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rom422
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I agree. The example I gave was one of physical evil, which may (to use your terminology) merely be serendipitously called “evil”.
There are two kinds of evil: physical evil, which is usually due to determined causes, and moral evil (or sin), which is due to the action of free causes (e.g. man’s free choice).
It is possible to argue that physical evil is not truly evil, because it often results merely as a necessary consequence of natural transformations. For example, the digestion of food usually entails the corruption of the food consumed. Therefore, when God designed these natural transformations, by that same stroke He also willed the natural consequences that would result. To those who merely see or observe natural events, but who do not see God’s grand design in nature, or who do not see God as the first cause, many natural occurrences would appear to be an evil, although they really are not.
I gave the example that involves physical evil because it was easier to understand. However, there is a parallel situation where moral evil is involved. Because when God willed human freedom, by that same stroke He also permitted the occurrence of sin. Those who only see moral evil but not God’s hidden purposes will likely not understand how the existence of moral evil can be reconciled with God’s infinite goodness. Yet, it is true that if He did not permit people to crucify Him, our redemption would not have been accomplished. If He did not permit the Roman persecution of the early Christians, we would not have had these glorious martyrs of the faith. That said, it does not mean that God purposely wills that sins be committed to produce martyrs or our redemption. No, but He definitely permits them for the sake of a greater good.
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tonyrey
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Thanks, jd. This is a standard refutation of subjectivism but expressing it concisely took some time.
God bless
Tony
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rom422
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The analogy fails because, strictly speaking, God does not know, before giving you the gun, that you will go on a shooting rampage. Let me elaborate on this.
It is incorrect to say that before giving you freedom, then God already knows what you will do with it, as if in God there is a “before” when He hasn’t given you freedom, and a “future” event when you will use or abuse that freedom. This is introducing the time dimension in God who is altogether outside time. He is eternal. He is not in a time duration because His duration is that of the eternal, timeless, ever-present NOW. The NOW of eternity is simultaneous with our past, our present and our future. That is how God knows the past, the present and the future, because they are all simultaneous with the NOW of eternity. Strictly speaking, therefore, God sees rather than foresees our future. Of course, He sees what you will do with your freedom, but not as something “after” His Act of giving you the freedom to choose between good and evil. Rather, He sees it as being in His NOW, and therefore simultaneous with His eternal Act of giving you freedom. Your ability to choose between good and evil is ontologically posterior to His Act of giving you this freedom of choice, but in His NOW duration the two are simultaneous, so that in the last analysis, what you will do with your freedom, although present to His eternal knowledge, remains absolutely unforseeable.
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Whadyamean
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Ultimately, “God” and “Satan” are terms whose referents defy definition, similar to the breakdown of physics as it attempts to approach the moment of singularity. And again, there is always Mark:4 31-34. You might find it fascinating to trace the history of “Satan” though history, as well as some other concepts. Though I am an alternative type “theist,” neither God as purported by any religion nor Satan are required for deep ethics that serve as well as any “Christian” ethic. Remember, Christopher (what a cruel joke of a name in this case) Columbus reported to Queen Isabella that the aborigines he encountered were exemplary beyond Christians. Then he killed them because they weren’t Catholic. Such is the way of all jihad, yes?
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TheTrueCentrist
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Wrong. God is omniscient. He knows everything. The answer to the question “does God know x?” where x is anything you like, is yes.
I mean “before” in the same way Genesis says “In the beginning.” To remove time, I will simply say: At the point where God existed and the world did not, God still knew everything about the world.
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TheTrueCentrist
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This discussion of atheist reasoning is a transparent attempt to distract from the fact that you have no answer for the problem of evil. Atheism is irrelevant to the problem of evil. Christianity asserts the properties of God as well as the existence of evil, and critics claim that these assertions are not logically consistent.Thanks, jd. This is a standard refutation of subjectivism but expressing it concisely took some time.
