I don't think that's a coherent postulate. If one knows that one cannot act on something, does one have that option? I would say that one knows one does not.

This is probably the point that needs to be broken down into multiple sub-points before coming back to the over-arching question. Among points I would make would be these, using capital letters (as somewhere above I think I used lowercase letters, still trying to keep all these itemized lists separate somehow):
A) Is physical significant freedom a requirement to be considered "significantly free?"
B) Is having physical significant freedom desirable, or good, or (if a creator grants it) in congruence with that creator's benevolence?

Regarding (A), a point that I feel like gets skipped over is that even in a world without physical suffering, beings would be significantly free even by Plantinga's definition: if S can't stab P, S can still make morally significant choices regarding P (does S lie to P? Does S break a promise to P? Does S say cruel things to P?). So if there is an objection that S isn't "significantly free," that objection is technically false: even without physical suffering, S is significantly free. Is the objection, then, that S isn't significantly free enough? And, if so, why?

For instance, right this moment, I don't have the ability to psychically attack you through the computer screen, causing your eyeballs to pop out or something gruesome by thinking really hard at my monitor: this is a significant freedom that I lack. Would the world be a better place if I had this significant freedom? The supposition that "more significant freedoms is better" would seem false if the world where I can attack you in this way is not a better world than this one.

Regarding (B), and still addressing (A) a little: Let's take a step back and talk about building a world from scratch. Let's say that we want to build a world with free beings that are able to share their minds with each other and form bonds of friendship with each other freely. Well, in order to meet our goals, we need to give our beings a way to talk to one another so they can share their minds with each other. "But wait," our helpful angel secretary interjects. "If they can share their minds with one another, then they'll be able to say mean things to one another, or break promises, or tell each other things that aren't true." We think about it, and these things are all inescapable consequences of our desire to have beings that can share their minds with one another: they are "necessary evils" to meet our goal, to use the vernacular.

"Well, that sucked," we might say in the divine break room. "Building a world that allows lying wasn't fun, I don't like lying. But it was necessary to have these beings able to talk to one another."

We get back to the job of creating the world. We make people able to fall in love with one another and to seek out a romantic partner. "But wait," our helpful angel secretary interjects again. "Sometimes, someone might really like someone else, but not be liked back!" We think about it, and we understand that unrequited love might be a harsh bit of suffering, indeed. Yet, we realize that if our goal is for beings to be able to freely choose one another romantically, it's an inescapable consequence that S might love P, but P might not love S back. It pains us to see this suffering exist, but we have no choice but to allow it to meet our goal: free beings that are able to freely enter relationships with one another.

We get back to the job of creating the world. We must have skipped coffee today, because now we're working on the physics of the world. "But wait," our helpful angel advisor chimes in yet again. "I've been reviewing the physics you ordered and from what I see here, this system will allow your beings to develop cancer. It will allow sharp objects to break their skin and disrupt their internal organs, which I see you also gave them for some reason (you know those can fail with the physics you're ordering, right boss)?" They pause for a second, then add, "well, the last two times you had good reasons. The suffering you allowed were necessary for your goal of making free people that are able to freely form relationships with one another. So I'm sure that you're allowing this kind of suffering for the same reason, somehow; right boss?"

Well, here you are, having created physical suffering because of the physics system you chose for the universe (you could have made it otherwise): what do you respond to your helpful angel secretary? Cancer isn't necessary for your free beings to freely share their minds and bond with one another, nor is being able to be stabbed. So why did you include it in your universe recipe? What was the point? They're already free and already capable of freely forming relationships.

"Uh," you say to your angel secretary, "I guess I did it so they can choose." The angel stares at you awkwardly. "Choose what, sir?" You respond, "oh you know, so they can choose to hurt one another or not." The angel doesn't get it (neither do I). He looks confused. "Er, well, for one thing sir, none of them chose cancer, so I don't know why you added that. Secondly, why is it important that they choose to hurt each other or not? They can already do that: it was a necessary consequence of letting them share each others' minds with each other. Why is it important to see if they physically hurt one another?"

(Ok, stopping the example because it's gone on so long by this point, lol). But really, the angel has a good point: why is it important to see whether people can cut each other up: it's not necessary for people to be free, it's not even necessary for people to be significantly free. So why is it important at all? (And of course, the angel had a good point about the cancer, too: why is that there?)

I would like you to answer this question. Remember the Big Red Button that makes kittens and puppies explode in front of children? Let us say that for this thought experiment you are in charge of a Toy World where physical suffering isn't possible. Everyone in this Toy World are free, they are able to freely decide who their friends are, whether to keep promises, whether to lie or tell the truth. They are free to wake up and decide what to do with their day, what they want to study, what they want to create, whom they want to spend time with, what they want to do with that time.

There is no physical suffering in this dimension you're in charge of. Now, you have a single choice for this thought experiment: you can either cross the boundary to their world to give them the Big Red Button (which will still work in their dimension once introduced), or you can refrain from doing so.

Do you give them the Big Red Button?

If so, why? Have you improved their world by giving them a form of physical significant freedom (where they otherwise only had mental significant freedom)? Is their world a better world now that they have the option to explode all kittens and puppies in front of children? What goal of yours did you meet by giving them the option to explode kittens and puppies? Do you think they asked for this option, especially the kitten and puppy owners that now have to worry someone else might press the Big Red Button against their own desires (e.g., now innocent victimhood is possible)?

If not, why not?

(I will be responding to points 5 and 6 separately because damn, this thread is long lmao)

[Astro Cat]

(Post)

Moving on to what I want to call points 5 and 6:

5) Informed choices
6) Innocent victimhood

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5) Informed choices
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I said, “it's a logical impossibility for God to make another being omnipotent, but I see no reason why God couldn't make another being omniscient.”

You responded,

Well, he'd be a god, then. And then God wouldn't be God. So analytically, that doesn't work.

But I don't think the creating of omnipotent beings was ever God's purpose. I think it was the chance to create free, volitional, loving creatures. None of that requires ominpotence in them. In fact, it may well work better without.

I think you misread me, I feel as though you’re responding as if I’m asking “why didn’t God make people omnipotent,” which I explicitly said God can’t do. I asked why God didn’t make people omniscient, or at least more knowledgeable about particular things. Other beings being omniscient doesn’t make them gods or God not God, so this question is unanswered, I think because you mistook it when you read it.

