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A startling thing happened last week on Patheos, a website for conversation about “religion”. Atheist blogger Leah Libresco wrote a post entitled “This is my last post for the Patheos atheist portal”. Not for the reason you’d normally expect – that she had no time for blogging and was moving on to other ventures in life. No, Libresco wrote this because she was now going to start writing for the Catholic portal. For exactly the reason you might expect: she has converted and become a Catholic.
This is particularly surprising since Libresco describes herself openly as a geek. I can vouch from personal experience that communities of geeks, built around shared interests in role-playing games or computers or science fiction, tend to be strongly atheistic; anything more than a vague deism seems a bizarre affectation or worse. Among her close friends, Libresco will likely be going this alone.
But, as also befits a geek, Libresco’s conversion, by her own account, was primarily intellectual. In line with what I understand to be Wittgenstein’s claims about conversion, the conversion did not seem to come about as a direct result of persuasion by argument per se – there was no conversation where someone came to her saying “P and Q, therefore God exists”, with her slapping her head and going “Wow! You’re right!” But intellectual it remained – she was searching for explanations and reasons, trying to put together a philosophy and worldview that made sense internally and with the world around it.
In spite of Karl Marx’s epigram-epitaph that the philosophers have only interpreted the world and the point is to change it, all the Marxists I know became Marxist not because they sought a program for social change but because Marx’s thought was the only way they could understand, make sense of, the social world around them. And so it was with Libresco and Catholicism. The worldview that made most sense of the world to her in general, did not make sense without God. Her line of reasoning was not far from the argument for God I discussed last fall. We need to explain the existence of value and goodness – not merely the fact that people happen to believe in them, but the fact that they are in some sense real. For this reality is something we can’t deny unless we accept the radical relativism few seriously defend, where Pol Pot was not really wrong but just different.
Where we go from that understanding is another matter. It might just be to a metaphysics of human nature; but it might also be to a metaphysics of reality itself, and that’s where Libresco ended up. She was used to arguing against insufficient evolutionary explanations, discussing what morality and its explanation are not, but had a hard time defining her conception of what morality and its explanation actually are. A friend pressed her hard to do so – “your best guess” – and the first response she came up with was “I guess Morality just loves me or something.” Her friend was left speechless, and she added: “Ok, ok, yes, I heard what I just said. Give me a second and let me decide if I believe it.” It turns out that she did: she realized in the instance of that conversation that she saw morality not merely as a truth but as a person. With that step taken, it didn’t take long to identify who the person in question was.
I recognize a lot of myself in Libresco’s early story: taking a great many ideas from Christian tradition without wanting to make a wholesale conversion. One of Libresco’s friends said that s/he would also have probably been convinced by Libresco’s reasoning if s/he, like Libresco, had been a “weird quasi-Platonist virtue ethicist.” That last phrase describes me reasonably well. But unlike Libresco I have not converted to Christianity or any other monotheism, certainly not now and I would guess not ever. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one stands out in the current context, one which is the biggest problem with theism from within a theist perspective.
There’s been a lot of buzz online about the difficulties that will come for someone in Libresco’s position; much of it focuses around her bisexuality, which is of course disapproved of in official Catholic teaching. But I bet that Libresco is going to wind up spending a lot of time over the next few years or decades butting her head against a much bigger question: the problem of suffering (or even of evil). If morality is both a person and a Platonic form underlying the universe, how can it possibly be that the universe is so full of immorality? Never having identified as a theist, I never really thought much about the problem of suffering until I started to take theistic claims really seriously – above all in order to teach them fairly and sympathetically. And it was exactly as I did so that the problem of suffering appeared to me as a real problem.
We are dealing here, I think, with a perennial question: one that I once called the problem of bad and the problem of good. A theistic account, which places goodness at the heart of reality, finds it very difficult to account for the existence of bad things. (This is true for at least some non-Abrahamic quasi-theisms as well, includes the account of early Buddhism – finds it difficult to account, not for the existence of good things, but of goodness and badness themselves. I suspect this is why certain later Mahāyāna forms of Buddhism, such as Yogācāra and Pure Land, wound up turning to theism or theism-like beliefs themselves. But those systems then face the need to ask questions of the form: if the bodhisattvas have the ability to save us all and get us to a pure land without suffering, why haven’t they done that already?
I disagree that Mahayana Buddhism turns to “theism or theism-like beliefs.” This is not to say that people who call themselves Buddhists don’t sometimes interpret Buddhism in a theistic way.
I attended a wonderful talk by Dzongsar Khyentse R. (“DKR”) at Yale University a few years back (I might have mentioned this before). The audience was very diverse, including Yale students with little or no background in Buddhism, academics, long time Tibetan Buddhist practitioners, Buddhists from other sanghas, and film students (DKR is a film maker with two or three films that he has directed). In the question and answer session, there was a question from a young woman who apparently was a Buddhist from a pure land school. Her question, which I recall used an aggressive tone, essentially asked Dzongsar to acknowledge that pure land Buddhism was the best form of Buddhism. I recall that the tone of the question made DKR pause for a few seconds. Then he said, “Well how can I argue with that?” Then he said, “But I think if you really work on your visualization of the pure land and concentrate on the details and put all of your effort into it, you will find that the pure land is” — and here he paused and asked the moderator a question that must have been: where are we? — “New Haven, the pure land is a lot like New Haven.”
Bodhisattvas are no more theistic gods than any person who helps others in a genuine way (a teacher, a friend who acts in a selfless way) is “saving” another person. Because we live in a relative world, there is potential to work to change conditions and we can, therefore, sometimes be helpful to others. But the other person has to at least come half way, and usually more than that.
Buddhism deals with evil as error — in the same way that what is relatively good (such as conditioned virtue) is fundamentally mistaken. And that is where there is common ground — or at least a possibility of dialogue between theistic and non-theistic traditions. Good and evil are always relative concepts that make sense only in the realm of logic — of this and that. A case can be made that logic does not even come close to describing our experience — that it is, at best, an overlay that limits experience and renders it understandable in a rigid, conceptual way. While a Buddhist (at least a Yogacharan) might not acknowlege the existence of anything outside of mind (subject, object and action all being aspects of mind) and feel that a concept of god — is simply a concept, more mystical theistic traditions have concepts of god as “passing understanding”. This creates some room for discussion.
Jim, important points here. I think that in Yogācāra there are (at least) two different posited entities that make it seem theistic – the celestial bodhisattvas on one hand, and the Dharmakāya on the other. These two entities both share a lot in common with beings referred to as divine in other traditions, but in very different ways from each other. The bodhisattvas are not typically held to be omnipotent, especially. I have not thought as much about this as I should.
As for Pure Land, it’s worth noting that even in your anecdote DKR, not himself identfying as a Pure Land Buddhist, is responding to someone who does identify as such. His response is a good way of incorporating Pure Land ideas into a non-Pure-Land worldview, but it sounds like it shouldn’t be taken as a Pure Land Buddhist approach per se – any more than my own views should be called Christian.
There is a fascinating parallel between the three kayas and the Christian trinity. Like the Christian trinity, the trikaya is both three and one (the unity of the trikaya is the svabhavikakaya). A Buddhist analogy would be the sun being the dharmakaya, the rays of the sun being the sambogakaya and a rainbow being the nirmanakaya. There is also a parallel along the lines of a descent to the material or tangible — dharmakaya being beyond concept (similar to the Chirstian concept of god, the father), sambogakaya being associated with emotion and speech (similar to the Christian concept of the holy ghost) and the nirmanakaya being the manifested form (similar to the Christ).
However, ultimately, there is a big difference. In Christianity, the trinity is external. The best that a mystical Christian can hope for is union with god — implying that Christ and the Christian are separate. And Christ is the savior of sinners who experience that separation.
The Buddhist approach is quite different since at the end of the path there is no one to have a relationship with, and indeed no one to be saved. Even the forms of refuge (buddha, dharma and sangha) are ultimately taking refuge in one’s own mind, speech and body.
There is also an emphasis in non-theism, as Michael pointed out in another post in this thread, on experience rather than belief. Chogyan Trungpa R. described the difference between theism and non-theism as the difference between seeing and looking. A theist, coming from a an orientation of belief, looks and then sees. A non-theist, coming from an orientation based on experience, sees and then looks (trying to understand experience through investigation).
@Jim, I see your point (which is probably right), but the circle seems to me to be too much biased in favour of the atheists and to be easily reversed.
