A New Proof for the Existence of God

[Peter_Plato]

I claim it is illogical because God is all loving, all powerful and He knows everything. Since He is all loving He would not want innocent children to suffer. He knows about the suffering of innocent children and He has the power to prevent that suffering. But the child still suffers. So it is not logical. Evil exists and cannot be explained logically considering the omnipotence and all loving nature of God.

Suffering is an indicator of a perturbed ontological state - that for whatever reason things are not right. An omnipotent and all-loving God would not allow pointless ontological evil to persist. Suffering, either our own or of those around us, signals that corrective measures need to be applied by responsible moral agents. As such, suffering could be allowed by God as prescriptive or formative.

Since suffering is not, in itself, evil - it is an effect or indicator of the perversion or negation of good by moral agents, it is not wrong for God to allow suffering, but it would be wrong for God to allow pointless evil, in the sense of evil that could not be used by God to bring about greater good.

From another thread…

The argument for God permitting evil has been addressed in philosophy numerous times.

A good overall resource on the philosophical debate is found here:

iep.utm.edu/evil-log/

An important premise in the argument from both sides is:

It is not morally permissible for God to allow evil and suffering to occur unless he has a morally sufficient reason for doing so.

So God could ONLY be faulted for permitting evil where a morally insufficient reason for allowing it existed. This would make that kind of evil ‘pointless’ or lacking sufficient justification.

So, properly understood, the argument ought to be expressed something like this:

If God exists he would not allow pointless evil.
There is much pointless evil.
Therefore God does not exist.

Essentially, the other side of the argument is that it would be permissible for God to allow evil if the allowance brought about a greater good than otherwise would have occurred. Therefore, only ‘pointless’ evil or evil where an insufficiently good reason for allowing it existed could that evil count against the existence of God.

The problem with using the argument against God’s existence, however, is that pointless or unjustifiable evil is based on a subjective determination. Merely because I - from a limited perspective - don’t see a point for the existence of any particular evil does not, logically, mean there is not or cannot be a point or sufficient justification for it.

Any apparently pointless evil is not necessarily 'pointless.’ If I break a leg, (an apparent ‘evil,’) end up in the hospital, and there meet my future spouse it may be that, even for me, the initially ‘pointless’ evil may have a point or reason for its occurrence.

The ’significance’ of any part of a sequential series of events cannot be fully determined until the final end of the sequence. Just because from within a temporal series, the ‘point’ or significance of each event cannot be ascertained does not mean that in the final analysis a sufficiently good reason cannot exist to justify every event in the chain.

This talk by Tim Keller addresses the issue quite well:

vimeo.com/9135547

Therefore, the existence of evil is not illogical nor is it logically incompatible with the existence of an all-loving, omnipotent, omniscient God.

 

[Tomdstone]

His interpretation, as Tomdstone suggests, is that the laws only appear to be probabilistic because we have incomplete information. This is simply not true. .

Not according to the Bayesian interpretation as described by E. T. Jaynes who says that interpreting probability as a physical phenomenon is a Mind Projection Fallacy.

 

[Tomdstone]

Since suffering is not, in itself, evil -.

I don’t think you are going to find too many people who think it is a good thing for a child to suffer a painful incurable illness.

 

[Peter_Plato]

I don’t think you are going to find too many people who think it is a good thing for a child to suffer a painful incurable illness.

No one claimed it was a good thing.

It does demonstrate and is a reminder that temporal physical existence cannot be, ultimately, the final or ultimate good.

 

[oldcelt]

No one claimed it was a good thing.

It does demonstrate and is a reminder that temporal physical existence cannot be, ultimately, the final or ultimate good.

How so?

BTW, love the Floyd quotes…but you are skipping parts.

 

[inocente]

But we do understand some things because they obey the laws. They don’t appear to obey, they obey. If I step off the top of a building, it isn’t that it only appears I may fall. I will fall!

Legislated laws are no different in that respect. Legislated laws don’t just appear to be laws. They are laws, and whoever disobeys them will be subject to the consequences.

We can’t get around laws. If we could dismiss laws as laws, there would be no alternative but chaos.

