The Problem of Evil: Toy Worlds

[Astro Cat]

Here I would like to present my version of the Problem of Evil (PoE). In order to head off tricky questions such as "what is meant by 'evil,'" I will instead be presenting the basic idea as a problem of suffering, and I shall carefully lay out the premises to take this into account (e.g., "omnibenevolence," one of the common premises of the PoE, will be defined in terms of suffering rather than in terms of good and evil).

At its core, the PoE is a form of reductio ad absurdum whereby some set of premises is adopted for the sake of argument in order to show that they lead to a contradiction or incongruency. This means that not everybody is going to accept the premises by fiat: that's okay, that simply means that the argument doesn't apply to their version of gods. Keep that in mind before posting objections in the form of "well I don't accept this premise": the argument isn't aimed at you, then.

As a quick bit of history, one of the most popular formulations of the Problem of Evil is attributed to Epicurus (this is paraphrased for modern sensibilities):

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent.
Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent.
Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?"

Over the long years, people have had a lot of responses to this basic PoE (called theodicies): examples include the soul-making theodicy (whereby God doesn't prevent evil because it's necessary for suffering to be possible for people to grow as people), free will theodicies (whereby God doesn't prevent suffering as it would presumably interfere with His creation's free will), and so on. Theodicies attempt to pre-empt the PoE by making some excuse, essentially, for why God would allow evil. Theodicies acknowledge that the PoE is a problem and attempt to give an explanation for the apparent incongruency between an omni-God and the existence of evil.

Eventually, the notion of PoE defenses arose: these would be different from theodicies because they deny the PoE is a problem in the first place by asserting that it's possible for evil to exist alongside an omni-God without contradiction (such as Plantinga's famous free will defense and Transworld Depravity, introduced in Plantinga's "Nature of Necessity" and fleshed out in "God, Freedom & Evil").

The PoE is generally separated between attempts to show a hard logical contradiction (the "logical PoE") and attempts to show that it's at least very reasonable to find it unlikely that a God with the properties laid out in the premises is congruent with the observed world (the "evidential PoE"). With Plantinga's free will defense, the theological community (and to some extent the wider philosophical community) held the logical PoE to have been defeated. There have been some that disagreed (I am among them, Plantinga makes some wonky definitional assumptions in "God, Freedom & Evil," but that is probably for another post. I have had multiple correspondences with Plantinga about the PoE and it'd probably make for a good post). Regardless of whether the logical PoE was defeated, the evidential PoE has been alive and well.

With all of that out of the way, I will move into my version of the argument. I will be presenting this in a conversational rather than syllogistic way: this is mostly because I'm terrible at melting down grand concepts into syllogisms without forgetting some important detail and having to go back and edit them 1,000 times.

First, what sort of God is this argument aimed at? It's aimed at what I perceive to be a relatively common conception of God as a being with omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, a being which created the world, and a being that is interested in some of its creations to have free agency*. I will provide working (not exhaustive!) definitions for each of these below.

Omnipotence: For the purposes of this argument, omnipotence is the capacity to actualize any logically possible state of affairs. This avoids silly paradoxes like "making a rock so large He can't lift it," or any other irresistible force meets immovable object type paradox (these are not logically possible, so we don't have to worry about them).

Omniscience: For the purposes of this argument, it's sufficient for an omniscient being to know every possible truth and avoid believing every possible falsity. We do not have to worry about deeper nuances such as "can God predict an exact free will choice," that will be irrelevant here.

Omnibenevolence: This is probably the trickiest one to nail down. For the purposes of this argument, a being is omnibenevolent if it doesn't desire to cause suffering and purposefully takes every measure logically possible to prevent its gratuitous instantiation. This definition leaves open the door for certain theodicies which will be addressed piecemeal at the end.

For the sake of brevity I will be calling a being that has these three properties an "omni-being" or "omni-max being."

(* -- sidebar about free agency. I abhor the free will debate. Whether or not we have free will, to whatever degree (from compatibilism to causa sui/libertarian, does not matter too much to this argument. What matters is that created beings may have free will or at least the illusion thereof.)

The argument proceeds along the lines of the usual PoE: if an omni-max being could have created a world in which some kind of suffering isn't possible, yet chose to create a world where that suffering is possible, then the omni-max being is culpable for the existence of that suffering. Consider an engineer that has the knowledge and power to build a bridge. If the engineer understands that the bridge needs to withstand certain conditions to avoid collapsing, the engineer has the ability to do this (but chooses not to), then the engineer is culpable for the bridge collapsing.