Consider the following: Why is one a theist? Possibly because she has had some experience of God. Thus, she has seen Her and then looks for explanations. Vice versa, why is one an atheist? One might argue that one is an atheist from one preconceived ideas. Thus, she only looks for what verifies her preconceived thought.
Chogyam Trungpa R. had an expansive view of theism. He seemed to view any inclination toward safety or refuge or the establishing of territory as a theistic impulse. I think he would not disagree with your observation that an atheist (or a Buddhist) could start from a premise of bias and look for confirmation of a set of beliefs — but he would define that as theism.
You are right as well that a relationship to god may be grounded in experience — a revelation on the road to Damascus.
Amod:
I think that Leah is working a slight fallacy which goes after this fashion:
Everything I do/think is based on rationality
Here is something that I think
Therefore it is rational.
What she has had is a basic intuition of the principle of rationality/morality which informs the cosmos. This has been termed Tao or Dharma. If it were really apodeictic it could be demonstrated to others in a Euclidean manner. It cannot. Not believing in this intuition is not a clear indication of stupidity or even a darkening of the intelligence by original sin. It is an intuition about rationality and not in itself rational. I have written a note related to this:
http://ombhurbhuva.blogspot.ie/2012/01/philosopher-swimmers.html
If what she has had is a genuine powerful intuition then it will be resistant to rational rebuttal which indicates to me that it is non-rational and not irrational. You may feel that to be a distinction without a difference or playing tennis without a net as Dennett puts it.
Michael, if I understand what you’re saying here I disagree with it. I think many of our most strongly held views are overall “resistant to rational rebuttal” – not immune, but resistant, simply because so many other things in our worldview are tied up with them and depend on them. This holds for an atheist’s attachment to empiricism as much as for Libresco’s view of morality as person. Similarly, like most beliefs, they cannot be demonstrated in a Euclidean manner because Euclidean deductive proofs are demonstrative argument – they follow from first principles already established, but establishing those first principles requires a dialectical argument that starts with people where they are. Conclusions follow from premises; if the premises are not accepted, the conclusions will not be either. Libresco has spent a lot of time noting how her conclusion of Catholicism followed from Platonist-Aristotelian premises that she had long come to view as more adequate than alternative explanations but that few of her interlocutors shared. None of this implies that any of it is non-rational (let alone irrational).
Amod:
Leah did not arrive at this view about God in an empirical fashion. Neither did Plato/Aristotle/Aquinas discover the form of the Good while they were clearing out the attic. To put it in Kantian terms this is a transcendental postulate or a theory of how things must ultimately be for things to appear as they do. It grounds concepts, natural kinds, universals etc. The feeling of the force of this, or its explanatory power comes in the form of an intuition, not in the sense of ‘female’ intuition but a direct grasp of the necessity of such a principal. It seems to make sense of everything, one could say that it is not an extra add on piece of mental kit but a binding ‘ratio’/’logos’ grasped by insight. The arguments for the existence of God are in a sort of way a preparation for this binding intuition.
To some this may seem as straightforward as getting the principle of excluded middle, it does not arrive out of rational consideration but in some sense is rationality. To Ed Feser the proof of the existence of God is an ontological rational argument. I think that such proofs are a preparation for an insight that may or may not come. This insight arises out of a ground of rational considerations but does not have the inevitability of a rational conclusion. What I mean is that you can understand all those arguments about necessity/contingency, prime mover etc. and yet at the same time not feel compelled to admit the existence of God. That is what I am trying to get at by the idea of the tension between the irrational and the rational which has been expressed by the non-rational.
I really feel that an enormous amount of time is blown on the problem of good and evil, without even taking the time to define what those words mean.
What is Good? Well, as always, that depends.
Without a goal in mind, you can’t have Good – anything that would move you towards that goal – or Evil – anything that is seen as preventing you from achieving it.
Now, evolution has provided us with a couple basic in-borne goals – first and foremost being survival and procreation, and we have a couple ancient physical mechanisms to help us out there – pleasure and pain, in all their varied forms – that act as guidelines to let us know how we’re doing. Our most basic moral instincts tend to revolve around these basic spurs, and the small scale social interactions that spool out from them.
But evolution offers us relatively little guidance on the larger scope – Year to Year, Decade to Decade, and in terms of our larger social units (anything beyond the small tribe). But that is how we are now generally organized, in units far larger than our instinctive minds are prepared for.
Thus, without making a conscious large-scale decision to set goals for ourselves as a society, we *cannot* define Good or Evil at those scales – in fact, those words cease to much meaning at all.
If we set ourselves a long term goal, such as ‘Colonize Mars’, or ‘Destroy Australia’ (sorry Aussies!), then a great many moral decisions would become immediately clearer – as well as financial and organizational ones, these all being closely bound concepts.
In this regard, WWII and JFK’s moon shot were excellent morally defining concepts. They both focused the nation’s energies and allowed us to think in terms of a goal and what was morally (as well as economically) necessary to achieve it.
With the end of the Cold War, we seem to have defaulted to a society that is not supposed to have any goal at all – that being seen as an impediment to personal enrichment – and as such our society currently has little to offer in the way of broad moral guidance.
And so it turns out that this is how Empires end – with no overriding threat or aspirational goal, societies become directionless, hedonistic, and ultimately disintegrate.
Unfortunately for our recently converted atheist, retreating into a church will not change the problem, nor its outcome.
“Notice also that if the existence of “Morality” justifies belief in a “Person”, God, embodying it, then the existence of “Immorality” equally justifies belief in a “Person”, Satan, embodying it.
What a neat proof, a la Gödel, of the “Truth” of Catholicism!!!”
http://thebaloneydetective.com/2012/06/25/librescus-baloney/
Suffering and evil are not problems in the Catholic moral system; they are opportunities. God in Catholicism isn’t as straightforward as we would like, even Mother Theresa labored for 50 years with NO direct spiritual experience and a good deal of direct contact with suffering.
IF, and it’s a mighty big IF but Leah seems to have done it, you make the jump from assumption that Morality exists to Morality is a Living Being we Call God, and then make that further logical leap to Catholic Dogma, then All Suffering and All Evil is really God Prodding Us to Do Good and Learn Lessons. In other words, to quote from that book all Biblical Fundamentalists love to tear apart and take out of Context: All things work for the best for those who Love.
Even Satan. Even Evil. We may be called to battle against evil, but evil too has it’s purposes. And sometimes, the elimination of evil (like the example of slavery vs the unjust wage) just creates a bigger evil.
Ted, thank you and welcome. I must say I do not buy this argument at all. What kind of fairness is it when evil befalls some people that others may learn lessons? What of the ones who are victims of it and given no chance for those lessons – children drowned by hurricanes, babies struck down by AIDS transmitted from their parents? I’ve previously referred to this conception of God as Maoist, and I think that sticks: you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and too bad for the broken eggs. But when Mao and Stalin sacrifice millions of innocent humans for the greater good, we rightly judge them as evil murderers. I don’t see why God should get a pass when they don’t.
Since Ted has not answered yet, I cannot resist the temptation to add something:
He did not just write “All things work for the best”. He wrote that “All things work for the best *for those who Love*”. This means that evil, illnesses, earthquakes are an opportunity for those who can grasp in them god’s plan. The suffering of babies (or of animals, in my humble opinion) remains unexplained and must hurt every moral conscience. (An alternative explanation in my comment below).
“Suffering and evil are not problems in the Catholic moral system; they are opportunities.”
So the Holocaust was an opportunity? For who, exactly?
P.
Viewing God as an agent among other agents is an unsophisticated approach which I’m sure Leah will avoid. She should look at Enchiridion by Augustine where he discusses the privative concept of evil. Only the metaphysically minded will get this, to others it will seem nebulous.
Michael: “Viewing God as an agent among other agents is an unsophisticated approach…”
What would you suggest as an alternative “sophisticated” approach? The view that God is the only agent, “All is He”? If we could make sense of it, it could open new vistas. What does it mean?
Augustine commits a non sequitur in arguing from examples of natural evils which are privations of natural goods to the conclusion that all evil is a privation of good.
Some instances of hatred are moral evils. But there is more to such forms of hatred than the mere privation or absence of love.
Therefore, it is false that all evil is simply a privation or absence of some good.
Even in the case of a natural evil such as disease, there are many types of diseases varying in the form and degree of afflictions they bring in their wake.
From the fact that someone is not in good health, we cannot infer that he or she has a particular disease. Therefore, there is more to disease than mere absence of health.