But why am I asking such a silly question: why would God make people omniscient, or have the ability to know all true propositions while avoiding all false propositions? Why would God do that, or something like it (just some greater state of knowledge than we have)? Well, the ability to make informed choices.

I said, “I haven't said that God would zoop them into prefering friendship with God, just zooped them with knowledge so they can make an informed choice about that.”

You responded,

But it cannot be TOO informed. That's a problem for "significant freedom." If they are so "informed" that they regard no other possibility as even an option, but to love God, then they have no power of free choice anymore.

Also,

Well, if we believe the Biblical account, any genuine encounter with God is utterly devastating to evil...and what's to happen to the skeptic if God comes down to meet her? But even if that were not a problem, if God had done that, then she would not ever have even been able to entertain the possibility of disbelief or rejection. The experience would be so utterly overwhelming as to obliterate that entirely.

I really don’t understand this on multiple levels. First, I should ask: are you saying that 100% of people would love God if they had more information about God? Why would it be a bad thing for them to have more information? I truly don’t understand this.

Let’s say that we’re on a game show and I present you with two doors. I say that behind Door 1 is a car and behind Door 2 is a suitcase. “Well what’s in the suitcase,” you might ask. “idk, lol,” I say, and wink. That might make for entertaining TV, but imagine that the choice you’re making has very important -- no -- infinite consequences? What if what you didn’t know is that by rejecting the suitcase in favor of the car that you know you need, you’re rejecting (against your knowledge!) -- what was it you said, light, life, mercy, some long list of really nice things that nobody in their right mind would reject?

Is reality a game show to God? Is forced ignorance entertainment? Why is ignorance ever a good thing? Why would this be celebrated?

If you watched a game show in Horror Universe where a captive has to choose between Door 1 and Door 2, one of which murders them brutally and the other leads them to freedom. They’re given enough information to be maybe 66% sure Door 2 leads to freedom, but that information might be incomplete. Would you watch this show with a smile, happy in the knowledge that this person has a choice, but not too informed of a choice?

If 100% of people would choose to love God with enough knowledge, if 100% of people would reject dismissing God with enough knowledge, that is still a choice: it’s just an informed choice. If I know 100% that life is behind Door 1 and death is behind Door 2 it’s still a choice to take Door 1. Why would we ever praise making choices with dire, even infinite consequences on a lack of information? What possible purpose could that ever serve other than entertainment? I am not trying to be obtuse. I really, truly don’t understand this.

I imagine God talking to that secretary angel from the last post. “Uh, I made sure to hide information so they have a choice.” The angel responds, “isn’t that kind of the opposite of a choice if they don’t really know what they’re choosing?” The angel’s no longer certain God has good intentions.

Regarding Adam and Eve and informed choices, I said, “If the tree would give them knowledge that they did not have, then they weren't making an informed choice.”

You responded,

They had the information they needed in order to make the right choice, but not all the information they would have needed to reject the bad one. Thus, they had a real choice. This is why Milton said they were "sufficient to have stood" -- they could have refused, and chosen God. But he also added, "but free to fall" -- given that they didn't have so many disincentives that it was not a live option for them.

How is this different from Horror Universe and being ~66% sure that you should take the door on the right (but maybe you’ll die)? What makes having ignorant choices a desirable or good aspect of reality? If there are infinite consequences on the line, how much information is the right amount of information to withhold? If I asked you, “Hey IC, 1 or 2? Don’t guess wrong or you’ll regret it literally forever, like literally for eternity,” how much information should I withold from you for you to be ecstatic that you’ve been given a “choice?” You’d be sufficient to stand but free to fall if I keep just the right tidbits of information away from you: with infinite consequences!

I brought up preparing children for deception, to which you responded that you “prepare children, but also let them go:”

You prepare children. But you also let them go.

That's the hardest paradox for mothers, I think. They begin by doing absolutely everything for the child, and have difficulty relinquishing their role. But the truth is, as one of my female friends so astutely told me, that the whole process of raising a child is a process of letting-go. Sooner or later, you have to start shifting the responsibility for making decisions to them, or they will not grow up and become agents in their own right, and properly developed human beings.

Smother-mothers ultimately destroy their children. They don't realize it, because they "do it with love." But a child only grows into adulthood by taking on his or her own volition, resposibilities, choices, freedoms, agency...and consequences. All of those are necessary, as hard as it is for mothers to watch. If you love your kids, you let them gradually make their own choices...and yes, even when those choices sometimes turn out to be wretched and painful.

I don’t feel this really spoke to the heart of why the analogy was made, though. I was pointing out that we prepare children for deception: that I’d be in some part culpable for my child opening the door for a stranger if I hadn’t explained what deception is and that the stranger might say, “you can open the door, your mom said it was OK.”

I’m still asking: why didn’t God prepare Adam and Eve for deception? Isn’t God culpable for that, if the story’s taken at face value: if Adam and Eve didn’t know what evil or deception was, should God really be surprised that they were deceived? Isn’t this what happens when you withhold information that you could freely give to make informed choices?

A choice that has no advantages and only detriments isn't a choice at all. And it's the "significant freedom" occasioned by the power to have a choice that is the precious commodity.

So a true "choice" has to be "informed" enough to make the good chooseable, but not so "informed" as to make the alternative unthinkable. That's about where good and evil are, in this world.

I feel like you’re contradicting yourself a little here. I had said, “Do you think anyone would make a bad choice if they truly knew the repurcussions of making that choice, both for themselves and others?” to which you responded:

Yes. I've seen it. Often, the proximal gains seem to outweigh the long-term detriments, especially if the perpetrator can cast those detriments as illusory or at least uncertain to follow. That's why criminals do what they do. They don't like jail; they just think they'll never end up there.

So which is it: on one hand you imply that with full information no one would make any bad choices, or they would? You’ve kind of said both here.

If, given full information, some people would still make bad choices (they see a door with life and a door with death, and they choose death; even given all the information), then okay: there is literally no reason, ever, not to give everyone a completely informed choice, is there? Otherwise you can end up with people needlessly choosing the wrong thing effectively on accident, it’s a cosmic dice roll whether or not they have the right information or are missing the right information. Why risk that happening to even one person that would have chosen better if they’d have just known more?