God bless
Tony
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TheTrueCentrist
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Again you are saying that free will (human freedom) inevitably results in moral evil. You are saying that it would have been impossible for God to create a world with free will and without any moral evil.
Catholic reasoning says that you can not achieve a good end by evil means. What you have said is that God’s ends are good, so they justify the evil means (e.g. the crucifixion and roman persecution.) Either Catholicism is wrong and you can justify the means by their ends, or things like the crucifixion and throwing Christians to the lions were not really moral evil.
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danserr
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I showed in post 11 and 19 how the existence of God and evil are logically consistent. In doing so, I follow the vast majority of even atheist philosophers who, since the work of the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, admit that there is no logical contradiction between the existence of God and evil.
William Rowe for instance: “granted incompatibilism, there is a fairly compelling argument for the view that the existence of evil is logically consistent with the existence of the theistic God” (referring to Plantinga’s argument).
Oppy, in a recent book disagrees, but even he admits that many philosophers accept that Plantinga has demonstrated that there is no logical contradiction between the existence of God and evil.
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TheTrueCentrist
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Plantinga takes exactly the approach I have described: he says that free will inevitably leads to evil.
His logic being (according to the wiki)
- There are possible worlds that even an omnipotent being can not actualize.
- A world with morally free creatures producing only moral good is such a world.
I would also say that if a world could not be actualized by an omnipotent being then it would (by definition) not be a possible world.
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danserr
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Well, if you are rejecting Plantinga, you should know that even most atheists would disagree with you, which should give you pause.
More specifically, I will offer some more explanation of what you suggest above.
We can conceive a possible world where only a bowling ball exists floating in space. This is a possible world. Yet, it may not be a feasible world. That is to say, perhaps, such a world has over-riding drawbacks that would lead God not to actualize it. (Such a drawback would be the existence of no people). So there is a possible world that God plausibly would not actualize, but it is also understandable why he would not.
Second, take a specific example. Suppose there is a person, John. John freely chooses to reject God. Can God create a world in which John freely chooses God? Not if he leaves it up to John!
To point 2. above, a Christian could reply that a). perhaps there is no possible world where all creatures freely choose God, or b). perhaps there is such a world, but perhaps this world has over-riding drawbacks, such as having a very small number of people. Hence though such a world might be possible, it might not be feasible.
I’m not sure whether to agree with this or not because I think it depends how we understand possible worlds, and people do in different ways.
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rom422
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God knows everything that could be known. But knowing what you will do with your freedom before God’s Act of giving you freedom, is impossible. Why? Because there is no “before.” What you will do with your freedom is future to you, but to God it exists in the same NOW when He gave you your freedom. Therefore, your future free actions are absolutely unforeseen and unforseeable in His eternal NOW.
You said, “At the point where God existed and the world did not, God still knew everything about the world.” My answer: God still knew everything that could be known about the world, not what couldn’t be known by reason of incongruity. This is not a limitation to God’s omniscience. In the same way, God could not make a square circle because a square circle is incongruous, but this is not a limitation to God’s omnipotence either.
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rom422
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I never said that free will inevitably results in moral evil. If that were the case, then the so-called “free will” wouldn’t really be free, but determined.
Also, I never said that it would have been impossible for God to create a world with free will and without any moral evil. Actually, I think that it is quite possible to have a world with free will and without moral evil. But whether there will be a world with free will and without moral evil depends not on God, but on the free choices of His creatures.
The crucifixion and the Roman persecution are not means willed by God to accomplish His good ends. He did not will to be crucified, and He did not will that the early Christians be devoured by the lions. Man willed these horrible acts. These acts happened as the result of man’s poor choices (sins), and God merely permitted them. As I explained in an earlier post, there is a big difference between the permission of evil and the willing of evil.
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shoe
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Perhaps atheists say that “atheism is irrelevant to the problem of evil” for the reason that in their denial of God’s existence, and of His goodness, atheists still must assume that an objective moral standard by which they are able to discern good and bad still exists; and for atheists, that assumption is a hard one to swallow.