What is the explanation of the availability of a plurality or variety of natural evils corresponding to the privation of single natural good, health?
Why are there so many ways in which a natural good can be corrupted or destroyed?
The richness of evil, the plethora of forms of natural evil (and, of course, moral evil)certainly cries out for explanation.
Might the “Good Lord” be justifiably charged, in Alan Greenspan’s immortal expression, with “irrational exuberance” in allowing for the proliferation of a rich variety of natural and moral evils?
Here, this link contains all the equations you will ever need in order to understand the root causes of all suffering and evil – and all good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth
All other forms of privation and evil, all striving and achievement, are derived from our efforts to survive within this model *without exception*.
Doesn’t matter if you’re stuck in a 6cm petri dish, or a galactic disk 100,000ly in diameter, the ultimate problem doesn’t change one whit, it’s just a matter of scope.
We can dress it up in as many philosophies as we wish, we can ignore the problem or profess not to care, we can even mentally transcend our personal desires – but it still doesn’t change the structure within which we live.
In order for an equation to produce a different outcome, you’ve got to change the relevant factors, and the overriding factor in our lives is – and will always be – the growth rate of our population.
‘Be fruitful and multiply’. How ironic.
OK, I think this claim is a little silly. The basic theory of population growth implies that it’s only a problem when a population exceeds its environment’s carrying capacity. Even if we assume that every population inevitably winds up exceeds that (and/or that humans have now done so), logically, even just staying within the theory, there are clearly plenty of points at which carrying capacity is not exceeded – before the population grows to capacity, at the very least. And are we really to presume that no privations or evils affected anyone when that capacity was not reached? The anthropological evidence on sparsely populated hunter-gatherer societies suggests otherwise: they kill each other just like we do, in addition to dying of diseases – not to mention malicious gossip, laziness and so on. And of course, every individual of every species eventually dies, and that happens no matter what the population size is.
No, we do not spend most of our time above carrying capacity – but we have spent our entire existence IN DANGER of that state, and as a – no the – fundamental limit on our existence, it has been engrained into the psychology of every living thing on the planet since time immemorial as a state that must be considered and provided against.
There will come a time in the life of every species without exception, when they exceed their carrying capacity (due to any of a large array of possible factors), and a population crash becomes inevitable.
The ‘sparsely populated’ tribes you refer to? Without agriculture, it would take precious few humans to completely exhaust a wild forest of its game in a few years time. Without technology, our carrying capacity as a species was vastly lower than it is now – but just because we have increased it greatly is no reason to believe that there are no hard limits to that expansion (indeed, thermodynamics ensures that there are).
In any case, all species face frequent periods of decline – during a phase of decline, many of the behaviors that suited a species well during a time of plenty become unwise, and vice versa – but psychologically speaking, we can’t just flip a switch when the time comes and become amoral survivalists when it is demanded of us – it is too hard to recognize the shift in time, and too many of the behaviors are deeply engrained in us as individuals.
No, instead evolution has chosen a surer path – SOME of us are amoral predators ALL of the time, while the rest of us are more socially oriented. During times of plenty, the socially oriented ones band together and generally out-perform the amorally oriented individual survivalists.
During times of decline and privation, the anti-social survivalists may thrive, or perhaps the militant raiders – they are able to eke out an existence through whatever means are necessary until conditions improve, either through population reduction or a change in climate.
There are of course many, many combinations and variations on these strategies, because there are many different conditions that one must survive through as a species over the course of millions of years – and we are a most adaptable and inventive species.
Were we a thousand immortal angels who could neither procreate nor die, NONE of this would be necessary!
Everything that you define as ‘good’ or ‘evil’ would be as nothing to such a race. They would simply be, and have no morality at all, unless they chose a collective goal towards which they might strive – though it is questionable whether such beings could motivate themselves in such a fashion. Perhaps out of boredom or idle curiosity.
But no, it is likely that angels would have no moral instinct at all, for there would be no point to such a thing without the imminent pressure of survival, and the constantly shifting play-field of overpopulation, limited resources, and the vast array of gambits one can employ to succeed within it.
Remember, all of the last 10,000 years of human history – and every scrap of philosophy ever written, has all happened in the blink of the evolutionary eye. We are still the same primitive apes who climbed down from the trees at the beginning of history, and we have barely yet learned to read.
On the concept of laziness as an ‘evil’ trait. Lets delve into that a bit. What is laziness, why is it so prevalent, and why do we deride it?
Laziness, in its simplest terms, is our rest state. We sleep out of necessity, but we rest when the mood takes us. Purposefully reducing our productivity. Why?
Well, let us examine the natural world, and find some of its laziest inhabitants… Cats are a fine example.
Cats (and dogs, and many larger predators in fact) spend much of their time asleep, even in the wild. Catnap is such a common concept that it has crept into our language.
Why are they so lazy – there is no physiological reason they should need to sleep 20 hours a day! Indeed, any casual examination of such slovenliness would suggest that they were non-competitive evolutionarily. But clearly they are not. They are a remarkably long lived evolutionary family.
The answer is: They don’t move more than they need to. Their meals are large and far apart, and require a great deal of energy – but relatively little time – to acquire. Many cats also live in hot environments where overheating is a daily, deadly risk. Motion generates heat. Thermodynamics.
Furthermore, their prey takes time to grow. It isn’t grass. They can only take a small % of the local prey each year without crashing their prey populations – even at the very low population concentrations of territorial, predatory species.
In short, Cats are lazy because they need to be. Hyperactive great cats would eat too much, breed too quickly, and wipe out their prey completely within a couple seasons – and then die out.
Only very small predatory species can afford that kind of hyper-active strategy.
We of course, are ourselves a very large predatory species, that is innately, PROPERLY lazy – but since the development of agriculture we have created social structures to force us into continuous activity, more like ants. We have shifted our moral structures to claim that any relief from activity is ‘lazy’ and placed a negative moral connotation upon that trait.
This, as they say, will not end well.
Lazy is very, very important for creatures of our size.
As a side note, you mention that every individual dies. This is a guaranteed side effect of entropy. Nothing, as they say, lasts forever, and nature has found that it isn’t worth it to even try.
Species that built in their own planned obsolescence turned out to be more adaptive and competitive than those that kept chugging along until their DNA degraded to the point where their cells could no longer reliably replicate (or far more likely, they died by happenstance).
There is nothing evil about death. It simply is the way things work. We look upon it with sadness, but oh boy would that population problem get worse a lot faster without aging. Populations would be on a constant roller coaster of starvation if members did not die naturally, and on one of those dips, they would disappear altogether – much faster than those who moderate their peaks and valleys through the mechanism of age.
I could spend a couple days with a whiteboard and we could hash out a lot of the basic mathematics of morality, if you like.
While the array of possible outcomes and real-world states are horrifically complex to describe and not particularly amenable to prediction save on the widest scales, the basic theory and principles aren’t actually that difficult to sort out.
The coherence of the concept of God is the fundamental issue in evaluating theism.
We have all assumed that the standard theistic concept of God is coherent. But is it?
The problem of compatibility between divine omniscience and human freedom has discussed in many articles and books.
I think that there is a neglected problem of compatibility between absolute freedom and omniscience, two essential properties of God in the traditional theistic conception.
Absolute freedom implies the freedom to choose not to know a state of affairs. If God is absolutely free, then she has the freedom to choose not to know that the Israeli forces killed more than 250 children in their invasion of Gaza in 2008-2009, an invasion which started at the time children were returning home from school. (source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/6162984/Israels-Gaza-invasion-killed-more-than-250-children.html)
But if God chooses not to know that or any other state of affairs, then, lacking that knowledge, she would not be omniscient.
On the other hand, if, given the essential property of omniscience and its implication that there can be no ignorance in an omniscient being, God cannot but know all states of affairs which have occurred or are occurring, then this implies that God does not have the freedom to choose not to know.
Hence, God’s attributes of omniscience and absolute freedom seem to be incompatible. If they are, then the concept of God is incoherent.
There are so many logical paradoxes that occur the moment you try to put the ‘Omni-‘ descriptor in front of anything that it is more appropriate to say that nothing can have it.
Omniscience and Omnipotence are both logically impossible, so there isn’t much point in having a logical conversation that includes them. One should stick to purely metaphysical assertions when using such terms.
As old a saw as it is, Omnipotence still runs into the problem of creating a rock it cannot lift. It sounds trite, but it’s an unresolvable paradox that invalidates the concept trivially.