If, given full information, no people would make bad choices because they know better, how is that a bad thing? But this is just repeating stuff from above, which I’m trying not to repeat. It is still just baffling to me altogether, though. Why make people not know enough to make the right choice, then punish them for it? What would anybody expect to happen? How is it their fault for not having all of the information? Who looks at Horror Universe game show contestant, only 66% sure that Door 2 will save their life, and smiles, thinking this is good (citing their freedom as why it’s good, even though they are already free in so many ways other than choosing doors with incomplete information)?

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6) Innocent victimhood
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I am curious why God allows innocent victims when it seems possible not to have them: this works both with physical suffering and in a Toy World. I have asked, though I don’t think I’ve seen an answer, why God can’t make it such that if someone makes a choice that would cause someone else to suffer that God couldn’t zoop them into experiencing the suffering instead: wouldn’t this be a really good method of soul-building, if we directly experienced how our actions might have, in a more brutal universe (ours), caused someone else to suffer because of our carelessness or worse, callousness?

[Belinda]

WHY are you ASSUMING, and THINKING ABOUT, THOSE WORDS here?

Because the words make up the title of this thread, and I am interested in the ideas.

And what were those words, in the title of this thread, in relation to, EXACTLY?

Tell me what the words mean to you. More interestingly perhaps tell what the words mean FOR you.

[iambiguous]

Lots of people use them interchangeably. But then there is "philosophical logic":

"Understood in a narrow sense, philosophical logic is the area of logic that studies the application of logical methods to philosophical problems, often in the form of extended logical systems like modal logic."

Okay, but how narrow? And what problem?

That's why I always suggest we focus in on a particular "human all too human" context and note how we distinguish between them. Rational often revolves around behaviors deemed either to make sense or not to make sense. Logic seems more in regard to the language we use to encompass them in our communication with others.

I have gone back and followed the trail to reread why we're even talking about logic and I guess I'm unsure still at this point what this has to do with my OP.

Are we talking about logic because I mentioned logical possibility?

In the OP, you are asserting it is logically impossible for God to have "created people with omnipotence". But logic, invented by mere mortal philosophers, revolves largely around the "rules of language". So, how do they pin that down when discussing God? Logic and an entity we don't even know for sure actually does exist? Or, from IC's point of view, does in fact exist because in fact it says so in the Bible?

Indeed, and I explored that in a post over at ILP:

One of the sub-plots in the Star Trek IV film revolved around the perennial squabble between Kirk and Spock over the role of emotion in human interaction. I say human interaction because, as those who enjoy immersing themselves in the Star Trek universe know, Spock was half human and half Vulcan. The Vulcan half was basically bereft of emotional reactions. A Vulcan's reaction to the world was always logical, supremely rational. Thus the human half of Spock was, apparently, something he kept buried deep down in his psyche.

In the course of the movie, the Kirk [emotional], Spock [rational] conflict ebbed and flowed. But in a climactic scene near the end, the crew of the Enterprise are in a jam. One of their comrades, Pavel Chekhov, is isolated from the rest of them. He is in a hospital sure to die if not rescued. But if the crew goes after him they risk the possibility of not completing their mission. And if they don't complete their mission every man, woman and child on earth will die.

Spock's initial reaction is purely calculated: It is clearly more important [more rational, more ethical] to save the lives of all planet earth's inhabitants than to risk these lives in the effort to save just one man.

But Kirk intervenes emotionally and reminds everyone that Chekhov is one of them. So, naturally, this being a Hollywood movie, Spock ends up agreeing that saving Chekhov is now the #1 priority. And, naturally, this being a Hollywood film, they still have time to rescue planet earth from the whale-probe. Barely.

But think about the ethical dilemma posed in the film. Is it more rational [ethical] to save Chekhov, if it means possibly the destruction of all human life on earth?

What are the limits of ethical inquiry here in deciding this? Can it even be decided ethically?

Consider it in two ways:

In the first, we can rescue our beloved friend knowing there might still be time to rescue everyone else.

In the second, we can rescue our beloved friend knowing that, if we do, there is no time left to rescue everyone else.

So, how would someone [philosopher or not] differentiate using reason and using logic here?

None of what was mentioned is logic, at least not in the way philosophers use the term. Logic is about internal and external consistency, propositions, soundness, validness, etc. The only thing logic has to do with deciding a moral dilemma is if there are any contradictions or whether the reasoning to do one or another is internally or externally consistent.

Okay, technically, you may be correct. Whatever, technically, that means. I'm just more inclined to differentiate being logical and being reasonable this way...

Logic: "reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity."

Given, say, a particular context?

The only reason logic came to exist at all is because the human species was around to invent it. And it was invented because language was invented by the human species and rules had to be thought up to differentiate what was rational -- epistemologically sound -- to say and what was not. That being important because what we think, feel, and say is often of fundamental importance in regard to what we do. And it is in regard to what we do that actual consequences unfold.

In other words, when we connected our words to the world that we lived in. And then interacted with others such that they connected the words to the same world differently. What then? Well, among other things, the birth of morality.

How about this:

"Logic and reason are two terms that are often used together in philosophy. The key difference between logic and reason is that logic is the systematic study of the form of arguments whereas reason is the application of logic to understand and judge something." from "differencebetween.com"

So, when Spock considers whether it is logical to go back and save Chekhov given that if they take too much time it might mean the possibility of the whale probe destroying all human life on earth...how is that different from whether it is reasonable? "...internally or externally consistent" with what set of assumptions pertaining to the whale probe? Spock's argument/logic [before and after Kirk's argument] vs. the consequences of it being wrong in going back for Chekhov?

Reason is a process that minds do: you wouldn't have reason if you didn't have minds. But logic is just about consistency and adherence to reality. While you wouldn't have symbols and words to represent logic without minds, the things that the symbols and words are about would still be there without minds. So for instance consider logical self-identity, that A = A: minds don't have to be around to note that a thing, if it exists, exists as itself. Minds don't "invent" that. Minds do invent words and symbols to talk about it, but the thing itself (self-identity) is not created by minds; it's only referenced by minds.

But it is entirely intellectual. The words are not connected to the world of conflicting goods. In either a God or a No God world. How is your assessment applicable to the quandary faced by Kirk and Spock above? Or to the moral conflagration that revolves around abortion or capital punishment or the Ukraine conflict.

I don't think any of this has anything to do with the OP, I am trying to figure out how it's related. Whether or not it's logically possible for an omnipotent being to make an omniscient being has nothing to do with abortion or Ukraine. Can you help me understand why this is being brought up?