So, is there a kind of suffering in the world that doesn't have to exist: could God have made a world in which some form of suffering we experience didn't have to be possible? Yes. I'd like to draw a distinction for instance between physical suffering and emotional suffering. If one of the premises is that God wants to create a world with free agents, then it seems that there are some emotional forms of suffering that God couldn't prevent as a consequence of this choice: for instance, if friends or lovers break up with each other, or a friend telling a lie to another, or unrequited love. Since it's necessary for people to be able to make choices like that to have free agency, God can't prevent that sort of suffering despite being omni-max (and so isn't culpable for it).

However, consider physical suffering: stubbed toes, disease, "natural" suffering (e.g. animals suffering due to natural circumstances), anything that causes suffering due to the laws of physics. Could God have created a world in which physical suffering doesn't exist while retaining the premises? Can a God with this arguments' premises be held culpable for suffering as a result of physical processes? The answer to both of these questions is "yes."

It is possible for an omni-max being to create a world in which physical suffering categorically doesn't exist (with caveats**) yet retains all of the premises, including free agency. Swinburne called such a concept a "Toy World." While this seems counterintuitive at first, it's easily cognizable by considering that if something can be simulated, then an omni-max being could actualize a world like that simulation. As any video gamer that's ever typed "iddqd" into Doom (or used whatever other invincibility cheats on any games) can tell you, it's quite easy to simulate a world friendly to free agency yet in which the laws of physics are incapable of physically harming the free agent.

We could suppose that an omni-max being could create a world with conditional physics, for instance: if a knife were to cut tomato flesh to create a salad, then it is physically permitted. If that same knife would cut human flesh, perhaps it loses all inertia. We can imagine any plethora of such conditional physics and understand that an omni-max being would have the power to instantiate them and the knowledge of how to do so perfectly such that free agents need never fear physical harm of any kind.

Would free agents still be free in such a Toy World? I think it's obviously so. In such a world you would still wake up, decide what to wear, decide who to hang out with, what movie you want to see that day, where to go with your friends, and so on. In every relevant way you would still have freedom of agency.

So we come full circle to the argument: if God could have created a Toy World while maintaining all of the premises, yet chose not to, then that's equivalent to God consciously choosing to inject physical suffering into the world (since He had the ability to do otherwise, and He knew there was an alternative). Yet consciously choosing to create a world with physical suffering when it's possible to do it otherwise is incongruent with the idea that God is omnibenevolent. By reductio ad absurdum, one or more of the premises would have to be wrong.

Now, let me pre-emptively take care of a few objections that might crop up.

Objection 1: What about the physical suffering people cause against other people? The answer is that in a Toy World, people wouldn't be able to physically harm one another: the physics of the world wouldn't allow it. This doesn't mean that people wouldn't be free agents, however. For instance, right now, I'm not able to walk on my ceiling or teleport to Mars: I'm physically incapable of doing these two things. Does my inability to do a few physical things relegate me to a non-free status? Of course not!

Objection 2: Isn't a person that can't stab another person less free than someone who can? My reply essentially boils down to: so what? Is this a good sort of freedom to have? Right now, I'm physically unable to perform all kinds of exotic attacks against other people such as morphing my body into a hideous monstrosity a la John Carpenter's "The Thing," or spit acid at someone, or perform strange and gruesome tortures one might see Freddy Krueger or Pinhead perform on a victim. Does that make me "less free" than I otherwise would be if I could do those things? Would it be good if I could do those things? I really don't think so.

Objection 3: What if we insist the number of freedoms does matter? My reply here would simply be this: I have already listed several things I am not free to do that are essentially morally neutral (such as walking on the ceiling or teleporting to Mars). If the sheer quantity of freedoms is deemed important, then God certainly has the power to grant a non-harmful freedom for every harmful physical freedom prevented with the laws of physics.

Objection 4: But suffering is necessary for some good things: you can't have heroes like firefighters without house fires, right? My response to this theodicy (an offshoot of soul-making theodicy) is that I find this sort of argument absurd. What makes a hero or a firefighter "good" at all if the thing that they fight doesn't exist? This is sort of like arguing that it's worth it to create a disease just so someone can be a hero and invent a cure. Would you rather live in the universe that has smallpox so you can celebrate the person that cures it as a hero, or would you rather live in the universe where smallpox simply never existed in the first place?

