I guess the simplest way that it can effect your life. . if you are at 30000 feet and the plane is going down, you have nothing to pray to. . you're just fucked
Always here to raise our spirits, Aneirin!
I guess the simplest way that it can effect your life. . if you are at 30000 feet and the plane is going down, you have nothing to pray to. . you're just fucked
The all-good part faces the problem of evil, which I haven't seen any good answers to personally, but perhaps there's something I'm missing.
How can Atheism affect one's life?
Ren said:Well, a world without evil is also a world without freedom. Evil is only possible on the condition that free will is granted.
Ah, I wasn't using the terminology 'evil' in the narrower sense you took it to be, I think. You seem to only include things like intentional wrongdoings, not things like natural disasters/disease. I was including natural disasters very much in the mix.
So at least ignoring the issue of terminology, I don't think our views differ in the way you apparently thought they might. Sometimes what you're talking of is called Natural Evil. You're of course free to use 'Evil' in the more traditional sense attached to Intentional Agents, just a matter of book-keeping.
But, I do think in the newer post, there's a point I don't find obvious. I follow this:
Evil is only possible on the condition that free will is granted.
since you are probably using 'evil' to mean intentional wrongdoing.
But not the first line
world without evil is also a world without freedom.
In particular, as generally defined, the all-good GOD has free will, and a world with only God is a world without evil but with freedom. Free will doesn't mean anything is within our capacity to choose, only things consistent with our nature.
More generally, I don't see why someone can't make choices within an all-good nature (whether the someone is God or just another good being).
Surely an all-good being can freely choose whether to eat vanilla ice cream or strawberry, even if they can't choose to do evil as it's inconsistent with their nature.
So even in the case of intentional beings, it is not clear to me that God creating human beings with the capacity for evil is itself consistent with his all-good nature. I would actually lean against.
I think it's already pretty shaky a case to say it's consistent with an all-good being to create someone like Hitler with whose nature it is consistent to do the things he did -- even if Hitler had to choose to do them ultimately.
Beyond that, it is further not obvious that even if creating Hitler was consistent with God's nature (if one accepts that ultimately he made the choices), it's not clear that allowing the laws of nature to be such that Hitler can inflict torture on innocent people is consistent with God's nature. It's one thing to create a being capable of intending evil which is already problematic, but it's another to make it consistent with the laws of nature that the intentions would ever actually lead to the terrible consequences they do in the actual world (death, torture, etc).
The laws of nature already prohibit me from jumping off a cliff and flying!! I may fully intend to fly when I jump off a tower and flap flap flap flap as hard as I can, but that's not possible. It's not clear why, when someone intends to kill me, the someone has a fair shot at doing that.
I personally think the only real way I'm aware of defend theism against the the problems of 'Natural' and 'Intentional' Evil is to say there's no way beings such as us would understand why these things happen/we shouldn't expect to. This is to say that it is possible for the terrible things like disease and childhood cancer to have an adequate moral purpose.
I guess the reason I find this so inadequate is that I don't think this sort of thing is a matter of complexity/pointing to our vastly lesser intelligence than god's own seems of questionable relevance. If a math problem is so complex that it would take tons more complicated a brain than I have to figure it out, that certainly puts some limits on me, but if I see a giant argument that says 2+2 = 5, I can immediately rule it out. The very idea that the childhood cancer has a moral purpose seems precisely this way -- if that shouldn't intrinsically not exist, I end up failing to see what one can say about morality.... why would helping someone out of obvious agony be more moral than not?
That or to argue evil/good is an illusion that we can escape. E.g. maybe just as illusionists about consciousness argue we misrepresent our inner states on introspection, perhaps we can argue pain is an illusion (some esoteric Hinduisms or Buddhisms may do this).
But this last option may prohibit characterizing God as all-good if 'good' is an illusion.
I had this similar experience (not in a plane, but I thought I was gonna die in an accident), I just said "if this is my time so be it."I guess the simplest way that it can effect your life. . if you are at 30000 feet and the plane is going down, you have nothing to pray to. . you're just fucked
But, I do think in the newer post, there's a point I don't find obvious. I follow this:
Evil is only possible on the condition that free will is granted.
since you are probably using 'evil' to mean intentional wrongdoing.
But not the first line
world without evil is also a world without freedom.
Ren said:That being said, here's another challenge: A) Without the possibility of evil, isn't the very notion of good meaningless?
If God is not free not to do good, then he is compelled to do good,
So the main thing is I'm not discounting the possibility of evil, so much as the actuality of it in a world with an all-good God. In other words, there can be many possible worlds with evil, it's just I would lean that those are not worlds with an all-good God (aka at minimum, a being with whose nature it is inconsistent to do evil).
Basically, what's needed to make sense of the concept of good might at most be that there's an antithetical concept of evil. Whether that concept ever describes something in our actual world should be independent.