The apparent theoretical conflict in laws (relativity versus quantum physics) cannot be an actual conflict in nature. Einstein was convinced of this. His take was that we simply do not understand how to reconcile the two systems of physics. After all, it may well be that the human mind is following a law of its own; that is, a physical law that says you are wired to understand so much, but not more.

This sounds like an extreme form of determinism.

But we are not gods, we cannot tell things what that must and must not do.

A physical law says that in all observed cases, things act in accordance with the law. It predicts how things will behave in future based on past experience. It does not and cannot give orders - we cannot invent laws and say everything must obey them. All we can say is that as far as we know, the laws have predictive power.

Determinism tries to see the universe as one big equation. It says that in principle, if we know the starting conditions (the position and velocity of everything), then by repeatedly applying the physical law we can predict everything. Einstein was a determinist, to him the universe is a machine, God does not play dice he says. A lot of people still think like that. But he and they are wrong.

 

[inocente]

I take it you presume that to know something requires something like a convincing “proof.” I doubt that is a sustainable presumption.

I’d say the opposite. I know that the Sun will rise tomorrow. I can’t prove it will, it’s just very likely based on history.

I have faith that the Sun will rise tomorrow from experience, not by logical argument.

The guy has faith that Jesus is Lord from experience, not by logical argument.

 

[Peter_Plato]

I’d say the opposite. I know that the Sun will rise tomorrow. I can’t prove it will, it’s just very likely based on history.

I have faith that the Sun will rise tomorrow from experience, not by logical argument.

The guy has faith that Jesus is Lord from experience, not by logical argument.

This is, to put it mildly, silly.

If you think your best argument for the Sun rising tomorrow comes from “history,” i.e., merely from the fact that it always has in the past, then you are missing from your repertoire all the physical laws and principles of chemistry which spell out very clearly how and why the Earth orbits the Sun. It is fundamentally the nature of the Sun and planetary system which provides the best reason for why the Sun will “rise” tomorrow. This is definitely not an historical argument. It is after we have an understanding of the nature of things that future events become predictable. It certainly isn’t conventions that tell us with relative certainty what will happen, it is the intelligibility of the makeup - the underlying reality - of things that does so.

Your argument, basically, is that the best reason for thinking a light bulb in my house will come on when I flick the switch is BECAUSE it always has RATHER than from the knowledge I possess about electricity which can, by the way, also help me diagnose problems if the light happens not to come on. Your reasoning would leave me scratching my head and puzzling about why it didn’t come on because “it always has in the past.”

 

[inocente]

This is, to put it mildly, silly.

If you think your best argument for the Sun rising tomorrow comes from “history,” i.e., merely from the fact that it always has in the past, then you are missing from your repertoire all the physical laws and principles of chemistry which spell out very clearly how and why the Earth orbits the Sun. It is fundamentally the nature of the Sun and planetary system which provides the best reason for why the Sun will “rise” tomorrow. This is definitely not an historical argument. It is after we have an understanding of the nature of things that future events become predictable. It certainly isn’t conventions that tell us with relative certainty what will happen, it is the intelligibility of the makeup - the underlying reality - of things that does so.

Your argument, basically, is that the best reason for thinking a light bulb in my house will come on when I flick the switch is BECAUSE it always has RATHER than from the knowledge I possess about electricity which can, by the way, also help me diagnose problems if the light happens not to come on. Your reasoning would leave me scratching my head and puzzling about why it didn’t come on because “it always has in the past.”

You may just be the only guy in the world who says scientific knowledge is proven and is not provisional. No difference then between a priori and a posteriori, between deduction and induction, between rationalism and empiricism, it’s all one to you, true or false, black or white, no room for doubt, everything is dead certain.

 

[Skeptic92]

You may just be the only guy in the world who says scientific knowledge is proven and is not provisional. No difference then between a priori and a posteriori, between deduction and induction, between rationalism and empiricism, it’s all one to you, true or false, black or white, no room for doubt, everything is dead certain.

There is no difference between empiricism and rationalism; Kant synthesised them. You seem to have a very large blind spot in Philosophy if you think those two are the only two competing systems, especially as they are apart of the exact same tradition.

 

[Peter_Plato]

You may just be the only guy in the world who says scientific knowledge is proven and is not provisional. No difference then between a priori and a posteriori, between deduction and induction, between rationalism and empiricism, it’s all one to you, true or false, black or white, no room for doubt, everything is dead certain.