(** -- the caveat I mentioned earlier is this: what causes suffering is something like a sliding scale. If we were to remove every kind of physical suffering in the world except for stubbed toes, then stubbed toes might seem so awful to us (as we have nothing to compare them to) that they might seem as bad as murder seems to us now. I find the feeling of walking on grass in my bare feet unpleasant, though I love sand. In a world without physical suffering, would I still consider it physical suffering to walk barefoot on grass? That might be possible. So a potential objection is that even a Toy World isn't totally devoid of physical suffering; and could ask "well is God culpable for that?" The way around this is to set some definitive bar that would definitely not exist in a Toy World, and a really easy one to consider is physical death due to bodily harm. Then we are dealing with a dichotomy rather than a sliding scale: does the world allow for death due to bodily harm or not? In a Toy World, it wouldn't. This is an interesting complication so I felt it necessary to bring it up here.)

Interesting sidebar: There are some people that don't require too much convincing that a Toy World is possible: after all, many theists believe in concepts like Heaven which is ostensibly a place of existence where physical suffering does not exist, to some. (Others argue there's more to it, I know; but you get the point).

[Walker]

Hi there Astro Cat.

- Pain is a more effective balancing force than concepts, or suggestions, or commandments.
- A balancing force is a movement towards balance, and the movement towards balance is the cause of all movement in the universe.
- Pain teaches the body to pick up the feet when walking in order to preserve the toes, in order to preserve the individual, in order to preserve the species.
- Pain makes this temporary preservation of the toes, and the person, and the species a natural ordering that doesn’t require conceptual understanding.
- The natural prevention of stubbed toes has nothing to do with good or evil*.
- The way of life is that the species preserves itself by means of its capacity for preservation, which can mean sacrifice of the individual, or preservation of the toes, depending on the situation.
- Clinging to pain, rather than pain, is the cause of suffering.

Ever watch The Jetsons?


* If the intent of causing physical or mental pain is to harm, that’s evil. If the intent of causing physical or mental pain is to not harm, or is to prevent harm, or is to treat what has been harmed, then that is good.

Thus, telling a child that they are forbidden to medically alter the appearance of their sex is not evil, even though the brat may throw a tantrum when throwing out that accusation.

[FlashDangerpants]

I can offer a general and a specific problem here. The specific one is that your treatment of objection 4 is insufficient. It amounts to an argument from incredulity: "I can't think of a reason why X therefore not X." Religionists aren't going to agree, their God moves in mysterious ways his inscrutible aims to acheive and they tend to view it as heretical to try and outwit the omni-dude. Pain, grief, sadness are fundamental to our existence as human beings just as much as joy is. The toyworld probably can't be said to contain humans if it doesn't have mortality and suffering. So if god's pupose was to create humanity - for any reason he or she might have at all - then something much like this world would be a logical requirement.

The more general point is that fundamentally, the Leibniz argument that this is the best of all possible worlds works perfectly against the problem of evil if you do want it to... but it fails spectacularly if you do not want it to work. This is the usual outcome in all arguments about God. No such arguments have any persuasive power, they all appeal solely to whatever preconceptions the audience brings into the debate.

That second point is why I (an atheist who actively believes there is no God) am by logical necessity an Agnostic. The value of examining arguments about God lies in finding out why the ones you like don't actually work any better than the ones you don't like. Thus my visits to the religion sub are very rare, and it is usually a safe space where the incorrigible wank-bastard poopDiddlepants wanders not.

[seeds]

Could God have created a world in which physical suffering doesn't exist...? The answer..."yes."

If humans didn't have a "personal incentive program" (in the form of physical pain) to compel us to protect our bodies from damage, or as a warning system when something internal goes awry,...

...how long do you think we would last as a viable species?

On the other hand, if you think that an omnipotent Creator could have (should have) provided us with invincible (pain-free) bodies, how would that work when it comes to death?

Should our bodies stop aging as of, say, 18 and simply drop dead for no apparent reason at the age of 90 without ever having experienced one instance of physical pain throughout our entire lifetime?

Should no one ever physically die?