Omniscience is far worse, stripping all beings in the universe (especially the omniscient one!) of all will by reducing the universe to a deterministic clockwork structure. Indeed, on closer examination, it seems unlikely that Probability or even Time could even exist in such a universe!
If your concept of God relies on an ‘Omni-‘ anywhere in the description, logic is not going to back you up on that.
Jesse: “Omniscience and Omnipotence are both logically impossible”
Why?
The so-called paradox of omnipotence has been dissolved. Omnipotence does not imply the capacity to do anything which is logically impossible for an omnipotent being to do. It is logically impossible for an omnipotent being to create a stone which it cannot lift. But this doesn’t show any incoherence in the concept of omnipotence.
The alleged inconsistency between omniscience and human freedom has also been resolved by construing “omniscience” in the following way:
If it is true that P, then an omniscient being knows it.
So, if it is true that you have chosen to be a non-vegetarian rather than a vegetarian, then God knows this fact.
There is no incompatibility, on this definition, between God’s omniscience and your choice to be a non-vegetarian.
You haven’t thought through the concept of omniscience very far.
If any being possessed omniscience, they would be trapped in amber – knowing their entire life from the moment their existence began.
Time could not exist for such a being, because it has all already happened in a very real sense, and they couldn’t change any of it.
Likewise they would BE their creations in a literal sense, because every action of every being that ever existed would be their own action, DIRECTLY.
Because there would be no possibility of deviation, there would be no distance, no derivation of responsibility *whatsoever*. In essence, we would all BE that creator, because we never escaped from its absolute knowledge. You can’t exactly have free will if every action in existence has been meticulously mapped out for you. :P
‘The so-called paradox of omnipotence has been dissolved. Omnipotence does not imply the capacity to do anything which is logically impossible for an omnipotent being to do. It is logically impossible for an omnipotent being to create a stone which it cannot lift. But this doesn’t show any incoherence in the concept of omnipotence.’
Yes. Yes it does.
Parsed out fully, your statement is properly read as:
1) Omnipotence is not paradoxical
2) Therefore omnipotent beings cant do anything paradoxical.
Unfortunately for this statement, Omnipotent beings can:
1) Create Big Rocks
2) Lift Big Rocks
Taken individually, neither of these actions is paradoxical, and thus not impossible for the omnipotent being.
In combination however, they ARE impossible, and thus paradoxical, ergo, the omnipotent being cannot exist. They cannot be protected from paradox linguistically.
As a side note from the realm of physics – so far as we have seen, the universe is NOT a realm of absolutes. Even the void of space itself does not appear to be infinite, and every value in existence has real upper and lower boundaries.
So far as we can tell at this time, the concept of Infinite is a purely imaginary mathematical construct of the human mind. It appears that any real infinite property in the universe itself would likely wreck it – a severe flaw in the structure of reality.
Error:DivByZero
You have missed the import of “logically impossible for an omnipotent being to do”.
The description of a state of affairs an omnipotent being is supposed to bring about must not only be logically consistent, but also logically consistent with the nature of an omnipotent being. You miss the latter part of this condition.
“creating an object which cannot be controlled” is a logically consistent description, but more is needed for us to claim that an omnipotent being can meet this description.
What is needed is that this description must also be consistent with the nature of an omnipotent being. Clearly, “not being able to control a being”, entailed by the description given earlier, is not logically consistent with the nature of an omnipotent being.
Therefore, it is logically impossible for an omnipotent being to fulfill the description “create a being which cannot be controlled”. But this is not, by any stretch, a proof of the logical impossibility of an omnipotent being!
One might as well argue that an omnipotent being is not logically possible because it cannot create square circles, or infertile biological mothers, or happily married bachelors.
“If God is absolutely free, then she has the freedom to choose not to know that the Israeli forces killed more than 250 children in their invasion of Gaza in 2008-2009, an invasion which started at the time children were returning home from school. (source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/6162984/Israels-Gaza-invasion-killed-more-than-250-children.html)”
Of course, I was not suggesting that it would make any sense for us to ascribe to God, or to anyone, the claim that “I do not know fact X”. The claim is self-refuting. The assertion implies that I do know fact X.
What I mean is that we could choose not to know anything about the number and types of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal, for example.
But can God exercise this sort of choice? If she does, she is not omniscient. If she cannot, then she is not absolutely free.
“What I mean is that we could choose not to know anything about the number and types of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal, for example.
But can God exercise this sort of choice? If she does, she is not omniscient. If she cannot, then she is not absolutely free.”
In defense of the compatibility of divine omniscience and divine freedom, one could respond that “God CAN exercise this choice not to know, but WILL NOT do so since it would abrogate her status as an omniscient being. God always freely chooses to know all states of affairs.”
In other words, the response is that, in just the way God always freely chooses to do the good, she also always freely chooses to know everything that is the case.
But is it meaningful to say that God always has the freedom of choice not to know about something or whether something is the case, if this choice can never be exercised except on pain of loss of omniscience?
The intractable problem with omniscience is Time.
You keep talking about the omniscient being as if it could make choices at some point in time… It can’t.
In fact, it has no concept of time, because to an omniscient being, all of time is visible at once, ?beginning to end?. They cannot make/never made any choices at all. For all intents and purposes, the omniscient being is non-existent because they cannot possibly act of their own volition.
All existence became utterly fixed the moment the came into existence.
1. You have not understood the interpretation of omniscience offered by Richard Swinburne, among others.
To repeat, omniscience can be conceived and defined in a way which does not imply foreknowledge.
This is your stumbling block. You seem to think that omniscience necessarily includes and entails foreknowledge. (“because to an omniscient being, all of time is visible at once, ?beginning to end?”). It doesn’t.
To repeat, if it is true that P (P is any state of affairs), then an omniscient being knows it.
It’s 11:41 now. Suppose that I decide to have a cup of coffee now. If omniscience includes foreknowledge, then God already knew that I will have a cup of coffee now. Since God is omniscient, I could not but decide to have a cup of coffee now.
Thus, construing omniscience in terms of knowledge of past, present, and future (“Trikala Drsti” – Sanskrit – meaning “knowledge of the the three times of past, present, and future”) implies complete determinism, not only in the universe, but also in God. God cannot be free to do otherwise since her omniscience, construed in terms of knowledge of past, present, and future, would determine all her actions.
But, to repeat, omniscience need not be construed in this way. In Swinburne’s interpretation, if it is true at 11:41 AM that I choose to have a cup of coffee, then God knows it.
Since there is no question of its truth (i.e., the truth of the statement “I choose to have a cup of coffee”) at any time prior to 11:41 AM, it makes no sense, on this construal of omniscience, to say that God could know that it is true prior to 11:41 AM.
2. “In fact, it has no concept of time, because to an omniscient being, all of time is visible at once, ?beginning to end?. They cannot make/never made any choices at all.”
Does an omniscient being know that humans have a concept of time and what sort of a concept of time they have? Does an omniscient being know what humans know? Of course, yes!
If so, an omniscient being must know time!
This is elementary logic.
Knowledge of time, knowledge that there is past, present, and future, cannot be lacking in an omniscient being.
2. The issue you raise is whether an omniscience being can make choices.
Your argument is:
1. An omniscient being cannot have a concept of time.
2. Only a being with a concept of time can make choices.
3. Therefore, an omniscient being cannot make choices.
This is logically valid and interesting! But the argument is unsound because of the falsity of premise # 1.
It would be more correct to say that an omniscient being would have an entirely different concept of time than we do – one in which causality does not exist, because nothing is in motion.
To him, all of existence would be a frozen image, forever unchanging – it would be a FOUR DIMENSIONAL image, granted, but still completely fixed.
It wouldn’t matter what he thought of our concept of time, because he would have no power whatsoever to affect it – he would in fact be Anti-potent, utterly powerless to affect the universe in any way.
Great knowledge, it would seem, comes at a steep cost.
He’d be frozen in amber for all eternity. I feel kind of bad for our Omniscient being now. His life sux.
Sorry, mistated at the start of that.
‘One in which causality is fixed…’ not non-existent. He could see that WE were affected by causality, but it would be one that he could not affect, because he himself would be completely bound by it.
We would be free of it only by dint of our lack of awareness. Which brings us back to the illusion of free will being essentially indistinguishable from free will. But not for an omniscient being – it’d be the ONLY entity completely lacking in free will in the cosmos.