Well, what I do is to bring things like omnipotent Gods down out of the philosophical clouds and ponder how They might be pertinent to the actual existential lives that we mere mortal live. Particularly the part that revolves around "evil and suffering". Logic and God and, say, the earthquake in Turkey/Syria. If He had made us mere mortals "omnibenevolent" how could we possibly worship and adore a God that was responsible for the earthquake? Logic and reason there. Harold Kushner's perhaps?

Again, though, sure, if the existential, newspaper headline stuff isn't of interest to you, by all means, just ignore me here and move on to others. No problem. As I noted, I get this a lot here. And it's true. I do have a tendency to "highjack" threads in order to bring them around to my own philosophical prejudices.

Okay, but what do we use to reason about capitalism and socialism? Language/words. And if, say, next month, the Big One strikes Earth and wipes out all of humanity, what of logic then? Isn't that why many come around to an omniscient/omnipotent God here? That transcending font that links all of us to an essential, divine logic?

If all minds were wiped out, the universe would still be logical: things that exist would still exist as what they are and not as something else at the same time and in the same respect.

Well, that part is always tricky. No minds around and the universe carries on. But what exactly does that mean if there are no minds around to actually know this? Again, all the more reason for mere mortals in invent Gods. That way there will never not be a mind around.

I don't see how this is on topic to the OP.

Yeah, I get that a lot.

I don't see how mere mortals who are clearly nowhere near to being either omniscient or omnipotent or omnibenevolent can come up with a logical assessment of God.

What God? The one that you "think up" in your head? The one you are indoctrinated to believe in as a child? The one that just happens to be in sync with your own historical and cultural context?

Well, the OP was directed at theists that believe God is omnipotent and omniscient, so generally that would be classical theists and perhaps some more idiosyncratic theists. We don't have to be omniscient to logically analyze the ways properties work.

Sure, the logical properties/interactions that science explores. In the either/or world. But what of logic in the is/ought world? What of logic in regard to the Big Questions? Is free will logical or illogical? And then logic and God. Especially in a world where all mere mortals are extinguished. Logic after we are dead and gone? Okay, let's convince ourselves that with God we attain immortality and salvation. Is it logical to believe that? Is it reasonable?

The PoE responds to particular premises about what God is proposed to be. If someone doesn't believe those premises, then the PoE does not apply to them: it can simply be dismissed since the premises are moot.

PoE? What does that encompass?

As for premises, my own main focus revolves less around what you believe about them "in your head" and more around how you go about demonstrating that all rational men and women are obligated to believe the same.

PoE = the Problem of Evil. I'm not sure what you're asking when you ask what it encompasses, could you clarify?

I just wasn't sure what you meant by PoE. I Googled it, but nothing about evil.

PoE revolves around theodicy for me: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=35199

This part in particular:

An omnipotent/omniscient God and...

"...an endless procession of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and tornadoes and hurricanes and great floods and great droughts and great fires and deadly viral and bacterial plagues and miscarriages and hundreds and hundreds of medical and mental afflictions and extinction events...making life on Earth a living hell for countless millions of men, women and children down through the ages..."

The Turkey/Syria quake being just the latest in a long, long string of "acts of God" down here. How, some wonder, does God logically account for it Himself.

As for premises, premises can be taken for the sake of argument (as I, an atheist, would be doing when debating something like the PoE) to show they lead to an absurdity. I'm not saying you have to accept the premises that God is omnipotent and omniscient and so on. The argument only works if someone believes the premises. If you don't believe the premises, the argument doesn't apply to your beliefs.

Ok, fair enough. You have your interest regarding these things, I have mine. If, from your end, they don't overlap enough to warrant further exchanges with me regarding my own interests, no problem.

[Immanuel Can]

Good heavens.

You're no better at "trimming" than I am at "being parsimonious." We both write a ton, even when we try to cut things down.

Well, to be fair, I have to say there's good value in it. I can't safely say if you're the smartest person with whom I've had the pleasure of speaking on this forum, because people don't always manifest on such sites all the they actually are; but I can safely say you're likely to be one of the smartest.

And most civil.

A most welcome combination.

My attempt to summarize at the end of the last post seems to have born some fruit, at least: I think we can maybe organize around those categories, as you have done. Let me try. I'll run them in order, if I may.

The item was: 1. The issue of the need for an objective moral standard to judge "benevolence."

The response was:

The answer to all of this is that suffering doesn't have to be objectively wrong to be incongruous with benevolence (which doesn't have to be objectively right to be incongruous with causing suffering).

Hmmm.

Here's the problem I see. "Incongruous" requires the detection of what "congruity" would consist in. And here, we're clearly talking about "moral congruity," are we not?

To say that "suffering" is "[morally] incongruous" with "benevolence" is to smuggle back into our equation value-laden terms...at least three...which is to say, terms that come bundled with an implication of moral negativity or positivity that is concealed by their having no adjectival indicator of the associate moral judgment being attached to each.

To make the case as you are endeavouring to do here, we would already have to know and grant as unproblematic that all "suffering" was morally bad. That "benevolence" was morally good. And that "congruity" between them was morally required. All of these would have to be objective, universal values, too...because, if we understood those value assessments as merely contingent, local and personal ones, they would not compel any agreement from anybody else. Why should one person have to agree with another's merely contingent, local and personal preferences? But if they were universal, well, maybe, right?

Is all of what appears to us to be "suffering" bad? Clearly not. Some is part-and-parcel of things like achievement, victory, creativity, relationship, charity, and so on, all of which are surpassing goods, but which always entail some kind of "suffering," broadly considered.

Is "benevolence" morally good? In theory, it seems obvious. It is, by definition. But that's the problem. We should at least note that "benevolence" begins with "bene," which is Latin for "good," so we know that is the moral assessment that the speaker is trying to bundle into that word. But "benevolence" is hard to detect. "Benevolence" literally means "good volition," though that is not what it has idiomatically amounted to in modern usage. How do we detect that somebody's volitions toward us are for the good? (Remember the case of the father who wishes to let his daughter learn a necessary harsh lesson, for her own good; he's certainly plausibly benevolent, though he's allowing suffering.) But we have the still-more-basic problem that the invoking of benevolence requires us to believe in an objective kind of good. The one of whom we predicate it cannot have just any kind of intention, but it must be "good" intentions...universally good, not merely "approved by the recipient" (the daughter, in this case).