Or are you just assuming that all of those concerns are something that the omnipotent Creator needs to sort-out before awakening us into existence?

Come to think of it, if an omnipotent Creator would have simply limited us to this level of consciousness,...



...then the so-called "Problem of Evil" would no longer occupy our minds.

Wouldn't that be easier?
_______

[Walker]

...then the so-called "Problem of Evil" would no longer occupy our minds.

Wouldn't that be easier?
_______

Would that the topic occupy completely, in order to understand completely, without experiencing.

Because of any human’s limited capacity to account for the causational relationship of every element comprising any compounded situation, and because all situations are compounded, then we can say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We can say that because obviously, given the personal historical records of Everyone, good intentions are no guarantee that the effects of good intentions won’t have hellish results.

That accounts for Good. What about Evil?

Evil intends harm. Even though a human’s limited capacity cannot account for every element of a situation, a human’s capacity can account for the significant elements of a situation that will cause harm, and act accordingly with the predicted results.

That accounts for Evil.

* When Truth, Justice, and The American Way are in play, Evil is stymied.

When they are corrupted, Evil throws a party and multi-manifests simultaneously with rioting, with wrong political decisions that cause pain and suffering for folks everywhere, that sort of stuff.


*

[Astro Cat]

Hi there Astro Cat.

- Pain is a more effective balancing force than concepts, or suggestions, or commandments.
- A balancing force is a movement towards balance, and the movement towards balance is the cause of all movement in the universe.

I am not quite sure what's being said here, this doesn't form a concept in my mind to read. Is there any way you can elucidate on the meaning?

- Pain teaches the body to pick up the feet when walking in order to preserve the toes, in order to preserve the individual, in order to preserve the species.
- Pain makes this temporary preservation of the toes, and the person, and the species a natural ordering that doesn’t require conceptual understanding.

Physical pain to preserve toes isn't necessary if toes can't be harmed, though. If the argument is "pain is good because it teaches you not to stub your toes," doesn't this notion sort of forget that it's possible to have a universe where toes can't be stubbed in the first place?

Another example is a stove with a hot burner. In the universe we exist in right now, it's a good thing that we feel pain because if we rest our hand on a hot burner, we immediately learn not to do that. And that's good, because in this universe, a hot burner is certainly capable of hurting us.

However, that doesn't justify the existence of pain because its justification is circular: pain in this context is good because it prevents future suffering. But in a Toy World, there is no future suffering to prevent, so what good does pain do? There's no reason for it in a Toy Universe. So trying to use pain to justify its own existence doesn't really accomplish anything.

- The natural prevention of stubbed toes has nothing to do with good or evil*.

...

* If the intent of causing physical or mental pain is to harm, that’s evil. If the intent of causing physical or mental pain is to not harm, or is to prevent harm, or is to treat what has been harmed, then that is good.

(Order changed to respond to this point in the same line). As commented on above, the pain from stubbed toes teaches us to be careful about how we walk. So the suggestion might be that causing (or creating the capacity for) this pain isn't malevolent similar to how causing pain in a person by giving them an inoculation isn't malevolent.

However, this still doesn't work because as mentioned above, there is no reason for the pain if the thing the pain is meant to protect us from can never harm us. If it's possible to make a world where the pain is unnecessary to prevent future harm, yet a world is created where the pain is necessary, then there is a moral culpability there.

Allow me to give a silly example. Let's say that I'm a programmer and I run a server full of artificial beings with sapience and sentience. I'm in control of the physics of their world. Let's say that I have the ability to prevent them from stubbing artificial toes at all in the first place, but instead I choose to let them stub their toes and feel pain over it. I can say, "but the pain helps prevent you from stubbing your toes in the future." Yet at the end of the day, that wouldn't have mattered if I just made the pain-free version where they can't stub their toes in the first place (and thus do not need to learn how to avoid doing it).

I have caused them harm, I'm culpable for doing that, if I choose the latter rather than the former.

[Astro Cat]

I can offer a general and a specific problem here. The specific one is that your treatment of objection 4 is insufficient. It amounts to an argument from incredulity: "I can't think of a reason why X therefore not X." Religionists aren't going to agree, their God moves in mysterious ways his inscrutible aims to acheive and they tend to view it as heretical to try and outwit the omni-dude. Pain, grief, sadness are fundamental to our existence as human beings just as much as joy is. The toyworld probably can't be said to contain humans if it doesn't have mortality and suffering. So if god's pupose was to create humanity - for any reason he or she might have at all - then something much like this world would be a logical requirement.