It’s called realism and has a history of its own in philosophy.

It seems to me that someone who draws conclusions like “it’s all one to you, true or false, black or white, no room for doubt, everything is dead certain” - about a philosophical system they ostensibly have no awareness of - is the one who is attempting to claim dead certainty about things being black (rationalism) or white (empiricism.)

Realism is the middle ground and simply because reality exists independently of human beings does not amount to a claim that humans currently have a complete and accurate picture. It simply means that in principle reality can be known, not that it currently must either be known or not. The implication is that with careful and complete analysis (both empirical and rational) reality can be understood.

 

[Oreoracle]

Regardless of the axiom of choice or of complex numbers or of modular arithmetic or of playfair’s axiom, I continue to claim that you cannot have 1+1 = 3 in a non-trivial system.

Sure you can. I had fun with this one:

Consider the set of numbers S={1,3}. Define addition* (we will call it the “Oreo sum” after its daddy) such that a+b=1 if and only if a=/=b and a+b=3 if and only if a=b. So we have 1+1=3, 1+3=3+1=1, and 3+3=3. I also calculated the 8 possible Oreo sums involving 3 terms.

Notice that the Oreo sum is commutative and associative, like the more familiar version of addition. The set S is closed under Oreo sums (all sums of elements of S lie in S). You can see from the equations above that adding 3 doesn’t change the value of a number, so 3 is an identity element. Whether you start with 1 or 3, you can always add another number to reach the identity element, so each element has an inverse.

This makes the set S equipped with Oreo sums an abelian group, and we can derive non-trivial facts from it. For example, a+b+c=1 if and only if abc is a perfect square.

I admit that it isn’t quite as useful as the ring of integers, but it is far from trivial.

*If you want it to be more relevant that the numbers in S are 1 and 3, then define the Oreo sum a+b to be the number of elements that are equal in the sequence (a,b), rounded up to the nearest odd number.

 

[Peter_Plato]

You may just be the only guy in the world who says scientific knowledge is proven and is not provisional.

The fact that scientific knowledge is provisional does not mean it is all wrong until we get it right, it simply means that we have some understanding, albeit incomplete, and are (hopefully) heading towards a more full and consistent understanding. Otherwise scientific knowledge is merely taking shots in the dark with no assurance that we are even close to the target. Is that what you mean by provisional? I hope not, but it won’t be the first time I’ve been made to scratch my head at one of your posts.

Admittedly, my puzzlement has been more along along the lines of you arguing, “If x, then y; therefore z.” Apparently, the provisional nature of knowledge implies (sort of) the provisional nature of logic, so, I guess, ANY conclusion is possible, if it is assumed that any conclusion is possible BECAUSE every conclusion is provisional.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

The guy has faith that Jesus is Lord from experience, not by logical argument.

The approach to Jesus is always more convincing by personal experience than by logic.

Logic can defeat logic.

But logic cannot defeat personal experience.

 

[Tomdstone]

I’d say the opposite. I know that the Sun will rise tomorrow.

Tomorrow, yes. However, what about 500 billion years from now? Will this physical law still hold then? Do physical laws hold at all times or do they differ from one point in time to another?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Tomorrow, yes. However, what about 500 billion years from now? Will this physical law still hold then? Do physical laws hold at all times or do they differ from one point in time to another?

The laws of the universe change constantly depending on when and where you are in the universe.

One law never changes: the law of the expanding universe.

 

[Tomdstone]

Sure you can. I had fun with this one:

Consider the set of numbers S={1,3}. Define addition* (we will call it the “Oreo sum” after its daddy) such that a+b=1 if and only if a=/=b and a+b=3 if and only if a=b. So we have 1+1=3, 1+3=3+1=1, and 3+3=3. I also calculated the 8 possible Oreo sums involving 3 terms.

Notice that the Oreo sum is commutative and associative, like the more familiar version of addition. The set S is closed under Oreo sums (all sums of elements of S lie in S). You can see from the equations above that adding 3 doesn’t change the value of a number, so 3 is an identity element. Whether you start with 1 or 3, you can always add another number to reach the identity element, so each element has an inverse.

This makes the set S equipped with Oreo sums an abelian group, and we can derive non-trivial facts from it. For example, a+b+c=1 if and only if abc is a perfect square.

