Astro Cat wrote: ↑Mon Feb 06, 2023 5:16 pm
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.
So again, intention and action were fused.
We both write a ton, even when we try to cut things down.