The more general point is that fundamentally, the Leibniz argument that this is the best of all possible worlds works perfectly against the problem of evil if you do want it to... but it fails spectacularly if you do not want it to work. This is the usual outcome in all arguments about God. No such arguments have any persuasive power, they all appeal solely to whatever preconceptions the audience brings into the debate.

That second point is why I (an atheist who actively believes there is no God) am by logical necessity an Agnostic. The value of examining arguments about God lies in finding out why the ones you like don't actually work any better than the ones you don't like. Thus my visits to the religion sub are very rare, and it is usually a safe space where the incorrigible wank-bastard poopDiddlepants wanders not.

You have a fair point about the preceonceptions brought into it: someone inclined to believe the Leibneizian "best of all possible worlds" isn't likely to agree with the reasoning of the argument. However, this is why I think the talk about simulations is important. When we try to think of what an omnipotent and omniscient being can do in a vacuum, it's hard for us to conceptualize that. However if we (general we) agree that if something could be simulated that an omni-being could make that simulation actual, I think it places it a little closer to a conceptualized arena.

I think if a person is earnest they could imagine, or close enough, a simulated world with free agents where physical suffering has been turned off. One person might imagine the Matrix where everyone is Neo for instance, another person might imagine it would be like typing "iddqd" into Doom, etc. (Also, many theists already have this conception in various ideas about Heaven: so they can imagine that).

Then I think the next step is that people would have to ask themselves, "would these creatures still be humans?" Sure, we can do a lot of navel gazing about that, but I think a lot of people would have the intuition that yes, they would still be humans.

[Astro Cat]

Could God have created a world in which physical suffering doesn't exist...? The answer..."yes."

If humans didn't have a "personal incentive program" (in the form of physical pain) to compel us to protect our bodies from damage, or as a warning system when something internal goes awry,...

...how long do you think we would last as a viable species?

As I mentioned in another response above this one today, this objection doesn't have any bite. The argument is essentially, "if we didn't feel pain to avoid touching a hot stove burner, then how would we know not to touch the hot stove burner?'

But this objection ignores the fact that in a Toy World, the hot stove burner can't harm you in the first place, so there's no need for a sensation of pain to learn to avoid touching it. That applies to all forms of physical suffering and all sources of physical harm.

On the other hand, if you think that an omnipotent Creator could have (should have) provided us with invincible (pain-free) bodies, how would that work when it comes to death?

Should our bodies stop aging as of, say, 18 and simply drop dead for no apparent reason at the age of 90 without ever having experienced one instance of physical pain throughout our entire lifetime?

Should no one ever physically die?

Or are you just assuming that all of those concerns are something that the omnipotent Creator needs to sort-out before awakening us into existence?

Many theists believe that people live forever in a Toy World they call Heaven: thus one answer that's apparently already commonly accepted is indeed that perhaps death doesn't need to occur at all.

Another possibility is that death could be an optional decision people can make for themselves when they tire of existence. The solutions to these problems can be truly exotic since we're talking about an omni-being that can do the fixing. For instance, we might object, "if people lived forever, we'd run out of space on the planet!" But an omni-being could make a living space that's literally infinite, filled with infinite resources.

Come to think of it, if an omnipotent Creator would have simply limited us to this level of consciousness,...



...then the so-called "Problem of Evil" would no longer occupy our minds.

Wouldn't that be easier?
_______

I think a hidden premise of the argument, since it already makes the assumption that the omni-being wants free agents to exist, is that the omni-being probably also wants its free agents to hold a certain level of intelligence and awareness as well.

[Walker]

I am not quite sure what's being said here, this doesn't form a concept in my mind to read. Is there any way you can elucidate on the meaning?

Begin with movement. All movement is to balance. Electrons jump between atoms to balance energy. The body moves for many reasons but they're all designed to scratch some itch, an itch being an imbalance on the comfort scale that leans towards discomfort. Perfect balance is perfect stillness. Absolute zero.

The movement required to ask a question may be caused by curiosity, i.e., the need to balance incomplete knowledge, with more complete knowledge. The movement required to ask a question may be caused by other things, too, such as evil and evil's nasty intentions, which causes an imbalance to be naturally balanced one way or t'other, sooner or later.