I started with the issue of the coherence of the philosophical theistic concept of God. It is important to remember that the philosophical theistic concept of God is that of a being which is eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, absolutely free, and absolutely good.
So, it may add to confusion rather than clarity on the concept of God if we think in terms of a being whose sole characteristic is omniscience.
If I have succeeded in understanding your remarks, you seem to be suggesting, in effect, that omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible.
This is interesting, but I fail to follow your argument for this claim.
Remember, the definitions of omniscience and omnipotence are:
Omniscience: If it is true that P, then an omniscient being knows it.
Omnipotence: If X is logically possible for an omnipotent being to bring about, then it CAN bring about X.
Again, God has other attributes than omnipotence and omniscience.
As for why I presume that Omniscience requires knowledge of future states, I do so because most religious adherents ALSO apply infallibility as an aspect of Omniscience.
God has a perfect plan, and he knows everything such that he can execute it perfectly. This exists in some form in many faiths. Certainly Christianity.
Given what we know of chaotic systems, one would need perfect foreknowledge of every possible systemic state of the universe in order to do such a thing. Lack of even a tiny aspect of this would result in a rapidly snowballing systemic deviation from the expected state – The Butterfly Effect.
Therefore, one’s future knowledge must be perfect – or you cannot predict the future, even with an intellect enormously greater than our own.
Without true Omniscience – essentially a four-dimensional view of time – God would have only a vague idea what the outcome of his actions was likely to be. Guesswork. Most certainly fallible.
If you state that God’s knowledge of the world is limited only to the present, well, then I don’t give him a whole lot more credence for accuracy than my weather forecaster, who faces the same problem.
As time spools forward, the number crunching required to accurately predict specific events based on a specific state increases exponentially. So god’s weather predictions might remain accurate for another few weeks at best, assuming he has an entire universe’s calculating power on hand to make his predictions – but that’s about it.
Everything else he did would be limited to generalizations about gross systemic state. The fate of any individual within that system would be up for grabs, and the ultimate outcome for the entire system… Uncertain.
As a note, if we assume that God DOES have the processing power on hand to figure out the future state of the entire universe – well, then we’re back to the four-dimensional view of time, and a lack of ability to change anything, because he’s already figured it all out, INCLUDING his own future actions for all eternity. He’s stuck again. It’s inevitable.
“If you state that God’s knowledge of the world is limited only to the present, well, then I don’t give him a whole lot more credence for accuracy than my weather forecaster, who faces the same problem.”
But the notion of omniscience is that God knows ALL that IS the case, ALL that IS true.
Your weather forecaster, other human beings, super duper aliens, if any, Gods, if any, cannot know ALL that IS the case, ALL that Is true.
‘But the notion of omniscience is that God knows ALL that IS the case, ALL that IS true.
Your weather forecaster, other human beings, super duper aliens, if any, Gods, if any, cannot know ALL that IS the case, ALL that Is true.’
No, you missed my point. Chaos theory states that knowing the perfect state of a system NOW does not confer perfect knowledge of it in the future. Not even in the fairly near future – UNLESS the system is completely deterministic.
If you:
1) know the perfect state of the system
2) You know how the system behaves
3) The system is deterministic
Then you could have a perfect knowledge of the future as well – and you’re stuck with it, unable to change it. That’s the ‘God In Amber’ outcome.
If any of those factors is NOT true – say, point 3 – then Chaos Theory instantly butts in and says that your knowledge of the future must very rapidly degrade until you don’t know anything about the distant future at all, and very little about what’s going to happen a few days from now, no matter how smart you are. And if you can’t predict the future, you are most certainly fallible – you can kick off events that have outcomes you do not desire.
Now don’t misunderstand me, the future is not wholly opaque – I can predict the heat death of the universe with a moderate degree of certainty based on our current understanding of the universe, even though it’s not scheduled for a few trillion more years – but that is an incredibly gross systemic outcome that is simply a vast summation of the random intervening events, and is pretty much irrelevant to everyone’s daily lives. That’s like saying that it’s probably going to be warm next summer. Big deal.
If you wanted to ask me when humanity ceases to exist along that continuum I’m afraid that is a very specific outcome that would be impossible to predict – though if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it’ll either be fairly soon, or a very, very long time from now. ;)
We cannot say that we know that there will be a “sunrise” tomorrow. We expect that there will be sunrise tomorrow, we predict that there will be a sunrise tomorrow.
“To know that P” implies that P is the case, that it is true.
Hence, no future state, in principle, can be an instance of P.
Therefore, it is meaningless to talk of knowledge of the future.
You can guess, predict, make probabilistic judgments, and so on, but none of this constitutes knowledge.
‘You can guess, predict, make probabilistic judgments, and so on, but none of this constitutes knowledge.’
Sure it does – Imperfect Knowledge is still knowledge. There’s just an unavoidable degree of uncertainty attached to any piece of data. I can say the sun will come up tomorrow with an exceedingly high degree of certainty – much higher, for example, than the likelihood that human civilization will still exist tomorrow, there being an available mechanism for ending the latter at hand.
Needless to say, I can make plans based on the sun being up tomorrow and not worry too much about them going awry. Tho I may get rained on…
In any case, in a non-deterministic universe ruled by probabilistic events, imperfect knowledge is the ONLY kind of knowledge one can have!
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
If we go by this model, perfect knowledge of a single photon – much less the entire universe – is impossible.
Honestly, debating God’s ‘perfect knowledge’ of the universe seems sort of absurd when the real focus of our study of the universe is whether it is even possible to know where a photon is or how fast it is going.
People have been arguing the former forever, with no resolution in sight, basically because ‘No’ isn’t an acceptable answer in philosophy. Makes it hard to make any headway.
As for the latter, empirical evidence continues to support it for the time being.
“Imperfect Knowledge is still knowledge.”
“Fallible knowledge” and “Imperfect knowledge” are not identical.
By “imperfect knowledge”, one can only understand “incomplete knowledge”, e.g., our knowledge of the brain. This simply means, not that what we truly know about the brain is fallible, but that there is great deal about the structure and workings of the brain we don’t yet know about.
“fallible knowledge” is an oxymoron. To know that P is to know that P is true. If I am mistaken in thinking that P, or that P is true, I can’t be said to know that P, but only to have surmised, guessed, or conjectured that P.
A few things to consider in the context of raising the problem of evil:
1. We tend to assume that what is bad for a human being or a group of human beings at a given time must also be absolutely and intrinsically bad. This is false.
2. We tend to assume that God must merely watch our suffering from a transcendent location. But if God is conscious and omnipresent, then she must experience all that occurs, including all occurrences of pain or suffering of finite beings.
3. We tend to overlook a great deal of self-created suffering due to our own greed, indifference, hatred, etc., even in light of knowledge that our traits and actions will produce suffering.
4. We overlook the fact that we have the intelligence and capacity to remove a great deal of suffering faced by our fellow human beings as a result of human actions, but fail to do so due to indifference. We have the capacity to remove starvation from this planet if only Western (and Russian and Chinese) governments would allocate a very small percentage of their obscene military budgets to the cause. It is not happening because of indifference to the suffering of other human beings. And the sordid truth is that we have chosen to be indifferent, or chosen not to overcome our indifference, to the plight of other members of our own species.
5. There are forms of suffering which are well-deserved. If I am a chain smoker, knowing well that it will increase the risks of lung cancer, then I deserve the predictable consequences. If I invade a country and wreak destruction on it, then I deserve the retaliation my victims understandably seek to inflict on me.
6. In shifting all the blame on suffering to God, we may just be indulging our vice of not accepting responsibility for the enormous, but avoidable, suffering we have created for our own species and others.
7. Instead of carping on the suffering in the world, let us focus on the conquest of it in our own lives by harnessing our potential for remedial or corrective insight and action.
‘6. In shifting all the blame on suffering to God, we may just be indulging our vice of not accepting responsibility for the enormous, but avoidable, suffering we have created for our own species and others.’
Whoa there. That WE have created for ourselves and all others? Back up there.
What do you think has been happening on this planet over the last 3-odd billion years? A giant planetary love-in?
Not quite. Red in Tooth and Claw, and all that.
Suffering pre-dates us by a great many millions of years, and to claim that only we can create and suffer by it is an incredibly ego-centric viewpoint completely unsupported by anything.
A mouse may not be able to expound upon the concept of evil at any length in a sophisticated dialog, but it sure as hell knows what it sees when it spots a cat crouching to pounce.