The universal badness of the suffering in view is being assumed. The universal goodness, the "bene" in beneficent is being assumed. And then we come to the third problem: even if we were right both times (we can now see that at least in the first case, we're not necessarily right at all, and in the second that we've just assumed the value in the coinage), we now need to know from where we can derive the universal moral axiom, "These things should be congruous." And from any impartial view, we don't have that. Whence the universal moral duty towards "congruity"?

All of this might seem mere obscurantism on my part, mere nit-picking. You could say, "IC, you know darn well what "suffering" is, and that much of it might well be bad; you also know what "benevolence" is like, and you have at least an approximate idea when that happens. Furthermore, you surely aren't criticizing congruity, are you?" But it's not only about me, but about you, as well. We're speaking with each other. And the problem with that rejoinder is caused by you: you declare you're a non-cognitivist. In respect of that declaration, I have to take for granted that you DON'T mean me to understand that "suffering" is universally bad, and "benevolence" isn't universally good. I must also think that any alleged moral duty we might have to produce any "congruity" is also being propounded non-cognitivistically. So there is no such universal.

Thus, on three points, the refutation has to fall flat. That is, if non-cognitivism is involved. And you say that for you, non-cognitivism is the truth... (Presumably the objective, universal truth, too , but I shall let that point slide.)

Let us shift to the second item: 2. Whether or not we can make God out to be the only effective moral will in the universe.

The reply to this was:

I'm not saying that God is the only culpable person for an act of gratuitous physical suffering (let's say stabbing as an example). The stabber is still fully culpable for their act. God has special culpability for the simple reason that He is responsible for the very environment and rules that make the stabbing possible.

This is an elaborate way of conceding exactly the point I was making, when I said that the price of making God ultimately responsible for evil is that you have to make everybody else not ultimately responsible.

But can we do that? Can we assert, with confidence an authority, that all of what we perceive as evil is done by God? I don't think we can even safely say that ANY of it is. Our assumption that God was the only effective moral will in the universe could be dead wrong: as "omnipotent" (to use the term of art, there) God could create free-will having beings who would be quite capable of performing things contrary to His preferences, and things for which He bears no responsibility at all. It might well be an analytic impossibility to speak of "free will having" creatures that CANNOT choose to perform such acts: and the creation of free-will-having eternal beings being such an overwhelming good, that any entailed suffering was trivial by comparison.

So even if we concede that God has allowed such a state to pertain, we're very far from showing it indicates, even provisionally, that He's being "malevolent" or "negligent" in so doing. And we cannot deduce from the fact that men do evil that God does. The very definition of "free" being means that they can, and that they alone are responsible IF they choose to.

(I enjoyed the Star Trek analogy, by the way; but I don't find it telling. To use "holodeck" as a metaphor there merely concedes the wrong point assumptively, rather than demonstrating the argument. A "holodeck" is something which is presumed already to be under "control" of one "controller," so it represents a universe with only one agent in it that can actually do or permit the harm. And my point is that we have no reason to suppose that's the right kind of scenario, and very good, ostensible reasons to think it's not.)

Let's leap to item the third: 3. How do we know that "non-benevolence" and "gratuitious" are warranted assessments?

To this, the reply goes:

How do we know gratuitousness when we see it? Well, the answer is that we aren't omniscient, so there's no way to absolutely know suffering is gratuitous. However, like anything else we don't absolutely know, we are still within reasonable and rational bounds to make observations and assign epistemic probabilities based on what we do observe and cognize.

Well, I want to be fair here: I think that although you and I are talking in philosophical terms, this is probably the pith of most people's problems with theodicy. And it comes not so much from philosophy as from painful, real-life experience. I want to respect that.

They see things that seem to them not to be explicable, not to have a purpose, or to entail unpleasantness of various kinds that they believe to be extreme, and they just trust that intuition. And it's not surprising we do that: we do it all the time, in normal life. When I think I see danger, I feel panic. When I think I see ice cream, I feel justified to feel a sweet tooth. All else being equal, we all take our first impressions for the right ones, and we tend to live based on them.

I will go beyond that: I will say, even, that in the case of real suffering, we sense (and I think rightly sense) that something terribly grievous and unjust is afoot. We are often at a loss to account for it; and if we rack our brains we find that we cannot come up with any sort of countervailing good we could think of that might relativize or excuse what is happening...whether to us or to others. That's a common experience.

All that makes the doubt and the question very natural. But does that justify us in having confidence that our intuition is possessed of all the relevant information and is accurately feeding us everything we need to know about what is involved?

Well, no. For a start, we know we are incarnated, local, transient, limited creatures. We not only don't know everything, taken by ourselves, we hardly have time in life to know anything. The vast amount of things we don't know dwarfs the teaspoonful of things any one of us ever gets to know in life...and as an academic yourself, you'll no doubt be immediately aware of how much information is out there in your own field, let alone in all the fields that you have never studied, and all the things worth knowing for which there is no field at all. So that's a big thing: if there's a plan in all that's going on, it's certainly bound to be bigger than the tiny vessel, or brain, that any one of us has.

Do we even have a means to assign what you call an "epistemic probability" to there being "gratuitious" suffering in the world? I don't think we do. What we have is a compelling intuition, but one that, like all intuitions, awaits confirmation from the facts. We just don't have the facts we need.

But I'm very sympathetic to the intuition. And so is God, apparently. For according to the Word of God, He allows people like Moses, Job, Habakkuk, Peter, Thomas, and others to question Him as to why things happen the way they do, and He does not despise the question nor treat it lightly. But what He does is give necessary answers to particular situations, not global answers to the human situation. And with good reason. We lack the capacity. This is one way in which Leibniz was kind of right...if there is an answer to all human suffering, it is very big and very complex, spanning not just different individuals, but also places, times, eras and epochs, objects and persons, animals and environment...and it is not a trite and simple answer, nor one we can reasonably expect to receive. The explanation is ocean-sized, and we stand on the shore with a tin cup and complain that we can't get the ocean into it.

We can't. And even in the individual life, we are often thrown back on deciding whether or not we trust the One who is working all things out, and have to leave it with Him, in faith. Still, sometimes God gives us just enough in the cup to have a sense of why particular things happen particularly to us, as individuals. That much, in his grace, He does. I have had such experiences in my life; and when I see God, I will have to confirm that what I thought was the meaning of a particular event or suffering in my life actually was.