[attofishpi]

As a quick bit of history, one of the most popular formulations of the Problem of Evil is attributed to Epicurus (this is paraphrased for modern sensibilities):

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent.
Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent.
Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?"

RE: Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent.
..not willing to a point. God is karmic, it has a good side, and an evil side.

The important thing about that, is we reincarnate through time based on how we have conducted ourselves. Indeed, EVERY day is judgement day.

So.

IF we reincarnate through time, I believe there can be 'carry over' to the next life of this karma, in some cases. Indeed, I have often considered that we also carry over certain attributes of our personality..our morality.

Interesting sidebar: There are some people that don't require too much convincing that a Toy World is possible: after all, many theists believe in concepts like Heaven which is ostensibly a place of existence where physical suffering does not exist, to some. (Others argue there's more to it, I know; but you get the point).

A nice OP there Cat. You need to remove "omnibenevolent".

Heaven is earned via the key LOVE. It is not given, and it is not another place..
I'm pretty much there..one truly needs to understand this to comprehend it: Reality is a convoluted apparition of the truth.

[Dubious]

Making evil relational to some god is merely a means of objectifying it away from ourselves as the cause of it. Thereafter, it can be discussed endlessly as a philosophical problem thereby "purifying" it in the form of an abstraction instead of the gross deficiencies in humans being the carrier and container of it. Evil in humans is not unlike a carcinogen infecting a brain that can no-longer reason correctly or control its impulses.

Evil has nothing whatever to do with god, even there were one, or any monolithic entity that must be coerced or conquered by another to regain some balance...or, metaphorically stated, dehumidifying the atmosphere. If one wants to make it philosophical make it moral in some human sense and not anchored to any ghost god who has no interest at all in our philosophical pondering and useless abstractions.

Passing the buck was never part of any solution.

[Iwannaplato]

Objection 4: But suffering is necessary for some good things: you can't have heroes like firefighters without house fires, right? My response to this theodicy (an offshoot of soul-making theodicy) is that I find this sort of argument absurd. What makes a hero or a firefighter "good" at all if the thing that they fight doesn't exist? This is sort of like arguing that it's worth it to create a disease just so someone can be a hero and invent a cure. Would you rather live in the universe that has smallpox so you can celebrate the person that cures it as a hero, or would you rather live in the universe where smallpox simply never existed in the first place?

What if God knows the following: reincarnation is the case, boredom in eternity is the worst suffering (that is, in the long run it becomes the most horrible madness possible),the elimination of suffering is not enough goals to get the best possible universe. Thus pain, while regrettable in the short term, contributes to incredible dramas (necessarily often played out over thousands of lives or millions or....). And perhaps God is involved in this (a bit on the Hindu take of deities being both immanent and transcendent). IOW God itself participates in this process and is also protecting itself from the potential horrors of infinite boredom.

I mean, we often react quite negatively to suburbs and disneyfication, and relationships with really nice boring people. To varying degrees we all choose to increase suffering to enhance life at least in some facets of our lives. We do not have a single heuristic for life: minimize suffering. And that's in our really quite short lives.

I do think the literal and infinite infinitie interpretations of God's power, knowledge, etc. are actually the ideas of a few theologians that then became tihs to some degree silly exercise in debate between theists and non-theists. Expressive poetic texts (at least partly such) are taken to mean these mathematically endless categories. A kind of red herring created by relatively few theists, that suddenly many theists (especially Abrahamic ones) feel obliged to defend and, well, just assert.

[FlashDangerpants]

I can offer a general and a specific problem here. The specific one is that your treatment of objection 4 is insufficient. It amounts to an argument from incredulity: "I can't think of a reason why X therefore not X." Religionists aren't going to agree, their God moves in mysterious ways his inscrutible aims to acheive and they tend to view it as heretical to try and outwit the omni-dude. Pain, grief, sadness are fundamental to our existence as human beings just as much as joy is. The toyworld probably can't be said to contain humans if it doesn't have mortality and suffering. So if god's pupose was to create humanity - for any reason he or she might have at all - then something much like this world would be a logical requirement.

The more general point is that fundamentally, the Leibniz argument that this is the best of all possible worlds works perfectly against the problem of evil if you do want it to... but it fails spectacularly if you do not want it to work. This is the usual outcome in all arguments about God. No such arguments have any persuasive power, they all appeal solely to whatever preconceptions the audience brings into the debate.