Evil. Fear. Pain. Death.
These concepts are carved into the core of our minds – our very genetic structure – over billions or years of evolution! Our animal forebears most certainly know of them quite intimately, because they relied upon them to survive eons before we came along to stake our short-lived claim on the Earth.
You are assuming that the universe is determinist in nature, that if we have complete knowledge of its state at any time, then we can accurately predict its future state.
The fact is that there is indeterminacy, unpredictability, at the most fundamental levels of the universe.
If this indeterminacy is an objective feature of the universe, then it is logically impossible for anyone, including an omniscient being – remember, omniscience is knowledge of all that is the case – to know what is yet to be the case in the universe.
Exactly – but how does that square with infallibility?
For the moment I’m fine with God NOT being Omniscient in the grand sense of the word. There are some issues with recursive information theory there that cause problems even for understanding the instant state of existence – but lets not get into that…
But now he’s fallible, and if he is fallible in deed, and perhaps even in purpose – is he worthy of worship?
By extension, should I positively acknowledge anyone who worships a fallible god and insists that I respect its goals and dictates, not even knowing what they are? He might be WRONG.
Infallibility?
By Jove, omniscience implies infallibility, except that the infallible knowledge here pertains to what it is logically possible for an omniscient being to know, i.e., all that is the case.
If it is not logically possible for an omniscient being (a being which knows all that is the case) to know what is yet to be the case in an indeterminist universe, this does not imply that it is fallible.
It is not that an omniscient being has only a “fallible knowledge” of the future states of an indeterminist universe. The reason is that there is no such thing as “fallible knowledge”. It cannot have any knowledge of the future states of an indeterminist universe. That’s all.
It looks like the only kind of universe God would create is an indeterminist universe. It seems to me a function of her omniscience and omnipotence, “paradoxical” as it may sound.
‘If it is not logically possible for an omniscient being (a being which knows all that is the case) to know what is yet to be the case in an indeterminist universe, this does not imply that it is fallible.’
Not to be curt but – Yes, it does.
Wait, sorry, let me rephrase my curt reply.
If your not-quite-omniscient God’s unknown future goal is an extremely broad systemic one that is a functionally guaranteed outcome of Entropic forces, then sure – he could be infallible without specific future knowledge. But only because his goal is so vaguely broad that it can’t help but come about.
I don’t know why WE would give a flying @$%@ about such goals however, because they don’t include us, save as a randomized field of slowly decaying neutrons scattered over the entire breadth of reality. Watching grass grow would be a trillion times more exciting.
On the other hand, he could just be WATCHING to see the unknown outcome out of curiosity. Then he’s infallible by dint of not especially caring about the outcome save for its dramatic quality – in which case I most certainly don’t like him, because he’s just using the universe as his own personal reality TV series, and he’s a jerk.
God’s goals?
I’m quite certain that if God exists, and has goals, the foremost among them would be to bring about the liberation of sentient beings from suffering, limitations, and death.
The interesting question, at least for me, is how she might go about achieving that goal.
Assume that you are God.
You have legions of souls bent on clinging to a life of impermanence, decay, death, suffering, limitations, etc.
How would you go about enabling them to understand that they can liberate themselves and to facilitate their liberation?
Damn Son… If I were a benevolent God I wouldn’t have stuck them in that situation in the first place!
If I came on the scene after the fact, I’d wave my magic wand, make them immortal, remove their desire to procreate endlessly, let them spend as long as they like exploring the vastness of creation, and let them decide when to end their own existences when they got bored of it all.
I’d also maybe, y’know, say hi. Hang out with the folks. Shake hands or something. Ask how things are going….
Universe might be a bit less exciting from that standpoint, but it’d be hugely less nasty.
You posit an Omnipotent god.
Not only should all of that be possible, it should be an unnoticed triviality to execute in the blink of an eye, without anyone realizing anything had ever changed.
You’ll note BTW, that that would pretty much exactly correlate to simply promoting everyone to Angels.
If you are correct in holding that an omniscient being, a being which knows any P if it is true that P, must necessarily be fallible, this would show that the traditional concept of God is incoherent.
“Fallible” in what sense? It predicts the future and finds that it is mistaken?
Why would an omnipotent being engage in predictions about the future given that it knows all that is the case and also that it knows that it is logically impossible to know what is not yet the case?
Non-omniscient beings do not know everything that is true. Hence, non-omniscient beings are fallible.
An omniscient being necessarily knows P if it is true that P. It knows everything that is true.
How, then,can it be fallible?
I must underline that the operative word here is “know”. Prediction is not an instance of knowledge.
Remember, the problem here is that we are discussing absolutes. Absolutes cause paradoxes, in pretty much every case I’ve ever studied.
Whether we use the word ‘know’ or ‘knowledge’ or ‘understanding’ or ‘predict’ or ‘plan’ or ‘blarglhe!’ – the issue isn’t with the type of knowledge, it’s with the absolute-ness of it, or lack thereof.
Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omni-whatever – they all run into similar sorts of paradoxes, because an infinite value in any one category instantly starts causing absolute value conflicts elsewhere – probably everywhere if you take the time to carefully chart their actual ramifications in detail. I’ve done enough exploration to satisfy myself as to the categorically paradoxical nature of such concepts, at least until someone can come to me with a very solid proof to the contrary.
As I said before, Infinity is most likely a construct of the human imagination. Reality appears to abhor it.
Interesting post, Amod, thanks. The problem of evil IS the major problem for theists (and, I suspect, for whoever wants to make sense of the world). You aptly show how focusing on the other side of the problem (how is good possible?) can make into a theist.
Just two small remarks:
1. There is no way to escape the problem of evil. I do not think Augustin’s approach really works, if only one focuses on each single suffering living being. But one can try to tentatively reply that God is NOT omnipotent, insofar as he wants his/her love to be freely reciprocated. And if we are free, we can do wrong.
2. I do not think that the theistic evolution of Buddhism (or of Nyāya) is driven by inner consistency. I see your point, but the drive towards theism in Indian philosophy is too generalised and happens almost at the same time. I suspect that philosophical schools just had to make sense/accept what had already happened on a religious level (a strong shift towards devotion for a personal being). What do you think?
Note that the problem of Evil immediately evaporates when one removes either the beneficient trait, or the Omniscient trait from one’s creator.
If we remove beneficent, then the creator allows evil for reasons of his own that are not beneficent – at least from our point of view. He has some ulterior motive, which we may be unwise to trust in.
If on the other hand, we remove Omniscient, then our creator could not see the outcome of his decisions, and he could simply make mistakes, or have limits in how complex a universe he could juggle without problems arising.
I for example, as a computer programmer, can create a universe over which I am nearly omnipotent, and nearly omniscient – but unless I keep that universe incredibly simple (‘Hello World’!) then my knowledge of and power over it’s state at any time is limited, and my power over the outcome is likewise limited.
In any even modestly complex simulation there are just too many factors for me to track, and chaotic butterfly effects ensure that the final outcome may change wildly based on small initial deviations in the simulation’s rules or state.
It does not matter that at any moment, I could freeze the simulation, even reverse it, and study its state intimately until I had a nearly complete understanding of it at that chosen point. Within a few minutes of run-time, it will soon achieve a state that is nearly unknown to me again, and if I make changes, they’re going to quickly spiral throughout the entire simulation and change EVERYTHING fairly soon, erasing much of my knowledge of it.
With a number of state outcomes that would easily number in the exotic value ranges of Google-plex, I could spend trillions of years laboring over such a simulation in order to achieve an outcome with little or no ‘evil’.
In other words, in order for a God to understand the entire universe, he would have to be almost infinitely MORE complex than the universe itself. Universe-to-the-power-of-Universe, essentially.
That is why I am an Atheist. Any omniscient God would be so complex that his would make the grand complexity of the universe look like a grain of sand on a beach. His spontaneous arrival would make problem of evolutionary complexity look like a child’s tinker toy.
In other words, an omniscient creator would perforce be almost infinitely unlikely.
A non-omniscient creator though? Sure. We could be a universe in a bottle on someone’s desk – but that curious other-dimensional researcher might not be any more complex and only vaguely more knowledgeable of our universe than we are – or even far less so at the detail level we exist at, having set in motion actions that they can only vaguely comprehend and study only on the widest scales from their viewpoint.
These are interesting discussions. I don’t have any answers to the problem of suffering and evil in a theistic world view — but I do have a few thoughts.