But I'm never going to be able to understand all suffering. I don't have that capacity. At least, I don't right now, if I ever can have it.

P.S. -- The Martian analogy.

If Martians arrive to Earth and begin blowing up cities and running through the streets with ray guns blasting people, suppose that they play over an intercom, "do not run, we are your friends." Now, of course, it's possible they are our friends. It's possible they have some inscrutable but benevolent reason for this wanton violence: we mere humans may just not be able to understand. But wouldn't you say -- asking you personally, IC -- that there is a threshold where it's more reasonable, more rational to believe they are not your friends no matter what they're saying over the intercom?

Again, I don't think the analogy works, and for a similar reason. It assumes the aimed-adt conclusion, rather than demonstrating it. It does this because it presumes the existence of only one agency of suffering.

So we would have to patch up the analogy by saying there were many such aliens, or many people running through the streets blasting people with ray guns, and an alien who may or may not have a raygun was yelling "I am your friend." In such a case, all we'd know is that he was saying he was our friend. We wouldn't know if he was responsible for the damage, or others were. Moreover, we'd have to include in the scenario the possibility of him having a "free will" ray, which produced immediate pain but made the "victim" suddenly much wiser, healthier and more moral than he or she ever could have possibly otherwise been, and caused him or her to live forever.

So now what do we know about the alien? On what basis do we even make a reasonable guess as to whether or not he was our "friend." Would we not really be perplexed? But the analogy is now in danger of becoming really speculative, isn't it?

Okay, now to item four: 4. The problem of what is required for "significant freedom": just thoughts, or actions too, how much knowlege, victims/no victims, etc.?

Note: The rest of 4 included "how much knowlege, victims/no victims, etc.?" but I feel like those topics are so rich that they deserve their own spot on some sort of itemized list of topics: as 5 and 6, respectively, basically.

Okay.

...a point that I feel like gets skipped over is that even in a world without physical suffering, beings would be significantly free even by Plantinga's definition: if S can't stab P, S can still make morally significant choices regarding P (does S lie to P? Does S break a promise to P? Does S say cruel things to P?).

I'm arguing that that is not correct, in my estimation. I think that "significant freedom" necessarily entails both the ability to have cognitive moral options and actual ones...ones one can "act" upon.

I was suggesting that that is manifest even in cases like you suggest...such as "promising," because a "promise" is generally a mental undertaking to perform a physical action. One cannot "promise" what one is powerless to deliver. There's no value in the promise-mental-state without the possibility of the promise-actual-delivery. In fact, in a world where there were only very "promisings" and no actual fulfilling of promises, every promise would be a lie.

So it is not sufficient for the act of "promising" for a person to say and not do. That's just a broken promise.

What is a "threat" with no possibility of follow-through? Another lie. But since we are positing a world with no possibility of violence in it, who even takes the threat seriously? Every threat would also be an obvious lie. So there's not even such a thing as a "threat" in that world.

What about a world where there was only love, but no possibility of unrequited love? What would the meaning of "I love you," be? What would make the statement special, exclusive, or even descriptive of anything, since it would be a ubiquitous, undifferentiated property?

In short, action and volition are intimately tied. If I say, "I intend to..." it only is meaningful because I can. I don't have to, and I can choose not to, and still be free. But I have to have the possibility of the contrary action as a live option.

That is what "significant freedom" means, I think.

As for your idyllic scenario, why should it retain either mental or physical misdeeds? If having the freedom of those things once, not forever, is sufficient to produce genuine volitional freedom, then why retain either? I can't see why that would be wanted.

Cancer isn't necessary for your free beings to freely share their minds and bond with one another, nor is being able to be stabbed. So why did you include it in your universe recipe? What was the point? They're already free and already capable of freely forming relationships.

Do we know what is required in order for all people to have the significant freedom they need to be full, complete, volitional individuals? I don't think we do.

So how do we know that the balance of goods and bads in this present world is not ideal? I'm not saying I know it is. I'm not saying you should believe it is. I'm not saying you can't question the balance. I'm asking how you know it isn't exactly what it needs to be?

Okay, that's surely got to be enough from me for one post. I will try to do some justice to your second one when I can set aside the requisite time. Meanwhile, I have noted...

(I will be responding to points 5 and 6 separately because damn, this thread is long lmao)

Right you are. Likewise.

[Age]

Because the words make up the title of this thread, and I am interested in the ideas.

And what were those words, in the title of this thread, in relation to, EXACTLY?

Tell me what the words mean to you. More interestingly perhaps tell what the words mean FOR you.

LOL I ASKED 'you', What were the words 'omniscience' and 'omnibenevolence', in the title of this thread, in relation to, EXACTLY, to you, YET you come back and respond with, Tell me what the words mean to you?

What does it MATTER what the words me TO me or even FOR me?

This is just an ATTEMPT at DISTRACTION from what WAS being DISCUSSED, previously.

[Immanuel Can]

(Post)

Moving on to what I want to call points 5 and 6:

5) Informed choices
6) Innocent victimhood

-----
5) Informed choices
-----

I said, “it's a logical impossibility for God to make another being omnipotent, but I see no reason why God couldn't make another being omniscient.”

You responded,

Well, he'd be a god, then. And then God wouldn't be God. So analytically, that doesn't work.

But I don't think the creating of omnipotent beings was ever God's purpose. I think it was the chance to create free, volitional, loving creatures. None of that requires ominpotence in them. In fact, it may well work better without.

I think you misread me, I feel as though you’re responding as if I’m asking “why didn’t God make people omnipotent,” which I explicitly said God can’t do.

Ah, you underestimate me.

No, I saw what you wrote. But there's a problem: omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence are not separable characteristics, but rather different aspects of the Supreme Being's nature...they don't work individually. Rather, they are like facets of a single diamond -- and you can't talk about "facets" without implicating the whole structure of the gemstone.

Omniscience, if we take it as an unnuanced term, implies, "knowledge of absolutely everything." Not only would that be impossible if God were strictly localized and time-bound (hence not omnipresent) but also would have to include how-to knowledge of everything (which implies omnipotence).

If you are talking about a kind of knowledge that is short of that, then you are, by definition, not speaking of unconditional "omniscience," the kind traditionally attributed to God, but of some kind of restricted or limited knowledge.