I admit that it isn’t quite as useful as the ring of integers, but it is far from trivial.

*If you want it to be more relevant that the numbers in S are 1 and 3, then define the Oreo sum a+b to be the number of elements that are equal in the sequence (a,b), rounded up to the nearest odd number.

This is equivalent to the system S={1,0} and 1+1=0 which most people would say is trivial. Also, it has the objection that you have simply redefined 3 to be 0. Of course you can redefine yes to mean no and no to mean yes or white to be black and black to be red. However, suppose that A stands for one apple.
John has A
Bob has A
Sally has 3 apples: A,A, A.
Then you cannot have a nontrivial mathematical system where the number of apples that john and Bob have equals the number of apples that Sally has.

 

[Oreoracle]

This is equivalent to the system S={1,0} and 1+1=0 which most people would say is trivial.

I agree that my first definition of addition makes the choice of 1 and 3 as symbols seem pretty arbitrary, so the second definition (the one with the asterisk) makes the choice relevant.

But I don’t think it’s trivial. The zero ring is trivial, because it basically only satisfies the bare minimum requirements to qualify as a ring. The group I described actually has interesting properties that some simpler groups lack.

However, suppose that A stands for one apple.
John has A
Bob has A
Sally has 3 apples: A,A, A.
Then you cannot have a nontrivial mathematical system where the number of apples that john and Bob have equals the number of apples that Sally has.

You’re describing the ring of integers equipped with addition, and I agree that in that ring, 1+1=/=3. That doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting systems in which 1+1=3. That is all I’m saying about axiomatic systems. It is okay if they conflict, just like Euclidean geometry and non-Euclidean geometries, because they are only tools meant to address different kinds of problems or exhibit different properties. Can we agree on that?

 

[Tomdstone]

I agree that my first definition of addition makes the choice of 1 and 3 as symbols seem pretty arbitrary, so the second definition (the one with the asterisk) makes the choice relevant.

But I don’t think it’s trivial. The zero ring is trivial, because it basically only satisfies the bare minimum requirements to qualify as a ring. The group I described actually has interesting properties that some simpler groups lack.

You’re describing the ring of integers equipped with addition, and I agree that in that ring, 1+1=/=3. That doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting systems in which 1+1=3. That is all I’m saying about axiomatic systems. It is okay if they conflict, just like Euclidean geometry and non-Euclidean geometries, because they are only tools meant to address different kinds of problems or exhibit different properties. Can we agree on that?

Look. If you have 1+1=3, what happens if you subtract 1 from both sides? You get 1=2. Now subtract 1 again from both sides and you have 0=1. You can’t have non-trivial mathematics with 0=1. Show me a mathematician that says that 0=1 can lead to non-trivial mathematics.

 

[Oreoracle]

Look. If you have 1+1=3, what happens if you subtract 1 from both sides?

Good question. First we have to decide what subtraction means in our system. Subtracting usually means that you’re adding an inverse. All elements of S have inverses with respect to Oreo sums, so this is a well-defined notion.

You get 1=2.

No. Firstly, 2 doesn’t exist in our group. In fact, we shouldn’t expect to get 2 at all, since subtraction is just a special case of taking an Oreo sum, and S has already been shown to be closed under Oreo sums. So if you have an addition or subtraction problem in terms of 1 and 3, your answer will be either 1 or 3.

Here’s what happens: You wish to subtract 1, and the only sensible way to interpret this subtraction in our system is to say that we are adding (by Oreo summation) the inverse of 1 to both sides. By definition, the inverse of 1, -1, is the number such that 1+(-1)=0, where 0 is just the symbol for the identity element of the group. As you noted, 3 is the 0 of this group, so the equation is 1+(-1)=3. So which element of S plays this role for -1? According to the equations we already have, 1 is the inverse of 1 since 1+1=3.

So subtracting 1 from both sides amounts to adding 1 to both sides in this group. Indeed, 1+1+(-1)=3+(-1) can be rewritten by this argument as 1+1+1=3+1 and both sides have an Oreo sum of 1. So subtracting 1 from both sides poses no problems for our arithmetic.

It’s easier to accept this sort of thing once you appreciate the group in its own right rather than try to compare it to other groups or translate problems between differing groups.