So I don't view the fact God is all-good as anything but the fact that well, he has to have a nature, and it so happens one thing about that nature is goodness....it's no stranger than that a human being has a certain nature too, e.g. perhaps some human beings are more talented at science than others and that constrains what they can do -- they still have free will within the scope of their nature, such as being able to choose what school to go to, whom to befriend, where to travel, etc.
To my own perspective, such a world where you cannot act on your whim is evil Maybe in such a world you wouldn't even see the act of him sleeping with your wife as evil. You may just pat him on the back, wish him a good night and tell him what time you're at work the next day. But then would he even be able to sleep with your wife, would not this force stop him as it stopped you killing her? Arguably for him sleeping with her may be justified, where for you it is immoral. He might love Mrs.Ren! (You poor sod Ren, it's okay)Is any of the above incoherent with regard to the nature of the possible world as being 'without evil'? Let's imagine that I act according to plan and attack the man from behind in the corridor as he's about to leave. But there, something happens: I realise that I cannot produce the next move, the killing move. Something stops me that I cannot explain; or else I just completely forget about my prior intentions. Would that qualify as a world in which evil is possible but not actual? A little bit like as far as our world is concerned, I may very much desire to fly, but it just so happens I can't because of the laws of physics?
The reason why I'm asking this is that the alternative seems to land us in strange territory. This alternative seems to be: not only am I unable to experience the temptation to kill that man, but I would also be unable to even contemplate the possibility of his having slept with my wife. In other words I would be unable to think about 'evil' things at all. How, in this context would anyone be able to come up with the concept of evil, i.e. intentional wrongdoing? In order to have a concept of intentional wrongdoing I would need to have an intuitive grasp of what 'wrong' means—and not just 'wrong' in a generic sense, but morally wrong.
In the possible world I described above, I can think: "I am a good cook" if I'm told by my guests that the meal is tasty, but I cannot think: "I am a good man".
@Ren -- I hesitate to introduce this nitpick, because it's not necessarily the main issue you're discussing, but I think a world that is all-good wouldn't involve my fearing people betraying me, because not only would all people be good-intentioned in such a world, but I'd know they're good -intentioned --- clearly a world where I'm tricked into fearing everyone being Hitler when they're angels ain't great. Even if my dagger turns to feathers, or whatever, due to funny laws of nature preventing my harmful act, the very fact I was in terror and distress does not represent an all-good world. I should not have reason to fear in an all-good world, and I should be rational and KNOW there is no reason to fear -- i.e. not have an irrational pathology.
Ren said:This leads me to argue that the concept of 'necessary goodness' is not a concept available to me in that possible world without evil.
I think my main reaction is to wonder a bit how much the issue goes much beyond mere terminology. Which is to say I'm not trivializing the distinction you want to make so much as wondering if it much changes how we ultimately question the existence of God based on all we see in our world, which is what I was addressing in the first place. As with the start of the discussion, when you took the term 'evil' to be defined differently than I, for e.g. you interpreted it to exclude what some call 'natural evil,' I wonder if similarly you're hardly differing from anything I believe but just attach a particular meaning to some of these terms.
It seems instead of the problem of evil, we have the problem of a world with imperfect beings (beings subject to good-evil dichotomies) and negative states of affair (torture, cancers, tsunamis) and this rules out that a perfect God (which we imperfect beings conceptualize as 'necessarily good God' if you want to make this deal about good being a valued concept) exists in our world.
As long as you accept there are negative states of affair, I think modulo terminology,we can always rule out the perfect God by saying the perfect God wouldn't will there to be negative states of affair.
God can still contemplate what we'd call 'doing evil,' i.e. he can contemplate what it would be like if he did bring forth tsunamis and cancer, but it would be inconsistent with his nature to bring forth such states of affair. Maybe you don't want to call that because he's all-good, but rather because he is perfect.
If you claim there is no positive-negative distinction even for states of affair (not just no distinction between good and evil intentions), then of course God can create the current world. That effectively eliminates the problem of Natural Evil as well, which is about states of affair, not intention.
But there you're likely embracing the 'pain/etc are an illusion' option I mentioned earlier.
In a nutshell, St Augustine battled with this very issue of 'evil' within a world created by an all-good God; coming to the conclusion that evil was just a corruption of the act. His understanding of it was that whilst the action itself was not evil, the evil is in deciding to do such an act.. Of your will being 'corrupted' to a lesser state. So for Ren's example, it was not him shanking the man that was the evil, but him changing his mind and deciding to do so, turning away from the moral perfection of God.
In terms of things people see as undoubtedly evil, Augustine's argument was that it's both a lack of context and understanding it that leads to such a view - as well as the fact that the greater good of this world is its moral freedom, but that with such freedom comes tragedies
Ren said:In a sense my position is that the best counter-arguments to the existence of God are those that literally don't refer to the valuation of good and evil.
In a sense my position is that the best counter-arguments to the existence of God are those that literally don't refer to the valuation of good and evil.