I made no mistake. However, I am guilty of skipping that logical step in my answer to you, so I can't hold you responsible for supposing I had misread. However, the answer is as before: an entity with those characteristics would have to be God. And there can only be one Supreme Being.

I said, “I haven't said that God would zoop them into prefering friendship with God, just zooped them with knowledge so they can make an informed choice about that.”

You responded,

But it cannot be TOO informed. That's a problem for "significant freedom." If they are so "informed" that they regard no other possibility as even an option, but to love God, then they have no power of free choice anymore.

Also,

Well, if we believe the Biblical account, any genuine encounter with God is utterly devastating to evil...and what's to happen to the skeptic if God comes down to meet her? But even if that were not a problem, if God had done that, then she would not ever have even been able to entertain the possibility of disbelief or rejection. The experience would be so utterly overwhelming as to obliterate that entirely.

I really don’t understand this on multiple levels.

Let's see if I can clarify.

First, I should ask: are you saying that 100% of people would love God if they had more information about God? Why would it be a bad thing for them to have more information? I truly don’t understand this.

No, I'm not saying it would be a "bad" thing. But it would be a much less good thing than them having the free opportunity to choose to love God of their own volition: and that opportunity for volition would be utterly destroyed if they ever had a full-on encounter with God. They would simply have no choice but to believe.

Which will happen one day. But not until all the persons God wants to have the chance to choose Him have had their full chance.

Let’s say that we’re on a game show and I present you with two doors. I say that behind Door 1 is a car and behind Door 2 is a suitcase. “Well what’s in the suitcase,” you might ask. “idk, lol,” I say, and wink. That might make for entertaining TV, but imagine that the choice you’re making has very important -- no -- infinite consequences? What if what you didn’t know is that by rejecting the suitcase in favor of the car that you know you need, you’re rejecting (against your knowledge!) -- what was it you said, light, life, mercy, some long list of really nice things that nobody in their right mind would reject?

But we do know what's in the "suitcase." God has told us. But some choose not to believe that; and because there is an alternate choice or "car," in your story, one with some attractions to us of its own, their choice remains free and uncoerced.

However, the cost of freedom is responsibility. (That's a great rule for life, by the way.) And the cost of us having such uncoerced freedom is that we may choose the wrong thing.

Why is ignorance ever a good thing?

Ignorance is not. But choice is.

Full knowledge of God is not resistible. By all accounts, it's utterly overwhelming -- as well as utterly devastating of any creature that is less than completely pure. There is very clearly no other choice to be made but to believe, when one is staring into the face of the Almighty. So if there's ever going to be a moment when people can choose, God must necessarily suppress that experience considerably. Or, in Christian language, He must "veil His glory" so as to be capable of becoming the Object of free and uncoerced faith.

I am not trying to be obtuse. I really, truly don’t understand this.

Do you now?

I brought up preparing children for deception...I was pointing out that we prepare children for deception: that I’d be in some part culpable for my child opening the door for a stranger if I hadn’t explained what deception is and that the stranger might say, “you can open the door, your mom said it was OK.”

I’m still asking: why didn’t God prepare Adam and Eve for deception?

They were. They were told not to take of the tree. But they were still left free to do it.

This is why I spoke of children being "prepared." It's one thing to "prepare" them to face the world; but the other thing you have to "prepare" them for is independence, for choice, for responsibility, and for adulthood. These two goals are not precisely harmonious, because you can never "prepare" them to such an extent that you leave them no possibiility of making choices, which entails that they can also make bad choices as well as good ones. If you do "prepare" them in such a way that they literally cannot go wrong by any means, then you have also crippled them for choice-making.

There is therefore a limit to what we can expect God to have done, in light of the twin goals of preparing Adam and Eve to be capable of resisting the temptation, on the one hand, (which, as Milton says, they were) and the other goal of allowing them volitional freedom (which entails that they could also choose to go with the deception, instead), on the other.

Isn’t God culpable for that,

Not if God did as much as He should have done to warn them away from the tree, which the Bible said He did. He told them "You shall not eat of it," and also "In the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die." But, as the story goes, they chose to disregard His warning. And what you're really asking, therefore, is that God should have done more -- which would involve intervening to prevent Adam and Eve from making the one free choice they actually had, out of fear they might choose the wrong thing...which would remove their free will.

Perhaps you can see the problem with that solution.

A choice that has no advantages and only detriments isn't a choice at all. And it's the "significant freedom" occasioned by the power to have a choice that is the precious commodity.

So a true "choice" has to be "informed" enough to make the good chooseable, but not so "informed" as to make the alternative unthinkable. That's about where good and evil are, in this world.

I feel like you’re contradicting yourself a little here. I had said, “Do you think anyone would make a bad choice if they truly knew the repurcussions of making that choice, both for themselves and others?” to which you responded:

Yes. I've seen it. Often, the proximal gains seem to outweigh the long-term detriments, especially if the perpetrator can cast those detriments as illusory or at least uncertain to follow. That's why criminals do what they do. They don't like jail; they just think they'll never end up there.

So which is it: on one hand you imply that with full information no one would make any bad choices, or they would? You’ve kind of said both here.

I see the problem. I have not been clear. I did not take them to be exactly the same question, inversely put. I took them to be two questions.

So let's fix up the seeming contradiction. In order to have a choice, people have to have at least two roughly equipoised alternatives. Both alternatives have to, in some sense, look equally "takeable," equally "reasonable to want," and "equally desirable." If the difference between them is too great, then no sane person will take anything but the one alternative -- and there is no "choice" to be made anymore. So the two options do not have to be exactly equal...but they must not be so wildly disparate that it's totally impossible to prefer one over the other.

And so you might think the situation is simple: Heaven is an overwhelming good, and sin is an obvious bad. So no sane person will choose to sin. But is that how it is in the real world? No, obviously not. So why is it not? Let me suggest: it is not, because the good and bad choice look equally desirable, equally rational, to the eye of human beings. They are essentially equipoised.

How is that? Well, things can be equipoised in various ways. They can be exactly equal, in all regards. That's one way. But another is this: that one could be very good and the other could be very bad; but they end up equipoised in our judgment because one the second offers immediate enticements, and the first offers long term benefits. Or it could be that one is very intense but remote or brief, and the other is comparatively mild but highly available and of some duration. And so on. (This relates to the problem of the "hedonic calculus" that Bentham and Mill tried to work out, in order to fix the problems in basic Utilitarianism: "goods" as we perceive them, come in different forms. But it also relates to our common experiences; have you never wondered if a one-night stand might be fun, even though you know it can put a serious dent in the much greater good of a committed relationship?)