First, it seems worth considering what we do when we conceive of god. In most cases, it seems to me, our conception is simply a large version of ourselves. There was a very funny movie years ago called “Life of Brian” by the Monty Python crew. They had a great scene with an Anglican minister leading a prayer in a cadenced voice: “Oh God, you are so . . . big, and we . . . are so . . . impressed.” The discussion of god here has something of that approach.
Second, it seems to me that the concept of suffering and evil should be examined. Is suffering and death necessarily bad such that it creates an argument against the existence of a benevolent god? And as for evil — isn’t evil entirely dependent on motivation and therefore a human trait?
“Second, it seems to me that the concept of suffering and evil should be examined. Is suffering and death necessarily bad such that it creates an argument against the existence of a benevolent god? And as for evil — isn’t evil entirely dependent on motivation and therefore a human trait?”
On the latter point, I fully agree.
As for the former point – if one presumes a God worthy of worship, then whatever its goals are would presumably define Good and Evil for its adherents – but if your God’s goals are completely inscrutable as many adherents claim, then we likewise could not define what is Good or Evil, save by hopeful guesswork.
I tend to think the a truly benevolent God would have created a much simpler universe, where painful outcomes were not so… inevitable.
If there were a God willing to create THIS universe, then I would see no need to worship it, given than his moral grounding doesn’t feel much better than mine. Probably a lot worse frankly.
While it is indeed a very beautiful and interesting universe. Contrast is nice and all, but I don’t think I could bring myself to be this much of a dick to conscious beings capable of feeling pain for purely artistic purposes – even on a really bad day.
Agnosticism is more rational than theism or atheism. It also sustains the passion for inquiry much more than theism or atheism can ever hope to.
Unfortunately, when engaged in these discussions, I always have continuous images of conversations about Lost or X-Files in my office. Endless discussions about possibilities and mysteries and hidden meanings.
I avoided them, because, for better or worse, I am very familiar with the technique involved in creating them.
The writers of those shows used a very basic narrative trick: They would simply string together the most emotionally dramatic scenes and bizarre twists they could think of – stuff no-one could ever have predicted – and then they’d leave them hanging unexplained.
Inevitably, the audience would go into a frenzy of guesswork and argument and spend the next week or two hashing endlessly over the possible hidden meanings and trying to rationalize the events and their likely outcomes.
Things would settle down, and then the writers would refer back to that prior scene in some oblique but unmistakable manner (without actually doing ANYTHING with it) – and again just leave it hanging. Audience goes into yet another frenzy, analyzing 1.75 seconds of meaningless screen time in a seemingly endless loop. This went on quite successfully for years in both series.
The problem?
In the end there were so many contradictions, so many red-herrings and unsolved mysteries, that the ending could do nothing but collapse in on itself with a flurry of hand-waving and meaningless symbolism. There WAS no ending to those narratives, because… and here’s the catch…
…there never was any narrative at all.
The viewers made it up the whole time. The writers just came up with such dramatic scenes, that grabbed the viewers so emotionally, that the audience felt compelled to justify them by whatever means they could, even though the writers never offered any connective tissue between them. When the end came without any resolution at all, many were justifiably annoyed. They felt tricked, because they were tricked.
It is an old, old technique, that pits our emotions into doing all the author’s work for them. The scene grabs our emotions, our emotions say it is true, and come hell or high water, they are going to drag our rational mind along for the ride, and hold it hostage until it comes up with an explanation – no matter how infeasible or unlikely.
But unlike the work of a highly skilled author which painstakingly constructs a world and characters that avoids internal contradiction, these works inevitably fail to end, unable to untie their Gordian Knot of unexplained and paradoxical events.
It all falls apart… Unless of course, you have an audience willing to go to any lengths to explain them. No matter how many centuries go by – because to them it has become more than a story. The story has become their reality.
And we discuss it endlessly.
And your point is____________(?)
Think about it. It’s a philosophy forum. :)
I grew up on Wittgenstein’s dictum that what deserves to be said must be said clearly and without much ado! :)
Ok. It’s more fun if you figure it out yourself, but what I am saying is that all the great religious texts – and many of the philosophical ones – rely upon the same narrative trick very heavily.
They mostly work with parables – dramatic set scenes – to tell a series of very emotional stories. These stories generally have little or nothing to do with each other, nor any particular bearing on reality.
There are many of them, and if they book covers enough ground each reader will tend to find some sub-set of those stories that ‘speaks’ to them in a very raw, emotional way. You’ll note that many religious folk will tend to have a pretty small and specific set of ‘favorites’ that they return to time and again, while many others are completely ignored.
Which, from a clinical viewpoint, is a VERY odd way to treat a sacred text…
Anyway, it doesn’t matter which parables any individual chooses, nor why. What matters, is that deep inside, the reader ‘feels’ that they are true, because they have felt a strong positive emotional response to them.
Once this happens, the process or rationalization begins. They talk about the story with friends or with a preacher, or even with themselves, they’ll inevitably run into problems or contradictions with it and other stories in the book – and they’ll find ways to rationalize them away, and also to tie the stories together into a narrative. In doing so, they become much more deeply invested. They’ve spent time, effort, thought into coming up with these answers.
They can’t afford to be wrong any more, so as they run into more and more problems, they will be willing to go to greater and greater lengths to rationalize them – until they aren’t being rational at all any more. If it goes wrong at this point, years of intellectual effort and emotional stress will literally come crashing down around them. It *CANT* be wrong.
It just cant…
Scientists have been discovering recently that we are very, very good at this sort of post-emotional rationalization – and evolutionarily this is a bit obvious in retrospect – we’ve been *feeling* for a great deal longer than we’ve been *rationalizing*. So it should come as no surprise that the order of operations tends to favor emotional attachment over rational analysis.
The writers of Lost just used the same mechanisms as the old religious authors, or that Scientology cult leader L. Ron. Hubbard used to pen his book. A great many stories, designed to appeal to various emotions and the reader’s ego, enticing it to drag the rational mind in line to explain how any of this is possible, even though a militantly rational view clearly shows that it isn’t.
This is interesting in its own pseudo-scientific psychological arena, but I fail to see the relevance to the analysis of the philosophical theistic concept of God.
Simple. I’m discussing how you construct the concept of Theism, or an important aspect of it at any rate.
Someone made this stuff up and a lot of people jumped on board. It’s been a major force in our society ever since – thus it is important to figure out how they did it, and why it works.
Simplistic and vacuous in rleation to philosophical issues pertaining to the concept of God. I would say.
What is it that you have said which explains how the philosophical theistic concept of God was formulated?
Which sacred text gives you the definition of “omniscience” in terms of knowing all that is true, or “omnipotence” in terms of the capacity to bring about what it is logically possible for an omnipotent being to do?
Which sacred text examines the coherence of the concept of God or does anything remotely suggestive of that?
You are talking about religious lore and the foundations of popular religious belief.
It sheds no light on philosophical issues pertaining to the theistic concept of God.
This should be rather obvious.
Theism is a human construct based around certain belief structures that appear to have arisen in early tribal oral storytelling traditions.
I was expounding on the storytelling forms that may have led to the formation of those theistic belief structures, which seems relevant to me, particularly as few people seem to be aware of their existence, nor the psychological emotional underpinnings they follow from.
I tied it to a common pop culture reference, because it creates an interesting case example of the phenomena, with what I consider an important contrast to the usual theistic format.
As for omniscience/omnipotence, etc. I referenced no text, because these are common concepts, with common problems. If you choose to engage in linguistic artistry to alter those meanings, you are free to do so, but I do not intend to endlessly follow such a methodological chain, as it has no end.
I prefer to stick to common language and word meanings, ESPECIALLY in philosophical contexts, where there is a tendency towards the use of recursive references and all manner of ontological nonsense. I’m afraid I’m something of a literalist, despite my interest in philosophy.
Also, please keep it polite.
I think his point is that we are all living in an episode of Lost. And god is a comedian playing before an audience that is afraid to laugh (to paraphrase Voltaire).
Not precisely what I was getting at – but I do like your interpretation. ;)
North American teens approach problems looking for fast, easy, and painless solutions.
But it is possible that God may not share the outlook of a North American teen.
“Damn Son…If I were a benevolent God I wouldn’t have stuck them in that situation in the first place!”
You hastily assume that God must have stuck them in that situation. Consider alternatives. For instance, consider the possibility that they misused their free will and devolved into their present condition in a law-governed causal chain.