That second point is why I (an atheist who actively believes there is no God) am by logical necessity an Agnostic. The value of examining arguments about God lies in finding out why the ones you like don't actually work any better than the ones you don't like. Thus my visits to the religion sub are very rare, and it is usually a safe space where the incorrigible wank-bastard poopDiddlepants wanders not.

You have a fair point about the preceonceptions brought into it: someone inclined to believe the Leibneizian "best of all possible worlds" isn't likely to agree with the reasoning of the argument. However, this is why I think the talk about simulations is important. When we try to think of what an omnipotent and omniscient being can do in a vacuum, it's hard for us to conceptualize that. However if we (general we) agree that if something could be simulated that an omni-being could make that simulation actual, I think it places it a little closer to a conceptualized arena.

I think if a person is earnest they could imagine, or close enough, a simulated world with free agents where physical suffering has been turned off. One person might imagine the Matrix where everyone is Neo for instance, another person might imagine it would be like typing "iddqd" into Doom, etc. (Also, many theists already have this conception in various ideas about Heaven: so they can imagine that).

Then I think the next step is that people would have to ask themselves, "would these creatures still be humans?" Sure, we can do a lot of navel gazing about that, but I think a lot of people would have the intuition that yes, they would still be humans.

I think it all comes down to your intent with the arrgument. The original formulations all purport to demonstrate by deductively valid and sound argument that if the world exists in this state which we observe around us, then the creator of this world cannot have all of those three properties. Being valid and sound confers benefits, namely that all the premises are true, and the conclusion necessarily follows, and therefore anyone who disagrees with that conclusion is demonstratably mistaken.

The argument from Leibniz robs that deductive validity by introducing an extra concept of balance. Meaning that the premises can be true while the conclusion is not. So you can accept all the premises and deny the conclusion, but you haven't been demonstrated to be in the wrong. It reduces the whole thing to a tussle over which is the more convincing explanation. But effectively renders the matter moot. Your move to factor in simulations might work in this second matter to help people conceptualise the matter in the way that you do (if they feel so inclined).

So it works if that limited aim is your intention - which it could be if you are making a denfensive point. This thread has not brought in any of the fanatical creationist pray-away-the-gay crowd who insist that you do really know there is a God, and you are being a dirty satanic whore when you deny him, a defensive argument that simply shows that it isn't unreasonable to hold a view that God is improbable isn't such a bad thing to deploy.

[attofishpi]

So it works if that limited aim is your intention - which it could be if you are making a denfensive point. This thread has not brought in any of the fanatical creationist pray-away-the-gay crowd who insist that you do really know there is a God, and you are being a dirty satanic whore when you deny him, a defensive argument that simply shows that it isn't unreasonable to hold a view that God is improbable isn't such a bad thing to deploy.

Pretty much well said their poop. The actual irony of the fund.a.mental.list prude bigots is that God/'God' actually encourages us, via stimulation sexually..to worship "him" IT through the human form, sharing our love...of the perfection of the female form (which IS totally innocent FFS!!).

What I love about Christ and this 'being' that resonates throughout our entire bodies, is that...it wanted to be quesioned, challenged, tested. Not to kiss its arse as unintelligent wimps.

[seeds]

...then the so-called "Problem of Evil" would no longer occupy our minds.

Wouldn't that be easier?
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Would that the topic occupy completely, in order to understand completely, without experiencing.

Because of any human’s limited capacity to account for the causational relationship of every element comprising any compounded situation, and because all situations are compounded, then we can say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We can say that because obviously, given the personal historical records of Everyone, good intentions are no guarantee that the effects of good intentions won’t have hellish results.

That accounts for Good. What about Evil?

Evil intends harm. Even though a human’s limited capacity cannot account for every element of a situation, a human’s capacity can account for the significant elements of a situation that will cause harm, and act accordingly with the predicted results.

That accounts for Evil.

* When Truth, Justice, and The American Way are in play, Evil is stymied.

When they are corrupted, Evil throws a party and multi-manifests simultaneously with rioting, with wrong political decisions that cause pain and suffering for folks everywhere, that sort of stuff.


*

I am unable to see how your post relates to anything I was saying to Astro Cat.
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