So equipoise of options is a complicated matter. And there are cases in which one "good" is perceived to be so "good" that the enticements of any alternative are simply vanishing...like the experience of seeing Heaven or being in the presence of God. Nobody, having had those experiences, could any longer be fooled by the tawdry temptations of more mundane things. It would utterly change one's outlook, compellingly and forever. And no sane person would reject such a good, if she really knew what it was, for any other potential advantage.

However, as I said, equipoise of very great goods with relatively tawdry evils can be achieved through factors like the very great goods only being promised and not yet experienced, and the tawdry evils, by contrast, offering their delights right at hand, and in immediate experience. And so, in real life, people all the time embrace tawdry evils and reject overwhelmingly great goods, not really out of ignorance but out of refusal to believe God, and out of preference for the immediate rewards of tawdry evils.

So it can both be the case that no person would reject the full knowledge of God if they had it, but also that people do reject God all the time, even though knowing Him is a very, very great good. They simply choose not to believe it, and prefer the passing temptations of the present age. For the delights of sin and the blessings of eternity seem equally poised in our imaginations...even in defiance of our very good reasons to believe that they are not at all ultimately equal.

A much more complex way of saying those two things, I know, and I've become wordy in the explaining of it. But it's a bit subtle, and I trust you catch the point.

Another way of saying this would be that either choice could be "informed." By way of one choice, you are "informed" that it is right, good, pure, difficult, demanding, requires endurance, will even entail suffering, will last forever and will be ecstaticly wonderful. But by way of the other, you are "informed" that it is immediately available, intense, present, twisted, intriguingly naughty, easy to achieve, satisfies immediate cravings, delivers immediate gains, yet ultimately will leave you unsatisfied, hollow and dead inside.

You are correctly "informed" about both, and all that information is true. Yet is it obvious which of the two everybody would choose?

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6) Innocent victimhood
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I am curious why God allows innocent victims when it seems possible not to have them:

Does it? I don't really see that it does. I think that when you try to parse out the particular mechanics of that, you see that, by implication, it starts right away to constrain the range of possibilities not only in our personal choices, but also in the manner of our relationships.

There is certainly, I think we'd both agree, very great good in people being able to affect each other in positive ways. Most of life's greatest joys come from such relationships, do they not? However, if we constrain the choices that can be made in our relationships to others, we start to morph that. I was speaking to you earlier about the phenomenon of "promising," and how that the greatness of the fulfilling of a promise made to us by somebody is contingent as well upon our awareness that they didn't have to do it, and they could have let us down. I spoke also of love, how that requited love is so delightful, partly because of the ecstacy of realizing we haven't been rejected. But if we could never have not-been-accepted in first place, why is it so great that somebody says they love us? But let's take another case...mercy, or charity, or empathy...have you never considered how much these qualities depend on things like guilt and judgment (so we can have mercy), or unequal distribution (so there's an action called "giving charitably and generously") or on suffering (because "empathy" is not possible to those who have no such experience)? The paradox is that there is actually a set of very great goods that are being "manufactured," so to speak, by the fact that we live in a very imperfect world. Would this world be better if we eliminated mercy, charity and empathy? And how about love or promises?

All these goods only come because it could have been otherwise. And it really has to have been the case that these things could have been denied us, or they are not nearly so precious as we now know they are. Indeed, there is a real possibility we would never know what any of these things are, without some sort of deprivation or suffering being at least actually possible.

So zooping has its limits.

I'm sure there's more to say. But I've already made this hugely longer. My bad.

For now, I've had at least a preliminary try at responding to your reply. Again, if I'm missed stuff, don't hesitate.

[Dontaskme]

But there's a problem: omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence are not separable characteristics, but rather different aspects of the Supreme Being's nature...they don't work individually. Rather, they are like facets of a single diamond -- and you can't talk about "facets" without implicating the whole structure of the gemstone.

What you've just described is NONDUAL understanding.

An understanding you have repeatedly REJECTED.

Oh well, I guess you can now understand the actual WHY there IS HERE no room for the two of us.

But do carry on Master Baiting / debating with yourself, it's all your good for.

Here, I found the perfect image of you IC



The WHOLE ...can never see or know itself IC ...stop pretending it can. No 3D object can ever get a peek up it's own WHOLENESS

[Immanuel Can]

But there's a problem: omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence are not separable characteristics, but rather different aspects of the Supreme Being's nature...they don't work individually. Rather, they are like facets of a single diamond -- and you can't talk about "facets" without implicating the whole structure of the gemstone.

What you've just described is NONDUAL understanding.

An understanding you have repeatedly REJECTED.

I've never rejected the idea that there are some things that have to be taken holistically. It's obvious that there are. But I have rejected the absurd premise that holistic thinking is the total rule of everything, which is just as obviously false.

[Belinda]

And what were those words, in the title of this thread, in relation to, EXACTLY?

Tell me what the words mean to you. More interestingly perhaps tell what the words mean FOR you.

LOL I ASKED 'you', What were the words 'omniscience' and 'omnibenevolence', in the title of this thread, in relation to, EXACTLY, to you, YET you come back and respond with, Tell me what the words mean to you?

What does it MATTER what the words me TO me or even FOR me?

This is just an ATTEMPT at DISTRACTION from what WAS being DISCUSSED, previously.

You are a member of an internet discussion forum .Internet discussion forums can't exist unless contributors play their part by proposing claims, and devices for extending ideas. There is a difference between obstructions on the one hand and devices for extending ideas on the other. At some point you, Age, should assert an idea which may be a specific objection , an extension of someone's idea, or an original idea of your own.
As you stand you seem either too timid to assert, or being obstructive is the only strategy you know . We try to draw you out but with no success to date.

[Astro Cat]

Good heavens.

You're no better at "trimming" than I am at "being parsimonious." We both write a ton, even when we try to cut things down.

Haha

Awesome responses, letting you know I’m on vacation until Wednesday so likely won’t be responding substantively until Thursday or so.

Also, I may try to work responses into syllogisms as an experiment to see if that’s shorter.

Also, it looks like there are places you are punting to mystery