“If I came on the scene after the fact, I’d wave my magic wand, make them immortal, remove their desire to procreate endlessly, let them spend as long as they like exploring the vastness of creation, and let them decide when to end their own existences when they got bored of it all.”
Perhaps, given the choice between striving to develop your understanding of physics by means of an arduous learning process and swallowing a pill which would immediately give you a great knowledge of physics, you would choose the latter option.
But it is certainly questionable whether your option is the best one in terms of your own development. You have missed the oppportunity to engage with problems, confusions, failures, etc., and accumulate a rich stock of insight as aresult of this sort of a learning process.
In just the same way, we would not be any different from “enlightened masters” produced in an assembly line fashion if God were to wave a wand and make us achieve our liberation.
“I’d also maybe, y’know, say hi. Hang out with the folks. Shake hands or something. Ask how things are going….”
Sorry Son, no anthropomorphism allowed! Don’t make God into your typical “jolly good fellow”.
“Universe might be a bit less exciting from that standpoint, but it’d be hugely less nasty.”
I think that you also overlook the fact of impermanence and momentariness of sensations of pain. In the majority of cases, the amount of time filled with pain is far less than the amount of time in which there is no pain. I don’t mean that there is necessarily joy or pleasure in the absence of pain. Most of the time we are in a “neutral” state.
So, although the problem of pain is a real problem, we must take care not to exaggerate its proportions, the actual amount of time it takes.
From this perspective, the universe is not all that nasty as you make it out to be.
“You posit an Omnipotent god.
Not only should all of that be possible, it should be an unnoticed triviality to execute in the blink of an eye, without anyone realizing anything had ever changed.
You’ll note BTW, that that would pretty much exactly correlate to simply promoting everyone to Angels.”
Ah, the penchant for miracles again! In a law-governed universe, such as the one we live in, goals are achieved by processes. Goals also have necessary conditions. Liberation has its necessary conditions. If we are not willing to give up the factors which have led to our present predicament, then we deserve that predicament.
So, work hard, Son, if you want liberation.
LOL
Right, sure. The god you are positing is impotent. Having set in motion a universe without knowing the outcome, and either unwilling or unable to intervene with the physical laws set down at it’s initiation.
He’s no different than the researcher with a pet universe on his desk that I posited earlier. Or the kid with the galactic marbles at the end of MiB.
And why would anyone bother to worship it? That God for all intents and purposes doesn’t exist to the beings inside the globe unless it violates the non-intervention rule and starts messing with things.
1. The God you are positing does not know the outcome of the universe it has set in motion.
2. This God is also unable to intervene with the physical laws of the universe.
3. Therefore, the God you are positing is impotent rather than omnipotent.
I don’t think this argument is valid. God may have good reasons not to intervene with the physical laws of the universe. Therefore, premise (2) does not imply or support the conclusion.
Intervention implies correction. Correction implies error. Error implies fallibility.
But God is omniscient, and, hence, infallible. Therefore, God does not intervene with the laws she has designed. She knows all the truths pertaining to those laws.
Even if premise (1) is true, it does not imply or support the conclusion that God is not omnipotent.
Lack of foreknowledge does not imply impotence. God cannot know that it will rain tomorrow because there is no such thing as knowledge of future. If it is raining now, then God has the power to stop it. If an asteroid is hurtling towards the earth now, then God knows it and has the power to stop it. So, omnipotence does not require foreknowledge.
It could be argued that God’s omnipotence is already at work in upholding the laws governing our universe. What is the explanation for the fact that those laws exist and continue to govern changes in the universe? A theist must appeal to God’s omnipotence here.
Thus, God’s omnipotence need not take the form of superfluous interventions in the universe. The maintenance of the laws would be enough evidence of her omnipotence.
On the other hand, if the indeterminacy and probablistic laws at the fundamental level of the universe do allow for God’s interventions, then she may be intervening at that level without abrogation of those probablistic laws she has designed.
Finite beings, however, might see those interventions as “random” events.
These discussions of theism remind me of the non-standard theistic views of two great Indian mystics: Ramalingam who lived in the nineteenth century and Swami Ramdas who lived in the twentieth century. For those interested in forms of theism other than the “axis” of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, here is a short summary of their central views.
According to Ramalingam, our original state is an abyss of ignorance without even a glimmer of sentience and consciousness.
God, out of compassion, brings about our embodiment as particular forms of sentient beings culminating, by means of an evolutionary process, in our embodiment as human beings, a form of embodiment still in the shadow of our original ignorance and all its attendant sufferings, but one in which freedom from that ignorance can be achieved by progressive cultivation of compassion and the consequent reception of divine grace and eventual liberation into a life free from suffering, death, and other limitations.
Thus, in Ramalingam’s view, the fact that we exist as human beings, in a body capable of astonishing powers of discernment and knowledge, is already evidence of unfathomable divine compassion.
What is the explanation of our original state of ignorance? It must have been the consequence of a sense of division between the self and God and the consequent loss of unity with divine existence.
How did this division arise? It is a possibility of individuality, although it is not an inevitable consequence of individuality. It is the result of a choice by the soul to assert its individuality separate from God. The soul falls into an abyss of ignorance as a consquence of this separation from God.
Swami Ramdas achieved God-realization and expressed his realization in terms of what may be described as Dramatic Monism, the view that God is the only subject and agent and that all individuals are simply characters assumed by God as part of a play with no purpose and motive other than the expression of divine delight or joy.
All individual beings are ultimately characters assumed by God in a play she has staged. They have no reality apart from God.
If we are ultimately God playing the part of a character in a play, why don’t we know it?
Ramdas’ answer is that ignorance is a necessary condition of playing a finite part or character in a play.
The impulse to cast off the finite character or part in the play and recover knowledge of our original divine nature also comes from God and is achieved at the time and in the mode of her choosing.
All we can do is to remind ourselves that we are characters in a play and view existence as a divine theatre with its rich manifestations of the beautiful, the sublime, the terrible, the macabre, the good, the absurd, and so on, and remember that these are all varied expressions of divinity.
Suffering, pain, etc., lose their stranglehold the more we are established in this realization of being characters in the divine theatre.
Both views provide a rich field of philosophical issues and problems.
“1. The God you are positing does not know the outcome of the universe it has set in motion.
2. This God is also unable to intervene with the physical laws of the universe.
3. Therefore, the God you are positing is impotent rather than omnipotent.
I don’t think this argument is valid. God may have good reasons not to intervene with the physical laws of the universe. Therefore, premise (2) does not imply or support the conclusion.”
Correction: Premise # 2 does support the conclusion since the word is “unable”. Jesse wrote “unwilling or unable” and I must have been thinking of “unwilling”, although the premise as stated in the argument has “unable”.
From the premise that God is unwilling to change the laws of the universe, it certainly does not follow that she is not omnipotent.
And she is omnipotent, it cannot be that she cannot change the laws, only that she has chosen not to.
Hence, it would be fair to say that premise # 2 is false rather than that it does not support the conclusion.
“So, omnipotence does not require foreknowledge.”
It could be argued that omnipotence includes the capacity to prevent things from happening and that this requires foreknowledge.
Well, I think “foreknowledge”, i.e., knowledge of future events, is an incoherent concept. All the same, it is not required to make an omniscient and omnipotent being prevent things from happening.
What do we mean by “prevent X from happening”?
Either X does not exist, or exists, or it is in the process of coming into being like a flower from a bud, or a plant from a sapling.
Prevention makes sense only in the case of the third condition. We can prevent the flower or the plant from coming into existence by destroying the bud or the sapling.
This surely does not require “foreknowledge”. All that is required is the knowledge that a bud is in existence and the rational belief that, other things being equal, it will probably develop into a flower. This knowledge and rational belief, obviously, are available to an omniscient being.
Hence, God does not require “foreknowledge” in order to prevent certain states of affairs.
Well, is the rational belief that a bud will, other things being equal, probably develop or blossom into a flower, a case of foreknowledge?
No, it is a case of belief, albeit rational belief, not knowledge.
Knowledge of P implies that P is the case, that it is true that P.
The belief or judgment that P is a probable state of affairs does not imply that P, or that P is the case, or that P is true.
Hence, the belief or judgment that P is a probable state of affairs is not an instance of knowledge that P. It can only be a case of rational belief in P.
Thus, we don’t know that the sun will rise tomorrow, but induction makes it a rational to believe that it will probably rise tomorrow.
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