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TheTrueCentrist
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Doesn’t make it any less irrelevant to the problem of evil.
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Poelice
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This is just non-sense dreampt up by atheists so they can sin. God is good. Everything that seems bad that happens in this world is allowed by God by some better purpose that we, who are lowly, cannot think of. Remember, if he is omniscient, he knows why drowning people in the flood is good (they were probably all evil).
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belorg
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The reason why atheism is irrelevant to the problem of evil is very simple.
There’s two claims made by t(Christian) theists.
1 God is objectively pefectly good
2 There is objective evil
Regardless of what the atheist actually believes, the logical problem of evil states that these two claims are logically ibcompatible. If they really are,then ono of the claims is false.
Plantinga has presented a solution to the logical problem of evil, which, as danserr says, has been accepted by the majority of philosophers, including major athiest philosophers,
So, there is some consensus on the fact that there is no logical problem of evil.
Two problems with this.
1 Plantinga has ‘proven’ that some kind of omni-God can be compatible with evil, but it’s stil very hard to reconcile this ‘some kind of God’ with the speciofic attributes of the Catholic God.
2 The free will defense is a possible solution to the logical problem of evil, but that does not mean the problem of evil has vanished, because the evidential problem of evil is still very much alive, and any theist who claims it’s not a problem is deluding himself. It’s still a massive problem for most brands of christianity.
All Platinga did was show that there is some possibility for God and evil to co-exist. But claiming this solves the problem of evil would be the same as claiming that the fact that there is a 1 in 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000( add as many zeros as you like) chance of the universe’s constants to have been exactly what they are, solves the fine-tuning problem. It doesn’t, of course, All it shows is that the fune-tuning is not a logical problem but an evidential problem.
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rom422
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Many Christian theists do not believe that there is such a thing as “objective evil.” I will explain the reasons for their denial in a series of clarifying notes:
- Evil is the absence of good. But it is not a mere *negation, * such as the absence of sight in a stone. Rather, it is the absence of a good that should be there, such as the absence of sight in a man. Therefore, evil is not a mere negation, but is the privation of a due good, the lack or absence of a good that should be there, but isn’t there. Thus, blindness in a man is an evil, because a normal man should be able to see.
- Because evil is the absence of a due good, it is therefore, strictly speaking, a non-being, a non-entity. For example, blindness is, strictly speaking, not a “thing” in the same way that a man is a thing or a being. However, this does not mean that evil is not real. It is real, but only to the extent that the thing of which it is the privation is real. Blindness, exists in the world, but only because there are blind people.
- We usually cannot think of anything unless we think of it as a being. In so doing, we make a mental construct (or a “being of reason”), a mental “quasi-being” of what is objectively a non-being. For example, there is no such thing as a square-circle. It is a non-entity. It is a non-entity because it is a square that is not a square because it is a circle; and it is a circle that is not a circle because it is a square. So it is really nothing. But we can’t talk about it unless we thing of it as if it were a something. So we construct in our minds a concept of it as a quasi-being or a being of reason (ens rationis). The same is true of evil. Because evil is not an objective thing, or because it is strictly a non-being, so we can only talk about it by thinking of it as a quasi-being or a being of reason.
Just sharing my thoughts and opinions on this subject. I don’t wish to knock anyone on the head.
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tonyrey
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If you deny that evil exists the objection collapses! You can’t refute one “illusion” with another “illusion”. You cannot prove God is an illusion if evil is an illusion!
- The materialist must at least believe that there is an objective reason why some events and situations are preferable to others.
- What can that reason be if we exist for no reason?
- If we exist **for no reason **the preference must be subjective.
- A subjective preference has no bearing on the nature of objective reality.
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tonyrey
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Evil is not a “thing” but it is a negative aspect of reality which causes an immense amount of suffering and death.
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